Car parade/walking demo protests County Council’s contract rejection
County employees and community groups staged a car parade/walking protest past County Councilmember Hans Reimer’s Takoma Park home on Saturday to show their displeasure with Reimer and five of his fellow councilmembers’ votes last week against funding revised contracts with the three county unions, UFCW 1994 MCGEO, IAFF Local 1664 (firefighters) and FOP Lodge 35 (police). Meanwhile, Local 1994 said, the Council voted to underwrite several nonessential projects and cut other expenditures for vital services that support and protect all county residents, raising the ire of County employees and community groups with “blatantly hypocritical claims of fiscal responsibility.” The Council, Local 1994 noted, did manage to find $54.9 million for a 980-ft. tunnel, $5 million for the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation -- which already has a $2 million reserve -- $1.25 million for a telework fund :with no demonstrated need or stipulations on who can get it or under what circumstances, and guaranteed pay increases for the County Council members. More photos here
Signature Theater workers vote in union
Signature Theater workers, in what their union called “an overwhelming display of solidarity” have voted to join IATSE Local 22. The union welcomed the new members, saying “We have worked hard together to get this far, and we look forward to standing together as we come together to negotiate a contract, and to help our industry restart when it can.”
Grocery workers renew demand for first responder designation
"You shouldn’t have to risk your life to buy food to feed your family. And you shouldn’t have to risk your life when you do your job providing sustenance to your fellow Americans. Who could possibly argue with that?" asked UFCW 400 president Mark Federici in a Washington Post op-ed yesterday. calling for grocery and food workers to be designated first responders. "The first-responder designation needs to include guaranteed free, universal testing and treatment for every worker (and) guarantee grocery workers masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment," Federici said, adding that the first-responder designation needs to guarantee free child care, which enables grocery employees to show up for work when schools are closed. "Rather than giving grocery workers lip service by calling them heroes, let’s actually do something to protect their health," said Federici. "That’s what the first-responder designation will do. What are our elected officials waiting for?"
photo: A Giant employee restocks eggs in Silver Spring in March; photo by Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post
Today's Labor Quote: Ty Cobb
“Sure, I fought. I had to fight all my life just to survive. They were all against me. Tried every dirty trick to cut me down, but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.”
On this date in 1912, in what may have been baseball’s first labor strike, the Detroit Tigers refused to play after team leader Ty Cobb was suspended: he went into the stands and beat a fan who had been heckling him. Cobb was reinstated and the Tigers went back to work after the team manager’s failed attempt to replace the players with a local college team: their pitcher gave up 24 runs.
Today's Labor History
This week’s Labor History Today podcast: “Strike for Your Life!”; labor history's lessons for the COVID-19 crisis
Peter Rachleff, co-director of the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, Minnesota, on how “Lessons from labor history can inform our labor movement during the COVID-19 crisis.” “As a labor historian, the closest thing I can think of to the spread of coronavirus strikes is the epidemic of sitdown strikes to spread across the country in the mid-1930s.” Historian and writer Jeremy Brecher, from “Strike for Your Life!” Also this week, we preview "Debs In Canton," a new audio/radio drama from the filmmakers of American Socialist: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs.
Last week’s show: Jack Kelly’s "The Edge of Anarchy”; “Union Maids” director Julia Reichert (Part 2)
Amalgamated Meat Cutters union organizers launch a campaign in the nation’s packinghouses, an effort that was to bring representation to 100,000 workers over the following two years - 1917
Big Bill Haywood, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), dies in exile in the Soviet Union - 1928
Atlanta transit workers, objecting to a new city requirement that they be fingerprinted as part of the employment process, go on strike. They relented and returned to work six months later - 1950
Insurance Agents International Union and Insurance Workers of America merge to become Insurance Workers International Union (later to merge into the UFCW) - 1959
Oklahoma jury finds for the estate of atomic worker Karen Silkwood, orders Kerr-McGee Nuclear Co. to pay $505,000 in actual damages, $10 million in punitive damages for negligence leading to Silkwood’s plutonium contamination - 1979
- David Prosten
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