The
Official Newsletter of the
Prepared by
Volume 10, Number 2, February, 2009
New officers elected; Young
nominations made
The council elected new officers at
the February meeting and accepted nominations for the W.C. Young Award.
Jeff Wiggins was reelected
president and Benny Adair vice president. Brandon Duncan was elected financial
secretary-treasurer and Berry Craig recording secretary. Craig was
sergeant-at-arms.
Howard “Bubba” Dawes
won another term as COPE director. Trustees reelected include Wayne Chambers,
David Childress, Dawes and Bonnie Edwards. All are incumbents. Jeff Duncan will
fill Berry Craig’s open slot as sergeant-at-arms.
“On behalf of the council, I
would like to express my appreciation for all the hard work Hardy and Donna put
in all these years,” Wiggins said. “Without brothers and sisters
like them, this council would disappear.”
Meanwhile, Kip Phillips, Benny Adair and Charles Williams were nominated for the W.C. Young Award. More nominations will be accepted at the March council meeting, Wiggins said.
Return to Western Kentucky AFL-CIO Area Council Home Page
Voters fixed
eight-year
We
received the following from a
We, the
We apologize for any inconvenience
caused by the outage. We look forward to resuming full service and hope to
improve in years to come. We thank you for your patience and understanding,
Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES
OF AMERICA
No right-to-work fight
expected in Frankfort
Union-haters aren’t making much noise
in this session of the General Assembly.
“A review of the Senate and
House bills finds nothing of major concern regarding workers’
issues,” Kentucky State AFL-CIO President Bill Londrigan recently posted
on the state federation’s Internet website.
Meanwhile,
the state AFL-CIO Legislative Committee will meet Feb. 21 to talk about
legislative proposals, Londrigan added. “We can expect a large number of
bills to be introduced during the interim and your labor lobbyists will monitor
committee meetings and other legislative actions during the interim.
“Given the dire fiscal
situation the Commonwealth finds itself in, we can expect that much of the Part
II of the General Assembly [which starts Feb. 3] will be occupied with fiscal
and budgetary matters.”
Meanwhile, the House elected a new
speaker, Rep. Greg Stumbo. He replaced Rep. Jody Richards, the longest-serving
House speaker in
“It is appropriate that the
Kentucky State AFL-CIO go on record thanking…Richards for his strong
support for
Londrigan also thanked Rep. Mary
Lou Marzian for her “strong support” for labor as chair of the
House Labor and Industry Committee and welcomed “our longtime
friend” Ben Nelson as the new chair.
Wiggins also praised Richards,
Marzian and Nelson. “We expect Jody and Rep. Marzian will still be our
good friends,” he said. “We are also looking forward to working
with Rep. Nelson.
“He has some big shoes to
fill just like Rep. Marzian did. They came after our neighbor, Rep. J.R. Gray
of Benton – now our labor secretary. He was one of labor best friends
ever in
|
From the
national AFL-CIO Report:
Employee Free Choice Act Needed to Make Economy Work |
|
by Seth Michaels,
The advocacy
organization American Rights
at Work has produced a new report, “The Employee Free Choice Act: Ensuring the Economy Works for Everyone,”
that clearly explains how restoring the freedom to form unions and bargain can
revitalize the
Restoring the right to form unions
is a key part of an economic strategy to bring shared and sustainable
prosperity to the middle class, creating the workforce needed for future
economic growth, and ensuring workers have a role in crafting future policies
that represent their interests.
The
report, drawing on work by policy experts and journalists around the country,
links the current economic crisis to a lack of bargaining power in the hands of
workers—a problem due in large part to the fact that forming a union has
become “a risk, not a right.” Workers who try to form unions are
routinely harassed,
intimidated or fired with little to no legal
recourse—denying them the bargaining power they need to improve their
wages, benefits and economic security.
A
majority of employers aggressively use both legal and illegal anti-union
tactics during union representation elections, which impedes workers’
ability to form unions…
If given a free and fair chance,
it’s likely that many more employees would choose union representation.
With expanded collective bargaining power, more workers would move into the
middle class, stimulating economic growth and leading to more shared
prosperity.
Johansson
and Martinez Ortega show that the benefits of
bargaining in the workplace are enormous for union
members—but broader bargaining rights improve conditions for all workers
in the labor market. The economy can only create broadly shared prosperity for
everyone if workers can participate freely in efforts to get a fair contract
and improve their own lives, according to the report. The benefits aren’t
just in wages, but in the long-term health of the economy and society, as
workers are engaged and empowered.
Allowing workers to freely form
unions is essential to putting money back into the pockets of those whose
spending drives the economy, producing a highly skilled workforce to promote
future economic growth, and increasing the political participation of workers
to shape new economic strategies that benefit the middle class.
From the Daily
by Vikingkingq
Background:
The first
thing that needs to be understood in the symbolic struggle is the historic
importance of symbols in the fight over labor law. Consider, for example, the
push of the American Left (including American unions) for a "right to a
job" in the 1940's and the response of the right in establishing
"right to work" laws prior to (but especially after) the Taft-Hartley
Act of 1947. They both sound great, right? But the "right to a job"
refers to public policies that would have obligated the government to create
jobs for the unemployed, and the second bans unions from negotiating a
"union shop" whereby everyone who gets a job at a unionized firm
joins the union automatically. People at the time knew that symbolism was
important, so when the "right to a job" movement faltered, the Right
took it up and attached it to an obscure part of labor law (the impact of which
is to create a huge "free rider" problem where people who benefit
from union contracts don't join the union, eventually weakening it to the point
where the union is de-certified and the union contracts evaporate). This made
it very hard for unions to argue against "right to work" laws because
they were symbolically placed on the side of being against rights, of trying to
force people to do things, and so on.
The problem:
We're in a somewhat similar situation with EFCA. A
rather technical issue, allowing majority card check as authorization of a union
instead of having people check off cards then hold an election, is being framed
as "taking away the secret election" or "taking away people's
right to vote" in union elections. Lots of literature has been passed
around, depicting EFCA as the return of mobbed-up, violent unions. For example,
check out this Norm Coleman ad from the Minnesota Senate race: Here
The response:
So how do we re-frame
card check?
First, I think we need to re-frame NLRB elections as no more
democratic than elections in
But there's
also another form of symbolism: card-check is no less democratic than signing a
ballot petition or registering to vote – both parts of the political
process that involve one-on-one meetings with committed activists asking you to
somewhat publicly declare yourself, without the expectation of privacy you get
in the voting booth. How intimidating is it when an Obama volunteer knocks on
your door and asks you if you've registered to vote? How coerced do you feel if
someone puts a clipboard in front of you and asks you if you'd like to put
Prop. Whatever on the ballot?
Another thing
we need to do is to make the work of union organizing known to the public.
Because of the weakness of unions, most people have no direct contact with
union organizers, and don't know how it works. So why not run some commercials,
or youtube videos, which share the stories of union organizers?
I'll start:
I’m a
union organizer who operates in a card-check neutrality work site (the
If they say no, you know what I do? I smile, shake their hand, and walk away.
I have no
power over the person I’m talking to. I can’t fire them, I
can’t discipline them, I can’t reassign them, I can’t force
them to talk to me. The boss does have that power. In that circumstance, why
would I try to use violence and intimidation against someone whose confidence,
trust, and support I’m trying to win? Actual intimidation from union
organizers is extremely, extremely rare because it’s a toxic strategy
– even if you get that person to sign a card, you aren’t going to
get them to walk a picket line or phonebank or go to a membership meeting or
anything like that; when the word gets out and it inevitably will, you’ll
have destroyed all possibility of building a rapport with workers and any idea
that the union is an institution that’s on their side. Not to say that it
doesn’t happen ever, or that it has never happened, but it’s a
dead-end strategy that only the most depraved individual would employ and any
sane institution would condone. You’d more or less have to assume that
unions were kamikaze institutions to think that they would embrace this as a
major tool, given the huge blowback they would face and the damage to their
interests.