| August
4, 2006
CWA Local 1037 has helped more than 6,000 home child care
providers in New Jersey get a union voice.
Day care workers were on hand as Gov. Jon Corzine signed
the executive order this week that gives them the right to
organize and bargain collectively. The campaign, carried
out with AFSCME, means that child care workers now will be
able to negotiate over wages — the payments they receive for
caring for children in their homes under the state-certified
program.
Local 1037 activists and other supporters knocked on
thousands of doors in a campaign done entirely through house
visits. The local also has built a "neighborhood shop steward"
program of activists throughout the state, said local
President Hetty Rosenstein.
During the campaign, family care providers built a strong
organization, and rallied and met with the governor to press
for bargaining rights. At the signing, Corzine recognized "the
invaluable and essential service to working parents and
guardians" that the state's family care workers provide. The
child care providers earn about $99 to $105 per week per child
for providing care in their homes to other parents receiving
welfare assistance — "unbelievably low wages," Rosenstein
said.
Rosenstein and her local were recognized at last month's
CWA convention with the President's Annual Award for leading
the campaign.
The local also thanked activists from Locals 1031, 1034 and
1079, and ACORN — the Association of Community Organizations
for Reform Now — for their support.
AFA-CWA gave Northwest Airlines notice of intent to
exercise their right to strike, bringing "CHAOS" to the
company as early as August 15. And next week the union
will defend that right before a bankruptcy judge in
New York.
The union threatened strike action immediately after the
airline on July 31 imposed terms of a tentative contract,
negotiated by the employees' former union and approved by the
bankruptcy court, which slashes wages and benefits for the
9,200 flight attendants by about 40 percent. The workers
earlier had rejected that tentative settlement by a vote
of more than 80 percent.
After AFA-CWA won an election to represent the unit on July
6, the union negotiated improvements in the prior settlement,
but was hamstrung by the bankruptcy court's mandate for
concessions totaling $195 million per year. Workers voted
down the second tentative contract by a 55 to 45 percent
margin.
"Our members have spoken. These drastic cuts to our
pay, benefits and work rules are simply unacceptable," said
Mollie Reiley, AFA-CWA interim master executive council
president at Northwest.
The union is seeking to resume talks and negotiate a new
settlement, but Northwest's only response so far has been to
file suit to try to block the flight attendants from
exercising their right to strike.
AFA-CWA maintains that labor law governing the airline
industry is clear — if an employer unilaterally changes
contract terms, workers can strike. "It's
America. No one has to come to work for terms they didn't
agree to," AFA-CWA's General Counsel David Borer told the St.
Paul Pioneer Press.
Senate Democrats this week refused to cave in to a
Republican scheme that would have increased the minimum wage
for some workers but only by tying their miniscule raise to a
repeal of the estate tax for America's richest families.
Republicans thought themselves so clever that some even
boasted to reporters that they had put their opponents in a
box: Vote with us or be prepared for campaign ads claiming
Democrats rejected a minimum wage hike.
But Democrats stood firm, heeding the calls of the AFL-CIO
and newspapers across the country. "So it's crumbs for the
working poor and a bonanza for the children of the superrich,"
said the Des Moines Register. "This is the House Republicans'
idea of a fair and balanced bill? Could they possibly be more
out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans?"
The Senate never voted on the bill itself. Instead, the
Democrats' solidarity kept the bill from getting the necessary
60 votes to cut off debate Thursday before senators left
for summer vacation.
The bill would have raised the minimum wage from $5.15 an
hour to $7.25 an hour over three years but it would have
excluded millions of workers who rely on tips for part of
their wages.
The so-called "Tipped Wage Fairness" provision would have
invalidated state laws that require employers to pay the
minimum wage regardless of a worker's tips. Currently, Alaska,
California, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington
have such laws on the books.
Combining a repeal of the estate tax with such a provisions
meant that "under the Republican bill, Paris Hilton and her
family will get $250 million, while the tipped workers in
Hilton hotels will lose up to $5.50 an hour," Sen. Edward
Kennedy (D-Mass) said.
Even with the estate tax repeal for the super rich, a
minimum wage increase was distasteful to many Republicans, who
have voted down nine proposed increases in the last decade
while raising their own salaries by $31,000.
"There's a general agreement among Republicans (opposing
the raise) that, 'maybe we don't like it much but we need to
move forward with it just for political reasons,'" Rep. Mike
Castle (R-Del.) admitted in a CBS interview.
One more fox is headed to the henhouse as Senate
Republicans get ready to rubberstamp another anti-worker
candidate chosen by President Bush for a position in the Labor
Department.
At his hearing this week, Paul DeCamp portrayed himself as
someone who'd stocked shelves and flipped burgers and
therefore was ideal to be in charge of the Wage and Hour
Administration, enforcing the nation's minimum wage and
overtime laws, and many other worker issues.
In truth, DeCamp admitted that as a lawyer in private
practice he never represented the workers' side in a lawsuit.
In fact, he represented Wal-Mart in trying to prevent a class
action by 1.5 million women suing the company for pay and
promotion discrimination.
DeCamp, now a senior policy advisor in the Labor
Department, has also proposed draconian overhauls of overtime
rights, represented businesses fighting union organizing
campaigns and fought for employers against the Americans with
Disabilities Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, state wage and
hour laws and other laws protecting workers and retirees,
according to the AFL-CIO.
- There's the boss who tried to force a part-timer
to work full-time while the employee's mother was dying and
the company that not only charged a worker for her desk
chair, it billed her $200 for the flowers it sent when her
father died. It almost makes the boss who barks and
makes barnyard noises seem benign.
Those are three of
the finalists in the Working America "Bad Boss" contest.
There's also a dentist who docked his workers' pay after
September 11 because patients cancelled appointments. And a
boss who shrugged off a worker's trauma when her patient —
an Iraq war veteran — killed himself. "I don't know why she
had to take the day off," the boss told the worker's
supervisor. "People commit suicide every day."
Read
them all and vote for the worst at
http://www.workingamerica.org/. The winner will get an all-expense paid trip away from his
or her very bad boss.
- Union leaders at the Environmental Protection
Agency say management is bending to political pressure and
ignoring its scientists' warnings about toxic chemicals that
may be approved for agricultural
pesticides.
A letter to the agency director,
signed by leaders of nine unions representing 9,000 EPA
scientists and staff around the country, said that workers
believe that that under EPA management, "the concerns of
agriculture and the pesticide industry come before our
responsibility to protect the health of our nation's
citizens."
It's not the first time union leaders at
the EPA and other federal agencies have spoken out against
harmful policies. "More and more, the unions are coming
together to confront the agency's unwillingness to make the
appropriate use of science to show risks to public health
and the environment," EPA scientist and union leader William
Hirzy said, quoted by the Times.
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