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Union Summer: Making a Difference and Having Fun |
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| Some 48 student activists are working on projects across the country as part of the AFL-CIO Union Summer program. | |
From Boston to New Orleans to Las Vegas and Phoenix, the next generation of union leaders is getting first-hand experience in how to help workers join a union.
For the past month, 48 student activists have been working on projects across the country as part of the AFL-CIO’s Union Summer, a 10-week program that began June 4.
Launched in 1996, Union Summer has graduated nearly 3,000 activists, many of whom continue to work for social justice. Past Union Summer interns have gone on to be union organizers, organizer trainers, strategic researchers and labor attorneys.
For Taneisha Straughter, a 21-year-old graduate of Tulane University, Union Summer has been an eye-opening experience. As part of her internship, the native of New Orleans is working in her hometown trying to garner community support to change the conditions in the city’s schools. Straughter, who says she’s thinking of becoming a labor lawyer, says:
Union Summer has shown me how important it is to have collective bargaining. When you see that employers will do any and everything to stop you from having a union, it just shows how much collective bargaining is needed. It’s a right.
Fewer than half the public schools in the Crescent City have reopened since hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in 2005. Most of those are charter schools. The state-controlled Recovery School District (RSD), which took over schools with performance scores below the state average, even if they were meeting yearly progress goals, operates most of the rest. Employees in RSD schools have no union representation.
Thousands of school teachers in the city lost their jobs or were forced to retire when local officials closed schools to gut the teachers’ union. Shortly after Katrina, some 4,900 public school teachers, mostly members of the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO/AFT), and 1,900 support staff were forced to retire or just lost their jobs.
Seth Dietz, a 23-year-old student at Montgomery County Community College in Rockville, Md., learned about Union Summer from his mother, a union member. He’s working to assist construction workers in Phoenix who are seeking justice from developers such as Pulte Homes, one of the largest developers in the country.
Dietz says the Union Summer activists (who have been involved in pickets, hoisting banners and other actions):
feel we are making incredible progress and having a lot of fun doing it. I’ve learned what it means to organize and some strategies to do that. Working people have to stick together or we’ll be crushed. It’s good for workers to get a union and the benefits. But the community benefits from the union struggle. It’s all good all around.
Of the 48 activists in Union Summer, two-thirds are women and three out of five are people of color.
In addition to the groups in New Orleans and Phoenix, the students are working with AFGE to help airport security workers in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix and with the Imperial Counties Labor Council in San Diego, Working America in Manchester, N.H., the Eastern Maine Labor Council in Bangor and the Massachusetts AFL-CIO in Boston.
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