Archive for December, 2009
New Season for Union Member Adventures in ‘Escape to the Wild’
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Illinois Firefighter (IAFF) Greg Curry’s elk-hunting adventure in some of Colorado’s most breathtaking countryside kicks off the fourth season of ”Escape to the Wild” on VERUS Country. The season premiere of the show, which takes union members on once-in-a-lifetime hunting and fishing adventures, will air Sunday, Jan. 3, at 9:30 a.m. EST.
The show is a union-sponsored television series of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP). “Escape to the Wild” is supported by the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance (USA), a joint venture of the TRCP and 21 unions to promote conservation and access for hunters and anglers.
While the show chronicles each union member’s outdoor adventure, it also gives viewers a look into the lives of the winners—their struggles, their triumphs and their commitment to their union, families and the outdoors.
Mentors Training Next Generation of Union Leaders
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When Royetta Sanford retired as director of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) Human Services Department, she did not stop working to improve the lives of working people. Instead, she has begun to train the next generation of union leaders.
Sanford has volunteered to share her knowledge and experience to mentor Carrie Meyers-Herron, a recipient of the Union Leaders of the Future Scholarship.
Says Sanford:
I’m mentoring because I feel it is one of the only ways we can move forward getting women and minorities in the mainstream of the labor movement.
This is a great, well-organized program with some real bright talent, a lot of people with capacity to be good leaders. I want to give back to the movement and do whatever I can to make it stronger and more diverse.
Frank on GritTV: Laws Tilted Against Forming a Union on the Job
In a recent edition of GRITtv, host Laura Flanders brings together three panelists for a talk about the economy, the labor movement and political organizing.
In one of the highlights of this episode, Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew, does a great job of explaining our broken labor laws and how they’re preventing millions of workers from exercising their basic freedom to form a union:
You’ve got to remember that one of the reasons it’s so hard to organize in the workplace is that there’s a whole industry out there that has developed to stop people from organizing. There are polls all the time asking, “Would you like to join a union,” “Would you be interested in bargaining with your boss,” that sort of thing, and mostly, people think that’s a good idea—but that doesn’t mean you get to have a union just because you want one. There’s a whole bunch of structural impediments in your way.
Caring for Retired Race Horses, Rehabing People
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For most of us, the world of thoroughbred horse racing begins and ends with the Triple Crown, those few weeks in the spring when the world’s best horses run in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont stakes.
But beyond the glamour that gilds the top of the horse-racing world, there’s a dirty secret that tarnishes racing’s carefully crafted image—the fate of the run-out and worn-out horses at the bottom-rung tracks far from Churchill Downs or Pimlico.
Every year, thousands of horses are shipped across U.S. borders to slaughterhouses in Canada or Mexico, while thousands more are neglected, abused or abandoned.
Ironworker Creates Sportsmen’s Oasis for 911 Responders with Disabilities
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John Sferazo, a retired member of Ironworkers Local 361 from Brooklyn, N.Y., was one of the first responders after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Like many of the firefighters, police officers, reservists and other union members who worked in the devastation of the bombed out World Trade Centers, Sferazo suffered psychological and physical damage, including the loss of more than one-third of his breathing capacity.
But despite his adversity, Sferazo is actively working to build a top-rated wildlife and nature program in Maine, which he is opening for hunting to veterans and first responders with disabilities.
In 2000, Sferazo, a member of the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance, purchased a parcel of land in Maine known as Owen’s Marsh. A former asphalt plant, the site had been reclaimed, including the construction of a dam, which created a deep-water marsh. Five weeks after Sferazo purchased the property, the dam breached, releasing a 73-acre wall of water.
Start Your After-Christmas Shopping at The Union Shop Online™
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So you thanked Aunt Tillie for the psychedelic tie and didn’t roll your eyes when you opened the fuzzy Batman slippers with blinking lights from your kids.
But if you cringe at the thought of day-after Christmas, door-buster crowds at the big-box stores and malls, you can flesh out your gift stash or get ahead of the birthdays on your gift list at the AFL-CIO The Union Shop Online.TM
It’s still winter out there and there is a wide range of warm weather gear, sweatshirts, fleece jackets and more. If you want to keep you noggin warm, there’s a nifty Working America knit ski cap.
For the kids—don’t hold the slippers against them—check out the picture book, Kid Blink Beats the World, by Don Brown. In the summer of 1899, hundreds of newsboys and girls who sold Randolph Hearst’s The Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s The World on New York City streets went on strike over a penny. Led by Kid Blink and others, they refused to sell the papers, staged rallies and finally brought the newspapers to the negotiating table. Click here for more kids’ stuff.
Kids with Cancer Get Winter Wonderland from Building Trades Union Members
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The children at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund Clinic are enjoying a jollier holiday celebration than usual, thanks in part to the more than $27,000 union construction and trades workers collected for the institute’s annual Winter Wonderland.
The donation helped deck out the more than weeklong Wonderland for children being treated for cancer and included visits from Santa, gifts, arts and crafts and holiday meals.
The workers are building a 14-story, 275,000 square foot, state-of-the-art outpatient clinic and research center next to the Jimmy Fund Clinic. The Yawkey Center for Cancer Care is set to open its doors in early 2011.
This fall, Mike Morgan, with Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) Local 537, posted a flier on the job site asking the workers to donate an hour of their salary to the kids at the clinic. The money started rolling in, and the donations are continuing, says Morgan.
Five SAG Lifetime Achievement Winners Featured in Film Marathon
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One night before the Screen Actors (SAG) honor Hollywood’s finest performers, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will pay tribute to five actors who won SAG’ s highest honor: the Life Achievement Award. TCM’s four-film prime-time presentation airs Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, the night before a live broadcast of the 16th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards—the nation’s largest and only nationally televised all-union awards show.
TCM’s tribute will begin at 8 p.m. EST with the 1935 comedy short “Tit for Tat,” starring Stan Laurel, who received the Life Achievement Award in 1963. Next up, Jack Lemmon, who was honored by SAG in 1989, stars in the Neil Simon comedy “The Out-of-Towners” (1969). Sidney Poitier, honored in 1999, and Ruby Dee, honored in 2000, star in the dramatic adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961). And the night closes out with 1998 honoree Kirk Douglas in the suspenseful Western “Last Train from Gun Hill” (1959).
Senate Passes Health Care Bill
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The Senate passed health care reform by a 60-39 margin shortly after 7 a.m. today.
While passage of this legislation continues the momentum for health care reform, the Senate bill itself doesn’t live up to the kind of reform we need. The bill has many positive features, but it falls short in three key areas:
• It is paid for by a tax on working families’ health benefits.
• It fails to provide a public health insurance option, which would control costs by giving insurance companies real competition.
• It does not do enough to make sure employers are living up to their responsibility.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said:
For this health care bill to be worthy of the support of working men and women, substantial changes must be made. The AFL-CIO intends to fight on behalf of all working families to make those changes and win health care reform that is deserving of the name.
The House bill is the model for genuine health care reform. Working people cannot accept anything less than real reform.
Lie of the Year: ‘Death Panel’ Attack on Health Care Reform
This year, opponents of health care reform hit new lows in promoting misleading, inaccurate or flat-out dishonest information. The worst of these lies was the scam that health care reform would create “death panels” whose members would judge whether to end seniors’ lives.
The website PolitiFact called the death-panel myth the “Lie of the Year,” and the watchdog group Media Matters named its originator, Betsy McCaughey, as “Health Care Misinformer of the Year.”
The vicious, absurd fairy tale of “death panels” got its start in July, when McCaughey, a former New York lieutenant governor, claimed on the air that, in a reformed health care system, seniors would be mandated to attend counseling sessions where they’d be told how and when to end their lives.
