LABOR CALENDAR
Union City Radio: 7:15am daily
WPFW-FM 89.3 FM; click here to hear today's report
Save the Postal Service Car Caravan: Tue, June 23, 9:30am – 12:00pm
601 L street SE DC 20001
Gender, Race, Class, and the Vote: From the 19th Amendment to COVID-19: Tue, June 23, 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Via Zoom
DC LaborFest screening: Survival by Zip Code (replaces The Infiltrators): Tue, June 23, 7pm – 9pm
FREE, via Zoom
photo: at Friday's Labor Support Black Lives Matter march/picnic; photo by Chris Garlock; see more on our Twitter feed
Metro Washington Council and Community Services Agency staff are teleworking; reach them at the contact numbers and email addresses here.
Save the Post Office today!
Imagine a world without the Post Office. It could happen. Postal Service leaders told Congress that unless it receives additional funding, the system will be out of money to operate by September. Today is the national Day of Action to Save the Post Office, and hundreds of thousands of petitions will be delivered to Capitol Hill. To raise the temperature back home there will be car caravans (see Calendar for the one here in DC) throughout the country filled with people who are demanding that the Post Office be saved from bankruptcy. Make sure you are counted; sign the petition to Congress, find out more about actions today and/or call your Senator here. The Post Office is reeling from the coronavirus outbreak, which has slowed business mail to a trickle. Despite this, the Postal Service has continued to deliver six days a week to every address in the country. Older Americans in particular rely on the mail to deliver their prescription medicines and for a link to the outside world. The government has approved trillions of coronavirus “relief” for wealthy corporations, and tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans; let’s make sure the Postal Service gets the help it needs to weather this crisis.
Today's Labor Quote: Erica Smiley
“This pandemic has exposed our deadliest weaknesses — our lack of public health investment, our bankrupt healthcare infrastructure, an economic system that treats women and people of color as expendable, and of course our racist system of policing to uphold that economic system. But it is also making our calls for justice louder, and more unified, than ever. We can — we must — come out of this situation with a more just and equitable America. We the People demand it.”
Smiley is Executive Director of Jobs With Justice -- the first Black woman to lead JWJ -- which on this date in 1987 staged its first big support action, backing 3,000 picketing Eastern Airlines mechanics at Miami Airport. Read here whole statement here.
Today's Labor History
This week’s Labor History Today podcast: SCOTUS bans LGBTQ workplace discrimination; Queer history of the UAW.
Last week’s show: Painters join Black Lives Matter protests; the history of black police in America; Race and Rebellion.
Charles Moyer, president of the Western Federation of Miners, goes to Butte, Mont. in an attempt to mediate a conflict between factions of the miner’s local there. It didn’t go well. Gunfight in the union hall killed one man; Moyer and other union officers left the building, which was then leveled in a dynamite blast - 1914
Congress overrides President Harry Truman's veto of the anti-worker Taft-Hartley Act. The law weakened unions and let states exempt themselves from union requirements. Twenty states immediately enacted open shop laws and two more did so later - 1947
OSHA issues standard on cotton dust to protect 600,000 workers from byssinosis, also known as "brown lung" - 1978
A majority of the 5,000 textile workers at six Fieldcrest Cannon textile plants in Kannapolis, N.C., vote for union representation after an historic 25-year fight - 1999
- David Prosten
Material published in UNION CITY may be freely reproduced by any recipient; please credit Union City as the source.
Published by the Metropolitan Washington Council, an AFL-CIO "Union City" Central Labor Council whose 200 affiliated union locals represent 150,000 area union members.
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