Tens of Thousands March for Voting Rights
Marvin Bing, a member of the AFL-CIO Special Committee on Labor-Community Partnerships, sends us this report.
Tens of thousands of labor and civil rights activists on Saturday marched from the New York offices of Koch Industries, whose owners have supported restrictive voting legislation modeled by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing think tank funded by brothers David and Charles Koch. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), who took part in the event, put it this way:
You can’t accomplish anything if you’re not prepared to fight.
The coalition of labor, civil rights and community organizations marked Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, with the Stand for Freedom march and rally where they voted to roll back new voting rules passed in several states.
Some of the laws passed in more than a dozen states around the country include Read the rest of this entry »
Human Rights Day: Celebrate Our Struggles, Build for the Future
 |
In a dramatic way not seen in years, today’s celebration of International Human Rights Day arrives during enormous and popular ongoing struggles.
In the worldwide job crisis, workers must still have right to decent work and should not be forced to choose between unemployment and precarious work. See the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) message on International Human Rights Day.
Yesterday, people around the world joined a conversation with Navi Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, to talk about human rights—including the right to form or join unions in the workplace and to bargain for a better life.
You can watch a short video or listen to the conversation here.
This has been an extraordinary year for human rights around the world. Millions found their voices using the Internet and instant messaging to inform, inspire and mobilize supporters to seek basic human rights. Social media helped activists organize peaceful protest movements in cities across the globe—from Tunis to Madison, Wis.; from Cairo to Cleveland and New York to Madrid—at times in the face of violent repression.
At the core of the struggles around the globe is the right for all people to have a real voice on the job, and the right to a decent job.
Unionists Denounce Qatar as Choice for 2012 Climate Change Talks
AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh, a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), sends us another in a series of reports on the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations taking place now in Durban, South Africa.
The choice of Qatar for next year’s climate change conference drew an immediate and harsh reaction from the ITUC delegation. Qatar’s labor laws are highly restrictive. In a country where migrant workers make up the majority of the workforce—87 percent of the total population—government employees as well as non-Qatari nationals are not allowed to form or join unions.
We issued a statement calling on the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to reconsider the decision. Says Sharan Burrow, ITUC general secretary:
The international union movement will not accept climate change talks being held in a country which does not respect workers’ rights and is the highest emitter per capita in the world.
Join AFT in Alleviating ‘Children’s Famine’ in Somalia
AFT sends us this report.
AFT President Randi Weingarten urged President Obama to “help marshal the humanitarian aid needed to halt the advance of the apocalyptic ‘children’s famine’ spreading through Somalia and neighboring nations in the Horn of Africa.”
President Obama has called a meeting of heads of state and ministers in New York this week to address the crisis.
Report: Austerity Measures Will Lead to ‘Permanent Recession’
Here’s mandatory reading material for lawmakers returning to Capitol Hill this week. A new United Nations study “savages” U.S. and European economic policies that call for austerity measures and deficit cuts, which the report says is pushing the world economy toward disaster “in a misguided attempt to please global financial markets.” The report called for:
wage increases, stricter regulation of financial markets, including a return to a system of managed exchange rates, and a conscious break with market-led thinking.
The report’s author, Heiner Flassbeck, is head of the globalization and development strategies division at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and a former deputy finance minister in Germany. Flassbeck says:
If interests rates everywhere are zero, and if governments stick to the policy of not only keeping fiscal deficits where they are but retrenching, cutting public expenditure, then we will end up in permanent recession.
Or, as UNCTAD Secretary General Supachai Panitchpakdi put it:
The message here is very pragmatic: We need to reverse our course quickly.
U.N. Workers in Struggle for Their Rights
The 67 workers who provide technical hookups for broadcasts and conferencing services at the United Nations are waging a battle for justice and respect.
The workers, members of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 1212, say they are being pressured by a contractor and the United Nations to accept drastic staff reductions that could pit union members against each other and endanger the economic security of employees nearing retirement. Ironically, the International Labor Organization (ILO), an arm of the United Nations, establishes international labor standards to protect workers’ rights.
Says Goldie James, a 28-year radio engineer:
The U.N. seems to be importing big corporation-style hardball into an organization that promotes world peace.
Local 1212 members have worked for contractors over the 65-year history of their bargaining unit. Most of the contractors have signed agreements with either IBEW Local 3 or Local 1212, the union says. When a contractor went out of business recently, Local 1212’s crew worked for a month without being paid, according to the workers. The local worked with the United Nations to secure a deal with a new contractor, Priority Production Services (PPS).
Workers Seek ‘Just Transition’ to Green Economy in Cancun Climate Talks
 |
|
AFL-CIO Industrial Union Council Director Bob Baugh is a member of a global union delegation led by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) attending the new round of United Nations climate change negotiations in Cancun, Mexico. This is the first of a series of blogs on the talks.
After the acrimonious climate change talks in Copenhagen last December and in Bonn last June, delegates to the 16th meeting of the Committee of the Parties (COP 16) come to the table in Cancun with reduced expectations. The delegates hope these climate talks will result in specific decisions that can serve as stepping stones for the next major meeting on climate change (COP 17) in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2012.
Black Joblessness: A Human Rights Issue
 |
||||
|
||||
High unemployment among African Americans is a human rights issue, a coalition of advocacy groups charge in a filing with the U.N. Human Rights Council last month.
As City Limits reports in its latest issue, black male unemployment is at 20.2 percent, more than twice that of white men. The groups charge that the United States has failed to live up to commitments it made under U.N. human rights agreements. Specifically, they claim the country’s anti-discrimination laws, provisions for pregnant women in the workplace and collecting bargaining rights fail to meet international standards.
The filing coincides with a periodic Human Rights Council review of the rights records of all member countries.
AFL-CIO Calls for Release of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi
The AFL-CIO and the global union movement are demanding that Burma’s military dictatorship immediately free Nobel laureate and democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been detained since last Thursday. She was just six days short of completing her house arrest. She was taken to prison after a U.S. citizen swam a mile across a lake to her home and stayed overnight, which violated the terms of her house arrest.
Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, has been under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years and reportedly is in poor health and in need of medical care. The military regime has given no indication that it will grant her freedom and just last week denied an appeal made by her lawyer for her release. A few days ago, she was transferred from her home to Insein Prison and threatened with new charges.
Aung San Suu Kyi is the legitimate leader of Burma and a recipient of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. Her political party, the National League for Democracy, won 82 percent of the parliamentary seats in a national election in 1990, but the military regime refused to cede power.
