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By jwjnational, on December 7th, 2011
 On December 6th, Jobs with Justice leaders joined small delegations of OUR Walmart and UFCW members and community allies to visit the local offices of members of Walmart’s Board of Directors. In DC, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Seattle and Chicago, workers and community leaders asked board members to meet with OUR Walmart, dropping off a letter and a DVD outlining the concerns of many of Walmart’s 1.4 million workers.
While Walmart associates are the lifeblood of the company, they aren’t always treated with the respect they have earned. Associates work tirelessly to serve Walmart customers and have earned the right to respect, the chance to work full-time in stores with enough staff to take care of customers, a predictable work schedule, a pay rate that allows us to take care of ourselves and our families, and affordable healthcare.
Jobs with Justice and other allies had previously joined OUR Walmart in Bentonville, AR at the company’s international headquarters to deliver the Declaration for Respect to CEO, Mike Duke and ask for a meeting. Mike Duke would not meet. Hundreds of JwJ activists called Mike Duke, Karen Casey and
Continue reading OUR Walmart, JwJ Pay a Visit to Walmart’s Board of Directors
By jwjnational, on November 15th, 2011
On November 11th, Alice Walton—one of the heirs of the Walmart throne opened the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville Arkansas. The project cost the Walton Family Foundation a whopping $1.2 billion, and was launched hardly weeks after slashing the healthcare of hundreds of thousands of Walmart workers.
In response, members of the Organization United for Respect at Walmart joined protestors at various Occupy encampments around the country to tell their story as members of the 99% and placing the Waltons squarely within the 1%.
This wasn’t hard to do. The Waltons are the richest family in the United States, representing 4 of the 11 wealthiest people in the country. This family could give nearly $5,000 to every resident of New York and still have $1 billion left over.
Although members of OUR Walmart were not able to get back to Bentonville to reach those who gathered for the museum opening, participants in the newly launched “Occupy Bentonville” were present with leaflets and signs. They mobilized in front of Sam Walton’s original five and dime to show that there is opposition to the company’s practices even in their own backyard.
By Sarita Gupta, on September 1st, 2011
 From August 5-7, 2011, Jobs with Justice held our National Conference in Washington, DC. The Conference, which was attended by nearly 700 activists from across the country, was intended to re-energize and recommit workers’ rights activists and advocates to working together in solidarity to address the rights of workers everywhere and to collectively engage in strategy discussions around the economy, corporate accountability, and strengthening grassroots organizing base around a variety of issues.
Most importantly the event allowed Jobs with Justice, our network, partners, and supporters to reflect on two critical questions: how do we protect and expand the right to organize and collectively bargain in this critical moment in our labor movement; and what is the role of Jobs with Justice in mobilizing the network, its allies, partners, and everyday workers around workers justice issues during this period.
In the period since our last national conference in 2008, we have regrettably lost a series of legislative strategies—including most potently the struggle for the Employee Free Choice Act. In the period since that defeat we have had
Continue reading JwJ Conference: Building a Transformative Vision to Expand Workers’ Rights
By jwjnational, on August 8th, 2011
Re-posted from the Caring Across Generations Campaign Leadership Team
The manufactured crisis on the debt ceiling has created a dynamic for politics, wealth and power to overshadow the real issues facing our country. We need to protect working people, create quality jobs and ensure critical programs to support people in times of need are available. It’s time for new solutions, not cuts – and they will only come from us.
Our elected officials tell us that there is not enough money in the bank to pay for the programs that the working people of this country need: unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. But only three years ago, when Wall Street was in trouble, those same elected officials decided to take more than $800 billion of our tax dollars and hand it over to some of the wealthiest people in this country. Those same corporations are now bringing in record profits, sitting on top of trillions of dollars in savings, not creating jobs or paying their fair share in taxes. Meanwhile, we are being asked, once again, to “do our part” and accept cuts to core social programs.
Although the debate is often framed as a conflict between “small government”
Continue reading Toward an Abundance of Care, Not a Debt Crisis
By James Haslam, on May 25th, 2011
The Vermont Worker’s Center invites you to tune into a special presentation on Vermont’s new universal health care law, to be signed by Governor Shumlin on May 26 at 10am. As a direct result of a highly energized and organized grassroots people’s movement for the human right to healthcare, Vermont has become the first state in the country to pass a bill for a universal, publicly financed healthcare system that commits to providing healthcare as a public good.
Join the Vermont Workers Center/JwJ at the Vermont Statehouse Room 11 at 9:00AM E.S.T. Thursday, May 26, 2011 or tune into the live stream here.
Immediately before the bill signing ceremony in the Vermont Statehouse, the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign will give a presentation to the press and the public, live-streamed online to a national audience, to explain the significance of this new law and provide a human rights assessment of its key provisions. Leading members of the Campaign will also look ahead at the challenges Vermonters face as powerful special interests, led by the deep-pocketed insurance industry, gear up to derail the transition to universal healthcare over the next few years.
The Vermont Worker’s Center
Continue reading Live Streamed Press Conference on Signing of Vermont Universal Healthcare Bill H.202
By rand wilson, on May 4th, 2011
Rite Aid Negotiating Committee after signing Tentative Agreement on May 1, 2011.Rite Aid workers at the company's massive Southwest Distribution Center in Lancaster declared victory on Sunday, May 1 in their five-year effort to form a union and improve working conditions.
Workers signed a 3-year tentative agreement with management on May 1 – subject to a May 12 ratification vote – that will improve conditions at the million-square-foot facility in California’s high desert by guaranteeing:
Health insurance rates that are fair for both individual workers and their families,
Job security provisions to prevent work from being sub-contracted,
A worker voice in production standards and ability to challenge unfair standards,
Protection against intense summer heat and winter cold, using innovative indoor-temperature standards,
A fair and impartial process for resolving disputes,
Wage increases in each of the next 3 years.
“We’re excited about winning this victory, even if it took longer than it should have,” said Carlos “Chico” Rubio, a 10-year warehouse worker who helped negotiate the union contract with a team of eight co-workers.
Employees decided to form their union
Continue reading Rite Aid workers win 5-year campaign to form union at giant Rite Aid distribution center
By James Haslam, on March 31st, 2011
On Thursday, March 24, members of the grassroots Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign cheered on as the Vermont House of Representatives voted 92 – 49 to pass the universal healthcare bill, H.202. The House bill passed as a result of thousands of Vermonters speaking out and demanding that healthcare be treated as a human right and provided as a public good.
“This bill puts Vermont on a path to a system in which every Vermonter can get the healthcare they need when they need it, and the financing of that system is shared equitably by all. This is a huge step forward,” says Peg Franzen, President of the Vermont Workers’ Center.
The Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign still hopes to strengthen the bill in the Senate based on its human rights principles of universality, equity, accountability, transparency and participation.
“This bill is a road map and it gets Vermont started down that road. We are fighting hard to have human rights principles be the guidelines for this bill, because we must have a system that works for everyone,” says Franzen. “We’re asking the Senate to specify that Green Mountain Care will be financed equitably, which means that people
Continue reading Vermont House Passes Universal Healthcare Bill
By Margaret Butler, on March 28th, 2011
Portland Jobs with Justice has led the building of a statewide network to strengthen the movement for a single payer health care system. With the addition of all the Oregon Jobs with Justice chapters (Southern OR, Central OR, Eugene Springfield Solidarity Network, and Mid-Willamette Valley) adopting single payer health care as a priority campaign, Oregon JwJ activist are gearing up to fight for a just healthcare system that puts people before profits.
Single Payer Conference a Huge Success
On January 29, over 450 single payer advocates from around the state of Oregon gathered at the First Unitarian Church in Portland to network and advocate for an improved, expanded Medicare for All program to fix our broken health care system.
The conference opened with a plenary talk by Dr Margaret Flowers, Physicians for a National Health Program’s Congressional Fellow. She presented the basics of what a single payer plan does and explained why the recent federal reform, while making a few positive changes, further entrenches the for-profit insurance industry, while failing to provide universal access to good care or to control skyrocketing insurance and care costs for individuals, families, businesses, governments and society as a whole. Flowers
Continue reading Fighting for Single-Payer Health Care in Oregon
By James Haslam, on January 7th, 2011
 More than three hundred Vermonters converged at the Statehouse on January 5th to deliver more than four thousand petition signatures to lawmakers Shap Smith, John Campbell, Claire Ayer and Mark Larson. The petition demands that Vermont lead the nation in the adoption of universal healthcare. The petition also builds on last year’s passage of Act 128 the “Universal Access To Healthcare Act,” which mandates that Vermont create a healthcare system which meets the human rights principles of universality, equity, accountability, transparency, participation and healthcare as a public good. The rally also comes in anticipation of the release of the state mandated universal healthcare system options, designed by Dr. William Hsiao, expected on January 19th of this year.
The Cedar Creek room of the Statehouse was packed with Healthcare Is a Human Right supporters from all across the state in red shirts carrying signs, along with many legislators on the first day back in the Statehouse. Mari Cordes of the Vermont Federation of Nurses & Health Professionals Union at Fletcher Allen, spoke about her personal
Continue reading Vermonters Rally for Health Care for All
By jwjnational, on December 2nd, 2010
 Each year, national Jobs with Justice gives an “award” to the greediest, most cold-hearted company or person of the year. Nominations for the 2010 Scrooge of the Year are in, and it’s time to vote.
VOTE NOW!
There are seven worthy candidates to win this year’s Scrooge award (or write in your own candidate):
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was nominated for leading the Republican party in aggressively blocking legislation that would benefit working people;
Express Scripts was chosen because despite racking up profits of $1.7 billion last year processing 12% of the nation’s prescriptions, they are demanding draconian concessions from workers and threatening to close facilities
Hyatt was nominated for trying to eliminate quality healthcare and make the recession permanent for its employees, and for their safety record;
Rite Aid was chosen for failing to bargain a first contract with workers who joined a union two years ago and demanding unreasonable concessions from other workers;
Publix was selected because they won’t join other companies in pledging to improve wages and working conditions for the farmworkers who pick their companies’ tomatoes;
Continue reading Vote Now for the National Scrooge of the Year
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On December 6th, Jobs with Justice leaders joined small delegations of OUR Walmart and UFCW members and community allies to visit the local offices of members of Walmart’s Board of Directors. In DC, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Seattle and Chicago, workers and community leaders asked board members to meet with OUR Walmart, dropping off a letter and a DVD outlining the concerns of many of Walmart’s 1.4 million workers.
