Unions Take Up White House $4 Billion ‘Better Buildings Challenge’
At a White House event today featuring President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, AFT President Randi Weingarten represented labor leaders in joining university presidents and corporate executives in support of the presidential Better Buildings Challenge initiative.
President Obama announced that nearly $4 billion of investments have been committed already, including $2 billion by workers’ pension funds, CEOs, mayors and university presidents for energy-saving upgrades. The labor movement committed to work to invest $150 million in energy-efficient retrofit projects in the coming months.
The goal of the initiative, which builds on work begun by the AFL-CIO earlier this year with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), is to spur job creation by harnessing private sector investment in energy upgrades in commercial and industrial buildings.
Working with the AFT, a broad coalition of public-sector unions, and the Read the rest of this entry »
AFT: No Child Left Behind Waivers Make Sense
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AFT President Randi Weingarten says until Congress fixes No Child Left Behind (NCLB), President Obama’s waiving of NCLB requirements for states makes sense. Read the full statement here.
Bill Clinton: Unions Are ‘America’s Employment Bankers’
Former President Bill Clinton yesterday singled out the efforts of the union movement in creating massive numbers of jobs through union pension fund investments. Speaking yesterday at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Clinton praised the AFL-CIO and AFT for already providing $1 billion in pension fund investments to improve infrastructure and increase energy efficiency. (Watch the video of the event here. )
He also called on financial institutions and corporations–which are sitting on $2 trillion in cash without creating jobs–to follow the lead of the union movement and “loosen up all this money and put America back to work. If you did that, you’d have a million jobs in no time.”
With AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and AFT President Randi Weingarten on the stage with him, Clinton said: Read the rest of this entry »
Seniors to Lawmakers: Protect Social Security, Medicare
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With Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid possibly on the budget cutting block, members of the Alliance for Retired Americans will celebrate the organization’s 10th anniversary this week by doing what they have done for a decade: fighting for for America’s seniors.
As part of the Alliance’s annual legislative conference which began this afternoon and runs through Sept. 9, hundreds of seniors will converge on Capitol Hill Sept. 8, just hours before President Obama’s address on jobs, to tell their representatives and senators to keep their hands off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Report: Textbooks Ignore Union Contributions
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Most American children never receive any education about the union movement’s proper place in our country’s history and its many contributions to the nation’s development, according to a new report.
“American Labor and U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center, surveys four major textbooks that together account for most of the market in U.S. history textbooks. The report found that these textbooks often present labor history in a biased, negative way, focusing on strikes and strike violence while giving little or no attention to the employer abuse and violence that caused the strikes.
In addition, it notes that the textbooks virtually ignore:
AFT Labor Day Message: Time to Work Together for Good Jobs
A strong public education system is central to achieving individual goals and restoring our nation’s economic strength–and the teachers in AFT are in a unique position to both prepare students for future opportunities and advocate for economic dignity as union members.
In the union’s Labor Day message, AFT President Randi Weingarten says AFT will continue to fight for educational opportunity for all our children, and for economic respect for all Americans who want decent jobs, fairness and a voice in the workplace, and a reinvigorated democracy. It is in tough times like these that “Americans must put aside our differences and work to heal our economic wounds and strengthen our country,” she says.
America’s unions are the product of tough times, and they are built for tough times…ours is a proud history of grace, grit, perseverance and progress.
The fight for economic dignity, collective voice and a check against unfettered power is as important today as ever before.
Weingarten invites union members to sign the AFL-CIO’s America Wants to Work pledge to help lead the movement for good jobs, saying, “Let us recommit ourselves to the fundamental premise that all Americans deserve economic dignity and security, and that we will not rest until we have achieved it.”
AFL-CIO Announces Commitment to Promote Large-Scale Infrastructure Investments
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The AFL-CIO today is announcing a major “commitment to action” to bring public and private partners together to encourage both workers’ capital and skilled labor to promote large-scale investments in America’s infrastructure.
This pioneering commitment, which will be announced at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in Chicago, will seek to create good jobs and address our public infrastructure deficit and the threats posed to the environment and our economy by the way in which we use energy.
As part of the commitment, the AFL-CIO will work with business and government to promote infrastructure investment with a goal of at least $10 billion in new funding over the next five years.
Union movement-affiliated funds also will invest at least $20 million in the next year in energy-efficient retrofits of commercial, industrial and public buildings. Taking a first step, the AFL-CIO is immediately soliciting bids to conduct an energy-efficient retrofit of its headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Weingarten Praises Launch of Worldwide Quality Public Services Campaigns
This is a cross post from AFT:
AFT President Randi Weingarten returned today from Egypt, where she met in Cairo with leaders of Egyptian unions instrumental in the recent political and governmental changes there. She noted that AFT, as part of its recognition of the vital role of public employees around the world, has joined with the Council of Global Unions in the worldwide “Quality Public Services—Action Now!” campaign. That effort was launched last week on United Nations Public Service Day.
Here’s Weingarten’s statement:
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) joins with workers around the world to launch a new campaign aimed at advancing quality public services in every nation.
Proposed NLRB Rule Change Draws Wide Support
The National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB’s) modest, common-sense proposed rule to remove roadblocks for workers who want to vote on whether to form a union has drawn praise from working men and women, political leaders and activists around the country. Here’s a sample of the comments:
Electrical Workers (IBEW) President Edwin Hill:
By eliminating delays, the board is not only bringing some balance. It is also saving money for taxpayers who foot the bill because of unnecessary litigation.
Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen:
Workers at T-Mobile USA and nearly every other company know firsthand how U.S. corporations use delay to keep workers from making a fair choice about union representation. The changes proposed by the National Labor Relations Board are a first and modest step toward ending some of that delay.
Report: Support High-Quality Education to Keep Young Teachers
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Generation Y teachers—those in their mid-30s or younger—are eager to make a difference. But they quickly get burned out and are leaving the classroom at a rate 51 percent higher than more senior teachers. Not only does this turnover deprive schools of a new generation of educators, it costs school districts about $7 billion each year.
To keep this next generation of teachers, public schools must become workplaces that support high-quality teaching and learning, according to a new report by AFT and the American Institutes for Research (AIR).
“Workplaces That Support High-Performing Teaching and Learning: Insights from Generation Y Teachers” is based on 11 nationally representative teacher surveys, seven focus groups with Gen Y teachers and three case studies.
