AFGE's UnionBlog

Make Em Do It!

AFGE Communications Department — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:46:00 EST

Speech Given AFGE’s Field Services & Education Department Director Bill Fletcher, Jr. During AFGE’s Annual Legislative Conference

Good afternoon and thank you. I am very honored to have been asked to address this conference.

I want to begin by giving a very special thanks to the Creator of all things on this, the 21^st birthday of my little girl. So, I hope to do her proud.

I am going to be brutally honest with you, so I ask your forgiveness in advance if my remarks unsettle you. The union movement is in a rut. Too many of the leaders of organized labor seem to have forgotten certain historical truths. Let me remind you of one such truth.

In 1857 a great leader in the struggle for justice offered the following observations:

“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

He went on to say:

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” [Frederick Douglass]

We, in organized labor, seem to get confused as to the difference between “requests” and “demands.” We sometimes think that they are the same. THEY ARE NOT. A demand is straight forward and guides your action, but it does not equivocate.

Let us be clear that, we, in the union movement made a big mistake in how we understood the November 2008 elections. Yes, we were sick of Bush. Yes, we realized how dangerous the McCain/Palin ticket was, but we made a particular mistake. We engaged in magical and wishful thinking.

Yes, Obama was the right person to elect, but he is not a miracle maker. He is an outstanding thinker and speaker, who is tied into corporate America. He is someone who seems to have an irresistible impulse to approach matters of controversy by jumping to the middle position and believing that a consensus can be built.—rather than staking out a position that he believes in and fighting for it.

Yet in today’s political situation, there is no real bi-partisanship, and not because Obama has not tried. The Republicans have made it clear that they want to not just cut his legs off, but hang and guillotine him at the same time!! Consider that some people are using this irrationalism as their organizing approach toward members of the military to incite a coup d’état against Obama. Think about the allegations that Obama is a socialist despite the fact that he surrounds himself with economic advisers from Wall Street! Added to this, Republicans are being clear that there is NOTHING that Obama says, including and not limited to THEIR own proposals, to which they will agree.

Obama seems to feel more compelled to respond to that than to pay attention to the likes of us. His reluctance to lead the charge on behalf of working people is as much driven by his ties to corporate America as it is to something that will be very uncomfortable for many of you to hear: his fear of being perceived by white Americans as an angry Black man.

Workers have been under attack since the early 1970s, and organized labor in many countries—not just the USA—has been unable to alter its approach as to how to respond.

The island of Guadeloupe has an unemployment rate of 23%. We complain—justifiably—about a 10% unemployment rate, but Guadeloupe has a rate that is depression level. Yet, in this situation in early 2009, the workers of this island, in response to continued attacks carried out a 44 day general strike against further cuts and against this economic atrocity. And not only did they win, but they won and inspired workers in France and Greece to resist.

Here at home, our response to the economic crisis has been nothing short of anemic…at best. When the financial collapse took place in the fall of 2008, organized labor did almost nothing. Organized labor basically kept this within the Beltway and made little effort to connect this to the issues that working people face every day; in other words they did not connect EFCA to economic justice. They AND WE have waited for the person who many people have come to believe to be the greatest magician—President Obama—to resolve everything. Change does not come from one person, or patiently requesting change.

We have to realize that elected leaders are bombarded by various forces, and particularly forces that have far more money and other resources than do we. This, then, goes beyond the matter of good intentions, good speeches, and good looks. It goes to matters of power…who has it…who wants it…and how it is used.

So, the fact that the Obama administration has not delivered many of the changes that we have requested, there has been both anger and despair, but what there has been so little of…particularly from unions and pro-worker/pro-community organizations…has been a mobilization to insist upon our demands.

We must make our so-called friends do the right thing. This is not personal. This is about power. And it is about taking on those whose legs wobble in the face of the goliath of corporate America. This is about saying to our so-called friends that we are not interested in being taken for granted. We are prepared not to rest easy or quietly. We will be heard. We are not interested in being the shock troops for change, only to sit back and see our hopes evaporate.

We cannot let the obstructionism of the Republicans, or the complacency of the Democrats, get in our way. We must let no one, and I mean NO ONE, turn us around.

It is now up to us to seize the time and realize the hope that was expressed in the 2008 elections. Despair has no place in our present or our future. It never has…and never will

Thank you.

Richard Trumka Speaks on Senate Passage of Jobs

Richard Trumka — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:42:00 EST

Working people across America welcome the news that the Senate has passed a jobs bill today as a first step to put Main Street back to work. Senator Reid has said more actions need to be—and will be—taken. We couldn’t agree more. We need much bigger and bolder actions to ensure that we create 10 million jobs and Wall Street pays the bill to fix the financial disaster.

In a turn of head spinning hypocrisy, some Republican Senators had the audacity to vote for a bill they voted less than 48 hours ago not to allow even to be considered. If these Senators want to be seen as part of the solution, they must stop these procedural hijinks that are slowing down the Senate and hurting the recovery. Working families need jobs and are demanding real results from Washington.

Moving forward, we will be taking the fight for jobs to communities nationwide, focusing on the solutions we have outlined in our 5 point jobs plan: Extending unemployment insurance benefits, food assistance and health benefits; rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and investing in green jobs; increasing aid to state and local governments to maintain vital services; increasing funding for neglected communities to match people who want to work with jobs that need to be done; and using TARP money to get credit flowing to small businesses.

AFGE Celebrates Black History Month

AFGE Communications Department — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:53:00 EST

The idea behind Black History Month is the “reaffirmation of struggle and determination to change attitudes and heighten the understanding of the African experience.” The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) shares in that reaffirmation. Not only do we share in the struggle for the understanding of the minority experience, but also in the equality and fair treatment on the workplace of federal and D.C. government workers.

A Part of History: NVP Augusta Thomas Recalls her Involvement in the Civil Rights Sit-Ins

On February 11, 1960, Augusta Y. Thomas and her sister drove to Louisville, KY, to participate in a sit-in that had started in Greensboro, NC. Thomas and her sister were joined by several other African Americans who lived in Louisville and promptly sat down at the first whites-only counter they could find and be served. “Well, they didn’t like that. So they spit on us and knocked us off our stools. And because me and my sister were so fair skinned and sometimes mistaken for white, we were mocked for supporting the ‘negroes.’”

The physical violence against Thomas and her sister was only the beginning. They were eventually arrested and locked up on February 14 for more than five hours. That did not deter them. As soon as they were released, Thomas and her sister went back to that same counter on February 15 and sat back down. Although they were spat on, kicked and knocked off the stools for a second day, Thomas and her sister never said anything to their attackers. They knew that it was better to say nothing at all because “when you do say something, the violence will only get worse.”

On the 16th of February, they got locked up again. Upon release, Thomas called her father who said she needed to come home to take care of her family. At the time, Thomas had six children and her sister had three. “My father was very supportive of what we were trying to do,” said Thomas. “But he felt that enough was enough. If I had not had six children, I would have remained in Louisville for several days. This cause was greater than me.”

When asked what she took away from the experience Thomas replied, “If you persist you will win. You don’t have to be nasty or rude…just keep being persistent and pray.”

Thomas felt as though what they were doing would eventually pay off and that the Greensboro sit-ins set an example for the rest of the civil rights movement. “I felt that if we sat long enough then others would understand what we were doing, and eventually the mistreatment would cease. The young men and women in the movement would take turns doing the sit-ins and every evening we would meet at the church to express our feelings about it. It’s something we just did,” Thomas concluded. “It’s like we knew in our hearts that it was something we just had to do.”

The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement

Then & Now: Washington, D.C. Government

In 1940, segregation in Washington, D.C., was not much different from many other places in America. African Americans held the menial jobs while whites had access to the professional and managerial jobs. Schools were still segregated, as were restaurants. African American women cleaned the homes of white people and took care of their children, worked at laundries and if they managed to land a job in one of the spectacular federal office buildings worked as secretaries and janitors. Yet AFGE Local 383, founded by African Americans at the Industrial Home School in Blue Plains, was already three years old in 1940 and an active part of the union.

In 2008, segregation is illegal, yet the large majority of janitors, street cleaners and other service workers who keep the city running are still people of color. Today the people they provide services for are a mix of African American, white and foreign-born. More men and women of all races and ethnic backgrounds have risen to the ranks of management, and African American and Latino senators and representatives can be seen walking the halls of Congress. And today, D.C. workers enjoy union wages and benefits and the right to speak up for their interests collectively to the city council because D.C. has partial home rule, an elected government and its own employees. Members of Local 383 include social workers, paramedics, and other professionals of all races.

Down With The People!

Jacob Weisburg — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:26:00 EST

Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis. . .

In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing i! ncoherence of the public at large.

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulati ons of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

The usual way to describe such inconsistent demands from voters is to say that the public is an angry, populist, tea-partying mood. But a lot more people are watching American Idol than are watching Glenn Beck, and our collective illogic is mostl y negligent rather than militant. The more compelling explanation is that the American public lives in Candyland, where government can tackle the big problems and get out of the way at the same time. In this respect, the whole country is becoming more and more like California, where ignorance is bliss and the state's bonds have dropped to an A- rating (the same level as Libya's), thanks to a referendum system that allows the people to be even more irresponsible than their elected representatives. Middle-class Americans really don't want to hear about sacrifices or trade-offs—except as flattering descriptions about how ready we, as a people, are, or used to be, to accept them. We like the idea of hard choices in theory. When was the last time we made one in reality?

The polit! icians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimis! m, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myth! s about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

Our inability to address long-term challenges makes a strong case that the United States now faces an era of historical decline. Our reluctance to recognize economic choices also portends negative effects for the rest of the world. To change this story line, we need to stop blaming the rascals we elect to office and start looking to ourselves.

View the original article at http://www.slate.com/id/2243797/

A Part of History: NVP Augusta Thomas Recalls her Involvement in the Civil Rights Sit-Ins

AFGE Communications Department — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:59:00 EST

Many Americans look forward to Martin Luther King Jr. Day (MLK) because it means we get a three day weekend–a little reprieve from the office in the post-holiday January doldrums. But we must never forget the true meaning of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in that we should reflect on all that Dr. King stood for and remember and celebrate the courage and audacity of those who fought for civil rights.

This week, the AFL-CIO will hold its annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration activities in Greensboro, NC, for five days of activities, including community service projects, a jobs town hall meeting and workshops and commemoration of the 50th anniversary of one of the most important demonstrations in the civil rights movement, of which AFGE National Vice President for Women and Fair Practices Augusta Y. Thomas participated. AFGE Communications Intern Courtney Johnson interviewed NVP Thomas on her experiences with the sit-in, which started in Greensboro on February 1, 1960, and spread throughout the South during the following weeks. . .

When asked what she took away from the experience Thomas replied, “If you persist you will win. You don’t have to be nasty or rude…just keep being persistent and pray.”

The Woolworth Sit-In That Launched a Movement