May 2011

JOBS WITH JUSTICE NATIONAL CONFERENCE
AUGUST 5-7, 2011 IN WASHINGTON, DC

Corporations want to use the failing economy as an excuse to reverse every worker protection put in place over the last century, but we are standing together and fighting back!

Come to the Jobs with Justice conference to learn from and strategize with labor leaders, rank & file workers, students, religious leaders, community activists, workers excluded from labor law protection, and many, many more about how to build a powerful movement of working people to defeat the corporate agenda! Join us as we explore:

The Vermont Worker's Center invites you to tune into a special presentation on Vermont's new universal health care law, to be signed by Governor Shumlin on May 26 at 10am. As a direct result of a highly energized and organized grassroots people's movement for the human right to healthcare, Vermont has become the first state in the country to pass a bill for a universal, publicly financed healthcare system that commits to providing healthcare as a public good.

Join the Vermont Workers Center/JwJ at the Vermont Statehouse Room 11 at 9:00AM E.S.T. Thursday, May 26, 2011 or tune into the live stream here.

Immediately before the bill signing ceremony in the Vermont Statehouse, the Healthcare Is a Human Right Campaign will give a presentation to the press and the public, live-streamed online to a national audience, to explain the significance of this new law and provide a human rights assessment of its key provisions. Leading members of the Campaign will also look ahead at the challenges Vermonters face as powerful special interests, led by the deep-pocketed insurance industry, gear up to derail the transition to universal healthcare over the next few years.

Cross-posted from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network

Its time to put S-Comm on ice.

For Norma, for Isaura, for Maria, for all the survivors of domestic violence and innocent people swept up in this dragnet, it’s time for a freeze on the flawed and failed so-called “Secure Communities” mass deportation program.

Last year NDLON started to expose the damages and the dishonesty of s-comm. People didn’t believe it was shakeable but now the program is facing an investigation and coming under fire.

Just yesterday the LA Times and Huffington Post broke a new story. A contractor responsible for much of the program’s expansion spoke out and indicated a cover-up from the top on down.

He said in a letter to Congresswoman Lofgren, “I believe key elements in the ICE correspondence [to you] are inaccurate and misleading… ICE painted itself into a corner and needed someone to blame.”

For years, American working families have shouldered the burden of an economic crisis they didn’t create, while those who caused it now reap record-high profits.  Last Thursday, tens of thousands of us stormed the belly of the beast, Wall Street, to demonstrate that we are no longer willing to tolerate a status quo of tax giveaways for the rich and sacrifice for the rest of us.  For a few shining hours, Wall Street wasn’t the territory of the bankers who drove this country to near collapse.  It was, undeniably, the people’s territory.

On May 12, twenty thousand New Yorkers of all ages and from all walks of life flooded Wall Street from end to end for three hours.  We marched, sang, chanted jubilantly, and led over 100 teach-ins in the middle of the street to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s recently-announced New York City budget, which would eliminate over 6,000 teachers and cut $400 million in funding to vital services to low-income communities, while leaving $1.5 billion in tax breaks to the city’s wealthiest untouched.

The sea of people was quite a site to behold:

Bloomberg’s proposed budget is the latest in a nationwide series of assaults on working families under the guise of “austerity.”

Every year, thousands of workers come to the United States via the H-2B guestworker visa program. Under this program, a workers' visa is tied to his or her employer, giving their bosses a great deal of control over their lives. All too often, workers in the US on the H-2B visa find themselves in unfair, unsafe, or even illegal work situations, but because their immigration status is tied to their employer, it is very difficult to organize for better working conditions. You may remember the story of Hilario Jimenez, a guestworker who escaped company housing to expose his employers for using taxpayer money to exploit migrant workers while excluding local workers from jobs.