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ISSUES & FORUMS
PACG News & Notes
The General PACG Meeting
We reformed our General Membership meeting as our new PACG Community Meeting. It will be held on the 4th Thursday of every month at 6:30 PM at the Unitarian Church, 3707 Eastern Ave in Davenport. We will be working with a new format, which will allow for our usual sharing and meeting of new people, as well as reports on activities within all of our Issue Forums. Our Community meeting is the 'power center' of PACG. After the meeting, we always gather at a restaurant/bar to provide opportunity for social time. Is there an issue you want to work on? Come and Join us!
The Progressive Event of the Year!
PACG is working on securing a bus (or two) to take a large Iowa contingent to Atlanta, Georgia from June 27th thru July 1st to attend the US Social Forum (USSF). Please mark your calendars and spread the word far and wide. Details about the cost of the bus trip and available lodging will be forthcoming, stay tuned...
The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression.
The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other's experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration. It will help develop leadership and develop consciousness, vision, and strategy needed to realize another world.
The USSF sends a message to other people's movements around the world that there is an active movement in the US opposing US Policies at home and abroad.
We must declare what we want our world to look like and begin planning the path to get there. A global movement is rising. The USSF is our opportunity to demonstrate to the world Another World is Possible!
Check out the following link to see some of the many workshops that will be available...
If you would like to be part of this great adventure, please contact
Caroline at 563-676-7580 , carolina1961@gmail.com
Proposed law would strengthen worker rights
By Mark Gruenberg, Press Associates, Inc.
6 February 2007 WASHINGTON - Linda Merfeld is a nurse and a union activist. And in a way, she's lucky: She hasn't been fired yet. The Employee Free Choice Act would protect her, and others like her.
But Merfeld, a Service Employees member who led the union drive at Finley Hospital in Dubuque, Iowa, is the exception to the rule: Last year, 31,000 workers were summarily and illegally fired for trying to organize unions at their workplaces.
Now, with a new Democratic-run 110th Congress and pro-worker allies in key posts in the House, organized labor has launched a determined campaign to change all that, with the re-introduction Tuesday of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
The bill, H.R. 800, has 232 House co-sponsors, more than a majority. That includes seven Republicans, so far. EFCA would help level the playing field between workers and their bosses in organizing and bargaining. Senate Labor Committee Chairman Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., introduced it there.
Leveling the playing field to let workers choose to join unions "is a basic and fundamental human right and a basic and fundamental civil right," says EFCA's lead House sponsor, Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller, D-Calif. One of his panel's subcommittees is scheduled to hold the hearing on EFCA Thursday.
Restoring the middle class
But even more importantly than its effect on worker rights, EFCA would be a first step towards restoring and reviving the U.S. middle class, both lawmakers and union leaders said.
"America isn't working the way it should for working families...The best opportunity for working men and women to get ahead economically is by coming together with their co-workers to bargain with their employer for a better life--through a union," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney at the kickoff press conference for EFCA.
"Yet far too few people ever get that chance. The current system for forming unions and bargaining is broken....EFCA is common-sense legislation that will help restore workers' freedom to form unions and bargain with their employers," Sweeney declared.
"The freedom to join a union is an essential pillar of the American dram, along with a paycheck that supports a family, affordable health care and a secure retirement," added Change to Win Secretary-Treasurer Edgar Romney. Yet "every 23 minutes, a worker is fired, intimidated, coerced or retaliated against, simply for supporting a union."
Intimidation and harassment
EFCA certainly would have helped Merfeld and her fellow nurses in Dubuque. They voted for SEIU in Dec. 2003, but did not win a first contract with the hospital for 18 months, she told Press Associates Union News Service. And then it was only a one-year pact "and we had to threaten a strike to get it," she said.
Hospital managers instituted anti-union meetings, intimidation and harassment. The meetings took nurses away from their patients in an understaffed hospital. Since July 2006, the nurses have worked without a contract, she told PAI.
"It's very difficult. At times, it can be a hostile work environment. I think the hospital is even changing nurse-patient ratios for the worse -- just to get us to give up," Merfeld explained. Last year, she told the press conference, the hospital fired a 30-year nurse who had a perfect record, because the nurse spoke up about patient care.
EFCA, if passed, would force some changes in such hostile conditions. It would outlaw mandatory anti-union meetings that employers now legally can force workers to come to, under threat of discipline. And if the two sides could not reach a first contract within 90 days, the dispute would go to arbitration. If that had been required in Dubuque, she said, "the issue would have been resolved" and the pact would have been over a year. Most importantly, EFCA would write into law current rules that permit "card check" recognition of unions on the job -- cases where unions convince a majority of workers to sign election authorization cards. Right now, Miller explained, card check exists, but only if the employer agrees to recognize the union after it achieves a majority.
Otherwise, added Miller, workers must go through the torturous National Labor Relations Board elections process, opening themselves to bosses' harassment, intimidation, threats, retaliation, firings and plant and company closure forecasts.
All those anti-worker moves are illegal under labor law, but fines are so small and penalties are so light that companies ignore them. So EFCA, in addition to its other provisions, increases the fines and makes it easier for unions to get court orders against such anti-worker conduct.
Illegally fired
Such tougher penalties would have helped Bill Lawhorn, a former forklift driver who took the lead in organizing for the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers at his plant, the Consolidated Biscuit Co., in Ohio.
The workers got a huge majority of cards, Lawhorn said, but Consolidated, which had subjected them to "a lot of abuse" on the shop floor, got rough. He described harassment, threats of "we'll close the plant if you form a union," warnings workers would lose benefits and pay cut and, finally, a personal threat from a supervisor that Lawhorn would be fired.
After the anti-union drive--which, due to the company's campaign, BCTGM lost--he was canned the next day. Four and a half years later, even after the NLRB ruled for him and against Consolidated, Lawhorn still awaits the meager back pay he is owed, delayed by company appeals. EFCA would increase the money he'd get for being illegally fired.
Deportation threats
Jose Guardado, a UFCW Local 271 member who led organizing at the Nebraska Beef meatpacking plant in Omaha, was also fired, some years after the drive ended. "I thought laws protected workers who wanted to form a union. I was wrong," he said in Spanish, through a translator. "I found when employers break the law, abuse workers and silence our voices, no one does anything to stop them." At NBP, after 900 workers signed cards, abuse included deportation threats against Hispanic-named workers.
Reintroduction of EFCA drew strong support from a top civil rights group and from other union leaders, since it is organized labor's top legislative cause both this year and for the foreseeable future. Kennedy said that "Americans know" the economy "is working for Wall Street, not for Main Street," and EFCA would help it work for them.
Since 1973, "We've seen increased productivity. Has a fair share of that been passed on to workers? No. We've seen increased profits? Has a fair share of that been passed on to workers? No," the senator added.
But EFCA faces strong opposition from business and the Bush administration. In a forecast of that, Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao issued a one-sentence statement: "A worker's right to a secret ballot is an intrinsic right to our democracy that should not be legislated away at the behest of special interest groups."
"You Say It's Your Birthday..."
On May 12th, PACG members celebrated our first annual Birthday Bash in recognition of our first year (January 2006) since we came together as concerned citizens to work on the issues and to take our country back! The Birthday party was a hit! Approximately 130 people turned out! There were door prizes, an array of great food, good conversation, a fantastic slide show featuring PACG activities, and fabulous music by the "Metrolites." As you can see, some of us felt the need to shake things up a bit once we cut the cake!
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An issue was identified in the coverage of the Peace Vigil Events -- the article, published on March 19 in the Times, well represented the peace and prayerfulness that marked the events. The photo printed by the Times did not -- the reporter took hundreds of photos and then printed the one that least represented the events of the day - the moment when one young man crossed the street to confront the handful of people on the other side who were there to "support the troops"--though, of course, we all support the troops.
The QC Times printed an editorial, again with the unfortunate picture that did not represent the events of the day. You can go to the Times to answer their question: How do you show your support of the troops -- the gist of the editorial is that you must not support the war to support the troops. They are encouraging letters or posts to the website in response to this question -- IT IS IMPORTANT THAT WE WEIGH IN!
Times Blog...
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As progressives, we value and promote peace, racial, social and economic justice, civil rights, diversity, civil liberties, human rights, a preserved environment, and a reinvigorated democracy.We seek to empower people to take action for positive change and we advocate for fundamental change when necessary.
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