Channel: Organizing & Bargaining
Fatigue, Short Staffs ‘Recipe for Disaster’ in Summer Flying Season
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With the busy summer travel season fast approaching, the nation’s air traffic controllers are alerting the public that a combination of short-staffing, fatigue and faulty equipment in control towers is a "recipe for disaster."
Just this week, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) issued warnings about several near misses at two of the country’s major airports—Atlanta and Cincinnati. In Atlanta, the world’s busiest airport, the number of incidents when planes have gotten too close has already exceeded last year’s total—and the situation is getting worse. In Cincinnati, three such serious incidents have occurred in the past six weeks.
Laid-Off Flight Attendants Need Your Help
Jeremy Bishop, executive director of Pride At Work, describes how we can assist laid-off flight attendants at Aloha and ATA airlines.
Recently, thousands of flight attendants at Aloha Airlines and ATA Airlines have been laid off after their respective companies went out of business. As any working person can attest, this is a terrible time to be unemployed.
Once covered by contracts negotiated by the Flight Attendants-CWA, these flight attendants were forced to leave stable wages, health care benefits and a path to retirement behind for the unemployment line.
Tell Us What You Think: The 2008 Working Woman Survey
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If you are a working woman, are you worried about finding a job that pays your bills and provides benefits? Or concerned about the rising cost of health care? Maybe you're frustrated you can't find time to do your job and spend time with your family. Or are you tired of working as hard as your male counterparts and not getting paid as much?
The AFL-CIO and Working America’s just-launched online 2008 Ask a Working Woman survey enables you to share workplace concerns about issues such as equal pay and stronger family and medical leave laws. Click here to take the survey and here to share it with other working women.
Help Provide Relief to Burmese Workers
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With more than 22,000 people reported dead and as many as 1 million homeless after a tropical cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend, the Federation of Trade Unions of Burma (FTUB) has issued an urgent plea to the global union movement for aid in launching rescue, relief and rehabilitation work for victims of the storm.
The cyclone was the worst to hit Asia in almost 20 years, according to weather experts.
FTUB, a partner of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, plans to use relief fund contributions to distribute clothing, medicine, and non-perishable food for displaced workers and their families, build temporary shelters and assist in providing needed counseling and health clinics. Click here to contribute to help Burmese workers.
Tobacco Workers Demand Safer Workplaces, Better Pay
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Hundreds of members of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), religious leaders and community and union supporters from across the nation traveled to Winston-Salem, N.C., where they rallied today outside the Reynolds American Inc. (RAI) shareholders’ meeting.
Carrying displays of mock tobacco leaves and placards depicting life in the tobacco fields, the marchers demanded that RAI CEO Susan Ivey meet with workers to discuss the unsafe and harsh work conditions, something Ivey has refused to do for more than a year. Reynolds American is the parent of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.
Child Labor Report Latest Example of China’s Disrespect for Human, Workers’ Rights
Here’s one more reason that the Bush administration’s refusal to push China to respect workers’ rights is wrong. This week, Chinese police rescued 167 village children sold to work as slave laborers in a city in the booming southern province of Guangdong in the Pearl River Delta. The children all came from poor families who lived more than 600 miles away.
The Guardian newspaper in London credits Southern Metropolis Daily, an underground Chinese newspaper, for revealing that more than 1,000 children, some as young as 7, had been sold "like cabbages" at a street market in southwestern China. Many had fake papers certifying they were adults, and more had documents saying they were in their early teens.
Chinese officials also said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, slave-like conditions for minimal pay.
On the March with Los Carwasheros!
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Amy Masciola from the AFL-CIO Organizing Department joined in one of many events that took place around the country on International Labor Day—May Day, when she joined car wash workers march in Los Angeles.
Si, se puede! Yes, we can! The chant echoed over and over again in the streets of downtown Los Angeles on May Day, as more than 10,000 people marched to City Hall from three different staging areas around the city. Up north, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) staged a virtual strike on May Day, effectively shutting down all U.S. and Canadian West Coast ports. ILWU leaders say workers staged the one-day work-stoppage to protest the war in Iraq, and the work-stoppage comes at a time when the union is in the middle of contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA). Among the many events on the East Coast, the North Central Florida Central Labor Council coordinated a rally in Gainesville, where University of Florida professor Robert Zieger cited the relevance of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s calls for civil rights.
UAW Set for Major Rally at Connecticut Casino and More Bargaining News
UAW members are planning a major rally at Connecticut's Foxwoods Resort Casino this month, and more news from "Bargaining Digest Weekly." The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 900 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.
Work Stoppages and Actions
UAW, Foxwoods: The UAW is planning a major rally May 17 at Connecticut's Foxwoods Resort Casino. The event is scheduled for the same day Foxwoods opens its new $700 million MGM Grand hotel expansion with an invitation-only party. The UAW won an election to represent table game dealers, but the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe, which owns the casino, has challenged the election several times, saying federal labor law does not apply to a casino on tribal land.
Put Your Food Donations Out Saturday to Stamp Out Hunger
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On Saturday, May 10, the day before Mother’s Day, you can help stamp out hunger with a few easy steps: Collect some nonperishable food items. Go to your mailbox and drop them off outside. That's it. Your letter carrier will pick up your donation as part of the 16th annual food drive sponsored by the Letter Carriers (NALC).
Donations will be collected in more than 10,000 communities and distributed to food banks, pantries and shelters in your local area. Since 1993, the NALC food drive has collected 836.2 million pounds of food to help feed hungry families.
In 2007, the drive delivered 70.7 million pounds of nonperishable items donated by patrons to local food organizations—the fourth consecutive year the total surpassed 70 million pounds.
Meet Four ‘Hearts of the Movement’
The success and strength of the union movement derives from the hard work of rank-and-file members whose dedication to improving the lives of America's workers is manifest in their daily actions and in willingness to go above the call of duty. At the AFL-CIO Heart of the Movement, we recognize some of these heroes of the union movement. Here are four union members we've recently profiled. You can click here to read all the stories of these and other Hearts of the Movement.
- George Calko, in his late 20s, is part of the future of the union movement. A member of the Steelworkers (USW), he is an organizer in his home state of Ohio for the Blue-Green Alliance, a partnership between the USW and the Sierra Club, which recently launched campaigns for green jobs and joined with Nobel winner Al Gore in the search for a solution to global warming. Calko says the connection between labor and environmentalists makes perfect sense. "We're going to have green jobs, or we'll have no jobs at all,” he says. “And we want clean cities and a healthy environment to raise our children."
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