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.)
Holt Baker: Unions Leading Way to Green Economy
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America’s future is green and the union movement is in the forefront of creating a new green economy, says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker.
Speaking to the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) education conference in Phoenix last week, Holt Baker said:
“One of our biggest opportunities lies in the creation of green jobs, and a new vision of America that our labor movement is helping make happen.”
She credited many unions for undertaking green initiatives, including the United Steelworkers (USW), the UAW, AFT, AFSCME and the building trades. She also pointed to the institute’s Center for Green Jobs and APRI’s new computer learning lab in Pittsburgh as examples of the ways in which unions are preparing workers for a green economy.
Highlights from Saturday’s Arkansas Rallies
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More than 1,500 union members across Arkansas rallied in 100-degree heat this Saturday, asking their senators to support the Employee Free Choice Act and give workers the freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life. Here are some highlights from press coverage of the event.
Arkansas state Rep. Jim Nickles was among the hundreds who joined the rally at the State Capitol and told Little Rock’s KATV he strongly supported the Employee Free Choice Act:
This is an attempt to make it to where [workers] can form unions and they can bargain…with employers.
Labor laws brought us minimum wage, brought us pension plans, brought us health insurance…all have been eroded in the past 20 years.
103 Students Set to Graduate from National Labor College
Rachelle Honeycutt works at an oil refinery in Washington State. Sam Schaffer is a skilled sheet metal worker from West Virginia. Javier Almazan organizes workers in south Florida and Cathy Merkel is a registrar in Maryland. They’re all union members. And in a few days, all four will be graduates of one of the crown jewels of the labor movement: the National Labor College.
With a 46-acre campus just outside Washington, D.C., the nation’s only labor college is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and grants bachelor’s and master’s degrees. The college evolved from the George Meany Center for Labor Studies, created in 1969, and now partners with the University of Baltimore and George Mason University for its graduate degree programs.
On Saturday, 101 students will receive B.A. degrees and two others will be awarded M.A. degrees, as the Labor College graduates its 11th class in a ceremony on the Silver Spring, Md., campus. U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will give the commencement address.
Blue Green Alliance: House Committee Takes A First Step Toward A Clean Energy Bill
A week after issuing its own principles for climate change legislation, the Blue Green Alliance said the draft bill released yesterday by the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce takes the first step toward building a strong clean energy economy.
Last week, the alliance, a national partnership of four unions and two environmental organizations, outlined its goals for climate change legislation that would rapidly put millions of Americans back to work building a clean energy economy and to reduce global warming emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
