MONTPELIER – Vermonters from all across the state converged on the statehouse on May 1st in a demonstration to show that Vermont can and should be the first state in the nation to recognize healthcare as a human right and provide it as a public good by implementing a single-payer, universal healthcare system.
Over a thousand people marched from the Montpelier City Hall down to the capital building accompanied by drums, dancers, puppets, baloons and signs supporting universal healthcare whiloe chanting “hey, hey what do we say? Vermont is ready to lead the way!” The marchers then joined another two hundred participants already at the Statehouse lawn and swarmed up the capitol steps for a festive rally. They were joined by US Sen Bernie Sanders and the rally also featured skits by various regional organizing committees of the “Healthcare Is A Human Right” campaign, musical performances by Vermont artists, and speeches by campaign leaders from all parts of the state.
In 2008, the Vermont Workers’ Center/JwJ launched the Healthcare Is A Human Right Campaign. On May 1, 2009 their “Healthcare Is A Human Right” Rally at the Statehouse drew over 1,200 participants and was the largest weekday rally in the state capitol’s history. They are gearing up now for an even bigger rally this May 1st. Over the past few months the campaign has organized a series of People’s Forums across the state with almost 100 state legislators and over 1,000 total participants. They have released two videos about the campaign, “If Vermont Leads, the Rest of the Nation Will Follow” and “We Ain’t No Fools Day.”
Yesterday, the Vermont State Senate voted 28-2 in favor of the S.88 healthcare bill. The bill calls for the Legislature’s Health Care Reform Commission to hire consultants who will design three health care models with implementation timelines beginning in July 2012. One of the three models must be asingle-payer system that is government-administered and publicly financed. All three of the models must meet the Healthcare is a Human Right principles of universal, comprehensive,
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
A team of VT Nurses, EMTs, and paramedics from Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, VT, members of the Vermont Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals (AFT), are organizing donations and groups of volunteers to go to Haiti in the coming days, weeks and months to help with the relief efforts.Below is a report from Mari Cordes, RN from the amazing first group of Fletcher Allen nurses and providers who are in now in Haiti. The Vermont Workers’ Center /JwJ is proud that Mari is also a major leader in the Healthcare is a Human Right Campaign.
After much effort organizing transport, gathering more supplies and continuing to develop very important infrastructure and network for this and future teams, working with the Cruz Roja in the Dominican Republic, communicating with Partners in Health in Haiti and our own reconaissance team that struck out ahead of us yesterday, we have joined the rest of our group in a large medical compound in Jimani. Jimani is a border town with Haiti on the
So we didn’t win the Public Option. It has been replaced with a vaguely defined government-regulated insurance exchange.
Additionally, labor leaders were not able to completely remove the tax on working people to generate money for that program. As of now, they were able to:
delay the tax for those of us who are state/local government employees or who have collectively bargained agreements,
to increase the thresholds for premiums taxed for women, seniors and those with high risk occupations—whose health insurance premiums tend to be higher, and
to exclude dental and vision from the calculations for the tax (starting in 2015).
Nevertheless, the inclusion of any tax on working people instead of taxing the corporate interests that got us in this situation in the first place is a qualitative loss from what we started with.
This is not the bill we fought for.
Single-payer advocates and many others might argue that we did not demand enough in the first place. And there is definitely validity in the notion that organized labor should have done more to support the single-payer movement outside of the beltway, even if they were pushing the public option on Capitol Hill.
In light of the recent negotiations, corporate interests will blame the Obama Administration
More than two hundred Vermonters from the Vermont Worker’s Center “Healthcare Is A Human Right Campaign (HCHR)” filled the Cedar Creek room at the Statehouse on January 6th, coming from all over the state, to deliver thousands of postcards to the leadership of the State Legislature and to take action on the two single-payer health care bills, S.88 and H.100, and mend the broken healthcare system this year.
“We came here today because we seek to change what is politically possible in the health care reform process,” said Susan Lucas, RN president of the nurses union at Copley Hospital. “We believe that health care is not a commodity but a public good shared by all. The time is now to make health care a basic fundamental right for every single person”
The event received a lot of attention from the Vermont media. Check it out!
Last night the Vermont Workers’ Center’s “Healthcare is a Human Right” Campaign held their second Chittenden County People’s Forum on Healthcare at St. Michael’s College.
State Senator Doug Racine, chair of Vermont’s Senate health and welfare committee, announced that his committee will begin holding hearings on S.88, the bill that (along with its House companion H.100) will put Vermont on the road to recognizing healthcare as a human right.
“Healthcare is the most basic of human rights,” said Racine. He has scheduled the first public hearing on the bill, to be held jointly with the House health care committee, for January 12, exactly one week after the start of the 2010 legislative session.
Racine’s choice of Tuesday’s forum for the announcement was seen by many as recognition of the success of the Vermont Workers’ Center’s statewide grassroots campaign at putting pressure on the Vermont legislature to enact healthcare reform legislation that embodies human rights principles.
“We now have organizing committees statewide and we have been working with a number of other organizations to build a grassroots network capable of changing what is politically possible for healthcare reform in Vermont. It is clear that these efforts are pushing
Thanksgiving is a time to gather family and friends to appreciate and enjoy the bounty of the harvest. And it’s been a really great year — if you happen to work on Wall Street, where CEOs are expecting record bonuses. But the rest of us are in the trough of the worst economic crisis in a generation. Millions more Americans are suffering hunger, joblessness and the loss of our homes.
November brought bleak reports on the state or our economic health. This month unemployment officially topped 10%, and while job loss has slowed, the economy continues to lose about 200,000 jobs per month. Meanwhile, nearly 1 in 10 homeowners is delinquent on their mortgage, while home values have dropped an average of 7.1 percent.
Americans are not only struggling to stay in their houses, but they are also struggling to put food on the table. A USDA report issued this month shows that 49 million people (14.6 percent of the population), cannot consistently get enough to eat. Another recent study found that nearly half of all children and 90% of African-American children in the U.S. will receive food stamps at some point during their childhoods.
An estimated three thousand people rallied for health care reform in Austin, TX on November 14.
The Texas AFL-CIO formed a very progressive coalition for health care reform under the slogan, “Health Care Can’t Wait!” A great many organizations, including North Texas Jobs with Justice, joined in. JwJ’s role was to organize transportation to the rally at the Capitol. We were extremely fortunate to be able to partner with the Texas Progressive Center, Organizing for America, and especially with Jacqueline Ban of MoveOn. By combining our efforts we transported 39 people in a chartered bus, and helped fill the buses from the Tarrant County AFL-CIO and another bus from the Dallas AFL-CIO and UAW. Dr. David Brockman did the research on other forms of transportation, which added to the crowd in Austin.
Our publicity efforts resulted in pre-action ink in the Ft Worth and Houston newspapers. Univision covered our bus launch from Oak Cliff. Our statewide publicity may have helped get major coverage in the state’s news agencies.
The featured speaker at the rally was Congressman Lloyd Doggett of Austin. He reviewed the fight
If you’re one of the 57 million workers in the U.S. without paid sick days, chances are the answer is “yes”. Thirty-nine percent of us have a difficult choice to make when we’re sick: go to work and risk infecting our co-workers (and risk making our illness worse), or stay home and put our finances and our jobs in jeopardy.
Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Rosa DeLauro are leading the charge to pass the Healthy Families Act first introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy last spring. The Healthy Families Act would provide 7 paid sick days to all workers at companies with at least 15 employees, and would prevent employers from retaliating against workers who get sick. The bill has 113 sponsors in the House and 21 sponsors in the Senate, and has been endorsed by the Obama administration.
Passing this bill is an important step in fighting the spread of seasonal and H1N1 flu. Three quarters of workers without paid sick days work in food and service industries where they come into contact with both co-workers and the public.
MONTPELIER – Vermonters from all across the state converged on the statehouse on May 1st in a demonstration to show that Vermont can and should be the first state in the nation to recognize healthcare as a human right and provide it as a public good by implementing a single-payer, universal healthcare system.
State Senator Doug Racine, chair of Vermont’s Senate health and welfare committee, announced that his committee will begin holding hearings on S.88, the bill that (along with its House companion H.100) will put Vermont on the road to recognizing healthcare as a human right. 
