Jobs with Justice Blog » Leaders

Summer is Heating Up! From Phoenix to Detroit and Beyond!

Huy Ong — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:43:03 +0000

May 29th marked one moment in the ongoing fight to stop SB1070. Over 100,000 merged to Phoenix to denounce legalizing racial profiling, demand that President Obama intervene, and call on people of conscious everywhere to join the fight to address the human rights crisis in Arizona as the implementation date of July 29th approaches.

From a candlelight vigil organized by JwJ of East Tennessee and others, to Diamondbacks Boycott held in San Francisco, over 70 other solidarity actions occurred leading up to and on the day. And more followed. Organizers, activist, people of faith, teachers, students, and community members took the call for solidarity back into their communities, cities and states.

Following a visit to Arizona on Mother’s Day, A group of women from a broad array of social justice movements, organized an ad-hoc hearing in Congress where women and children from Phoenix shared their stories. Catherine Figueroa, Silvia Rodriguez, Sylvia Herrera

Communities and organizations are unveiling the truth about Police/ICE collaboration and the direct link it has for creating a pathway for SB1070 type legislation and moving campaigns to

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Student Labor Week of Action Builds on Successes

Maria Escobar — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 17:58:51 +0000

The past two months have been unprecedented, filled with victories and actions that have proven to be successful in bringing real change to our communities.

The first victory for working class people was the passage of the Student Aid reform. This bill will take away subsidies given to loan companies and invest them into programs such as the Pell grant and community colleges. “Students across the country were able to see their amazing direct-action organizing payoff with comprehensive student aid reform becoming the law of the land,” said USSA President Gregory Cendana. “This is especially critical for working class students and families who have struggled the most in affording their education.”

The second victory was the agreement reached between for the Coalition of Immokalee workers, the Student Farmworker Alliance, and giant food service provider Aramark. Marc Rodriguez of the Student Farmworker Alliance said:

Aramark becomes the 8th major food corporation to agree to work with the CIW to improve wages and root out modern-day slavery in its tomato supply chain. This is a huge step forward for our campaign, because it means that the CIW now basically
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Students and Workers Organizing for Justice

Maria Escobar — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:18:32 +0000

From Florida to California, March 4th marked an exceptional moment for the student and worker movement in recent U.S. history. People took to the streets to demonstrate their frustration with the government’s failure to pass legislation that would benefit young people such as Student Aid Reform and the DREAM Act. The mainstream media seemed taken by surprise of all these coordinated actions across the country – How could students and workers come together on one specific day? Was this an organized effort? Were people demanding change from the government and legislators?

I got the opportunity to march along with students, staff, and faculty at U-Mass Amherst. Being there reminded me about the power of organizing and strategic escalation. Students at this school provided a deadline for their administrators to accept their demands around fees, budget cuts, treating staff & faculty fairly, and improving the school’s climate. We will be watching their administrations’ response and actions to come. Check out video from the great actions at the University of Central Florida and the University of California system. You can also go to www.defendeducation.org

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Troublemakers Go to School in Boston

rand wilson — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:30:20 +0000

(Originally published on Working In These Times blog at http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5639/troublemakers_go_to_school_in_boston)

BOSTON—More than 90 union members, students and community activists jammed the SEIU Local 888 union hall here on Saturday for a “Troublemakers School” sponsored by Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.

IBEW Local 2222 Business Manager Myles Calvey gave a rousing welcome to kick things off. “We’re not going to get labor’s problems solved in Washington or on Beacon Hill unless we take a page from the civil rights and gay rights movements,” said Calvey, a former New England telecom strike leader. “We’ve got to be a lot more aggressive so that politicians are forced to deal with our issues. We’ve got make our problems, their problems!”

Calvey was followed by a panel of local organizers from the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Angelica Laundry strike, Service Employees’ Local 1199’s Caritas hospital campaign and American Federation of Government Employee’s Transportation Safety Officers organizing drive. Their presentations were followed by a wide-ranging discussion about organizing strategies and reports from other workplace struggles. (To learn more about these campaigns, go to www.ufcwlocal1445.org/Open1445Intro2.htm; http://fairunionelections.org and

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Oregon Unions Save Services, Tapping Voter Anger to Tax Wealthy

Margaret Butler — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:54:52 +0000

Faced with yet more blood-letting of public services, Oregon voters chose a different treatment: Tax those most able to pay. It's given union activists hope that relentless organizing can settle bulging state deficits by targeting recipients of the bubble economy's billions, not public services and public workers. By 54 percent, they passed new taxes on the wealthiest 3 percent of the state's residents and on corporations in a special election in late January. The vote preserved funding levels for schools, critical human services, and public safety statewide. It's also given union activists nationwide hope that relentless organizing can turn the media fascination with the anti-tax Tea Party on its head and settle bulging state deficits by taking money from recipients of the bubble economy's billions instead of public services and public workers. The tax boosts should cover a $727 million hole in the state budget-although the latest revenue estimates forecast deeper shortfalls. Oregon's budget situation has been critical for many years. One of five states without a sales tax, Oregon has relied on an essentially flat personal income tax and limited property taxes. Lacking the ability to create a "rainy day" fund, Oregon has been hit by the recession especially hard. Unemployment hovers above 12 percent. After cutting $2 billion from services last year, Democrats, who had enough of a majority to pass revenue measures, enacted two measures to plug the remaining budget gap. But most business groups opposed the tax increases, so business sent out paid signature gatherers, who collected enough to refer both measures to the voters. The Yes for Oregon campaign was based in many organizations that have worked together over the years, most recently in the 2008 election to fight off anti-union, anti-tax, and anti-immigrant ballot measures. Key funders and strategists included the Service Employees (SEIU), the Oregon Education Association, AFSCME, AARP, Our Oregon, Stand for Children, and the Oregon Health Care Association. The state AFL-CIO was an important source of volunteers and funds. Staff from many coalition partners were loaned to the campaign and provided its leadership. The campaign built a coalition of 250 groups statewide, including all five Jobs with Justice chapters. "There was an amazing willingness from the average citizen to say, 'I've got skin in this game and I've got to get involved,'" said Timothy Welp, a 15-year member of SEIU Local 503 now organizing for the local. Beginning in the summer, all the coalition partners signed their members up on a "vote yes" pledge and started to focus their persuasion on undecided voters. Polling showed that we began the campaign with a solid majority of the voters. The challenge was to keep them in the face of what the Yes campaigners knew would be a well-funded, slick, and dishonest "vote no" drive. The state's minimum corporate tax had been $10 since 1931, making the need to increase corporate taxes an easy sell that appealed to voter anger at corporate greed and corruption and the federal bailout. Business groups reported raising $4.6 million for their group, Oregonians Against Job-Killing Taxes, but the Yes campaign, largely bankrolled by public employee unions, raised $6.9 million. Most newspapers editorialized against the measures. Portland's influential Oregonian sold the No campaign wrapper advertising, so in the days before the election the front of the paper advertised its "vote no" position. TV ads from the no side were misleading but effective, implying that the taxes would affect middle-class Oregonians. Oregon votes only by mail, stretching the get-out-the-vote push for weeks. We thought as we went into the last two weeks that it was very close and knew that turnout would determine the outcome. Thousands of people phone-banked and canvassed during the final push. Volunteers at SEIU Local 503 made so many calls that phone service crashed throughout the neighborhood. In total, Yes campaigners made more than a million phone calls at locations around the state. We knocked on 300,000 doors-nearly one-fifth of registered voters in the state. Jobs with Justice had a small piece: recruiting volunteers, getting faith leaders on board, creating our own JwJ voters pamphlet statement, and helping pull together a rally in the campaign's closing days. The backbone of the volunteer base was the public employee unions. ANGER AT BUSINESS It was very clear as we went door to door that the business message was not resonating with working people this time. People are angry about corporations and the $10 minimum tax struck most people as ludicrous. "Oregon has had decades of anti-tax rhetoric, but at some point people are pushed to the wall," Welp said. "Working folk have been squeezed so hard here. They're tired of getting squeezed." The "vote no" message combined the two ballot measures and hit several themes, many of them false: a bad recession was the wrong time to raise taxes; 70,000 Oregon jobs would be lost; businesses would close or raise prices; public employees got a big raise. Oregonians Against Job Killing Taxes argued that many of the households making over $250,000 were really single proprietorships who filed taxes as individuals. Their message was complicated: for some corporations, the tax would be on sales, not profits. We said that both taxes were modest and affordable and that enacting them would save critical services we all depend upon. No polling has surfaced, but it seems clear that majorities of people voted their class interest. The keys to victory were the smart strategy, the broad coalition, the incredible number of volunteers, and the breadth of the field campaign. There is much more to do to stabilize the state's finances, even with the new taxes. Their passage, the first tax increase in Oregon since the 1930s, was a historic step toward fairness-although many Oregonians agree that our tax structure needs more change to make it stable and fair. --------- Margaret Butler is the director of Portland Jobs with Justice.

Howard Zinn, August 24, 1922 – January 27, 2010

jwjnational — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:40:55 +0000

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of historian, author, teacher, and activist Howard Zinn.

Howard was a long time supporter of Jobs with Justice. He was arrested in in 1996 as part of a Jobs with Justice delegation peacefully supporting striking immigrant workers at the Richmark factory in Everett, MA.

Howard Zinn inspired the Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice “Voices of a People’s History” performance and inspired our “Voices of Working People’s History” May Day Celebration. You can listen to Howard deliver a heart-wrenching and spirited reading of his work incorporating a rich selection of quotations and rememberances of labor history in Western Massachusetts on the W. Mass JwJ website.

His leadership, insight, and inspiration will be greatly missed.

Obituaries:

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87

Howard Zinn, Historian, Dies at 87

More information will be forthcoming at www.howardzinn.org.

Scholarships Available to Union Families, Student Activists

jwjnational — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:39:58 +0000

Two exciting scholarship opportunities have come to our attention recently.

UNION PLUS SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM Deadline: January 30, 2010

Union members and their children are eligible for $500 – $4,000 scholarships for college graduate and undergraduate programs. Since 1992, the Union Plus Scholarship Program has awarded more than $2.4 million to students of working families who want to begin or continue their post-secondary education. You can learn more and download the application here.

DAVIS-PUTTER SCHOLARSHIP FUND Deadline: April 1, 2010

The Davis-Putter Scholarship Fund provides grants to students actively working for peace and justice. These need-based scholarships are awarded to those able to do academic work at the university level and who are part of the progressive movement on the campus and in the community. Early recipients worked for civil rights, against McCarthyism, and for peace in Vietnam. Recent grantees have been active in the struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression; building the movement for economic justice; and creating peace through international anti-imperialist solidarity. Learn more and download an application here.

Sustaining the Movement for Jobs with Justice

Rev. Jim Sessions — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:36:40 +0000

Fran Ansley and I have been involved with the JwJ network since 1995 when our local Central Labor Council invited us to help organize our local East Tennessee JwJ. For the past several years, we have made a monthly automatic contribution to both the Jobs with Justice Education Fund (national JwJ) and to our local JwJ coalition, JwJ of East Tennessee.

Early on, we got to witness the power and significance of union/community solidarity in the Mineworkers’ strike against Pittston Coal Company in the hollows and on the ridges of Southern Appalachia. We saw what the union and its members meant to the community and what the community, its churches and civic organizations brought to the struggle for labor justice and workers’ rights. To win that fight, it took national and even international support, and I think most fundamentally, the shoulder-to-shoulder daily support of neighbors, pastors, and local community organizations. Across the board Solidarity of material support and mutual reinforcement was necessary to win. We have seen those lessons multiplied in years since.

That is why Fran and I give regularly scheduled contributions to both

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Remembering Tim Costello

Russ Davis — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:42:17 +0000

Jobs with Justice is saddened to announce the passing of longtime friend and Jobs with Justice supporter Tim Costello on December 4th at the age of 64. Tim was a lifetime activist and visionary of the U.S. and global progressive and labor movements. His hard work deep thinking and good humor will be sorely missed at a time when we are confronting a deep crisis. Tim’s contributions have been, and will be, invaluable in developing new strategies for working people moving forward.

We will be working with Tim’s family, friends, and colleagues to remember Tim and his work. For now you can go to the website that Tim helped to develop to read more about Tim’s life and to write your tributes and condolences, http://www.laborstrategies.blogs.com.

Southern Labor Leaders to Celebrate Life of the Real Norma Rae

Smiley — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:27:02 +0000

On January 9, 2010 labor leaders and activists from around the southern region, including James Andrews and Donna DeWitt–presidents of the North and South Carolina AFL-CIOs, will gather in Greensboro, North Carolina to celebrate of the life of Crystal Lee Sutton. NC Triad Jobs with Justice is hosting the event. John Wilhelm, president of UNITE HERE, AFL-CIO will present the keynote.

At the age of 33, Sutton attempted to build a union at the JP Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. She was making $2.65/hour folding towels at the time, in the early 1970s. Most Americans were exposed to her struggle via the movie “Norma Rae” where Sally Field played a character based in large part on Sutton’s efforts.

Crystal Lee Sutton passed away earlier this year on September 11, 2009 in Burlington, North Carolina from a long-standing fight with cancer. She had been engaged in a struggle with her insurance company who had delayed her treatment.

Through testimonials from family and friends, cultural performances, old videos and pictures, activists will pay tribute to this hero of the working class.

For more information, please contact NC Triad

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