| December
8, 2006
The battle for health care and good jobs at Goodyear, whose
manufacturing workers have been on strike for more than two
months, is a call to arms for all union members, CWA President
Larry Cohen said.
Cohen has asked CWA staff, and is urging members across the
country, to take part with the United Steelworkers and other
AFL-CIO unions in leafleting Goodyear tire centers on
Saturday, Dec. 16. He said Goodyear's attempt to cut health
care benefits for retirees should be of enormous concern to
everyone.
Go to
http://www.cwa-union.org/action/goodyear/ for
details on locations where labor is leafleting on Dec. 16.
"This is a fight for all of us in the labor movement," he
said. "The time to stand up to this corporate attack is now.
This fight is our fight. Saving retiree health care at
Goodyear is the first step to saving health care for our
members too. At key times like this, we can make a real
difference."
About 15,000 employees at more than a dozen Goodyear Tire
& Rubber Co. plants in the United States and Canada began
the walkout Oct. 5 to in a fight to save their jobs and
protect health care coverage for current workers and
retirees.
In 2003, Goodyear closed its Huntsville, Ala., plant
leaving 1,200 workers unemployed and now another 1,100 face
job losses as the company prepares to shut down another plant
in Tyler, Texas.
Meanwhile, Goodyear has invested more than $150 million
since 2004 in overseas production, including China and
Colombia. "Despite its flag-waving rhetoric, Goodyear's
performance reveals a company that is turning its back on its
country and on communities all across North America,"
Steelworkers President Leo Gerard wrote in a recent column.
"Goodyear's attitude is especially galling after workers
agreed to sacrifices in 2003 that pulled the company back from
the brink of bankruptcy."
Those sacrifices included agreeing to the Huntsville
closure and taking wage, pension and benefit cuts. But rather
than let workers share in last year's $228 million in
after-tax profits, Gerard said Goodyear is demanding more
concessions.
Gerard said Goodyear is taking not just an anti-worker
position but an anti-American one "by financing manufacturing
in countries where health care is subsidized but workers'
rights are brutally repressed. Instead of demanding cuts to
employee and retiree health care benefits, Goodyear should be
working with the USW and the newly elected Congress to secure
universal health care, which would lower costs for employers
and employees while improving the health of all
Americans."
The AFL-CIO, which is calling for the Dec. 16 "Day of
Action," is urging America's working families to boycott
Goodyear products and services during the strike. Unions will
also encourage employers who use Goodyear tires and equipment
for their fleets to stop "until such a time as Goodyear
relents in its unconscionable demands and shameless hypocrisy
and reaches a reasonable and equitable agreement with the
United Steelworkers."
More details about the Goodyear strike are available from
the Steelworkers at
http://www.usw.org/.
More than 600 organizers and activists from unions, Jobs
with Justice and other groups — including about 40 CWAers —
are spending two days at the AFL-CIO's Organizing Summit in
Washington, D.C., talking strategy and planning how to fight
back to restore workers' rights in the United States.
A key goal of the summit is to move forward on building the
Stewards Army, a mobilization across the labor movement that
will create a force of hundreds of thousands of activists who
will stand together on jobs, health care, bargaining rights
and other important fights for working families.
The summit also is focused on the fight to win the Employee
Free Choice Act, strategic organizing campaigns, building
community-labor alliances, and globalization, among other
issues.
The fight for the Employee Free Choice Act isn't only about
organizing, as important as that is, CWA President Larry Cohen
told the participants. "It's about our rights on the job. It's
about bargaining rights and the squeeze on the middle class"
that has hit working families hard, he said. The preamble to
the National Labor Relations Act says that the purpose of the
law is to promote collective bargaining, Cohen said. Today,
"this is a farce."
Cohen called on every activist and every union to be a part
of the Dec. 16 fight for justice at Goodyear Tire. "All of us
need to mobilize at this Goodyear fight as if it is our own,
because it is our own fight. We need corporate management to
know that in every fight, the Stewards Army will be there. We
need to build that together," he said.
"The election on Nov. 7 was a turning point for all of us.
The second turning point wil be winning the Goodyear strike
and the third turning point will be passing the Employee Free
Choice Act in the House. We will continue building on each
victory until we have justice in America again," Cohen
said. Cohen heads the AFL-CIO Organizing Committee.
Participants marched to Capitol Hill for a rally on the
Employee Free Choice Act, with top House and Senate leaders,
including Sen. Edward Kennedy, who will head the labor
committee in the new Senate and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.),
who will chair the House labor committee.
Miller told the crowd that workers must mobilize as they
haven't done for generations to win back bargaining and
organizing rights. "We are going to ease the squeeze on the
middle class and one of the most important ways to do that is
by restoring the freedom of workers to have a voice at work,"
he said. "When workers have the opportunity to join a union,
it makes a world of difference for them and their
families."
Kennedy said
that “History tells us that the best way to make sure that
workers get their fair share is to give them a stronger voice,
but shamefully America’s labor laws are too weak to prevent
employers from resorting to illegal union-busting tactics to
intimidate workers. That’s why Representative Miller and I are
determined to protect every employee’s right to join a union
and stop once and for all this continuing epidemic of bullying
and intimidation.”
- Realizing defeat was at hand with Democrats in
control of Congress, the Bush administration has announced
plans to withdraw a controversial Transportation Department
rule that could have handed control of U.S. airlines to
foreign interests by selling U.S. carriers to the highest
bidder.
The administration was pursuing the
scheme even though both the U.S. House and Senate, under
Republican control, voted earlier this year to block the
foreign giveaway. With Democrats in charge as of January,
the White House knew the scheme was doomed.
"This is
just the first in what we hope to be a long series of
victories under the new Democratically-controlled Congress,"
AFA-CWA President Pat Friend said. "AFA-CWA, along with
other transportation worker unions, has fought consistently
against the change."
Edward Wytkind, president of the
AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department, said the decision
"answers bipartisan congressional calls for the
administration to pull back this rule and strong unified
opposition from America's transportation unions. It's our
intention now to work with members of Congress and
Transportation Secretary Mary Peters to promote a strong
aviation industry while protecting the jobs and long-term
economic interests of U.S. aviation
employees."
- Through TV and print ads, CWA is urging Buffalo,
N.Y.-area citizens to tell their state legislators to block
a proposal to shut down three community
hospitals.
The legislature has until Dec. 31
to reject a recommendation by a state commission on health
care facilities or else St. Joseph's, Gates and DeGraff
hospitals will be closed along with six others across the
state. Nearly 4,000 workers at the hospitals are represented
by CWA Local 1168.
CWA's message points out that in
the last of Buffalo's frequent snow storms, area emergency
rooms were at 103 percent capacity.
- Following introduction of a bill that would
weaken pensions and other benefits for New Jersey public
workers this week, Gov. Jon Corzine urged Democratic leaders
in the legislature to drop these issues from property-tax
reform legislation and allow him to address them through
ongoing collective bargaining talks.
The
governor "is doing what needs to be done," District 1 Vice
President Chris Shelton said. "Leaving these issues to
collective bargaining is the way to go, which has been our
position all along."
State Senate President Richard
Codey and Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts both said they had
no intention of advancing a bill that the governor would not
support.
Thousands of CWA members and other New
Jersey public workers will rally in Trenton on Monday, Dec.
11, to protest attempts by many lawmakers to interfere in
the bargaining process and attack their
benefits.
- CWA printers at the Toledo Blade are now in the
16th week of a lockout in a battle over the publisher's
demands for massive cuts in health benefits and wages and
elimination of job security.
Other production workers also have been locked out and
replaced by scabs, although the paper so far hasn't locked
out TNG-CWA members. All the unions are united in a public
outreach campaign that has prompted 250 businesses to stop
advertising and thousands of subscribers to cancel
subscriptions. The dispute has cost the paper an estimated
$2.5 million so far.
Local President Richard Momsen is asking other CWA locals
for financial assistance. Donations may be sent to the
Toledo Typographical Union, CWA Local 14535, P.O. Box 5033,
Toledo, Ohio 43611.
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