[Educationforall] spam con huevos labor news, views and concerns, 4.17.12‏‏‏‏-I‏

[Carlos Pelayo]

'Student Loan Forgiveness Act' introduced - E-Action Labor Studies 115 Class: Workplace Health and Safety Certificate - Saturday April 21, 22 & 28 2012 - L.A.‏Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open Shop America‏ Take Action to Protect Workers' Rights‏Equal Pay Day Story!‏ Senate Seeks Ways To Save Ailing US Postal Service   Class Warfare: As American as Apple Pie
AFGE members' action against USCIS move-April 18‏Health Insurance Reforms: How Will They Affect Employment-Based Coverage in California?‏URGENT: Workers' Rights on the Line‏ 
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Since 1999, average student loan debt has increased by a shameful 511%. In 2010, total outstanding student loan debt exceeded total outstanding credit card debt in America for the first time ever. In 2012, total outstanding student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion.In response to this crisis, U.S. Representative Hansen Clarke of Michigan has just introduced H.R. 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, which would extend a helping hand to those struggling under massive amounts of student loan debt. 
That's why I created a petition to Rep. John Kline, Chairman of the House Education and the Workplace Committee; the United States House of Representatives and Senate; and President Barack Obama on SignOn.org, which says:Total outstanding student loan debt in America is expected to exceed $1 TRILLION this year. Millions of hardworking, taxpaying, educated Americans are being crushed under the weight of their educational debts, while the economy continues to sputter. Support a REAL economic stimulus and jobs plan. Support the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012 (H.R. 4170).Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:http://www.moveon.org/r?r=272847&id=39566-5226545-lbuTUTx&t=2-----Original Message-----
From: Robert Applebaum <moveon-help at list.moveon.org>
To: john f martinez <inmart5 at aol.com>
Sent: Tue, Apr 17, 2012 12:57 pm
Subject: Student Loan Forgiveness Act introduced

Below is an email from Robert Applebaum, a MoveOn member who created a petition at SignOn.org that is getting a lot of attention and may be of interest to people in your area. If you have concerns or feedback about this petition, click here.Dear MoveOn member,Since 1999, average student loan debt has increased by a shameful 511%. In 2010, total outstanding student loan debt exceeded total outstanding credit card debt in America for the first time ever. In 2012, total outstanding student loan debt is expected to exceed $1 trillion.In response to this crisis, U.S. Representative Hansen Clarke of Michigan has just introduced H.R. 4170, the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012, which would extend a helping hand to those struggling under massive amounts of student loan debt. 
That's why I created a petition to Rep. John Kline, Chairman of the House Education and the Workplace Committee; the United States House of Representatives and Senate; and President Barack Obama on SignOn.org, which says:Total outstanding student loan debt in America is expected to exceed $1 TRILLION this year. Millions of hardworking, taxpaying, educated Americans are being crushed under the weight of their educational debts, while the economy continues to sputter. Support a REAL economic stimulus and jobs plan. Support the Student Loan Forgiveness Act of 2012 (H.R. 4170).Will you sign the petition? Click here to add your name, and then pass it along to your friends:http://www.moveon.org/r?r=272847&id=39566-5226545-lbuTUTx&t=2Thanks!–Robert ApplebaumThe text above was written by Robert Applebaum, not by MoveOn staff, and MoveOn is not responsible for the content. This email was sent through MoveOn's secure system, and your information has been kept private.Want to support our work? MoveOn Civic Action is entirely funded by our 7 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.
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Worker Occupational Safety and Health (WOSH)  24-HR Specialist Training

Labor Studies 115 “Workplace Health and Safety” 

Course Description: What do you do when a worker is injured on the job?How do you protect workers exposed to unsafe equipment or chemical hazards?When and how do you file a Cal/OSHA complaint? Topics Include:How to identify and analyze chemicals, ergonomic, and unsafe equipmentHow Cal/OSHA and Workers’ Compensation workHow to form effective health and safety committeesElements of a comprehensive Illness and Injury Prevention Program (IIPP)Effective communication skillsResources and strategies for taking successful action Saturday, April 21st; Sunday, April 22nd; and *Saturday, April 28th   8:30AM-5:00PM 
*Optional 3rd class to earn Health & Safety certificate

Location: Los Angeles Trade Tech College (LATTC) Labor CenterSouth Campus, TE Bldg., Room 221
Contact: Tanya Akel (310) 794-5992 or LATTC (213) 763-7129  Register Online at: www.lattc.edu or on-site on the 1st day of classFee: $36.00 per unit / Health Center: $11.00 per semester
For more information on current projects and resources available from LOSH visit the website at www.losh.ucla.edu or call:310-794-5992                                                                         LALS is an e-mail list announcing UCLA Labor Center and local events and actions. (Posting of announcements to the LALS listserv does not imply any endorsement by UCLA or the UCLA Labor Center.) 

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Back to the Future: Union Survival Strategies in Open
Shop America
By Steve Early and Rand Wilson
Social Policy
Spring 2012
http://www.socialpolicy.org/index.php/component/content/article/4-latest-issue/532-back-to-the-future-union-survival-strategies-in-open-shop-america

When the history of mid-western de-unionization 
is written, its sad chroniclers will begin their
story in Indiana. That is where Governor Mitch Daniels
paved the way, in 2005, for copycat attacks on
public-sector bargaining in Wisconsin, Ohio, and
Michigan -- and for a successful assault on private
sector union security in his own state earlier
this year.

A right-wing Republican, Daniels was elected in 2004.
Immediately after taking office, he began cutting state
agency jobs and, via executive order, revoked
state-employee bargaining rights granted by his
Democratic predecessor, Evan Bayh. Over the next six
years, state government employment dropped from 35,000
to 28,700. In 2005, 16,408 state workers were paying
union dues; by 2011, only 1,490 still belonged to labor
organizations now deprived of dues check-off.1

n Indiana, the end of collective bargaining led to a
pay freeze in 2009 and 2010, introduction of a new
merit-pay system, loss of seniority rights, and
health-care cost shifting. Several state employees
interviewed by The New York Times in February, 2011,
reported paying $5,200 a year for their insurance
premiums -- $3,400 more than when Daniels took over.
According to The Times's reporter, Steven Greenhouse,
the resulting drop in union membership was due "to
workers deciding it was no longer worth paying dues to
newly-toothless unions."

Jim Mills, a welfare worker in New Castle, Indiana,
offered a different explanation for why his union
branch shrank from 260 to twelve members: workers were
afraid that management would retaliate against them for
union activity once they were no longer protected by
union contracts.2

Republican governors elected in the fall of 2010 -- like
Scott Walker in Wisconsin, John Kasich in Ohio, and
Rick Snyder in Michigan -- all looked to Daniels as
their model. For unions like the Service Employees, the
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal
Employees (AFSCME), the two national teacher
organizations, NEA and AFT, unionized firefighters and
police, the Indiana scenario is a formula for union
marginalization, if not total extinction. As soon as
they took office in early 2011, Snyder and Kasich
quickly rescinded bargaining rights for the newest
public-sector union members in their respective
states--more than 40,000 child-care providers and
home-health aides. These workers had only recently been
organized under the terms of executive orders issued by
previous Democratic governors; none were covered by the
pension and medical plans covering regular state
workers, with a longer history of collective
bargaining.3

Broader anti-union measures introduced by Walker in
Wisconsin, and by Kasich in Ohio, were adopted by state
legislators not long afterwards, triggering the mass
community-labor protests in Madison described and
analyzed elsewhere in this issue of Social Policy. In
Wisconsin, these demonstrations reached truly unusual
and inspiring proportions in the winter of 2011. The
focus of organized labor's counter-campaign then became
a partially successful recall effort aimed at
Republican legislators and a legal challenge that
delayed -- but did not prevent -- implementation of the
law.4 Weighing its potential impact on 360,000 public
employees in the Buckeye State, some experts argued
that SB-5, Ohio's anti-union law, was even tougher than
Wisconsin's, because uniformed public-safety employees
were included whereas Walker excluded them from his
"budget repair" bill.5 Fortunately, labor opponents of
SB-5 collected more than one million signatures to
force a referendum vote last November that repealed
Kasich's draconian curbs on collective bargaining in
Ohio.

In Wisconsin, however, all state employees have been
thrust into a new open-shop environment since last
summer. County and municipal unions, along with local
teachers' associations, are losing their ability to
collect dues through automatic payroll deduction as
their current contracts expire. According to University
of Wisconsin labor historian Stephen Meyer, Walker's
anti-union legislation is worse than the private sector
"right to work" laws spawned by the 1947 Taft-Hartley
Act "because it requires that unions get re-certified
by their members yearly, at the same time that the
unions are prevented from accomplishing anything for
them."6 The new electoral deck is further stacked
against incumbent unions by the requirement that they
win recertification by majority vote of everyone in the
bargaining, rather than just 50% plus one, of the
workers who turn out to vote.7

Most of the 1.6 million American workers covered by
labor agreements, but who are not union members, can be
found in our twenty-three right-to-work states. This
political bloc increased by one earlier this year, when
Indiana's Republican-controlled legislature passed a
bill signed by Governor Daniels that outlawed
negotiation of any contract clause requiring payroll
deduction of dues -- or non-member "agency fees" -- for
union representation. In Indiana, as elsewhere, unions
in private industry remain legally obligated under the
National Labor Relations Act, which Taft-Hartley
amended, to provide services on an equal basis to
everyone in their bargaining units, regardless of
whether individual workers contribute a dime. In New
Hampshire in 2011, it took a Democratic governor's veto
to prevent the open shop from being imposed there, with
similar unfair financial burdens, on unions in both the
private and public sector. If anti-union forces had
succeeded in the Granite state last year, as they did
in Indiana this year, it would have marked the first
encroachment of "right-to-work" in New England, a
supposed "blue state" bastion.8

Dues-Deduction Dependence

Wherever legally sanctioned, negotiated provisions for
automatic payroll deduction of dues have long produced
a guaranteed income stream for U.S. labor
organizations. With the revenue from dues and "agency
fees" -- payments required by workers who choose not to
join -- unions have paid for their lawyers, lobbyists,
full-time negotiators, and field staff. They have also
helped finance state, local, and/or national election
campaign activity by their members, some of whom also
make voluntary membership contributions to union
politicalaction funds. Some commentators on the left
have long argued that "dues check off" makes unions
less responsive to workers, because the latter have no
way of withholding financial support from organizations
granted the exclusive legal right to represent them.
One radical critic of the union shop -- a longtime labor
educator and former organizer in the garment industry --
believes that labor's post-New-Deal reliance on
government certification and automatic dues deduction
effectively "precludes any meaningful internal
democracy -- a precondition to a militant mass
organization."9

For better or worse, depending on your point of view,
major unions are now operating in hundreds, if not
thousands, of workplaces in which union membership has
just become voluntary again. According to the
all-knowing editors of the New York Times, Republican
sponsors of recent openshop legislation are mistaken in
their belief that "unions will simply fade away" when
they have "no ability to raise funds." Says The Times,
optimistically, "As much as unions may struggle with
these new shackles, their members -- and their
motivation -- are not going away."10 On the other hand,
it has been many decades since passage of the NLRA and
the later public-sector bargaining laws modeled after
it. During that time, most unions have not had to
function as voluntary membership organizations within
privateand public-sector enterprises in much of the
country. One major challenge they face today is quickly
adapting to this new and more difficult
"internalorganizing" environment. In Wisconsin, for
example, a combination of rank-and-file apathy, anger,
fear, and/or dissatisfaction over past union
representation, including recent concession bargaining
about wages and benefits, could easily send dues
receipts plummeting to Indiana levels, if unions do not
strengthen their workplace structures and become more
member-oriented.

This is exactly the crisis that faced Local 100 of the
Transport Workers Union (TWU) New York City, when it
paid a high price for its workplace militancy seven
years ago. After a 2005 citywide bus and subway system
strike, 35,000 transit workers were punished under New
York's Taylor law which prohibits walkouts by public
employees. Local 100 members were assessed fines
ranging from $650 to $750, the equivalent of three
days' pay for most strikers. The local was fined $2.5
million, its president briefly jailed, and automatic
dues deduction temporarily suspended. The contract
settlement, which included unpopular givebacks, was
rejected narrowly but later imposed by an arbitrator.

The punitive suspension of TWU's dues check-off deal
with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority resulted
in the local's paid-up membership sinking to nearly
fifty percent in the bargaining unit involved in the
strike. Local 100's weak and demoralized steward
structure made systematic hand collection of dues
impossible in many workplaces. Members were bitter and
angry about being fined for striking against benefit
concessions they were ultimately forced to accept
anyway, after a work stoppage that many felt was poorly
organized and led by the union.

Dues deduction was eventually restored but, as recently
as late 2009 when a reform slate took over Local 100,
about 17,000 former strikers were not eligible to vote
because they still owed as much as $900 in back dues
and could not or would not pay that amount. Members of
the Take Back Our Union slate, headed by current Local
100 President John Samuelsen were faced with the
monumental challenge of restoring rank-and-file
confidence in the TWU and gradually coaxing as many
lapsed members as possible back into the fold. In late
2010, when Local 100 began preparing for contract
negotiations this year, stewards, officers, and
staffers were still trying to get 14,000 bus and subway
workers back into good membership standing.

In the rest of this article, we examine the pressing
debate, within labor, about how best to respond to such
daunting open-shop conditions, whether they arise in
atypical Local 100 fashion or as the result of
legislation and executive orders that more permanently
disrupt union financing, administration, and day-to-day
functioning.

Clearly, conducting "business as usual" is not a viable
option in new open-shop states. If government-employee
unions remain what Stanley Aronowitz calls "insurance
companies and grievance machines," the soft underbelly
of mainstream unionism, public sector division, may
soon be exposed for all to see. Are there ways that
these endangered labor organizations can operate
"outside the protection of the law?"11 Can they learn
to function with greater membership consent,
rank-and-file participation, and voluntary financial
buy-in than was needed in the past? Can they develop
internal organizing plans based on worker-toworker
relationship building and collective action on the job
as a substitute for formal collective bargaining?

Lessons of Southern Organizing

Public-sector unionists with long experience in
openshop states like Tennessee, Mississippi, North
Carolina, or Texas argue that all is not lost for their
brothers and sisters north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In
North Carolina, notes United Electrical Workers (UE)
organizer Leah Fried, "collective bargaining rights
were stripped from public employees in 1959 by an
all-white state legislature [which] made it illegal for
state and local governments to enter into collective
bargaining agreements with workers." For more than
fifteen years, the UE has "helped public workers across
North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia form
non-majority unions that organize and fight to improve
workers' lives on the job without a contract."12

UE Local 150, the North Carolina Public Service Workers
Union, initially concentrated on gaining strength
within the state university system, which includes
sixteen campuses and over 19,000 workers. The union's
primary base and leadership came from parts of the
workforce that is majority African-American and female,
like house-keeping, groundskeeping, and other blue
collar jobs. As UE organizer Steve Bader reported in
Labor Notes, "When UNC refused to meet with the union,
UE 150 organized Martin Luther King Day leafleting,
Black History Month black armband days, and meetings
with legislators [that] culminated in a meeting between
UNC System President Molly Broad's office and 18 rank
and file workers. The meeting pressured the president
into issuing an official memo that recognized workers'
rights to join and build their union without
retaliation, changed the grievance policy to allow a
co-worker grievance assistant, and established 'meet
and confer' bodies between employees and top
management."13

Later, the UE expanded to other UNC campuses and the
Department of Health and Human Services, where members
held union meetings during lunch or break time to
decide on issues and strategies. An independent union
of city workers in Durham voted to affiliate with UE
Local 150 and has even conducted several strikes.
Whether they are state or municipal employees,
rank-and-file activists are trained to represent
co-workers in grievance meetings with management and
serve as elected stewards and officers. According to
Bader:

"Victories in this area include winning formal
grievances over unfair discipline. In at least three
cases, racist managers and supervisors have been forced
to leave the job due to pressure from the union. At
almost every institution, union chapters have had
direct meetings with management regarding workplace
issues. In several instances they have won concrete
changes, such as improved equipment, respect for or
changed policy, and internally granted raises of
$1,500-3,000 for individual workers."

UE Local 150 also gathers, organizes, and distributes
data on wages, benefits, personnel practices, and
employment-related legislative initiatives --
information that may be publicly available but
difficult for workers to obtain. The union has
established a regular presence in the capital when the
legislature is in session and regularly contacts
lawmakers about issues affecting public workers.
Rank-and-file members are organized and encouraged to
speak directly to elected officials, rather than
relying on professional lobbyists. UE legislative
priorities or accomplishments in the past include
winning flat rather than percentage raises, to aid the
lowest paid, passage of bills to improve the grievance
procedure, and win stronger family and medical leave
rights and protection against discrimination based on
disability. The UE has also generated much publicity
for its creative challenge of North Carolina's legal
ban on public-sector bargaining as a violation of
international labor standards.

Tom Smith is an organizer for and former president of
Communications Workers of America Local 3865,
Tennessee's United Campus Workers (UCW). UCW/ CWA is a
"non-majority union" of state university workers that's
grown from two dozen members on one campus to more than
1,200 in eight cities in the last ten years. "While
having dues check-off helps, not having it isn't
fatal," says Smith, although he notes that "we struggle
with selfsustainability every day." According to Smith,
in the early years of Local 3865, "elements of our
leadership argued that having to hand-collect dues kept
the local's leaders and organizers honest. This
attitude meant attending weekly meetings to make plans
to collect dues. Quickly we realized that spending the
majority of our time playing bill collector was not
part and parcel of union democracy, nor did it help
build the kind of political relationships we're aiming
for on the job."14

Instead, stewards started to spend more of their time
"listening to co-workers, gathering opinions about how
to build the union, organizing meetings, and working to
save jobs from budget cuts." Local 3865 switched from
hand collection of cash or checks to a bank-draft
system which enables dues to be deducted straight from
members' accounts. But that requires new members to
fill out a form providing their bank routing and
account numbers, which creates "a new layer of
difficulty in signing up members."

"Bank drafts are complicated. We have a number of
different drafts depending on pay periods. As anyone
who has lived from paycheck to paycheck knows,
automatic withdrawals need to be timed so that enough
"available funds" are left behind to ensure groceries
and gas do not overdraw the account. When possible we
deduct dues from the check that does not contain the
health insurance premium."

According to Smith, "very few people sign on first
contact" because "a longer relationship must be built
beforehand." The amount of work required for dues
collection via bank drafts is still "very large." Local
3865 staff devote dozens of hours each month to adding
new members to the system, dealing with transaction
fees, returns that slam the union with an additional
fee, and costly "drops" when workers drop out of the
union. "We now know all the local bank routing numbers,
"he says, "so new members signing up can simply put
their bank's name on a dues form that specifies savings
or checking account, to prevent expensive returns."15

In Texas, the CWA-backed counterpart of Local 3865 is
the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU)/CWA Local 6186,
a group launched as a "non-majority union" organizing
project in the early 1980s. Although heavily subsidized
by the national union for many years, TSEU has built up
a dues-paying membership base, now numbering about
12,000, in the same fashion as higher-ed union
organizers in Tennessee. (Texas has more than 120,000
state employees.) Both white-collar and blue-collar
state workers can join, in any state department,
agency, or university system campus. As TSEU lead
organizer Jim Branson explains, "The union can
represent workers in grievance hearings, which means
that individual workers don't have to be on their own
when faced with some kind of adverse personnel
action."16 But individual worker representation in
grievance proceedings is just "a small part of what
TSEU does," Branson says.

"We have a voice on the job because we are an active
and growing movement that puts a lot of emphasis on
organizing. We have agency caucuses, made up of union
activists, who meet regularly to formulate goals and
plan actions for winning those goals. From time to
time, members of the caucus will meet with agency heads
to discuss our goals, and when the legislature is in
session, caucus members will speak directly to
lawmakers. ....If a united group of workers act like a
union, they can have a voice on the job. It's not easy,
but it can be done."

TSEU activist William Rogers says his union "has
managed to win some victories even though it has very
few legal rights." In 2007, for example, TSEU led a
campaign that saved thousands of government jobs by
preventing further expansion of privatization of the
state's health and human services. "That was a fight of
organized workers, even though we weren't a majority in
the health and human services agency, and we didn't
have collective bargaining," Branson said. "But members
mobilized like crazy. Their mobilization turned public
opinion against the privatization plan, and when the
contractor screwed up, the state had no choice but to
fire it." TSEU members throughout Texas lobbied elected
officials and succeeded in getting about 100 counties
and municipalities to pass resolutions against the
governor's privatization plan. They also visited state
legislators, marched, rallied, demonstrated, held press
conferences, and spoke out at public hearings. In the
process, reports Branson, "We got workers who had been
sitting on the fence to join the union. We were able to
maintain our presence in the agency -- even though a lot
of workers were quitting in anticipation of being laid
off -- because we never stopped organizing."

Rethinking the Union Idea in Wisconsin From the early
1930s until 1959, Wisconsin's public workers practiced
"informal bargaining," like UE and CWA members in the
South today, with the eventual goal of securing full
collective-bargaining rights. Their efforts began
during the great union wave of the 1930s when many
public employees, like private-sector workers, asserted
their rights to organize and negotiate with their
employers, wherever they could. It was through
organizing, demanding voluntary recognition, and
working to expand these bargaining relationships that
most Wisconsin public-sector unions were finally able
to win a legal mechanism for formal certification and
dues checkoff fifty years ago. Before that, union
members kept their organizations afloat with voluntary
dues payments, and/or national union subsidies. Several
competing University of Wisconsin faculty organizations
functioned this way until several years ago, when they
finally won the right to seek union certification,
based on representation elections -- only to lose that
new recognition process under Walker.

One longtime faculty organizer for the AFT was Frank
Emspak, who taught at the UW School for Workers and now
runs Workers Independent News (WIN), a labor radio
project based in Madison. Emspak was among those
veterans of last year's "Wisconsin uprising" who warned
about the impending impact of the June 2011
cancellation of automatic dues deduction. According to
Emspak, organized labor's shift to recall election
activity, after the state capitol occupation and
rallies ended, meant that "rebuilding of the locals in
offices and work sites took second place," even though
some unions, like the NEA-affiliated Wisconsin
Education Association Council (WEAC), did conduct
"training for their local union leaders based on member
mobilization."

According to Emspak, "as the spring turned to summer,
it became clearer that, at the level of the workplace,
the Wisconsin trade union movement faced a much more
difficult challenge [because] the culture and history
of public sector unionism has essentially been that of
a lobbying organization combined with a legalistic
contract enforcement mechanism heavily dependent on
arbitration. [F]or that to change at the base, one
would have to see an expenditure of resources similar
to that in the political sphere." As Emspak points out,
AFSCME Council 24 and the Wisconsin AFT "are in a
long-term untenable position unless they can organize
their members in individual dues collection programs."
As of mid-October, 2011, Emspak characterized their
individual sign-up results as "not too successful,"
with "some larger AFSCME and AFT locals covering state
workers" only having dues-paying membership of "about
10 percent."17 The recently organized University of
Wisconsin faculty units on campuses outside of Madison
-- although now stripped of the ability to negotiate
first contracts -- have a much higher reported
membership, nearly 75%.

The Wisconsin Teaching Assistants' Association (TAA) is
the forty-year-old Madison-based AFT affiliate that
helped trigger the state capitol take-over in February
2011. The TAA has a "strong organizing culture" and
"the ability to mobilize people when push comes to
shove," says TAA co-president Alex Hanna proudly.
Nevertheless, in any highturnover academic bargaining
unit of part-timers, finding and signing up members is
difficult under the best of legal circumstances. On the
Madison campus, in the past, the TAA has generally
achieved about 50% membership, while the remaining
1,500 teaching assistants were mandatory agency-fee
payers.

In August of 2011, the union launched its first
recruitment "blitz" under the current conditions of
having no contract that requires everyone in the
bargaining unit to pay their fair share of union
bargaining and servicing costs, in one form or another.
As TAA co-president Adrienne Pagac observed, "No law,
including one that grants an organization the right to
collectively bargain, makes us a union. Unions existed
prior to the implementation of such laws and will
remain even though Scott Walker and Republican
legislators have taken our rights from us." As of
February 2012, about 600 to 700 TAs had voluntarily
agreed to pay dues, less than half the TAA's old
membership level, although sign-ups continue throughout
the academic year.

David Newby, a founder of the TAA, former Madison
central labor council leader, and now the retired
president of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, worries that
neither AFSCME nor AFT, in other state-worker units,
will be able to reach membership levels of 25%. He
fears that "this year will be the best they do for
membership unless they organize at the worksite and
start acting like a union, even though they don't have
contracts or legal status." One factor that has not
helped is the lack of any substantial dues reduction
from unions already facing budget crises and the need
to lay off staff. For example, TAA is getting no relief
on the per-capita dues it is still required to pay to
the AFT's state and national organizations for each
member it signs up. In contrast, when members of CWA
affiliates like the TSEU or Local 3865 in Tennessee
lack contract coverage, they pay lower than normal
dues, 1.15% for public-sector members.

AFSCME's university locals sought a reduction in their
dues, since members have suffered a big pay cut due to
benefit concessions extracted by Walker, but they got
just a few dollars knocked off average dues payments of
$39 a month. Both rank and filers and officials agree
that getting workers to pay dues voluntarily now is a
"hard sell" in many workplaces. As one Wisconsin union
officer told a reporter last year, "People have
different perspectives on whether the union will still
be what it was or should be and that may affect whether
they're willing to pay dues." Anne Habel of AFSCME
Local 171 believes that some of her co-workers will be
less likely to maintain their membership in a statewide
labor organization if "they don't understand what they
get from it."18

To encourage members of AFSCME Local 2748 to "recommit"
to paying dues through automatic deductions from their
bank accounts, union staffers first went door to door
on their own. Local 2748 member Estelle Clark reports
that the results got better when rank and filers from
Wisconsin's Department of Workforce Development were
recruited and trained to help with house visits,
"because they could relate better to their co-workers."
As Labor Notes reported in February, this one-on-one
canvassing "became a way not only to talk to inactive
members but also to develop leadership skills among
activists." Workplace meetings have been turned into
"an opportunity for members to discuss why belonging to
a union is important in the first place -- conversations
that many feel should have been happening all along."
In Rock County, seventy-six out of eighty
highway-maintenance shop workers are now AFSCME members
in good standing after collectively deciding to use the
same credit union for dues payments. "Walker said the
county couldn't collect our dues," explains Local 1077
President Marv Vike. "We're just going through a
different route."19

Like Newby, AFSCME Council 40 representative Ed
Sadlowski, Jr, welcomes this embrace of "old-school
unionism that we haven't had in the past." Already,
highway maintenance workers and public employees have
been forced to organize together, on the job, in
response to safety problems, work-rule changes, and
unfair discipline. Before Walker's law, the union might
just have filed grievances, Sadlowski notes, but "now
it's 'get people to the picket line.' Direct action
gets the goods." In Sadlowski's view, "we simply can't
return to the model of having a staff do everything for
workers and expect to survive as a union. Now, we
actually have to involve people and make them feel like
they, not their staff representatives, run their
unions."20

Conclusion

Longtime union activist and sociology professor Stanley
Aronowitz has written extensively about the unhealthy
synergy between membership expectations and
public-sector-union functioning, as the latter has
evolved since the rank-and-file upsurge that won
collective-bargaining rights for teachers and other
civil servants in the 1960s and '70s. Over time,
members came to "view their unions as service
providers, rather than as instruments of mobilization."
As Aronowitz notes, "The unions may fight individual
grievances and negotiate decent contracts, but to call
upon their members to conduct collective political
fights -- including direct actions that might disturb
the comfortable relationship that the leadership enjoys
with the employer -- is well beyond the perspective, and
therefore, the capacity, of the union. In short, the
member is now generally a client of the union rather
than its owner."21

The rupture of labor-management relationships that may
have been "comfortable" in the past, plus the
accompanying loss of legal rights in a growing number
of states, have triggered membership-mobilization
activity reminiscent of the original struggles for
collective bargaining. In Wisconsin and elsewhere,
labor's recent defensive battles demonstrate that a new
model of union functioning is not only possible but
necessary for survival. As a first step in this process
of union transformation under duress, workers must
definitely shed their past role as "clients" or passive
consumers of union services. In workplaces without a
union or agency shop and collective bargaining as
practiced for many decades, they must take ownership of
their own organizations and return them to their
workplace roots, drawing on the experiences of public
workers in the South whose practice of public-sector
unionism has, by necessity, been very different for the
last half century.

Steve Early worked for twenty-seven years as an
organizer and international representative for the
Communications Workers of America.

Rand Wilson is organizing director of Service Employees
International Union Local 888 in Boston. This article
is an updated version of a chapter in Wisconsin
Uprising: Labor Fights Back (Monthly Review Books,
2012), edited by Michael D. Yates.

____________________________________________

PortsideLabor aims to provide material of interest to
people on the left that will help them to interpret the
world and to change it.

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Dear Friend,Our rights to fair, democratic elections are under attack.  Big business and extremist Republicans in Congress have teamed up to use a procedural gimmick to deny workers access to fair, democratic union elections. The U.S. Senate will vote on this important issue this week. Email your Senators now and take action to protect America's workers.The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) protects America's workers from corporate greed. Extremists in Congress and anti-union businesses have broken the system with endless delays designed to undermine democracy at work. The NLRB has passed a sensible rule that modernizes procedures, increases efficiency and eliminates frivolous lawsuits.  Now these extremists want to overturn that rule.Click here to email your Senators and tell them to protect America's workers and vote NO on Resolution 36. Fight the corporate lobbyists trying to keep the status quo.Anti-union politicians and corporate special interests are working to hi-jack the regulation process to benefit the 1% and silence the 99%.  We cannot let the Senate pass Resolution 36 and overturn the NLRB rule that balances the election process. The rights of working people to achieve economic security are at stake.Click here and contact your Senators today. Stand with the 99%. Stop businesses from forcing workers to wait months or years to vote and bargain for good wages and benefits. http://cwa-union.org/no-36In Unity,Beth Allen
Online Communications Director
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Dear Friends,Laura from California and her husband graduated from the same college, with the same degree and interviewed for the same job. There were several openings for the position and both Laura and her husband were made an offer. The catch? Laura's salary offer was 13% less than her husband's.1Robin from Connecticut worked for years as a copywriter at an advertising agency. When the agency took on a new client, they needed to hire another copywriter. They hired a man with no prior experience and offered him $20,000 a year more than what Robin was making. When she asked why, her employers told her, "he has a wife and children to take care of."2Sadly, there are millions of stories like these. Today, on average, women only make $0.77 for every dollar a man earns.3 Worse, women can be fired for discussing or revealing their wages.4 Right now we have a chance to do something about it. The Pay Check Fairness Act is pending in Congress right now--and today, Equal Pay Day, members of Congress are discussing this bill and the issue of wage discrimination in meetings all over Capitol Hill. But Congress is only going to act if they hear from hundreds of thousands of us. Can you sign this petition demanding that Congress pass the Paycheck Fairness Act right away? We'll deliver it with our allies at MomsRising.org this week.http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/fairpay/The facts when it comes to pay discrimination are really staggering.The average, full-time working woman in America makes only $0.77 for every dollar a man makes. At the state level, things can be even more dire--women in Louisiana for example only make $0.67 on the dollar.5It's much worse for women of color. African American women make only $0.62 on the dollar and Latinas only $0.546These gaps can add up to as much as $24,000 in lost wages every single year. On average, women will lose $431,000(!) over a 40 year working career.7Mothers make up 40% of the primary breadwinners in this country and therefore it's not just women who are affected by this discrimination, it's entire families.8And when women try to fight wage discrimination in their jobs they are often retaliated against or fired because labor laws are filled with loopholes that encourage wage discrimination and make it impossible for women to even sue to rectify it.Frankly, it's outrageous and it has to stop. The Paycheck Fairness Act can help.The Paycheck Fairness Act would help bring an end to pay discrimination by closing a set of loopholes in current labor laws that make it near impossible for workers to expose and fix pay discrimination. It would ban employer retaliation against workers who seek to expose wage discrimination, make it easier for workers to join together in class action suits to fight it and give victims full compensation and back pay.9There is a lot of talk in Washington about the War on Women. Members of both parties have been trying to score political points with rhetoric about which side values women more. At a time when the country is in a serious recession and families are struggling to put food on the table, there is an easy way for politicians to prove it.They can support and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. Click here to sign the petition calling on Congress do that:http://act.weareultraviolet.org/sign/fairpay/Thanks!--Nita and Shaunna, UltraVioletSources:1. Families Need Equal Pay for Equal Work, MomsRising.org, April 12, 20122. Families Need Equal Pay for Equal Work, MomsRising.org, April 12, 20123. Women Can't Afford Unfair Pay Today, National Women's Law Center, April 11, 20124. Combating Punitive Pay Secrecy Policies, National Women's Law Center, April 20125. The Importance Of Fair Pay For Louisiana Women, National Women's Law Center, April 20126. Closing the Wage Gap is Especially Important for Women of Color in Difficult Times, National Women's Law Center, April 20127. Closing the Wage Gap is Especially Important for Women of Color in Difficult Times, National Women's Law Center, April 2012
The Top 10 Facts About the Wage Gap, Center for American Progress, April 20128. Closing the Wage Gap is Especially Important for Women of Color in Difficult Times, National Women's Law Center, April 20129. Women’s Lower Wages Worsen their Circumstances In a Difficult Economy, National Women's Law Center, April 2010

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http://www.alternet.org/rss/breakingnews/901371/senate_seeks_ways_to_save_ailing_us_postal_service/?akid=8604.16102.zFMol4&rd=1&t=13

Senate Seeks Ways To Save Ailing US Postal ServiceBy The Huffington Post News Editors | Huffington Post
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http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/901333/class_warfare%3A_as_american_as_apple_pie/#paragraph2

Class Warfare: As American as Apple PieBy Ed Kilgore | Washington Monthly
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1 attachment (333.3 KB)April 18 ...pdfDownload(333.3 KB)Download as zipI apologize for not attaching the flyer. Here it is. From: Sandy Naranjo 
Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 10:40 AM
To: Sandy Naranjo
Subject: AFGE members' action against USCIS move-April 18 Greetings Sisters and Brothers, Please come out in support of AFGE members’ action against U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ decision to relocate offices from Downtown San Diego and Chula Vista to Kearny Mesa. This move will be a detriment to those applying for citizenship and for those who work in Citizenship and Immigration services. Join us tomorrow, Wednesday, April 18 at 11:45 a.m. at the intersection of Union and Broadway in Downtown San Diego for a rally and march. Attached is the flyer. Please contact me if you have any questions.    In Solidarity, Sandy NaranjoField OrganizerSan Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, AFL-CIO  3737 Camino Del Rio South, Suite 403San Diego, CA 92108Phone:619-228-8101 ext 6Email: snaranjo at unionyes.orgTwitter: @sandyunion “ Strike not for a few cents more an hour, because the price of living will be raised faster still, but strike for all you earn, be content with nothing less.” Lucy Parsons sn/OPEIU-537, AFL-CIO
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 Leadership Schools · Workshops · Research Reports · Publications  A joint report from the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, NORC at the University of Chicago, and Towers Watson Health Insurance Reforms: How Will They Affect Employment-Based Coverage in California?April 2012, by Jon Gabel, Ryan Lore, Roland McDevitt, and Jeremy Pickreign » Issue Brief The objectives of this issue brief are: (1) to examine how insurance reforms required by the Affordable Care Act will affect benefit packages currently offered by California employers and (2) to estimate out-of-pocket expenses and actuarial values for households with employment-based health plans in California in 2010. We use simulated bill paying to estimate the percentage of the bill paid by the health plan (actuarial value) and via households’ out-of-pocket expenses. Data on employment-based health benefits are from the 2010 California Health Benefits Survey. MarketScan medical claims data provide the source of information on use and cost of services. Findings indicate that most 2010 and 2014 insurance reforms will not have major effects on current plans offered by California employers. Two exceptions are a prohibition on lifetime maximum benefits and a limit on the out-of-pocket expenses an employee may incur. The average actuarial value for an employment-based plan in California is 0.87 compared to 0.83 for the nation. Average out-of-pocket medical expenses for households with employment-based insurance are $1,298.    Stay connected to the Labor Center DonateJoin our mailing listFollow usBecome a fan Center for Labor Research and Education, Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, University of California, Berkeley2521 Channing Way # 5555 · Berkeley, CA 94720-5555 · TEL (510) 642-0323 · FAX (510) 642-6432   
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  URGENT
Protect workers' rights from corporate politicians.

Write your senators NOW.Share on Facebook andTwitter

     

Corporate-bought politicians are taking aim at workers again. And this time, they’ve got fair elections for workers in the crosshairs.

In December, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—the federal agency that protects workers’ rights—issued a rule that modernizes the NLRB election process and helps ensure workers have a fair way to form a union without unfair delays and manipulation of the process by employers. 

Now, anti-worker politicians in Congress are trying to ram through a resolution to undo this modest step forward for the 99%. 

The resolution is headed for a vote in the U.S. Senate this week, and we need your voice in this debate. Please take 30 seconds to write your senators NOW.

By limiting delays and frivolous litigation, the NLRB’s rule helps ensure that workers who want to vote to form their own union have a fair opportunity to do so. 

>From the day a worker is hired, companies have every opportunity to communicate with employees about the pros and cons of having a union. But extremists have pushed a congressional resolution that would overturn the NLRB’s new election procedures: They’re trying to pay back their corporate donors by slashing workers’ rights on the job once again.

Let your senators know that voters won’t stand for this senseless attack.

The stakes are too high for working families to stay on the sidelines. If corporate-backed politicians pass this week’s attack on fair elections, they’ll:Resurrect the barriers workers face when they want a simple up-or-down vote on forming a union, giving an unfair advantage to law-breaking CEOs.
 
Encourage costly delays and litigation, paving the way for employers who want to retaliate against workers.
 
Make it even harder for employees to form a union and negotiate for fair pay and benefits, weakening the middle class and our chances at a brighter economic future.From statehouses across the country to Congress, the forces of the 1% are openly and brazenly waging war on workers. This attack on the NLRB is just the latest in this relentless series of nationally coordinated assaults on workers and collective bargaining rights. Rather than working together to create jobs, restore tax fairness and jumpstart our economy, extreme legislators are pushing divisive policies that put workers' rights on the chopping block. 

Corporate politicians won’t let up until even the most modest workplace protections have been eliminated. But you can help stop this attack in its tracks. 

Tell your senators: Don’t reverse progress for workers. 

Thank you for all the work you do.

In Solidarity,

Richard L. Trumka
President, AFL-CIOTo find out more about the AFL-CIO, please visit our website at www.aflcio.org.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

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