Unions
Updated 2024-08-29
2024-08-06 Humphrey Without Vietnam, but More Down-Home Rural roots. High school social studies teacher. As coach, turned around losing high school football team and led it to state championship. Twenty-four years’ service in the state’s National Guard. Gun owner; hunts pheasants. As congressman, won historically Republican district six times. As governor, worked with the legislature and signed into law universal free breakfast and lunch program for public school students, paid sick and family leave, groundbreaking sectoral bargaining for nursing home employees, and first-in-the-nation outlawing of employers’ common practice of compelling employees to attend anti-union rants—all with just a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Coined a devastating (because accurate and simple) meme to describe Donald Trump & Co.
In 2022, however, not only was Walz re-elected as governor but the Democrats were able to cling to their narrow majority in the lower house and win a one-vote majority in the state Senate. Whereupon, as my colleague Ryan Cooper noted last year, the legislature passed and Walz signed into law new statutes that created paid sick days for nearly all workers, which will accrue at the rate of one hour per 30 hours worked up to a maximum of 48 hours; forbids noncompete agreements in labor contracts; establishes a sectoral bargaining system for nursing homes; allows teachers to negotiate class sizes; and bans “captive audience” meetings where employers force their workers to listen to anti-union propaganda. It also sets up new protections for meatpackers, construction workers, and Amazon employees. And a separate bill passed on Sunday guarantees a minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers.
In other words, second-term Walz had a first hundred days almost comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1933. Walz deserves huge credit for this. If you’re a Democrat who understands the need to win back some of the rural and working-class voters who’ve moved right, not to mention the need to enact major progressive populist, pro-worker, and pro-choice legislation, what’s not to like about Tim Walz? https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-08-06-humphrey-without-vietnam-tim-walz/
2024-05-25 UAW rank and file demand their union divest from genocide UAW Labor for Palestine (UAW L4P) issued the statement below on May 10. United Auto Workers leadership must stop crossing the Palestinian trade union picket line and immediately divest from Israeli genocide! UAW Labor for Palestine has learned that the International Executive Board of the United Auto Workers [at its meeting held April 30 to May 2] voted down a motion to divest from Israel Bonds, with only three IEB members voting in favor. https://www.workers.org/2024/05/78887/
In a letter sent to Biden on Tuesday, the unions said that ending weapons shipments is the only way to secure the ceasefire deal that U.S. negotiators have supposedly been working on for months. It is one of the strongest statements yet from organized labor in the U.S. against the genocide.
“We write to publicly call upon your Administration to immediately halt all military aid to Israel as part of the work to secure an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the war in Gaza,” the unions wrote. A copy of the letter was posted online by HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson. https://truthout.org/articles/major-unions-urge-biden-to-stop-arming-israel-amid-netanyahu-visit/
2024-07-23 US Teachers Pushed Their Union to Divest From Israel. What Happened? s the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention kicked off in Houston, Texas, this week, the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza was top of mind for many in attendance.
“We’re going to show up at [the] convention and do everything we can to organize people around doing something about the genocide,” Ted Cooper, executive vice president of AFT-Oregon, told Truthout as he was preparing to travel to Houston last week.
Like Cooper, delegates from union locals nationwide are leading political education and organizing efforts at the convention and calling for AFT, their locals and their pension funds to divest from State of Israel bonds and companies implicated in Israel’s assault on Gaza and its decades-long occupation of Palestine. In doing so, they’ve come up against some of the union’s leadership, who have instead put forth a resolution of their own: one that calls for a two-state solution and argues that “rather than turn away and divest from Israel and Palestine, now is the moment to rededicate ourselves.” https://truthout.org/articles/us-teachers-pushed-their-union-to-divest-from-israel-what-happened/
2023-12-15 Largest Health Union in US Calls for Cease-Fire in Gaza Days after U.S.-backed Israeli forces conducted its latest raid on a hospital in Gaza and as the spread of diseases including meningitis and chickenpox were reported in the besieged enclave, the largest healthcare union in the United States joined the international call for a cease-fire.
The executive council of 1199SEIU, a union that represents more than 450,000 healthcare workers from five states and Washington, D.C., said all parties involved “must commit to negotiating a permanent, just resolution to this conflict which will enable Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and build a future.”
“1199SEIU calls for the immediate cessation of hostilities in the Gaza Strip, to allow for urgent humanitarian relief amid the collapse of the territory’s health and other infrastructure,” said the executive council. “International humanitarian law and the laws of war must be upheld without exception, which include the inviolability of healthcare facilities. War crimes committed by one side of the conflict cannot and do not serve as justification for crimes and breaches of the Geneva Conventions by the other.”
The union rejected the notion that Israel’s numerous attacks on healthcare centers—where doctors are struggling to treat sick and injured patients and displaced Palestinians are sheltering—as well as “apartment blocks filled with families, and the deaths of 11,000+ Palestinian women and children are acceptable collateral damage.”
1199SEIU made its statement a day after the leaders of unions including the United Auto Workers; the Postal Workers Union; and the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America joined progressive lawmakers at a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to urge President Joe Biden to back a cease-fire. “https://www.commondreams.org/news/health-union-ceasefire
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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