Voices At Work

This show was the first week of the Winterthon 2010 FUNdrive and we had excerpts from the full senate committee hear on the nomination of Harold Craig Becker to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board.

Download the "STATEMENT OF CRAIG BECKER NOMINEE FOR MEMBER, NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR AND PENSIONS OF THE UNITED STATES SENATE FEBRUARY 2, 2010

Join us as we interview Bill Barry, Director of Labor Studies at Community College of Baltimore County and author of Union Strategies for Hard Times: Helping Your Members and Building Your Union in the Great Recession.

Bill has been the Director of Labor Studies for CCBC since 1997, and has maintained a program started in the 1970s by Rev Everett L. Miller, Sr., to help put the move back into the labor movement. The program offers an Associate Degree in Labor Studies, and is one of the very few in the United States which has not become either a research facility or been swallowed up into an “industrial relations” program. The program offers all of the basic union training courses, trying to answer the basic question: how are workers trying to make their lives better? The programs stresses worker self-reliance, and has a motto “Teaching Workers to Teach Themselves.” Classes are taught through the middle-Atlantic states, and on-line, and the program is experimenting with pod casting and with streaming video.

The book, Union Strategies for Hard Times: Helping Your Members and Building Your Union in the Great Recession, has chapters on how to handle grievances, negotiate contracts without concessions, how to make your union the center of activity for active and laidoff members, and their communities.

There is a brief historical discussion of how we got where we are and how unionism is the solution, and not the problem, for the current economic crisis.

Tonight we will have an open forum. This is your chance to discuss labor in the news or ask a labor related question after the current events segment. Give us a call at (713)526-5738.

We'll also have a piece from veteran Labor journalist, Dick Meister.  Dick says we've not paid enough attention to one of the key aspects of President Obama's recent State of the Union Address -- his promise to "crack down on violations of equal pay laws, so that women get equal pay for an equal day's work."

This week, Dick Meister discusses Labor's Big Loss.  The senate Democrats loss of a filibuster proof 60-vote majority with the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown seems almost certain to doom attempts to revive the barely functioning National Labor Relations Board, the country's chief labor law administrator and enforcer.  That, along with its effect on health care reform, is certainly one of the most serious consequences of Brown's victory.   It threatens to seriously weaken the union right's of America's working people.

We also played a speech from Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President, addressing the National Press Club on January 11, 2010.  The newly elected leader of the nation's largest labor union spoke about the state of the economy and its impact on families, as well as some of the proposed legislation that could impact the labor movement.

Christine mentioned the recent launch of "UCubed".  Ur Union of Unemployed, nicknamed UCubed, is a community service project of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). With over 31 million Americans idled to some degree by this Grave Recession – and no relief in sight — the IAM and its partners saw a need to unify the unemployed in a unique and useful way.

Join us on Friday, January 15th, 2010 for Voices At Work. Our guest will be Patrick Flynn, a Houston lawyer that specializes in Employment & Labor and Employee Benefits/ERISA. Call in with your questions for Patrick. 

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Rob Witherell works in the Organizing department for the United Steelworkers (USW) at its headquarters in Pittsburgh, PA and has nearly 20 years of experience in Union organizing, contract negotiations, strategic campaigns, research, politics, and student organizing. Rob leads the USW’s efforts on co-ops and the Union’s recently announced framework agreement with Mondragon Internacional. In recent years, Rob has also been actively working on green jobs and led the USW organizing and negotiations with Gamesa, a wind turbine manufacturer in Fairless Hills and Ebensburg, PA.

MONDRAGON Corporation - 2009 - English - Inglés - Anglais - Englisch - Ingelesa from MONDRAGON Corporation on Vimeo.

Tonight, our guest will be Steve Ashby, co-author of Staley: The Fight for A New American Labor Movement. Staley chronicles the bitterly contested labor conflict in the mid 1990s at the A. E. Staley corn processing plant in Decatur, Illinois, where workers waged one of the most hard-fought struggles in recent labor history. When the company launched a full-scale assault on its workers, Allied Industrial Workers Local 837 responded by educating and mobilizing its members, organizing strong support from the religious and African American communities, building a nationwide solidarity movement, and engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the plant gates. Through scores of interviews and videotapes of every union meeting, the authors bring the workers' voices to the fore and reveal their innovative tactics that inform and strengthen today's labor movement.

Steven K. Ashby became a union activist in the early 1980s when he worked at the American Maize corn-processing plant, similar to A.E. Staley's Decatur plant, in Hammond, Indiana. He earned his Ph.D. in U.S. labor and working class history from the University of Chicago in 1993. He was a founder and co-chair of the Staley workers' flagship support group, the Chicago Staley Workers Solidarity Committee. For five years he led a non-profit group, Calumet Project, in Northwest Indiana that united labor with religious and community groups to fight for workers' rights. Ashby taught labor studies at Indiana University at Bloomington from 1999 to 2007. He currently teaches classes for unionists and coordinates and teaches in an online Global Labor Studies credit program as an Associate Clinical Professor with the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tonight's guest is Ruth Milkman, co-author of the report "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in America’s Cities ".

Ruth Milkman Ph.D., is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and the CUNY Graduate Center, and Associate Director of the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at CUNY. Her most recent book is L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006).

Join us on Labor Day, Monday, September 7th, 2009 7:00PM to 9:00PM for the annual Voices At Work Labor Special on Houston's Pacifica Radio Station, KPFT, 90.1FM.