22,000 L.A. Workers Win Pact with City that Saves Jobs—and More Bargaining News
Some 22,000 Los Angeles workers win pact with city that prevents layoffs—and more bargaining news from the “Bargaining Digest Weekly.” The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily, bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 1,200 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.
SETTLEMENTS
Multiple, City of Los Angeles: The Los Angeles City Council on Friday approved a pact with the Los Angeles Coalition of City Unions, a group made up of AFL-CIO and Change to Win unions and representing 22,000 city workers. The agreement avoids layoffs and furloughs and will save the city more than $77 million by offering an early retirement plan, reducing the number of hours worked and postponing pay raises until after 2011. A deal with the Los Angeles Police Protective League/IUPA also was approved Friday and will save the city $63 million.
Global Unions: Put Jobs First at G-20
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At the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh this week, the world’s leaders need to focus on the urgent need to create millions of new jobs and reform the global financial and trading system.
More than 50 trade union leaders from around the world, including AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, will meet with the G-20 leaders to press the case for a coordinated global economic strategy to stimulate new jobs to ensure a real recovery.
With 59 million people expected to be unemployed worldwide by the end of the year, Guy Ryder, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), says:
Governments must do much more to arrest the plunge in jobs as tens of millions of people, especially young people and those in precarious jobs, find themselves facing a future without work. Coordinated global action to maintain and create jobs is required, and this has to start with the Pittsburgh Summit. Any talk of recovery has little meaning until people are getting back to work.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney: Solidarity Is Our Way of Life
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| AFL-CIO President John Sweeney gives his final keynote to convention delegates. |
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| Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Bill George (above) and former Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris (below) help open the AFL-CIO Convention. |
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With the convening of the 26th AFL-CIO Constitutional Convention this afternoon in Pittsburgh, nearly 2,000 delegates, alternates and guests took part in the formal opening ceremony and paid tribute to retiring AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. Following greetings by Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Bill George, Jack Shea, president of the Allegheny County [Pittsburgh] Labor Council, and former Pittsburgh Steelers player Franco Harris, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka welcomed everyone, noting how great it is to be in Pittsburgh, “the city of bridges.”
And bridges are the perfect illustration of what we’ll be talking about over the next few days. Bridges that connect diverse people, diverse unions, diverse communities and diverse nations. Bridges to cross together, so we can turn around America….Some of the bridges America needs have been burnt—destroyed by years of a rampant corporate agenda embraced by the Bush administration. It’s hard to overstate just how damaging those years have been.
Our unions and the workers we represent are suffering in a historic collapse. But at the very same time, we have historic opportunities. New bridges with a new administration, a new Congress and rivers of hope flowing through the people of our country. Our Convention has a theme for today: We are many, we are one.
That’s our power—and it’s our joy.
USW President: AFL-CIO Convention Opportunity to Rally Activists
This is a cross-post from the United Steelworkers.
United Steelworkers International President Leo W. Gerard today gave the keynote speech at the Union Label & Service Trades Department convention in Pittsburgh, saying the meeting along with the upcoming AFL-CIO convention is an opportunity.
Gerard said working families should be hopeful after President Obama’s decision last night to enforce trade rules in the 421 trade case that showed a flood of tires imported from China was harming the domestic industry. Thousands of jobs at U.S. tire plants have been lost because of the imports. (Click here for more information on the 421 story.)
Stop by the New AFL-CIO Online Convention Site
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Today, we’re launching the full website for the AFL-CIO’s 26th Constitutional Convention, which runs from Sept. 13-17.
At the AFL-CIO Convention site (www.aflcio.org/convention2009), you can:
• Keep track of events with the Convention Schedule.
• Get fast-breaking updates on Convention action.
• Watch video clips of the Convention floor discussions.
• See photos from Convention events as they happen.
• Read Convention Resolutions and Constitutional Amendments.
• Access the Executive Council Report.
The site continues as the portal for online Convention registration for delegates and hotel information and registration (registration for alternate delegates and guests closes today).
AFL-CIO Convention Meeting in City Rich with Labor History
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The 26th AFL-CIO Convention, Sept. 13-17, will convene in a city rich with labor history. Pittsburgh is the birthplace of both the AFL and the CIO, as well as the United Steelworkers (USW), the Ironworkers and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM). It also is the site of two legendary strikes—the Homestead steel mill strike in 1892 and the U.S. Steel strike in the 1930s.
Labor historian Charlie McCollester writes in The Point of Pittsburgh:
[Pittsburgh's] workers and industries had produced incalculable volumes of coal, iron, steel and glass. Its inventors and laborers had been the first to refine oil, manufacture aluminum and create some of the primary mechanisms of electrical generation and distribution. In a stupendous effort, its mills and factories had been the arsenal of democracy, providing much of the muscle that made the United States of America the world’s most powerful nation.
Delegates Prepare for 26th AFL-CIO Convention
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The 26th AFL-CIO Convention will make history as delegates elect new leadership for the federation and chart a course for the 21st century union movement.
The convention will be held Sept. 13-17 in Pittsburgh, a city rich in labor history. Building on the incredible success of the union movement’s 2008 political mobilization, delegates will discuss how to maintain momentum and continue to increase the strength of working people.
For some delegates, the work will begin in the days before the convention. In the week prior to the opening gavel, the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department, the Union Label Department and Pride At Work will hold their conventions in Pittsburgh.
At the State and Local Conference on Sept. 12, state and local leaders will discuss strategies to build the grassroots movement. And four years after the 2005 AFL-CIO Convention passed a landmark resolution on diversity in the union movement, delegates will discuss the progress in making the leadership more inclusive at the AFL-CIO’s Diversity Summit on Sept. 13.
