Super Solidarity over Super Bowl Weekend
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Over the weekend, all eyes were on the Super Bowl in Indianapolis, where tens of thousands traveled to see the event and hundreds of thousands more watched it on television. But while the spotlight was on the game, workers across the city took to the streets to protest the outrages happening to working people.
In one such event, we rallied at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Indianapolis, where hardworking hotel housekeepers are fighting to keep their jobs and boost their poverty-level pay at a hotel where rates can be more than $1,000 a night for a Super Bowl week room. Twenty longtime hotel workers may be out of jobs in a few days when the hotel ends a subcontract with Hospitality Staffing Solutions.
The hotel workers are not in this fight alone. In the midst of what is undoubtedly the busiest few days for football players, DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), and NFL players joined Hyatt housekeepers at the rally to demand Hyatt end its abuse of subcontracted workers and hire outsourced workers directly. Smith said NFL players would continue a year-old boycott of Hyatt over its treatment of workers and told the crowd:
I love people who stand together to fight for what’s right.
Just blocks from the Super Bowl, these football players, together with construction workers, office staff and steelworkers, stood side by side with hotel housekeepers, joined in common cause by the struggles that unite all working people—all of the 99 percent in this country who are fighting against corporate greed and challenging politicians who seek to take away our rights as citizens of this great country. Read the rest of this entry »
Indiana Working Families Ready to Take Back the State
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AFL-CIO Field Communications staffer Cathy Sherwin sends us this from the Indiana statehouse.
Far from conceding defeat after the passage of a so-called right to work (RTW) bill, tens of thousands of Hoosier workers came together in solidarity to march from the statehouse to Super Bowl village in Indianapolis. From the steps of the statehouse, Indiana AFL-CIO President Nancy Guyott said today would mark a new start to taking back the state, starting with “the biggest march Indiana has ever seen!”
Construction workers and teachers, grocery clerks and truck drivers cheered on the workers and elected officials with chants of “Remember November,” vowing to take back the state door by door, neighborhood by neighborhood. WISH-TV has some great aerial footage here.
The overreach and extreme politics that led to today’s vote—including actions by RTW supporters that included shutting the doors to the statehouse, cutting off debate and an ad campaign bankrolled by secret special interests have given the voting public a window into the Indiana Capitol. In poll after poll, Hoosier voters say they don’t approve of these strong-arm tactics by GOP leaders. Read the rest of this entry »
‘Right to Work’ for Less Passes, Indiana Working Families Vow to Fight On
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The Indiana state Senate this morning approved (28-22) a “right to work” for less bill. Passage of the bill, says Indiana State AFL-CIO President Nancy Guyott, “means that strong arm tactics, misinformation and big money have won at the Indiana Statehouse.”
She says the bill, which Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) will sign, sets Indiana upon:
a path that will lead to lower wages for all working Hoosiers, less safety at work and less dignity and security in old age or ill health. Indiana’s elected officials have given the wrong answer to the most important question of this generation.
While thousands of working people—some days more than 10,000—traveled to Indianapolis over the past few weeks as Daniels, House Speaker Brian Bosma (R) and others muscled the bill through the legislature, they were often denied the right to be heard. Says Guyott:
Citizens who stood against this legislation were barred from entering the Statehouse, were denied the chance to testify before the committees considering it and were refused meetings with their own legislators.
Breaking: Indiana House Passes RTW
Moments ago, the Indiana state House passed a “right to work” for less bill by 55 to 41. The issue now moves to the state Senate, where it’s expected to be taken up and voted on next week. The Senate previously passed a different version of the bill.
Working Hoosiers by the thousands have been rallying in opposition to “right to work” for less each day and plan to keep it up as Gov. Mitch Daniels and his Republican statehouse colleagues push to ram through the measure.
Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma and Gov. Daniels have been ramming the so-called right to work bill through even after the voters have made clear that they want a public referendum on the controversial anti-worker measure. Only one-third of Indiana voters favor passing the RTW for less law and a whopping 69 percent of Hoosier voters say that the Indiana General Assembly should slow down the process to allow more debate. An overwhelming 71 percent of respondents want to give voters—not the legislature—the final say on this controversial legislation.
Follow all the action at #inunion.
Indiana’s Daniels: Opponent of Working People
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Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent. (Feel free to post a message to Daniels at his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mymanmitchfans .)
In his rebuttal, Daniels had the audacity to claim the mantle of people’s champion—this from the man who said he was against the “right to work” for less before he was pushing it armed with lies and ruthlessly anti-democratic tactics. This from the political party fighting Obama’s plan to address the deficit by raising taxes on retired financiers like Mitt Romney, who pay less in taxes than most firefighters, bricklayers, teachers and nurses.
Inconsistency and numbers not adding up is nothing new for Daniels, who failed miserably as George W. Bush’s budget director for the first 2.5 years of Bush’s presidency, which had massive tax cuts for the rich as its No. 1 domestic priority. And Daniels’ concern for working people is more than a little bit ironic in light of his record as governor of Indiana, which has included taking away the right in 2005 of public employees to collectively bargain.
Today, Daniels has entered the national stage as an angry opponent of workers acting collectively. He may have seemed mild-mannered in a speech well-received by right-wing pundits, but that manner is belied by his efforts to shut down the basic institutions of democracy in Indiana. Daniels, a lame-duck governor who seems to be spending a lot more time thinking about Washington than about getting Hoosiers back to work, ought to follow the lead of President Obama and listen to working people rather than CEOs.
Trumka: Obama Showed He Hears People Not Heard by 1%
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address tonight made clear that he hears the people who aren’t being heard by the 1 percent, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Obama’s speech showed he “listened to the single mom working two jobs to get by, to the out-of-work construction worker, to the retired factory worker, to the student serving coffee to help pay for college.”
By laying out a vision of an America that can create jobs and prosperity for all instead of wealth for the few, Trumka said the president “voiced the aspirations and concerns of those who are too often ignored.”
Obama also made clear that the era of the 1 percent getting rich by looting the economy, rather than creating jobs, is over.
“Now it’s time for Congress to stop standing in the way of rebuilding our country and act,” Trumka said.
President Obama presented Congress a choice, Trumka said, between Obama’s vision of the need to invest to achieve stable, long-term prosperity for all and the vision of presidential candidates squabbling over how much further to cut the taxes of the 1 percent.
Obama “spoke to the confidence of working people that if we are determined and committed, we can revitalize ‘Made in the USA.’ That commitment to American manufacturing, made possible in part by enhanced enforcement of trade laws being violated by China , is welcome news to the too many productive, hard working Americans sitting idle unnecessarily.”
Trumka praised the President’s powerful insistance “on a more humble Wall Street subject to a thorough investigation of the misconduct in the mortgage markets that wrecked our economy,” and applauded the creation of a new mortgage crisis unit to be co-chaired by New York’s Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman. Read the rest of this entry »
10,000 Hoosiers Pack State Capitol to Protest RTW
AFL-CIO Field Communications staffer Cathy Sherwin sends us this from the Indiana statehouse.
More than 10,000 working people are filling the Indiania statehouse to protest “right to work” for less legislation. Inside the House and Senate chambers, legislators are battling between the interests of everyday working people and those of the big corporations and out of state special interest groups who are pushing this deceptive legislation.
As the Senate prepares to vote on final passage of its version of RTW today, the House will be considering key amendments today and the final version could be ready for a vote as early as Tuesday.
Big corporate dollars and national politics are threatening Hoosier wages and middle-class jobs. Worse, politicians like Speaker Brian Bosma and Gov. Mitch Daniels are playing fast and loose with the democratic process. They want to push our unions right out of Indiana.
But we aren’t going to let that happen.
Closing doors and cutting off debate is no way to represent Indiana voters. Our legislative process—and the upcoming Super Bowl—shouldn’t be hijacked by extremist politicians. Today, we’ve seen a stark divide between legislators working for lobbyists and special interests and those working for their constituents to stop the rush to ram through RTW. Tomorrow we must stand with the elected officials that are standing up for us.
This week, we’re taking our state back.
Follow us on Twitter with the hashtag #InUnion.
Gov. Daniels: Against ‘Right to Work’ Before He Was for It
Look what just came to light! Here’s a video clip of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who’s now teamed up with statehouse Republicans to ram into law a “right to work” for less bill, telling a Teamsters Local 135 stewards dinner back in 2006 that he opposes “right to work.”
“We can’t afford to have super wars over issues that might divide us….I have said it over and over again, and I’ll say it again tonight: I’m a supporter of the labor laws we have in the state of Indiana and I’m not interested in changing any of them—not the prevailing wage law and certainly not a ‘right to work’ law….”
Republican Party Makes RTW Top Priority
The national Republican party has selected Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union address next week–sending a clear signal the party is making attacks on working people a top priority in the 2012 elections. Daniels is a key backer of right to work for less (RTW) legislation which state Republican lawmakers, in a stunning display of arrogance, have repeatedly tried to ram through, while thumbing their noses at working Hoosiers–not to mention democracy.
Democratic state house lawmakers yesterday left the legislature to protest moves by the Republican majority, especially the refusal to allow Democrats to offer a vote making RTW a referendum, so that the people of Indiana would vote on it directly. From Huffington Post:
“We wanted the vote to be up or down,” said House Minority Leader Patrick Bauer (D). “The Republican Party wanted to skip the people completely, skip the election process and then skip the referendum process on whether or not you can have this bill, which many consider a ‘right to work for less’ — less pay, less safety less health care.”
Republican state House Speaker Brian Bosma is fining 33 House Democrats $1,000 each per day for every day they are not in the legislature. Read the rest of this entry »
Indiana: 20,000 Signed Postcards Say No Way to RTW
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AFL-CIO Field Communications staffer Cathy Sherwin sends us this report.
In their campaign to rush through so-called right to work (RTW) legislation, Indiana Republican leaders, including Gov. Mitch Daniels, have claimed they have public support. Wrong.
Polls show that the public overwhelmingly wants to see legislators slow down on “right to work” for less legislation, or let the people decide directly.
At worksites and around kitchen tables, at the Statehouse and door to door throughout Indiana, Hoosier workers have been speaking out and taking action against this anti-worker bill. Tens of thousands of workers have signed postcards now being hand-delivered to legislators urging a vote against RTW.
Today in Indianapolis, union members are at the Statehouse, putting 20,000 Read the rest of this entry »
