People Before Profit blog

The stories that matter: Workers making things better

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:02:00 +0000

WASHINGTON, D.C. – “I remember what she did every weekday in the 1950s, riding the back of that bus in Austin, Texas so she could clean other people’s houses. I remember how he, as a day laborer, suffered the indignity of not being able, with his own labor, to provide for his family.”

She was talking about her mother and father. A group of labor journalists from union and independent magazines and newspapers, including the People’s Weekly World, had the opportunity Nov. 21 to talk with Arlene Holt-Baker, the executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, the first African American elected to that position. She met with labor journalists at a meeting here of the International Labor Communications Association.

Before she would take any questions she insisted on telling us that we and the staffs of the newspapers we worked for were “the un-sung heroes of the labor movement because when the major media tries, as it did during the recent elections, to sensationalize trivia and marginalize what’s important you guys are the message carriers of the labor movement and its allies. You have told the stories that matter.”

Holt-Baker’s own story, it turns out, is one of those.

“Mom never let anything beat us down. She called a family meeting just before Election Day, when John F. Kennedy was running for president because, as usual, she was determined to vote. My shoes had holes in them and the choice was do we buy new shoes or do we pay the poll tax so she could vote. We decided to pay that tax so we could exercise that right,” Holt-Baker said.

“She sent me in with a note saying I would be late for school because on Nov. 22, 1963, she was determined that we would be in Dallas to hear President Kennedy, the man she voted for, talk. It was his last speech.”

Holt-Baker was asked if she could remember any key event that helped spark what became a life-long involvement with and dedication to the trade union movement. “When I was a young girl, we had a friend named Mrs. Burns,” she said. Mrs. Burns and her husband were the only people in the neighborhood with a good working automobile. Mrs. Burns worked at the rail road and her husband at a packing house. They were both union members and I quickly came to understand that their union membership was the reason they could afford that car.”

That early spark of trade union consciousness, the role of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and trade unions in building the historic labor-civil rights alliance, her eventual move to California and the role she played there in building AFSCME, and her promotion to executive assistant to Linda-Chavez-Thompson, former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO were all milestones, she said, that helped prepare her for her job today.

Holt-Baker’s assessment of the 2008 elections: “This has been the most successful political cycle in the history of the labor movement. In the last four days alone, we had a quarter million people out there campaigning. But even more important, and here again the major media didn’t tell the whole story the way you told the story. You were the ones with the correct analysis – with this election the working people of America took the future into their own hands.”

Holt-Baker’s view of what comes next: “The next six to eight months are crucial. The task of the labor movement is nothing less than, together with our allies, securing economic justice for America. This means jobs with income, a re-building of and creation of a green economy that works for everyone, health care for all, education, immigration reform and so much more.

“We won’t be able to create a broadly shared prosperity, however, unless we restore the right of workers to form unions. This means that all of labor, the AFL-CIO, Change-to-Win and the independent unions must remain united and with our allies we must continue the same level of mobilization we had during the elections – and for you guys it means keep on telling this incredible story of workers and their movements.”

jwojcik @pww.org

AFTs Weingarten puts everything but vouchers on the table

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:25:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI)--In her first major policy address since being elected President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten put “everything but vouchers” on the bargaining table--including merit pay and tenure--as long as the results help students and teachers.

In a Nov. 17 speech in Washington, Weingarten, elected this summer to head the 1.4-million-member union, also said the union wants to rewrite federal education laws to get away from the “teach to the test” mentality of anti-worker anti-public school GOP President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which she scornfully slammed.

That law, she said, “has become a stand-in for real discussions…about a robust education policy that prepares our children for the 21st century.” Its rewrite, however, should still emphasize accountability for classroom performance, a longtime AFT goal.

Weingarten, head of AFT’s largest local, the United Federation of Teachers of New York City, succeeded Ed McElroy in the union’s top job last summer. She helped push AFT into campaigning for successful Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama after the AFT at first endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) for the White House.

Like AFT, Obama is dubious about Bush’s education law. But he had also made clear during the campaign that he supported some ideas AFT previously opposed, such as greater use of merit pay. The union and its members have seen merit pay misused by principals and administrators as a form of favoritism, without objective standards.

But Weingarten said she’s for it, both to reward those teachers who take on the toughest tasks or who mentor their colleagues to improve, and as long as it supplements general raises for all teachers to recognize their hard work and valuable role in teaching the nation’s kids--and as long as it’s based on objective criteria.

Weingarten used her speech to say that AFT is willing to come to the table and discuss everything except vouchers, which rob public schools of needed tax dollars by funneling them to parents of private-school--usually religious school--students. She challenged other groups involved in education to come to the table, too, with open minds and the same goal of improving public education for all kids.

Whether some of the others in the education debate, notably the Radical Right which has held sway over education policy during the Bush regime, will come with open minds is another matter. Vouchers are their favorite cause, to use tax dollars to impose their religious views on students, while at the same time yanking money from public schools, especially from schools--usually in cities--that teach the most poor kids and need the most aid. And the Right advocates using merit pay and abolishing tenure as a way to strip teachers of protection and force them to teach what ideologues prefer.

Weingarten had a warning for the Right: Attack teachers’ unions and you attack teachers--and kids. And AFT will fight back against that, she said. But that didn’t stop her from laying out principles to guide the coming education debate, especially since Bush’s law expired and Congress must write new federal legislation to aid local schools.

The first, which she said Obama agrees with, is universal pre-school, a longtime AFT cause. “Educational research shows most brain development takes place before age 6, and economic research shows investment in high-quality early childhood education reaps returns many times over,” she said. After just one year of virtually universal pre-K education in Oklahoma, she noted, test scores of kids are up by 16%.

Some of AFT’s other principles include “rigorous career training” of high-school graduates for “green jobs” and other jobs of the future, help for “high-achieving students from low-income households” to take the most-challenging courses, and then to attend college, and expansion of “high-quality choices within school systems.”

She noted that UFT and the New York City school system developed two union-run charter schools in New York and that Chicago’s Hamline K-8 school has a comprehensive improvement program for all of its students, jointly designed by the teachers and the administration. UFT and New York also have merit pay in their pact.

“And we need physical environments where teachers can teach and children can learn. The Department of Education found condition of 43% of the nation’s school build-ings ‘interferes with the delivery of instruction,’” she said. Weingarten did not say how much that would cost, in repairs or modernization. Other figures start at $250 million.

“Rebuilding and rewiring our schools are important ways to boost the economy and put people to work” in a time of rising unemployment, as well as ways to help kids, she said.

“President-elect Obama understands this,” Weingarten noted. “During the campaign…he said repeatedly education reform must be done with teachers, not to teachers (her emphasis).”

But Weingarten warned the present economic tailspin is pushing schools in the other direction. While campaigning for Obama, she said teachers told her of falling state aid, declining local school district tax revenues, and scores of teacher and program cuts. “No cutbacks are as harmful as cutting back on our children’s futures,” Weingarten said.

Bushs Midnight Rules include weaker family leave, longer driving hours for truckers

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:21:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI)--Call them the “Midnight Rules.” In haste, and to meet legal deadlines, the GOP Bush regime pushed through approximately 90 pro-business federal rules before Nov. 22, trying to lock them in so the incoming Obama administration can’t overturn them.

One big one, which has drawn outrage from organized labor and women’s groups, would weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act, by making it tougher for workers to take “intermittent leave” for such things as doctors’ appointments, restricting workers from using paid vacation time for family leave and by opening workers’ medical records to company executives, not just to doctors.

And another, defying a prior federal court ruling against Bush’s Transportation Department, would let truck companies force drivers to stay longer behind the wheel and with less-frequent rest breaks. That could lead to unsafe conditions on the road.

Bush’s push to institute “Midnight Rules” is like that of prior administrations, including the Clinton administration, according to OMB Watch, a non-profit group that tracks government rule-making. Rules are needed to provide detailed standards for business, workers and consumers to follow when trying to obey sometimes-vague laws.

But the difference between Bush’s action now and Clinton’s eight years ago is that Bush issued the rules early enough so the legal period--60 days--to challenge them expires before Democratic President Barack Obama takes office at noon on Jan. 20. Clinton didn’t do that, and Bush was able to yank and dump several of Clinton’s rules. The GOP-run Congress killed another pro-worker Clinton rule, on ergonomics.

The question facing unions and their allies, who are outraged by Bush’s schemes, is how they can halt or reverse them. The Bush “midnight rules” include:

Family and Medical Leave Bush’s rules, at business behest, would make it harder for workers to take intermittent leave for such things as doctors’ appointments. They would also require workers with “chronic conditions” to more frequently give firms advance notice--and get approval--for taking leave. Bush would also make it harder or a worker to take paid vacation or personal leave for family issues. And Bush would let firms snoop and spy into workers’ medical records, by allowing companies to demand them of workers’ doctors. Right now, the records are only shared among doctors.

Bush’s “11th-hour move to weaken the Family and Medical Leave Act is another slap in the face to working families struggling just to get by,” AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney said. He called it “reprehensible, but all too predictable” that Bush “would use his last days to give big business one more gift by placing more hurdles in front of workers who need to care for their families.”

“The new FMLA regulations for workers take us in the wrong direction, and are harmful and unnecessary. They will restrict access to protections workers relied on for 15 years,” added Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families.

The National Women’s Law Center hosted a conference call on Nov. 19 among women’s groups, including the Coalition of Labor Union Women and NPWF, to discuss Bush’s changes. “We’re still considering all of our options, and talking to our allies,” including unions, about what to do, said Sharyn Tejani, NPWF’s senior policy counsel.

A complicating factor for groups involved with family leave is that one section of Bush’s rules extends family leave, for the first time, to military families. They don’t want to delete those rules, Tejani added.

On-the-job safety risks This Bush brainstorm would change the way federal regulators calculate on-the-job risks, by assuming workers don’t stay in a job too long--and thus lower the risk of exposure to toxic chemicals and other safety hazards. The rule would also add an extra comment period to new worker health standards, creating unneeded delay. It was dreamed up by ideologues in Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao’s policy office, without consulting federal job safety and health professionals.

Truckers’ hours The Bush Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration--the agency that is supposed to ensure trucks are safe and truckers drive safely and with proper licenses--sent its rule to OMB on Oct. 21. It would have the truckers drive 11 hours straight, not 10, with shorter rest afterwards and greater probability that they must do it again soon. That type of schedule produces tired truckers and more accidents.

FMCSA tried its truckers rule twice earlier in the Bush regime, but fouled up its own process so badly that a Teamsters lawsuit got the whole thing thrown out. “We will continue to fight this dangerous midnight rule through the courts and through Congress,” Teamsters President James Hoffa said. “We’re currently reviewing our legal options, especially since the court threw out this regulation twice.”

The union said FMCSA tried again “in brazen defiance of the court and in subservience to the trucking industry.” Hoffa added: ”Letting tired truck drivers spend even more time behind the wheel is foolish and dangerous. I just hope this country can survive the last days” of Bush’s “frenzy of gutting public health and safety protections.”

Drug and alcohol testing for miners The Bush Mine Safety and Health Administration proposed testing workers in “safety-sensitive positions” for drug and alcohol use. “Safety-sensitive” was purposely left vague.

Mine Workers Communications Director Phil Smith says both the union and the mining companies opposed Bush’s scheme at an Oct. 28 Mine Safety and Health Administration hearing. “But it’s not clear that it’ll go forward. Their process was flawed. If they do, we’re prepared to take action legally or to solicit congressional action,” Smith added.

But there’s another path unions and their allies could use to overturn Bush’s “Midnight Rules” -- an ironic one. It’s called the Congressional Review Act, or CRA.

That law, passed in the opening days of the GOP “Contract With America” in 1995, gives Congress a limited time after any new rule hits the books--and Bush’s schemes take effect just before Obama’s inauguration--to pass a law dumping that rule.

The Congressional Review Act has been used just once, and that’s the irony for workers. In 2001, the GOP-run Congress, in the very first law it passed under Bush, used CRA to dump President Clinton’s rule regulating ergonomic, or repetitive-motion, job safety injuries. Bush signed the repeal. Bush and business pushed for it.

Ever since then, unions and their allies have agitated, unsuccessfully, for action on ergonomic injuries, which number in the hundreds of thousands. Now, says Matthew Madia of OMB Watch, the foes of Bush’s brainstorms--opposed overwhelmingly in public comments--might have to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn them.

“Even if the Obama administration can’t do anything, the new Congress…will have an opportunity to take a look at these rules. They’ll have 60 session days, under the CRA, to determine which rules they think are the worst, and they’ll be able to introduce a resolution to disapprove these rules. If that’s passed by both houses and signed by the president, then it’ll be like the rules never came into effect at all,” he told Democracy Now! radio.

The one problem with using the Congressional Review Act to throw out a Bush “midnight rule” is that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition, Tejani points out. That means if foes of Bush’s weakening of family and medical leave try to use CRA to overturn it, the new rules helping military families take family and medical leave get tossed out, too.

Nevertheless, “If people can contact their congressmen in the new year and tell them about this Congressional Review Act and why it’s important to undo some of these rules, I think we could see some progress made in 2009,” Madia concluded.

Know News

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:41:00 +0000

World unions: Time for a global economic fix is now

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:23:00 +0000

Unions representing workers in the 20 most economically powerful nations called on world leaders Nov. 14 to take urgent action to prevent a global depression by radically changing the way the global economy is run and by reversing decades of deregulation policies they say have caused the current crisis.

Union leaders from the G-20 countries demanded massive world-wide development projects to create decent jobs and called for a world-wide “Green New Deal” to save both the world economy and the planet itself, which they said is suffering because of climate change.

The unprecedented joint call by many of the world’s largest labor unions came out of an AFL-CIO-hosted meeting of the union leaders that took place in Washington D.C. last weekend while leaders of the G-20 nations met there to grapple with the world financial crisis. The labor gathering was sponsored by the International trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (TUAC-OECD) and Global Unions.

Trade unions from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, China, Russia, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were represented.

“Tens of millions of workers are facing the loss of their jobs and more and more people are falling into poverty, with women frequently the worst affected,” said ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder.

“Now is the time for a complete change in direction, and we will be putting the case for that change to world governments.”

“Immediate action is needed to get the world economy moving and boost employment,” John Evans, general secretary of the TUAC-OECD, told the gathering. “Governments need to make further, coordinated cuts in interest rates and to front-load investment in infrastructure, education and health to help stimulate growth and reinforce public services. This needs to be accompanied by tax and spending measures to support the purchasing power of low-and middle-income earners, and concrete steps to launch investment in green goods and services, to help address climate change.”

The unions promulgated a detailed world-wide economic recovery program called the Washington Declaration.

The declaration calls for immediate steps to stimulate the world economy and for numerous more long-term measures. The demands include: •better accountability of central banks;

•regulation of hedge funds and private equity;

•proper supervision of banks and global conglomerates;

•reform and control of executive pay and profit distribution;

•taxation of international financial transactions.

•reform of the credit rating industry;

•ending tax havens;

•protection against predatory lending;

•active policies for housing and for community-based financial services.

Major parts of the Washington Declaration deal specifically with conditions in the poorest countries, where the trade unionists say the global recession will hit hardest. The document calls on richer nations to make massive creation of decent jobs a primary goal of “the new approach to the global economy with fundamental workers’ rights, social protection and social dialogue central to reversing massive inequality, which is at the root of the present crisis.”

Ryder told the world labor gathering, “Governments have found it easy for the past three decades to withdraw from their proper role in regulating markets and enduring that multinational companies meet global standards on workers’ rights. Getting good government policies back in the driving seat will be much more difficult, as no government can achieve this alone. Now is the time for coordinated action to restore proper regulation to put the markets at the service of the people.”

Voters back union rights

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:28:00 +0000

Progressive mandate includes Employee Free Choice Act

On Nov. 4 voters rejected an anti-union big business campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act and elected candidates who support the bill. The labor law reform measure is at the top of the unions’ post-election agenda.

Six newly elected senators expressed strong support for the bill, despite the millions of dollars the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and big business outfits spent to try and defeat them. The new senators – Rep. Mark Udall of Colorado, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Rep. Tom Udall of New Mexico, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Warner of Virginia and Jeff Merkley of Oregon – could play a key role in passing the legislation. The EFCA would vastly expand the number of unionized workers because it requires recognition of unions at workplaces as soon as a majority of workers sign pledge cards expressing their desire to be represented.

The bill was passed by the House last year but killed by a threatened GOP filibuster in the Senate. President Bush had vowed to veto the bill even if it had passed.

The picture is changed now because of greater progressive majorities elected in the House and Senate and because President-elect Obama, who co-sponsored the EFCA in the Senate, has said he will work to pass it and then sign it once he takes office. Obama, as a presidential candidate, showed his pro-labor credentials when he actually walked picket lines with striking workers including the picket line in front of Chicago’s Congress Hotel where employees have mounted a five-year strike.

A poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates right after the election showed that nearly two thirds of voters believe it is important to pass the EFCA and nearly one-third believe it should be a top priority for Congress. Overall, 55 percent of voters said they approve of labor unions, compared with just 27 percent who say they disapprove.

The labor movement has long viewed the EFCA as critical to rebuilding the U.S. economy. According to David Bonior, chair of American Rights at Work, a group affiliated with the AFL-CIO, “Workers are supporting the Employee Free Choice Act because it gives working people the freedom to make their own decision about whether and how to form a union. Working people are struggling to make ends meet and the Employee Free Choice Act will allow more people to bargain for better wages and bargaining conditions – which in turn helps rebuild our middle class and create an economy that works for all.”

While it is no surprise that support for the EFCA is strong in the labor movement and among its allies there is growing recognition, even in some business circles, that unions play a critical role.

Robert Rubin, Treasury secretary under President Clinton and now director of CitiGroup, recently co-authored an article in the New York Times with Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. They wrote: “The problem is that the benefits of productivity growth have largely eluded working families. Though productivity grew by some 20 percent from 2000 to 2007, the real income of middle class, working-age households has actually fallen $2,000, down 3 percent.

“One factor behind this outcome is the severely diminished bargaining power of many workers, and here the decline in union membership has played a key role. A true market economy should have true labor markets in which labor and business negotiate as peers. Many years ago, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith argued that collective bargaining was necessary so workers had the countervailing force to bargain for their fair share of the growth they’re helping to produce. To re-establish that force, workers should be allowed to choose to be unionized or not.”

In addition to allowing workers to make that choice by simple card check, the EFCA would also sharply increase penalties, up to $20,000 per violation, for companies that violate labor laws and would make it easier to get court orders against labor law breakers. The law would also mandate binding arbitration between unions and employers if they cannot reach agreement on an initial contract within 120 days of starting talks.

One of the reasons the ultra-right is so determined to defeat the EFCA is that a larger union movement, it fears, would strengthen the broad progressive movement that helped elect Obama president, solidifying a new progressive direction in American politics.

Even with their current numbers union voters had a powerful impact in this election. Across the battleground states, the Hart poll found, they backed Obama by an impressive 68-30 margin.

The special union “difference” was dramatically shown in other findings:

Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public.

Union military veterans voted for Obama by a 25 point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points.

Obama even won among union gun owners by a 12 point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points.

jwojcik@pww.org

Eight pro-worker changes may be coming

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:08:00 +0000

Post-election statements issued by the nation’s major labor federations, union press conferences, the Senate record of President-elect Barack Obama and bigger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, taken together, indicate that in the coming period the labor movement is on the verge of winning as many as eight major legislative changes.

Topping the list is possible passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining.

The EFCA would automatically allow card check recognition of unions, increase fines for labor-law breaking, order arbitration if unions and employers cannot agree on a first contract in 120 days and simplify procedures for getting court orders to stop corporate dodging of labor law.

This new law will be difficult to win because it is expected to draw bitter and well-funded opposition from big business. At a Nov. 6 press conference the Chamber of Commerce dubbed the EFCA its top priority for defeat in the coming period.

The second priority for labor, even before the Obama administration takes over next January, is passage of a meaningful economic stimulus package when the current 110th Congress returns for a lame-duck session Nov. 17.

Unions want extension of federal unemployment benefits from the current 26 to 39 weeks, billions of dollars in spending for infrastructure projects – rebuilding highways, airports and bridges that would result in good-paying jobs – and extending aid to the states to deal with the rising costs of Medicaid. Medicaid has been hard hit by rising costs associated with the growing numbers of uninsured

A third priority for labor, when the new administration takes over, is legislation that reverses the. Supreme Court’s Lilly Ledbetter ruling, which virtually barred anyone from suing employers for pay discrimination based on sex – or any other factor – except within 180 days of being hired.

Labor-backed legislation overturning the Court’s Ledbetter ruling passed in the House this year but was killed by a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

A fourth priority is a new law that will expand the Family and Medical Leave Act and also, for the first time, enact paid family leave. A bill instituting seven days of paid leave passed the House Education and Labor Committee this year but failed to go further.

Fifth on labor’s list is a law that would overturn a ruling by President Bush that barred airport screeners from unionizing. Unions that represent government workers have already been assured by Obama that he will allow what they consider the anti-labor National Security Personnel System, imposed by Bush on Department of Defense workers, die when its renewal comes up next year.

Sixth is a bill called the Respect Act. It would overturn a National Labor Relations Board ruling that allowed millions of workers to lose the protection of labor law by re-classifying them as “supervisors.”

A seventh priority for labor is to ask the incoming Obama administration to reverse the government’s refusal to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to bargain a new contract with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association.

A five-year agreement between the FAA and the union was reached in 1998 during the Clinton administration but was not renewed by Bush who was president in 2003 when it expired. Instead, Bush imposed longer hours, wage freezes and cuts. Since then controllers have been retiring en-masse, causing air traffic problems across the nation.

Patrick Forrey, president of the controllers union, said, after the election, “Our workforce has been in crisis, attacked and disrespected by an anti-union administration. But change is coming. It is imminent. We will be there to welcome, embrace and escort it as we work together for a safer, more efficient system. No longer will the employees at the FAA be treated like the enemy.”

An eighth priority for labor will be fair trade. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Steel Workers President Leo Gerard held a joint press conference recently where they predicted a new push for the labor-backed Trade Act. That measure, introduced this year, would set new rules for U.S. trade pacts, ordering trade bargainers to write enforceable labor standards into the texts of any proposed law.

Will work for bailout

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 07:32:00 +0000

Gun owners for Obama? Yes, if they had a union card

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 12:00:00 +0000

Union voters were critical in President-elect Obama’s victory, providing a crucial bloc of support in swing states that helped him win big, election night polling released Nov. 5 by the AFL-CIO showed. In their announcement of the results, union leaders promised to continue their largest-ever election mobilization to push for broad support of Obama’s program for economic reform.

The Peter D. Hart poll commissioned by the federation showed that high turnout among working class union voters in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan formed a solid foundation of support for Obama. Hart’s analysis of his poll results indicated that in new battleground states like Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, a bigger-than-ever labor effort, “voting by large margins for Obama and joined with young people and other new voters, union members helped build a new majority for economic fairness.”

Union members across battleground states supported Obama by an impressive 68-30 margin, according to the election night survey.

Other key findings from the survey include:

Obama won among white men who are union members by 18 points while losing that group by 16 points in the general public.

Obama won among union gun owners by a 12 point margin while losing that group in the general public by 25 points.

Union veterans voted for Obama by a 25 point margin. He lost among that group in the general public by nine points.

Working America members voted 67-30 for Obama. Working America gun owners (33 percent own guns) voted 23 points for Obama; general public gun owners voted 25 points for McCain.

Sixty percent of union members identified the economy and jobs as their top issue. Union members identified protecting pensions and Social Security and reducing health care costs as the top priorities for the new administration.

Seventy-five percent say the new president and Congress have a mandate to strengthen the economy, create jobs and reform health care.

Eighty-one percent of union members support passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

Guild workers demand fair deal from Plain Dealer

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:25:00 +0000

CLEVELAND – Over 100 members of the Newspaper Guild Local 1 held a brief rally and picketed the Plain Dealer Oct. 30 to protest an anti-union buyout offer in an ongoing downsizing of the city’s only daily.

Since 2005, union jobs at the paper have been reduced through buyouts from around 300 to 238. The paper, part of the giant Newhouse-family owned Advance Publications empire, now proposes to eliminate 38 more jobs by early December.

While previous buyouts have included health care as well as severance pay provisions for both management and union positions, this time health care is only being offered to management.

“It is unfair to penalize workers simply because they are members of a union,” Harlan Spector, chair of the local’s Plain Dealer unit told the rally.

This is particularly unfair, said Local 1 Executive Secretary Rollie Dreussi, since Plain Dealer President and Publisher Terry Egger admitted the paper is still making a profit.

If the buyout is not accepted, the jobs are to be eliminated through mandatory layoffs, the first in the paper’s 150-year history.

Under terms of the union’s contract workers would receive severance pay in a layoff, but no health coverage. But if they accept a buyout they “give up unemployment compensation and the right to potential rehire,” Dreussi said.

Veteran reporters were bitter about the fact that with downsizing going on throughout the industry there are no media jobs to go to and, especially in hard hit Northeastern Ohio, there are virtually no other jobs either.

“Why are they creating such a hardship for Guild members,” one reporter asked. “Health care for 38 workers is nothing for the Newhouse family. If they offered one year of health coverage, there would be no problem getting people to leave. We might have time to relocate or find another job.”

The ongoing crisis in the newspaper industry, brought about by the rise of the internet as well as the general economic downturn, is chronicled in the October issue of the Guild Reporter, the union’s monthly publication. The paper reported that in the past month alone layoffs have occurred at newspapers in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Duluth and Lexington, Ky., as readership and advertising revenues continue to decline.

Author, activist Studs Terkel dies at 96

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 04:07:00 +0000

CHICAGO (AP) — Studs Terkel captured the essence of Chicago in the pages of his best-selling oral histories, chronicling common people and celebrities alike.

Along the way he became an ageless master of listening and speaking, a broadcaster, activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Terkel died Friday at age 96.

'He found his home in Chicago and he found it in the gritty aspect of Chicago life,' said Russell Lewis, chief historian at the Chicago History Museum. 'The ne'er-do-wells, the outcasts, the bums, all these people were people he was curious about. They intrigued him.'

Dan Terkell said his father died at home, and described his death as 'peaceful, no agony. This is what he wanted.'

'My dad led a long, full, eventful, sometimes tempestuous, but very satisfying life,' Terkell, who spells his name with an extra letter, said in a statement issued through his father's colleague and close friend Thom Clark.

Terkel was a native New Yorker who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its 'carbuncles and warts,' as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, 'Touch and Go.' He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and 'never met a picket line or petition I didn't like.'

'A lot of people feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'' Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. 'Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope.'

The tougher the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called 'Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession,' and, in 1995, 'Coming of Age,' recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death — in his 2001 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith,' and hope, in his 2003 'Hope Dies Last.'

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for 'The Good War,' remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in 'Division Street: America,' 1966; limned the Depression in 'Hard Times,' 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in 'Working,' 1974.

Said Andre Schiffrin, Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close friend: 'He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his genius.'

He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film 'Eight Men Out,' and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from 'a national Alzheimer's disease' that made government the perceived enemy.

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved 'alphabet agencies' from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, 'Studs' Place,' a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place and would go looking for it in Chicago.

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

Alton Miller, an associate dean of the School of Media Arts at Columbia College Chicago and a friend of Terkel's for more than 20 years, said Terkel hoped to live to see Barack Obama elected president.

Obama called Terkel a Chicago institution and national treasure.

'His writings, broadcasts, and interviews shed light on what it meant to be an American in the 20th century,' Obama said in a statement Friday night. 'He will be deeply missed by all who knew him, all who loved him, and all whose lives were enriched by the American stories he told.'

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. 'Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it,' Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

'She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so.'

___

Associated Press National Writer Hillel Italie and reporters Don Babwin and Michael Tarm in Chicago contributed to this report.

On the Net:

Health workers strike for safe staffing, job security

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 08:50:00 +0000

OAKLAND, Calif. — Bright purple tee-shirts filled the plaza at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center here Oct. 29, as striking health care workers gathered to demand the highly profitable company improve staffing levels, stop contracting work out and drop proposed takeaways in the contract they have been negotiating since May.

The strikers were among thousands of nursing, technical and service workers participating in a day of action at 15 mostly northern California health facilities operated by Sutter Health, the Daughters of Charity and the Alliance Clinic. Sutter workers have been without a contract since Sept. 30. Workers struck for 24 hours at 11 sites; they held informational pickets at four more. At three Sutter facilities including Oakland, registered nurses belonging to the California Nurses Association (CNA) struck in solidarity.

Longtime environmental services worker Odell Hunter told the World that his union, United Healthcare Workers West, SEIU, is fighting for the needs of hospital patients as well as the workers. Concerning the union’s key demand for adequate staffing, Hunter observed that “What helps us helps the public, too.”

While state law mandates nurse-to-patient ratios for RNs, no such provisions exist for other health care workers.

Hunter, who later told the crowd he’d raised his family — now young adults — during his 34 years “on this job,” said Sutter’s proposed takeaways in seniority rights and health benefits are also unacceptable.

Millicent Borland, a registered nurse in the hospital’s medical-surgical unit and a CNA member, said she joined the picket line because “professional nurses see health care workers as a team. Without the housekeepers, dietary workers, licensed vocational nurses and technicians, we can’t care for our patients.” Borland said the RNs “went through three strikes to get our contract,” because Sutter sought the same cutbacks and takeaways from the nurses.

UHW’s one-day strike came within days after the union won an agreement with Catholic Healthcare West that includes wage increases averaging 26 percent over four years, supplemental unemployment benefits for laid-off workers and other job security provisions. The CHW workers’ contract already includes safe staffing committees with binding arbitration if needed, fully paid family health coverage, retiree health care and pensions, strong job security and union rights provisions.

UHW President Sal Rosselli highlighted the CHW agreement and a comparable pact with Kaiser as he told the rally, “We’re not going to settle for anything less … If Kaiser and CHW and other companies can listen to their health care workers and give them a voice, so can Sutter.'

The workers also heard strong expressions of solidarity from area elected officials and from the Alameda Labor Council.

Calling the workers’ proposals “reasonable proposals that deserve immediate consideration,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) thanked the union members “for their ongoing commitment to seeking fair and just working conditions for all.” In a statement read to the rally, she pointed out that the Sutter and Daughters of Charity facilities “provide the majority of beds in Alameda County,” Lee said unsuccessful talks potentially impact “untold numbers” of area residents.

Alameda Labor Council head Sharon Cornu pledged the council’s full, ongoing support. “Please know you are not alone,” she said, noting that over 50,000 Alameda County workers have faced the same sorts of unacceptable contract proposals.

Robert Lieber, mayor of the nearby city of Albany and himself a registered nurse, told the crowd, “As an RN myself, I know what you do. Sutter has an agenda to take down unions; all they care about is dividing you.” In a reference to the Nov. 4 national elections, Lieber added, “I’m tired of a National Labor Relations Board that always sides with management.”

mbechtel @pww.org