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"What lessons are we teaching at George Mason University about justice?"

Solidarity Friday

MontCo pre-registering essential workers for vaccine

Organizing, fighting, winning

Today's Labor Quote: Heidi Shierholz

Weekend Labor History

[link removed] LABOR CALENDAR; click here for latest listings

Union City Radio: 7:15am daily
WPFW-FM 89.3 FM; [link removed] click here to hear today's report

[link removed] Airport Union Caucus: Mon, February 22, 2pm - 3pm
Meeting for unions representing airport and airline workers at DCA and Dulles

MWC Executive Board meeting: Mon, February 22, 2pm - 4pm

Metro Washington Council Delegate meeting: Tue, February 23, 5pm - 7pm
[link removed] RSVP here

[link removed] Loudoun County Labor Caucus: Tue, February 23, 5pm - 6pm
Meeting for union members and community allies in Loudoun County.

Addressing the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Workers in the German and US Metalworking Sectors: Wed, February 24, 11am - 12pm
[link removed] FREE; REGISTER HERE

Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond: Wed, February 24, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
[link removed] Register here

Taxing the Rich and Bargaining for Racial Justice in Connecticut: Wed, February 24, 5pm - 6pm
[link removed] Register here

Baltimore Labor Council meeting (rescheduled from 2/17): Wed, February 24, 7pm - 9pm
Email for call-in details: mailto:[email protected] [email protected]

[link removed] Fairfax County Dems Labor Caucus: Wed, February 24, 7pm - 8pmhttps://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwtcOyrqDMjE9EcGgS_QB7NAgXq8xP1U5Uy

Union City Radio: Your Rights at Work: Thu, February 25, 1pm - 2pm
WPFW 89.3 FM or [link removed] listen online

[link removed] Arlington Dems Labor Caucus: Thu, February 25, 6pm - 7pm
Meeting of Arlington union members and community allies.

[link removed] Shenandoah Valley Labor Community Alliance: Thu, February 25, 7:30pm - 8:30pm
Meeting of union members and community allies in the Shenandoah Valley.

[link removed] A Woman's Work: The NFL's Cheerleader Problem: Fri, February 26, 3:30pm - 5:00pm

Missed last week's Your Rights At Work? [link removed] Click here to check out Peter Cole on "Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly" and Dr. Laura Warren Hill on "Strike the Hammer: The Black Freedom Struggle in Rochester, New York, 1940-1970."

"What lessons are we teaching at George Mason University about justice?"
George Mason University president Gregory Washington's vision to establish GMU "as a national exemplar of anti-racism and inclusive excellence in action" will never advance "if we as an institution are complicit in the exploitation & abuse of the most vulnerable workers on our campuses," wrote Timothy Gibson and Bethany L. Letiecq in a [link removed] Washington Post op-ed last Saturday. The latest complaint accused a GMU janitorial contractor of "intimidating workers, sabotaging work areas, making false accusations of theft, physically shoving a worker, and slow-walking a worker's paycheck." "We have recently learned about several troubling accounts of contracted-worker exploitation at Mason, affecting mainly immigrant workers," they wrote. Gibson, an associate professor of communication at George Mason University, is a faculty senator and interim president of the GMU chapter of the American Association of University Professors and Letiecq, an associate professor of human development and family science at GMU, conducts research on Latino immigrant families and serves on the executive committee of the GMU chapter of the AAUP.

Solidarity Friday
"Happy Solidarity Friday!" [link removed] tweeted NPEU (the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union) last Friday. "We love our members and stand with our units bargaining, working towards recognition, and beginning to vote in their union election!"

MontCo pre-registering essential workers for vaccine
"Montgomery County, Md. is pre-registering essential workers for the vaccine," tweeted UFCW 400 on Friday. If you live in Montgomery County, [link removed] sign up to be notified when you are eligible.

Organizing, fighting, winning
"I came to the US in 2015 through a lottery system and became a citizen in 2020," said UNITE HERE 23's Aschalew Asabie (photo) at the Feb. 10 Rally for Black Immigrant Lives. "I organized a union where I worked at Paradies at National Airport in 2016 and have been organizing ever since. Recently, I have been organizing tenants at Southern Towers in Virginia. The building is owned by a hedge fund called CIM who has filed to evict many hard working African immigrants in the midst of this pandemic. I am passionate about this work, but I took a leave of absence to spend one month in Georgia to make sure that the Democrats won the Senate. We had 21 canvassers from many different African countries and we focused on Dekalb county, where between 30 and 40 thousand African voters live. We knocked on doors and told our stories of why this election is important to us, and we spoke to people in their own language. We got people to vote who had never voted before. We showed that when we fight, we win."

Labor Quote: Heidi Shierholz

Shierholz, Policy Director and Senior Economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said that the [link removed] long-term decline in major strike activity highlights the need to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which she says "would restore workers' right to strike and help ensure that workers have the leverage they need to secure their share of economic growth."

Today's Labor History
This week's Labor History Today podcast: [link removed] The Valentine's Day Strike of 1921. Last week's show: [link removed] Remembering John Sweeney and Anne Feeneyhttps://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-qm7ys-f938fb

Representatives of the Knights of Labor and the United Mine Workers meet in St. Louis with 20 other organizations to plan the founding convention of the People's Party. Objectives: end political corruption, spread the wealth, and combat the oppression of the rights of workers and farmers - 1892

Albert Shanker dies at age 68. He served as president of New York City's United Federation of Teachers from 1964 to 1984 and of the American Federation of Teachers from 1974 to 1997 - 1997

- 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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