Archive for October, 2007
Union Members Help Victims of California Fires
Throughout Southern California, central labor councils and union locals are mobilizing to make sure their union brothers and sisters affected by the devastating fires receive all the help they need to get back on their feet. At least 18,000 homes have been destroyed and 14 people killed in the 16 blazes that have ravaged 500,000 acres—an area about twice the size of New York City—over the past six days.
Firefighters at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, members of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 2881, and members of dozens of other locals of the California Professional Firefighters (CPF/IAFF), along with firefighters from neighboring states, are battling the fires that stretch from Santa Barbara County in the north to San Diego and the Mexican border in the south.
Walks, Phone Banks Ready for Virginia Activists
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Doris Crouse-Mays, secretary-treasurer of the Virginia AFL-CIO, urges all union members in the Northern Virginia area to take part in this weekend’s get-out-the-vote walks. A lot is at stake for working families in the November elections in Virginia, where state Senate races are expected to be decided by just a few hundred votes.
It’s Friday, Oct. 26, just 11 days from Election Day. We are getting much needed rain in Virginia that will be turning the grass green, but we know the Virginia Labor 2007 program will be turning our state blue! So we can not let anything stop us!
Honk If You Support Nurses
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Rachele Huennekens, AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow, is blogging and leafleting her way through the fifth day of a 10-day bus tour through Kentucky, where Steve Beshear (D) is challenging Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R), who has canceled bargaining rights for state employees and taken other anti-worker stands.
Dozens of local labor leaders and union volunteers are taking part in the Bluegrass Express tour, which yesterday stopped to support striking nurses, members of the United American Nurses (UAN), at Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals. Nearly 700 nurses are on strike at the hospitals in West Virginia and Kentucky.
It was first and foremost an amazing sound. At each stop of the Bluegrass Express tour yesterday, we could hear the nurses’ picket lines in front of the Appalachian Regional Healthcare hospitals before we saw them.
In Middlesboro, Harlan, Whitesburg and Hazard, the nurses’ chants and supporters’ car honks were deafening:
Hey hey, ho ho, (CEO) Jerry Haynes has got to go!
Fired up, can’t take it no more! We’re fired up, can’t take it no more!
Honk, honk, honnnnnnnnnnnk!
Second, it was an amazing sight. The nurses, members of the Kentucky Nurses Association/United American Nurses (UAN), packed the picket lines, wearing a rainbow of t-shirts. There were red ones saying “RNs for Safety;” white ones with “United We Bargain, Divided We Beg” and black ones with a picture of a viper saying, “When Provoked, Will Strike!”
Guess Who Wants to Talk Health Care in 2008? (The Answer May Surprise You)
The Kaiser Family Foundation has released its latest Election 2008 tracking poll, and not surprisingly, respondents listed health care as a top priority. According to the survey:
When asked about the two issues they would most like to hear the presidential candidates discuss, the top four issues overall are again Iraq (44 percent), health care (38 percent), the economy (18 percent), and immigration (12 percent)–the same four issues which have topped the poll since tracking began in March.
But what has changed since March is the percentage of Republicans who choose health care as a top issue.
Among Republicans, 30 percent name health care as one of the top two issues–the highest share recorded for that group since the tracking poll began in March 2007.
Drug Industry Paying Big Bucks for Sneaky Ads
Our friends over at the Alliance for Retired Americans sent this item today in the organization’s weekly e-mail newsletter. Seems as though the giant pharmaceutical industry is spending lots of its money on cleaning up its tarnished image.
But the new series of paid advertisements by the drug industry is being promoted as public affairs programs and features interview segments with guests such as talk show host Montel Williams and former White House Press Secretary Tony Snow.
Postcard from New Orleans: Wishing You Remembered Us
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Marcy Rein, a communications specialist with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Organizing Department, took part in the International Labor Communications Association annual meeting in New Orleans and describes how the reality of New Orleans is not the one portrayed by traditional media.
We pile onto our buses during a break between late-season thunderstorms. Muggy skies hug the city’s flat streets as the tour heads out through the busy Central Business District.
The International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) has set up a media center here, gathering nearly 100 of us labor communicators to spotlight the real stories of Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath (check out more of our work here). Before we begin our reporting, we get a tour.
“I have to be honest with you,” said the guide on our bus, Chet Held. “I left before the storm. Twenty-five of us piled into my wife’s cousin’s house in Tampa.” Held, an assistant business manager for Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 130, is a wireman by trade and hails from a family of shrimpers and fishermen. He lives in St. Bernard Parish on the southeast side of the city.
We had 42,000 houses under water in St. Bernard, only the rooftops showing.
Katrina had no prejudice. She hit rich, poor, black, white.
AFL-CIO Files International Complaint Charging Bush NLRB With Assault on Workers’ Rights
Instead of fulfilling its mission to protect workers and promote collective bargaining, in recent years the Republican majority on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has systematically reduced the freedom of workers to join unions. The abuses have been so egregious that the AFL-CIO today took the unusual step of filing a complaint with the International Labor Organization (ILO) charging the Bush administration’s NLRB with denying workers’ rights in violation of international labor standards.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:
Under Bush, America’s labor board has so failed our nation’s workers that we must now turn to the world’s international watchdogs to monitor and intervene. The Bush labor board is kryptonite for America’s workers. There is no historic precedent for such aggressive efforts by the Board to curtail workers’ rights of freedom of association and collective bargaining.
BP Fined $50 Million in Texas Refinery Blast That Killed 15
Oil giant BP today agreed to pay $50 million in fines to settle a criminal case over a 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 at a refinery in Texas City, Texas. That brings to more than $70 million in federal fines BP has paid related to the blast.
Today’s agreement, announced by the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, follows a $21.3 million fine levied in September 2005 by the Occupational Safety Health and Safety Administration (OSHA). The fine included penalties for what OSHA termed 170 “egregious and willful violations” of safety rules.
Deja Vu: Bush Promises Veto After House Passes New Child Health Care Bill
The U.S. House today voted again to provide health care coverage for 10 million children whose families can’t afford it. Today’s vote (265-142) on a revised bill to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) won overwhelming bipartisan support, but not enough to overcome another veto by President Bush.
With Bush ready to veto another SCHIP bill, it is unclear what the next step will be after today’s vote. Temporary funding and authorization for the program both expire Nov. 16.
Bush vetoed Congress’ first attempt to reauthorize the program to provide health care for more than 6 million children currently covered plus an additional 4 million. Last week, the House fell 13 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto.
Steelworkers Demand Apology After Wall Street Journal Makes $800,000 Error
The latest entry in the “you can’t believe everything you read in the mainstream media” category comes from The Wall Street Journal. On Monday, the paper ran an editorial attacking congressional Democrats who voted to trim $2 million from the budget of the Office of Labor Management Standards.
Somewhere in the mix, the Journal’s editors singled out United Steelworkers (USW) member Jimmy Warren, a local union financial officer from Arkansas. The editors claimed Warren’s local paid him $825,262.
But here’s the rub. The Journal got it so wrong it would be comical if it weren’t such an egregious mistake. If the editors had spent just a few minutes checking the financial report for his local, which is available free to the public online, they would have easily found the truth—the records clearly show Warren was paid $8,252.62, not $825,262, a difference of, oh, more than $817,000.
