Loudoun County Labor Caucus: Tue, January 12, 5pm – 6pm
Special guest is Leesburg District Supervisor Kristen Umstattd.

Building A More Perfect Union: Wed, January 13, 12:15pm – 1:45pm
A Policy Blueprint for Rewiring the Economy, Rebuilding the Social Safety Net, and Reconnecting America With the World

Alexandria Dems Labor Caucus: Wed, January 13, 7:30pm – 8:30pm
Meeting for union members and community allies in Alexandria.
Contact [email protected] for the link.

Labor Radio Podcast Weekly: Labor Radio Podcast Network Livestream (featuring Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly and AFL-CIO Policy Director Damon Silvers); America's Work Force; The BCTGM Voices Project; Labor Vision; LRPN Spotlight; Labor History in 2:00

‘I Did Not Feel Safe’: How the insurrection at the Capitol affected D.C. essential workers

After pro-Trump insurrectionists fought their way into Congress and essentially shut the city down Wednesday, stories began emerging of restaurant workers, hotel, and hospital staff getting caught in the fracas. D.C.’s essential workers, it would seem, were once more put in danger. For the third time since the election, cohorts of Trump supporters, alt-right groups, and Proud Boys instigated violence in D.C., disrupting the lives of residents, before leaving the Capitol and surrounding area in disarray. One Washington Post reporter shared a firsthand account of Capitol food staff handing out boxed lunches of chicken and beef in the middle of the insurrection, while Congress members sheltered within the depths of the building. Meanwhile, essential staff on and near the Capitol grounds, many of them Black and Brown workers, were left to clean-up from the violence. By early Thursday morning, crews of National Park Service and Capitol employees were out collecting the discarded MAGA gear, beer cans, and other trash littered across the grounds of the National Mall.
- Adapted from a report by Colleen Grablick and Elliot C. Williams on DCist; photo WAMU/DCist / Daniella Cheslow

IBEW 26 retirees’ medical equipment program helps families heal, stay connected
Joe Pittore had excellent insurance because he was a journeyman wireman and member of IBEW Local 26 in Washington. He also had access to Medicare. Yet, there were times when the Pittores had needs come up that had to be dealt with quickly and additional help was required, especially when it came to medical equipment. Such was the case when Joe went into hospice care.
A program administered by Local 26’s Retired Members Club moved a hospital bed and transport chair into the family home that day. The program dates back to at least the 1950s. Susan Flashman, the retiree club’s recording secretary who voluntarily does much of the program’s day-to-day work, remembers it being run out of a closet at Local 26’s old hall in the District of Columbia, but it really took off when the local moved to a new hall and training center in suburban Lanham, MD., in 2006.
Read more on the IBEW website. photo: Susan Flashman, with fellow retiree Rusty Griffith at a party for the local’s Retired Members Club.

Labor Photo: LIUNA trainees

#TrainingTuesday: @LIUNA trainees are very interested in what they are learning in #landscaping training at the @TrainingLiuna @BaltFund
From the LiUNA! Mid-Atlantic Twitter feed

Today’s labor quote: Jack London

"After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles."

Novelist Jack London was born on this date in 1876; this is his classic definition of a scab -- someone who would cross a picketline and take a striker's job.

Today's Labor History
This week’s Labor History Today podcast: The Vancouver Island Coal Strike; Skyscraper Labor
The story of the 1912 Vancouver Island Coal Strike -- the most protracted, violent and hard-fought strike in British Columbia's long labour history -- from the On The Line podcast.
In Part 1 of her online talk for The Skyscraper Museum last November, architectural historian Joanna Merwood-Salisbury traces labor protests in the construction industry in Chicago in the 1880s and examines the formation of unions uniting trades-based groups with ethnic organizations, as well as the public spaces of their protest movements.
And on Labor History in 2:00, Rick Smith tells us about The Rise of Settlement Houses.
Last week’s show: Cutting along the Color Line

Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson orders police to raid an open-air mass meeting of shipyard workers in an attempt to prevent a general strike. Workers were brutally beaten. The strike began the following month, with 60,000 workers walking out in solidarity with some 25,000 metal tradesmen - 1919

Pres. Roosevelt creates the National War Labor Board to mediate labor disputes during World War II. Despite the fact that 12 million of the nation’s workers were women -- to rise to 18 million by war’s end -- the panel consisted entirely of men - 1942

- David Prosten.

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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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