South Florida Jobs with Justice achieved a historic victory in our fight to keep Miami-Dade County from cutting public sector jobs and funding for community based organizations! With unemployment in Miami at over 14%, labor and community came together to say that in these harsh economic times: If you cut one of us, you cut us all.
A network of labor and community allies stood together to fight the loss of 1,200 public sector jobs and a 25% cut in funding for community based organizations. Forty community based organizations and twenty unions signed on to a Letter of Unity published by the Miami Herald on September 11th. The coalition then held a 300-person Unity Rally in front of the Government Center in opposition to draconian budget cuts on September 13th, the first day of the County budget hearings. The coalition brought the energy of the rally into County Hall when the President of the South Florida AFL-CIO, Andy Madtes, led a delegation from labor and the community to deliver our Letter of Unity to Mayor Alvarez and to individual County Commissioners and demanded solutions!
On September 23rd, labor and the community achieved a huge victory! The Commissioners voted to rollback
On Saturday, October 2, 2010, hundreds of thousands of people from across the country will gather at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to help reorder our national priorities so that investments in people come first.
Fifteen Jobs with Justice coalitions from Vermont to North Carolina to Illinois are sending more than 500 workers, community members, unemployed, and others impacted by the economic crisis to Washington, DC to demand Congress put people back to work. Eleven more Jobs with Justice coalitions will participate in solidarity actions in their own cities.
Will you be in DC? Join us! The JwJ meetup spot will be at the Jobs Pre-Rally at RFK stadium 9am-11am. This pre-rally, hosted by the IAM’s Union of Unemployed, will feature a number of labor speakers and allies including CWA President Larry Cohen, IAM President Tom Buffenbarger, and our own JwJ Executive Director Sarita Gupta. The rally will be to the left of RFK Stadium’s Main Gate in Lot 4, close to where most buses will park and the Stadium-Armory Metro stop. Look for our new Full & Fair Employment signs!
Central Falls, Rhode Island is the smallest city in the smallest state in the U.S. Central Falls is also the poorest and the most densely populated city in Rhode Island, which has the third highest unemployment rate in the nation. As of the 2000 Census, fifty percent of Central Falls’ residents identify as Latino or Hispanic. Lately, this small, poor, community with the highest percentage of Latino residents anywhere in the state has been ground zero for economic justice struggles in Rhode Island.
In February, 2010, the Central Falls became the center of the national debate around school reform when the school district fired every teacher and all administrative staff in the district. The state was instituting a plan endorsed by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who applauded the decision to fire the teachers. 93 individuals were fired including teachers, counselors, physical education teachers, assistant principals, the school psychologist, reading specialists, and the principal. Under the turnaround model, no more than 50% of faculty and staff could be rehired. George Nee, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO called the firings “immoral, illegal, unjust, irresponsible, disgraceful and disrespectful.” Mark Bostic of the National American Federation of Teachers stated
Congressman Stephen Lynch, Fall River Mayor William Flanagan and community leaders representing the Massachusetts Workers’ Rights Board reviewed a list of employees at Comcast’s Fall River and Fairhaven locations and then checked it against union authorization cards voluntarily signed by employees at the same locations requesting IBEW Local 2322 to represent them.
Based on their card count, an overwhelming majority of Comcast employees in the above named locations desire to unite in IBEW Local 2322.
Rep. Lynch and Mayor Flanagan sent a letter immediately afterwards, “urging Comcast management to respect the employee majority and voluntarily recognize IBEW Local 2322 as their representative and begin collective bargaining for an agreement covering their wages, benefits and working conditions.”
“We requested the certification because we wanted to prove beyond a doubt to management that a genuine majority of our co-workers want to form a union and begin collective bargaining,” said Brian Almeida, a Comcast technician from the Fall River office who stared with the company in 2001.
Almeida was accompanied at the certification event by about 25 other Comcast employees
Yesterday NBC launched a new show called Outsourced which makes comedy out of the all-too-real conditions of outsourcing. While the first episode was interesting, making light of age-old cultural clashes and stereotypes, there is nothing funny about the reality of outsourcing and the impact it has both on the American worker and their counterparts around the world.
For decades, big companies like the one portrayed in Outsourced have been engaged in a global race to the bottom, constantly seeking to maximize their profits by cutting wages, benefits and working conditions. Corporations have learned to avoid local worker bargaining power by organizing themselves globally and exerting a downward pressure on wages along the supply chain that brings goods from manufacturing to consumers.
Meanwhile, there are currently 15 million unemployed people in the United States. And the situation is not much better overseas where many workers scrape by on substandard conditions and wages that have been outlawed for centuries in the US.
Going back to the first episode, the angry American workers who have just been laid off are portrayed only by a stack of bricks thrown through the boss’ window. This is then juxtaposed against the hapless, comedic, and
Think about working in temperatures, upwards of 100 degrees on hot days. Finding used hypodermic needles; human body parts, fluids and excrement; umbilical cords and other biohazard material from the Cleveland Clinic hospital system. No safety harnesses for workers climbing over 10 feet in the air on scissor lifts. Nonexistent water breaks and a minimal amount of fans to cool the facility on extremely hot days. Now think about enduring all of this while earning $8.34 an hour. Think I am talking about a sweatshop located in a third world country? Well, think again.
I have just described some of the horrible conditions Sodexo Laundry workers in Cleveland, Ohio face on a daily basis. It doesn’t stop there either. Poor ventilation and circulation of the air causes oppressive heat inside the plant, even during cold weather. One worker described going in and out of the plant like, “going from a stove to a refrigerator.” Doors are thrown open in the winter, sending bone chilling drafts into areas of the facility, just increasing the uncomfortable surroundings the workers have to face. Machines are overloaded and workers are expected to meet production by any means possible.
That’s what is likely to happen if the Senate doesn’t vote to extend the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund, which is set to expire next week.
The TANF Emergency Fund is an emergency jobs program through which 37 states have provided subsidized jobs for nearly 250,000 otherwise unemployed parents and youth – helping families, businesses, and communities across America weather the recession.
"We have seen our future again. Our life, our hope, our happiness has begun to bloom. Please don't let it wither." – Juandi S.
If the program is allowed to expire on September 30, tens of thousands of people will most likely lose their jobs and join the ranks of the unemployed. Most state programs are already shutting down or scaling back greatly, even though the programs are still needed.Extension of the TANF Emergency Fund would allow states to build on their current efforts and to maximize the investments they have already made.
The House has already passed legislation to extend the TANF Emergency Fund twice, but like so many other pieces
The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act – more commonly known as the DREAM Act – would allow undocumented youth raised in the United States who have completed their K-12 education with no criminal record to earn their citizenship through either a college education or military service. Although the legislation has widespread support, the DREAM Act has stagnated in Congress for nearly a decade.
But the long wait could be over! Today at 2:15 ET, the Senate is scheduled to vote on cloture for the defense authorization bill, which currently includes the DREAM Act. If passed today, a vote on the DREAM Act amendment is expected on Thursday.
Call your Senators at 1-888-254-5087 and tell them: Vote ‘YES’ on the cloture motion for H.R. 5136 and ‘YES’ on the DREAM Act amendment, and ask them to give a speech on the Senate floor in support of the DREAM Act.
With the DREAM Act passed, qualifying undocumented youth would be given the chance to invest in themselves and their futures through education or the armed services, shattering the glass ceiling impeding these young people from reaching their full potential. Communities, which have already invested so much in these youth
Over one month ago, Jobs with Justice coalitions and allies around the country took action to demand Obama appoint Elizabeth Warren to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to create accountability and oversight of the consumer credit market was a big part of the financial reform success over the summer.
Wall Street interests lobbied tirelessly to block her appointment because of her history as an advocate for consumers at the expense of big bank interests.
But our voices were louder.
Today President Obama will announce that Elizabeth Warren will lead the creation of the new CFPB, set to get the agency off the ground. Although she has not been confirmed by the Senate as the permanent director of the Bureau, she will oversee its establishment as an Assistant to the President and as Special Advisor to Timothy Geithner, the Treasury Secretary. And even with that, she could still eventually be confirmed as permanent director.
She might just be the most powerful agent of Wall Street reform in the country. And Warren is clear that the battle has just begun, stating on the Huffington
With Persistent Unemployment & Record Numbers in Poverty, Protesters Demand Bold Action on Jobs.
On September 15, Jobs with Justice coalitions and allies in more than 100 cities nationwide brought the voices of workers, community members, and the unemployed into the debate on how to move forward on a jobs plan that would put people back to work immediately. With 15 million people out of work and one in seven Americans living below the official poverty line, the time is now for Congress to take bold action to move the country towards full and fair employment and to ensure that Wall Street pays their fair share.
“Joblessness is the central issue for voters in this election,” said Sarita Gupta, Jobs with Justice Executive Director. “People are angry, and for good reason. Corporate greed and recklessness have driven the country into a crisis, and leaders in Washington have yet to offer any real solutions. If Congress won’t act to create jobs, then maybe they don’t deserve to have jobs.”
Jobs with Justice coalitions organized a wide range
