Social Media: New Tools Aid in Organizing
They’re tweeting in Northern California about the Employee Free Choice Act, sharing about health care reform on Facebook in Montana and posting organizing messages on My Space for workers in York, Pa.
Across the country, union members are using the new social media to mobilize workers and share information.
Steve Selby, an Electrical Workers (IBEW) organizer in York, Pa., knows the value of social media. He urgently needed to reach 300 workers at a local Comcast office. Rather than standing outside the office and handing out a flier with different information each day, Selby taught himself how to set up a MySpace account. He handed out one flier directing workers to his MySpace page, where he shared information the workers needed to know.
Are Industry Lobbyists Raising Our Health Care Premiums?
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While the Senate Finance Committee is slogging through more than 530 amendments to Sen. Max Baucus’ flawed health care reform bill, more than 2,700 lobbyists are working overtime to protect the private health insurance industry and other health care corporations.
Protecting their health industry clients means blocking a public health insurance plan option, derailing strong health care cost controls and gutting tough new health care rules that would put people before profits.
In trying to kill the public option, insurance industry lobbyists are thumbing their nose at the American public, who strongly support a public option. A New York Times/CBS poll released today found that 65 percent of respondents want a public health care option, while only 26 percent oppose such a plan.
Health Care Kumbaya
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| Protest against health insurers need to have both a union and community face—like this march both against foreclosures and for the Employee Free Choice Act earlier in March in Lynn, Mass. |
The peasants are filing their pitchforks to a fine point in anticipation of an attack on the palace—and the target of their ire is not what we might have intended. At this critical moment in the health care debate, more than a few working folk are taking a suspicious look at the health care reform efforts of Senate Democrats, President Obama—and their own unions. A headline in my local newspaper, the Lynn Item, helped stir the tempest: “Obama Open to Taxing Benefits to Fund Reform.”
Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:
If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class.
Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready. And Donna Smith, an organizer and legislative representative for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) notes that insurance companies continue discriminatory rates for older workers and ongoing rescissions of benefits—that is, targeting people with more than 1,400 medical conditions for “opposition research” investigations so their benefits can be cut off. “Ugly stuff,” she puts it. (At a health care forum in Lynn, Mass., last week, Rep. John Tierney reported that in congressional hearings he asked every insurance company if they would stop these viscous targeted rescissions—each one said “No.”)
States May Lead the Way on Health Care Reform
This is a cross-post from the Daily Kos blog.
In Canada, it took the dogged determination of one province, Saskatchewan, and a visionary leader, Tommy Douglas, to pave the path to a national health care system, which they call Medicare.
For all the detractors of the Canadian system in the studios of Fox News and the board rooms of right wing think tanks, consider this one note: In 2004, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation conducted a national poll to select the greatest Canadian of all time. The winner in a landslide—Tommy Douglas.
Nevada Nurses Vote to Join CNA/NNOC
The 1,100 registered nurses at three St. Rose Dominican hospitals in Las Vegas and Henderson, Nev., voted by a 3-1 margin last night to join the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC).
The RNs work at the Siena and Rose de Lima campuses in Henderson and the San Martin facility in Las Vegas. The hospitals are part of the Catholic Healthcare West (CHW) system, where the union already represents 10,500 other RNs at 30 sites in California and Nevada.
In Rare Move, NLRB Takes Hospitals To Court
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is asking a federal court to force Fremont-Rideout Health Group to recognize the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) as the representative of RNs at two of its hospitals and return to the bargaining table to negotiate in good faith.
For three years, management has worked to thwart the nurses’ choice to join a union and bargain collectively at hospitals and clinics in Yuba City and Marysville, north of Sacramento.
The NLRB court filing, known as a “10(j) petition,” is rarely used, except in cases the board considers to be the most egregious violations of federal labor law, according to the union.
