Portland Rising Events Teach Union Summer Interns About Solidarity
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AFL-CIO Union Summer interns learned what labor solidarity is all about recently when they joined the Portland (Ore.) Day of Rising sponsored by Jobs with Justice. In a series of seven actions in one day, nearly 200 people traveled across Portland to lend support to workers embroiled in contract disputes and to speak out on trade issues.
Kelsey Jorgenson, an intern working with the Communication Workers of America (CWA), said
Portland Rising gave me an experience of true solidarity. I’ve been to many rallies, but this was the first time that I saw people coming together to support each other at multiple sites and taking on other’s struggles as their own.
Oregon Unions Helping Unemployed Learn Skills to Find Jobs
AFL-CIO Community Services Director Will Fischer reports on the recent Oregon Wants to Work meetings for the unemployed.
Earlier this week, Oregon Wants to Work, an organization that advocates for the needs of the unemployed and underemployed, held a meeting with dozens of jobless workers in the Portland area to help them learn new skills to gain employment.
Human resources specialist Peter Casanova conducted an engaging presentation on what hiring managers look for in job candidates. Casanova even coaxed a brave participant into a mock interview to show the entire group how it’s done. He also showed participants how to handle tough questions in interviews from explaining long lapses in employment and how to use proper interview etiquette.
In Oregon, Labor’s Next Gen Redefines Union Member
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Nora Frederickson, AFL-CIO Media fellow, sends us this profile of the Oregon Young Emerging Labor Leaders program.
One week, Oregon’s young workers might be speaking out on the radio. Or they might be dishing up food at a Portland homeless shelter. They might be learning about labor history through the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center. Or they might be biking 18 miles in Portland’s only wintertime bicycle ride.
Through the Young Emerging Labor Leaders (YELL), a new group sponsored by the Oregon AFL-CIO, Oregon’s young workers are getting a chance to foster new pride in holding a union card and are redefining what it means to be a union member. In October 2009, the Oregon AFL-CIO Convention unanimously passed a resolution calling for a young worker program and adding a seat to the General Board for a young representative. In early 2010, the group developed a monthly social calendar and began planning their first-ever convention for August 2010.
Trumka: Wins in November—Path to Jobs in Future
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Elana Guiney, Communications and Research director for the Oregon AFL-CIO, sends this report on the start of the Labor 2010 campaign season in Oregon.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka kicked off the Labor 2010 campaign season in Oregon this week with two full days of events, including a town hall meeting on jobs, with more than 500 union members from across Oregon. The crowd filled the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) hall in Portland and spilled into overflow seating in the parking lot.
Trumka was joined by Oregon gubernatorial candidate John Kitzhaber, who has spent his career working for Oregonians as an emergency room doctor, as an elected official and through programs to help expand health care to all Oregonians while bringing down costs.
Both Trumka and Kitzhaber laid out their priorities—bringing back manufacturing jobs; stopping the demonization of our hardworking public employees, teachers and front-line workers; prioritizing policies that help us all get ahead; and electing working family candidates.
Three Oregonians whose lives have been directly affected by the recession told their stories.
Oregon Voters Tell Corporations, Wealthy: ‘Pay Your Fair Share’
Oregon voters, faced with a $727 million budget deficit that threatened severe cuts in education, health care, public safety and senior services, voted Tuesday for two “fair share” measures that raise taxes on the state’s wealthiest families and boost a minimum tax on businesses that had been set at just $10 since 1931.
Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain says the victory on both these measures “sends a strong message on how we value education and other vital working family services.”
Oregon unions, community allies and progressive groups led the fight against the deep-pocketed corporate community that preached economic doom if the tax measures passed.
Health Care Reform Needs Public Option—Not Band-Aid
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Today, union and health care activists around the country are raising their voices against the private health insurance companies’ mutlimillion-dollar campaign to block health care reform. In dozens of rallies and demonstrations they are saying: “Big Insurance: We’re sick of it.”
Union members are joining a march on Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association’s Portland, Ore., headquarters. In a letter to Blue Cross President Scott Serota, Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain calls on the company to cease opposition to a public health insurance option and stop the use of union members’ premium payments to fund lobbying against a public option.
Union members in Oregon have spent too many years at the bargaining table knowing that they have to choose between bargaining for better wages, or maintaining their healthcare. This is unsustainable; healthcare reform with true cost controls is necessary. For union members to now see their healthcare dollars spent lobbying against the reform they support is absolutely unacceptable.
Oregon Bill Bans Mandatory Anti-Union Meetings
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When Oregon workers are choosing to form a union and bargain for a better life, they would not be forced to attend coercive, mandatory anti-union meetings by management under the Worker Freedom Act passed Monday by the Oregon State Senate. It now goes to the House, where it won approval in 2007.
The legislation will make it illegal for an employer to discipline or fire a worker who chooses not to attend a meeting on politics, religion or union organizing during work hours.
Says Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain:
Workers should not have to give up their opinions or be lectured about their employer’s beliefs to get a paycheck.
Wyden Wants to Tax Health Care Benefits
Last year, in his failed run for the presidency, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) proposed taxing working families’ health care benefits as part of his deeply flawed plan for health care reform.
The reaction was direct and swift. “No!” said unions, health care reform advocates and consumers. Candidate Barack Obama blasted the McCain proposal.
But today, the idea of taxing health care benefits has resurfaced, and from an unlikely source: Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who for most of his career has been a good friend of working families. His call to tax your health care benefits is buried in legislation (S. 391) that he introduced this year and is now being considered by the Senate Finance Committee as one of several possible ways to finance health care reform.
State Workers, Taxpayers Caught in a Fiscal Vise
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The badly needed economic recovery package included some substantial assistance for states that are facing growing budget shortfalls, possible layoffs and cuts in vital services. But despite critics’ noise about the amount of spending in the package, even with that helping hand, the fiscal outlook for states is still “dire” and likely will worsen, says the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP):
The state fiscal situation is dire. Revenues are declining, and the need for services such as Medicaid is rising as people lose income and jobs….If revenue declines persist as expected in many states, additional budget cuts are likely. Budget cuts often are more severe in the second year of a state fiscal crisis, after reserves have been largely depleted and thus are no longer an option for closing deficits.
AFL-CIO Announces Center for Green Jobs
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As part of the AFL-CIO union movement’s commitment to fighting for green jobs, President John Sweeney and other union leaders today announced a major program to help working Americans prepare for the next generation of jobs by creating a Center for Green Jobs.
Starting with $1 million from the Working for America Institute, the AFL-CIO’s workforce and economic development arm, the center will partner with affiliated unions to help pave the way to good union jobs in a variety of the country’s unionized and greening industries. The center also will spread the lessons of AFL-CIO affiliates who have successfully joined the green economy, especially in manufacturing.
At a packed press conference this morning in Washington, D.C., Sweeney said the center is part of the AFL-CIO’s effort to “make progressive energy and climate change a first order priority.”
