UFCW Members Take Capitol Hill by Storm

A big thank you to all who came out to yesterday’s health care rally on Capitol Hill yesterday! UFCW members were out in force with thousands of other union members and health care advocates. Together, we sent a strong message to our representatives in Washington that the American people know what we want: a strong public health insurance option and a solution that shares responsibility among employers, individuals, insurance companies, and the government.



UFCW members came from as far away as Washington state. Here’s just a few of their stories and what they had to say:

Christie Menyard lives in South Bend, Indiana where she is a front-end supervisor at Kroger and a UFCW Local 700 mem­ber.

Before Christie was employed with Kroger, she ran her own day-care business. But when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and cancer, she closed her business to take care of him. During this time, Christie got shingles. The resulting medical bills quickly ran through her savings. Christie says, “I feel like I experienced the recession before they announced the recession. Shingles can be a deadly disease, and I feel lucky that I had a family and a little bit of money to help me get through this. I worry about people without even that help. ”

Dawn Cutler has been a Registered Nurse at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Washington for over 20 years.

In Dawn's work with women and children in a large hospital birthing center, she sees that patients receive the good care they deserve. Dawn says, “We need to say no to a system that says that if you lose your job you lose your health care. As a nurse, these patients, these families, they are people to me and they deserve the best.”

Eric Lawhorn lives in Charleston, Indiana where he is a truck driver for Riverton Truckers.

When Eric was divorced and lost his health insurance, he turned to COBRA, but the out-of-pocket costs were unbearable. Eric tried to buy insurance on the open market, but was rejected because he’d had kidney stones the previous year. Eric says, “What the insurance companies are doing aren’t right, and I believe in fighting when that happens . . . What do you do? We can’t all be as healthy as an athlete.”

Vincent Germani is a produce clerk at ShopRite in Edgewater, New Jersey and has been a UFCW member since 1979.

Vincent is grateful for the good benefits he has, but worries his 19-year old daughter will lose coverage when she leaves for college as she has to maintain full-time status to be covered under his plan. Vincent been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Four years ago, Vincent had a heart attack. Vincent says, “Thanks to insurance and the union benefits the operations did not cost me. Everything was taken care of. My lost time was compensated by my disability insurance. Many people don’t have that chance. I have more of a safety net than most Americans. There are many people suffering and that’s a shame.”

Leslie Firth is a single mom from Marysville, Washington.

Leslie has worked as a pharmacy technician at Group Health for the past 16 years. In addition to her two 11 and 18-year old children, she cares for a 16-year old teen who lost her mother to cancer in January. Leslie says, “I believe I speak for my co-workers back home when I say ‘quality affordable health care for all can be done.’ We ask our nation’s leaders to make it happen. The longer we wait, the longer each one of us will be suffering for it.”

Massive Health Care Day of Action Today

UFCW members from all across the country will be descending on Congress today to call for quality, affordable health care as part of "Health Care 09 - We Can’t Wait," a massive day of action hosted by Health Care for America Now.

Here's the rundown of the day according to HCAN:

The main event on Thursday will be a large rally held in the Upper Senate Park at 11:30am.

Actress Edie Falco, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY), Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), HCAN Campaign Manager Richard Kirsch, CWA President Larry Cohen, AFSCME President Jerry McEntee, SEIU Secretary Treasurer Anna Burger, Governor Howard Dean, Congressman Becerra (D-CA), National Physicians Alliance President-Elect Valerie Arkoosh and other leading Members of Congress and Senators are expected to speak.

Then we'll be heading on to town hall meetings on Capitol Hill and flooding the offices of our representatives.

It looks like it's shaping up to be a historic day for health reform. You can keep up on the action from home by following our Twitter feed or keep tabs on what other advocates are tweetin' throughout the day with the #healthcare09 widget on http://www.ufcwhealthcarenow.org/.

And don't forget to take a minute and write in to your paper on why we need a strong public health insurance option. Even though the majority of Americans want a public health insurance option (and poll after poll says we do), those insurance companies still have a lot of money and power. So write in to those papers and let 'em know what we want!

Unions Members Confront Gov. Ritter Over Broken Promises

Colorado Governor Bill Ritter's in town today, fundraising for his re-election campaign. So some union members from his own state, along with supporters here and from Colorado, have decided to ask Ritter about his refusal to support Colorado's working families.

So why do union members feel betrayed by Ritter? Despite promises to the contrary, Ritter has vetoed bills that would allow Colorado's fire fighters to form unions and provide unemployment compensation to workers locked out by employers during contract disputes.

UFCW members from Local 7 in Colorado and the Colorado Professional Fire Fighters (IAFF), along with supporters, are holding informational pickets today to remind the governor of the hard-working Coloradans he has forgotten as he raises money from his big-spending lobbyist donors.

Hopefully, their efforts will jog his memory a little. You know, help him remember who he's supposed to be working for.

Health Care Insurance Companies Scared of Losing Massive Profits to Public Option

According to the Associated Press, Health Insurance companies sent a letter today to the Senate saying that a pubic option for health insurance would cripple their profit-driven business model and hamstring employer-provided health insurance.

This is just another example of the scare tactics that opponents of health care reform are selling, and the American people still aren't buying.

And the health insurance lobby has a reason to be scared. New York Times/CBS Poll that came out this week found that most Americans

said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.

These are companies that have imposed average premium increases of more than 120% over the past decade, according to Health Care for American Now!

The basic disagreement comes down to this:

Americans think that the government could do a better job than private health insurance companies and therefore want a public option.

Private Health Insurers know that the government could do a better job than private health insurance companies and therefore do not want a public option.

The private health insurers have a really big interest in keeping the system the way it is, in spite of it being broken. Why? Because

Profits at 10 of the country’s largest publicly traded health insurance companies rose 428 percent from 2000 to 2007. In 2007 alone, the chief executive officers at these companies collected combined total compensation of $118.6 million-an average of $11.9 million each.

Whose interests should our elected officials keep in mind?

An End to Bush's Immigration Raids, and Hope for Meaningful Immigration Reform

The Bush administration’s enforcement-only policy was a disaster for workers. Administration officials became masters of misdirection, as Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents conducted terrorizing worksite raids under the guise of meaningful immigration reform.

On December 12, 2006, the Bush administration conducted massive worksite raids at six Swift and Company meatpacking plants, rounding up, detaining and criminalizing thousands of workers at each plant for doing no more than reporting to work, no more than trying to earn a living.

The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), the union that today represents the workers in those plants, established a National Commission on ICE Misconduct soon after. The Commission held five hearings on those and other raids, in cities across the nation. Now it has released a report telling the story of the human toll exacted by the Bush administration’s enforcement-only policy, in the hope it will trigger a dialogue on immigration reform with our new administration.

It’s the story of workers’ terrifying ordeal, when ICE agents handcuffed them, denied their right to counsel or to meet with union representation, and didn’t even have the decency to let workers use the bathroom or call their families. It’s the story of workers held against their will, native born and immigrant citizens alike—all because the Bush administration had identified, out of the 12,000 people working at those Swift plants, 133 who were suspected of identity theft. It’s the story of misplaced priorities on national security. As Senator John Kerry, who spoke at Commission hearing in Massachusetts, said of a raid there:

On March 6^th of 2007, of all the dangers that were lurking in America…of all the threats being assessed by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, apparently, on that day, none were more insidious or challenging to us, or more menacing, than several hundred people, mostly women, in New Bedford who were making backpacks for the U.S. Army.

The consequences were grave; towns were devastated, families were torn apart. Children and parents suffered lasting mental effects. A high school student, Maria, described her mother’s arrest at a Swift plant and how she broke the news to her younger siblings:

At night, I had to do the hardest thing in the world, explain to a three-year-old and a five-year-old what was happening and why their mother wasn’t coming home. They looked at me with their eyes filled with tears. I felt the same way, so helpless and alone…Many kids are scared of the boogieman, but [my siblings] are afraid of ICE.

And the consequences for workers’ civil liberties were just as horrifying. In the report’s introduction, UFCW International President Joe Hansen describes the Bush administration’s flagrant disregard for the rule of law. “Racial profiling. Due process ignored… the Constitution tossed aside.”

The Commission offers this report as a record of an administration utterly abdicating its responsibility to provide a workable immigration policy. But it’s also offered as an opening for a new dialogue on immigration with the Obama administration, with a president committed to the idea that our ideals and security need not be mutually exclusive.

And central to that discussion, that dialogue, is the idea that at its core immigration is about workers. We need a productive immigration discussion about all workers, native born and immigrant, and their rights, protections, and opportunities to achieve the American Dream.

crossposted at DailyKos

GOP scare tactics fail against public option

What do you do when your fear appeals are no longer working in your fight to stop Americans from getting the health care reform they want? Most people would think about changing tactics, but not the GOP! In an new NBC/WSJ poll it is clear that the American public supports a public plan.

From the Wall Street Journal.

"There was also support for the Democratic push to let people sign up for a public health-care plan that would compete with private companies, one of the toughest issues in the health-care debate. Three in four people said a public plan is extremely or quite important."

This is from a paper whose editorial board hates the idea of a public option, who today gave Karl Rove space for an op-ed to say that the plan was a bad idea and use scare-tacticy phrases like "nationalization."

So what's going on? How can a paper print poll results on one page which clearly demonstrate that the public is indeed in the mood for a drastic change in current coverage, that 75% Americans believe that a public plan for health insurance is a good idea, and then print GOP scare tactics on their op-ed page?

Goes to show: the same poll finds that only 25% of Americans hold a positive view of the Republican party. That's an all-time-low for what was once the party of Lincoln.

The scare tactics that the GOP is using against the public health care option are failing and making the party look bad in the process.

The poll also shows that people don't want their benefits to be taxed, that maybe increasing taxes on the wealthiest among us is a better idea. We couldn't agree more!

Why Labor Celebrates GLBT Pride Month

As you may or may not know, June is LGBT Pride Month (not to be confused with LGBT History Month, which is in October). As the President has "proclaimed" it so, there has been an upswing of activism, remembrance of the Stonewall Riots and heroes like Harvey Milk, and increased media coverage of the debate about marriage for same-sex couples.

But what does LGBT right have to do workers? Why does labor celebrate Pride Month?

Labor's mission is to give workers a voice in their place of business, a collective voice that is stronger than the sum of its individual parts in order to level the playing field between workers and management. We can negotiate pay and benefits, increase safety in the work place, ensure job security, and protect one another from unfair treatment. Protecting one another from unfair treatment is the particular tie that binds Labor to the LGBT movement.

Labor has always been involved in making sure that those who are discriminated against in our society are protected in their workplace. Protected from harassment, protected from unfair firings because of who they are, and guaranteed the same rights and benefits as those around them.

This was true in the Jim Crow South, where minorities were often the first to sign on to unions. This has always been true of women in the workplace.

And it is true of LGBT individuals. Unions push for partner benefits, for anti-discrimination language in contracts, for equal opportunity in the workplace. We lobby for legislation such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Action, which would ban discrimination in the workplace places upon sexual orientation or gender identity/gender expression. Because at the end of the day, that's what it's about: protecting one another. We raise our collective voice when our work schedules are too overbearing, when we have to decide between wages and health care benefits, when our job security is threatened--and when our co-workers are treated unfairly, for any reason.

This need for justice extends beyond the walls of the grocery store or the meat packing plant. This is why unions representing over 10 million workers have voiced their support for marriage equality. This is why unions donated more than $2 million in the fight against prop. 8 in California.

This is why we share this fight, and this is why LGBT Pride Month is important to us.

American Prospect Turns the Limelight on Working Women

It’s time to draw attention to the vast majority of women who get overlooked in the discussion about working women. Women who work as caregivers, night- shift workers, housecleaners, etc need to be recognized just as much as their high-powered, professional peers.

The American Prospect is doing a five-article series on working women, specifically bringing to people’s attention the women who don’t have the option to “opt out” of work.

Most families can no longer afford the cost of living without the woman of the household bringing in a steady income. Families are relying now, more then ever, on women bringing home a paycheck. As author Ann Friedman says, “The recession is an opportune moment to refocus that narrative about women and work on the majority of women who work- those who don’t have multiple degrees or high- power careers.”

All working people should read this article and the others in the series, which helps shine light on the truth about working women.

Another Meme Debunked: Immigrants Not Actually Taking Our Jobs

"They're taking our jobs!" It's the most common refrain heard in the the narrow dialogue and screaming matches that pass for debate on immigration, on cable news shows and faux-populist rallies alike. It's the one supposedly irrefutable argument, the one that immigration opponents use to try to stoke the fears and anger of the under or unemployed--especially in this troubled economy.

It's not a new refrain. It's been heard throughout our history during periods of immigration of various groups, like the Chinese, to the United States. It's a dangerous phrase that implies a delicate balance between "us" and the "other," the immigrant, which "they" are tipping by coming into our country and taking all the jobs. It's a phrase that cuts off all debate and has even some reasonable, otherwise compassionate people nodding in agreement.

And now we find out it's not even true. From the Des Moines Register today:

With the Obama administration and Congress expected to push ahead with immigration reform, it's important that lawmakers and the public shape policy changes based on fact rather than fears.

It has perhaps seemed logical to assume that the willingness of many foreigners - particularly those here illegally - to work for low pay takes jobs away from Americans. But it turns out that having a large number of recent immigrants in a location doesn't necessarily correlate with a lot of native-born workers being unemployed, based on an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data.

That analysis, done by the Immigration Policy Center, shows that "there is little apparent relationship between recent immigration and unemployment rates at the regional, state, or county level."

The report shows, for example, that:

Recent immigrants make up 8.4 percent of the population in the Pacific region (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii), but just 2.8 percent of the population in the East North Central region (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin). Yet, the regions had similar unemployment rates of 10.8 percent in the Pacific region and 10 percent in the East North Central region as of March 2009.

Another example: In New Jersey, recent immigrants account for 7.3 percent of the population, but in Maine they are just 0.8 percent. Nonetheless, the states' March unemployment rates respectively were 8.3 and 8.l percent.

The report found the highest unemployment rates are in counties in manufacturing centers and rural areas, which generally draw fewer recent immigrants.

The tradition of blaming job loss on immigrants is one we ought to lose in a hurry. Unemployment is very real problem, but it's not the fault of immigrants. We need problem-solving, not scapegoating, to fix our economy and implement meaningful immigration reform in this country.

The Mezzo-Mezzo Jobs Report

So, I guess it's good news because it's not getting worse...right?

I mean, as a non-economist, when I see that we lost 345,000 jobs in May, I think about all the men and women who lost those jobs and what that will mean for their families in the months ahead.

There's no good news for them.

On the other hand, the Washington Post reports that:

Economists had expected a much worse loss, of as many as 525,000 jobs. The Labor Department also said that April job losses were somewhat less severe than originally reported.

So I guess that's good. That's 180,000 jobs we didn't lose; that's 180,000 people who can still expect a paycheck next week or next month. The bleeding hasn't stopped, but at least it's slowed a bit.

Not Such Bright Bulbs at Morning Joe

A funny thing happened this morning. During a rather lopsided discussion about unions, the folks at Morning Joe pretended to try really, really hard to think of ANY successful unionized companies. But they couldn't name a single one. They hemmed and hawed and got these strained looks on their faces--but nope. Couldn't come up with one. Not even the company that owns NBC--GE.

What a bunch of dim bulbs.

After all, almost anyone could probably name at least a few successful unionized companies--companies that not only survive, but thrive with a terrific union workforce. Folks have been suggesting many of these companies to add to Talking Points Memo's post on the subject.

You can find the growing list here.

UPDATE: Sorkin apologizes. Good on him--but what about Joe, Mika, and Mike?

Thousands march in Seattle to demand health care reform

Members of UFCW Local 21 in Washington state marched alongside thousands of other health care reform advocates from labor and community groups during a rally through the streets of Seattle on Saturday. More than 3,5000 individuals and 190 organizations came together for the event to demand “Health Care for All in 2009.”

U.S. Senator Patty Murray spoke before the crowd of thousands and promised to take the demand for real reform to Washington, DC:

Here in America, families are struggling with the crushing costs of health care that threaten their financial stability, leave them exposed to higher premiums and deductibles and put them at risk of losing coverage as employers struggle to provide coverage.

Here in America, families are losing the very parts of their health care that they value most – their choice of doctors, hospitals, and insurance plans; their choice of treatments and the security and stability that comes from knowing that they are covered if anything goes wrong.

Here in America, people who should be focused on fighting for their lives are instead fighting insurance companies.

Here in America, families are telling their kids they can’t go out for football or baseball or soccer because if they get hurt, there is simply no way to pay the bills.

Here in America, twilight years are darkened by having to choose between seeing a doctor and buying groceries.

Here in America, too many people are limping and crawling into Medicare – like I watched my own parents do.

Here in America, too many people can’t get care when they need it, can’t pay for it when they do and aren’t given a say in some of the most important and personal choices in their lives.

Here in America, we can do better.

Now, some critics out there argue that now is not the time to tackle health care reform. Well to me, that’s shortsighted reasoning and tone-deaf governing.

Investing in our health care system is not a luxury – it’s absolutely critical to our future strength. There is a direct connection between our nation’s long-term prosperity and developing health care policies that stem the chronic bleeding in business and in our state and national budgets.

We must reduce costs and make health care more affordable.

Rep. Don Young: Defender of Employee Free Choice?

Well, well. Representative Don Young (R-Alaska) has come out in defense of the Employee Free Choice Act. And no, you didn't just read that wrong. As Greg Sargent notes:

GOP Rep Don Young isn’t exactly known for his reluctance to toe the Republican line on key issues. So it’s kind of a big deal that he has openly broken with his colleagues when it comes to their leading talking point against the Employee Free Choice Act: The claim that it would eliminate the “secret ballot” option for joining unions.

The Anchorage Daily News reports that Young made the comments at a gathering of "Alaskans for Liberty" last Thursday. Apparently, after the outspoken Republican was asked about "card check legislation," Young said this:

I believe in unions. I believe in working people. They say the secret ballot is eliminated. That's not true. A secret ballot can be requested.

So there you have it, folks. Even Rep. Don Young says the "no secret ballot" argument is bunk.