Coalition to Ensure People of Color Have Role in Health Care Debate
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A coalition of African American and Latino groups, along with other civil rights and grassroots organizations, launched a campaign today to make sure the voices of people of color are heard in the final weeks of the health care reform debate.
A series of TV and print ads in English and Spanish will run in key states and urge viewers and readers to let members of Congress know the importance of health care reform to people of color.
In a press conference today, leaders from Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the NAACP, National Council of La Raza and Campaign for Community Change said recent studies have shown the inequality in the health care system falls most heavily on communities of color. People of color are more likely to suffer and die from diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases.
Women’s Groups Send Letter to Capitol Hill Supporting Employee Free Choice
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A dozen of the nation’s leading women’s organizations has called on Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. In a letter this week to every member of Congress, the groups say that restoring the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain for a better life would benefit women and all workers.
The letter notes that unionized women workers earn almost one-third more than nonunion workers—32 percent.
In addition, women in unions are 19 percent more likely to have health insurance benefits and 25 percent more likely to have an employer-provided pension. (Click here to learn more about the union difference.)
The letter was organized by the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF).
Frank McCourt: Inspirational Writer, AFT Member
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Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former New York City teacher Frank McCourt, 78, who died July 19, was one of the world’s “most inspirational writers and teachers,” says AFT President Randi Weingarten.
Frank McCourt saw teaching, storytelling and writing not only as a way out of his unimaginable, poverty-stricken childhood and adolescence, but also as a way to share his life’s lessons.
McCourt, an AFT member, taught social studies and English in the city’s public schools from 1960 to 1987. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 memoir, Angela’s Ashes, that detailed his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. His 2005 book, Teacher Man, chronicles his teaching career in New York City. Says Weingarten:
Thousands of students benefited from his remarkable ability to help them realize the richness of their own lives, no matter how difficult.
In 1997, McCourt spoke at an AFT conference. McCourt told the educators he knew nothing about teaching when he became a teacher, except what he had picked up from his teachers in Ireland, all “trained by the Marquis de Sade.”
I didn’t know I was learning on the job that first year and later found out I had been learning on the job for 27 years….Norman Mailer said the only way you learn something is by writing about it. The only way I learned anything was by teaching about it.
