WA State JwJ Update and
Local Workers' Rights Victories
March 2008
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In the coming weeks you’ll be receiving our spring newsletter and annual request for a contribution to continue JwJ's critical organizing. If you moved recently, or don’t normally receive our mailings and would like to, please update your address.
Three quarters of our funding comes from local individuals like you and local democratically run organizations. We are an almost all-volunteer organization except for 31/2 organizers, and have a small organizing expense budget. Even with these modest costs, our bills are over $200,000 per year.
As we are devoting much of our energies to this fund-drive over the coming months, we greatly appreciate your timely contribution so we can get back to committing more of our time to organizing and less time to fundraising. Make a tax-deductible contribution, or simply mail a check to: JwJ, PO Box 9662, Seattle WA 98109.
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Join over 130 fellow JwJers who contribute almost $2,000 per month. You can make monthly contributions using your credit or debit card, or through your checking account. This source of steady, reliable income helps us make organizing plans for the future. Will you accept the challenge? Become a sustainer today!
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A community-friendly builder has now assumed the Salishan project after the state’s largest anti-worker builder cut and run from accountability. This shift improves developer accountability to workers and low-income residents. Next, the developer of Pierce County’s largest upscale property project Pt Ruston has begun to embrace housing justice and fair job standards. This now marks a new trend in an industry long-plagued with sweatshop conditions and corporate Robin Hoods. Despite resistance from Tacoma elected and appointed officials such as Council-member Rick Talbert and City Manager Eric Anderson, JwJ’s Developer Accountability campaign is propelling this new trend on the frontline between our community and developers. After laying a powerful foundation of a grassroots strategy, we are making concrete progress.
Tacoma Housing Authority’s mega-million dollar Salishan public housing project is now operating with local hiring, apprenticeship training programs, living wage jobs with benefits, and respecting workers’ voice to organize. Merlino Construction is supervising this "Phase 2" infrastructure stage and has a strong track record with building trades unions. Hiring and training Salishan and local residents will at least meet HUD Section 3 standards and contribute back to our local economy. City of Tacoma has awarded Merlino the $1.18B streets contract as part of the Salishan Revitalization project. It wasn’t but a few months ago when anti-worker Quadrant Homes, a multi-billion dollar subsidiary of Weyerhaeuser, paid a million dollar fine to back out of the Phase 2 contract. Community allies backed by JwJ’s mobilization capacity had demanded concrete community-friendly practices.
After more than a year of raising the pressure on $1B Pt Ruston developer Mike Cohen, he has pledged to provide mixed-income housing and pay living wages. Mr. Cohen insured that living wages and benefits were paid to the workers installing the utilities and infrastructure pads for his first 34 luxury homes on Stack Hill. He also signed for the entire Pt Ruston project a local hire and apprenticeship "LEAP" contract as well as a letter of intent that insures some skilled workers will earn living wages. Now Mr. Cohen is pursuing a "LID" contract with Tacoma to install all Pt Ruston public works infrastructure through a process that insures living wages, benefits, apprenticeship training, and a voice on the job. These are firsts for Mr. Cohen but they are half-measures and he can revoke them anytime.
Additionally, Mr. Cohen has announced he might build mixed-income affordable housing in conjunction with his Pt Ruston project. In a draft environmental statement, Mr. Cohen offered to explore building 15 to 30 "affordable" units depending on government grants and other tax-funded and charitable subsidies. The entire project will have up to 1000 units with prices running between $2 million and $300,000 in addition to a hotel, major retail space, and other profit-making enterprises. It is unclear why Mr. Cohen needs more of our tax dollars and charity to subsidize these units when he benefits from tax breaks at some of his market-rate projects and federal oversight at Pt Ruston.
We are seeking binding commitments and higher standards. While Mr. Cohen is starting to change his practices despite an anti-worker and exclusive luxury builder track record, we must organize with more capacity to ensure that he and all local developers and elected officials step up to build a sustainable economy for all.
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The security officers and SEIU 6 have been negotiating a contract for over a year. Family medical coverage has been a big issue for the security officers. Without universal health care, workers have to fight for health care coverage one contract at a time. With rising health care costs and health insurance companies valuing profit over insuring people, retirees and working people have to continually fight for health care coverage in their contracts.
Recently the Security contractors offered the worst health care package to date.
In response to the less than favorable health care offer from the security contractors Jobs with Justice, SEIU 6 and the security officers and janitors organized a take over of the streets on February 25th. Several JwJ activists, students, security officers and community members blocked the intersection of Columbia and 5th to send a message to the security contractors that there is a whole community fighting for the security officers to get family health care and a fair contract.
JwJ helped out with media coverage and the action was covered by KIRO, KING and Q13 TV as well as Real Change and the Seattle P-I.
Negotiations were scheduled the next day and the contractors offered, after many hours of bargaining, an attractive health care package.
Once again when community and workers unite, we win!
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This past January, President George W. Bush was forced to end one piece of his assault on the right to organize when he restored collective bargaining rights to employees at the Department of Defense on the heels of an over five year campaign that included over 15 actions in Washington State lead by Jobs with Justice and the American Federation of Governmental Employees (AFGE). Tens of thousands of these workers live in Washington State and work at bases such as Fort Lewis, McCord, and Bremerton Naval Yard.
According to AFGE president John Gage, "There are not many wins in our history bigger than this one. These core rights not only assure fairness for employees, but these rights are vital to a merit based career civil service instead of a politicized system. The firing and hiring process in the Department of Justice became highly politicized. NSPS [National Security Personnel System] would have opened up the Defense Department to that kind of chicanery on a much bigger scale."
The legislation signed into law by Bush will restore collective bargaining and appeal rights, as well as exempting all hourly employees from NSPS.
The NSPS was the leading edge of an unprecedented ferocious attack on federal worker rights. Similarly to the 1980's air traffic controllers, 3.3 million federal workers faced becoming the national symbol of union busting and the Bush patronage system. Bush's original NSPS plan attacked by combining privatization, cutbacks, erosion of civil service, assault on the right to organize, outsourcing national security, creation of a backdoor draft of civilians, and eliminates whistleblower protection.
In the face of these attacks, Washington State JwJ has played a leading role in mobilizing support for federal workers and in helping the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) develop into a fighting force. Actions in Washington State lead by JwJ & AFGE served as a model for a growing national federal worker rights campaign, including six simultaneous actions in multiple counties on December 10th, 2005 to demand leadership from US Rep. Dave Reichert regarding NSPS and EFCA.
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Jobs with Justice has been working with the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) for the past year on a campaign with the Grassy Narrows First Nation in Canada to support sustainable economies and to stop clear-cutting the Whiskey Jack forest. Indigenous people on the Grassy Narrows Nation have set up the largest road block in Canadian history and are asking for a moratorium on clear-cutting their forest. Grassy Narrows is also asking for the lumber mill who is logging their land to develop sustainable local economies that employ Grassy Narrows’ people.
Weyerhaeuser is the main buyer of clear-cut hard wood on Grassy Narrows land. They sell the hard wood to companies like Quadrant Homes. The main buyer of clear-cut soft wood is Cascade Boise who sells paper products to Office Max.
RAN started a national campaign demanding Office Max to stop buying paper products made from clear-cut forests and Jobs with Justice was there to take up the fight!
Office Max has caved from the pressure of these national actions and has asked Cascade Boise to stop buying wood from the Whiskey Jack forest.
Cascade Boise has agreed and will stop buying forest products that were clear-cut on Grassy Narrows land beginning this year.
Now Weyerhaeuser stands alone and JwJ will continue to fight for sustainable economies, indigenous rights and the ending of clear-cut foresting in solidarity with RAN and the Grassy Narrows First Nation.
Jobs with Justice is proud to be a partner in bringing the connection of workers rights, environmental rights and indigenous rights to fruition and demonstrating to corporations like Office Max and Cascade Boise that people and movements working together are unstoppable.
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Please welcome Helene Lustan to the mix as JwJ staff. Helene is currently training in the South Sound, and will start organizing in MLK Jr. County in mid-May. Helene is originally from Port Orchard and attended Washington State University where she studied Political Science. In 2004, she worked as the Northwest Regional Organizer for United Students Against Sweatshops where she focused on international labor solidarity and supporting more students of color to be involved with activism on their respective campuses. Most recently, she was in California working as an organizer with AFSCME Local 3299 working with outsourced food service workers to be directly employed at the University of California-Davis. Please help us in welcoming Helene to JwJ by email at helene@wsjwj.org or by phone at (206) 441-4969.
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May 2-4, 2008 in Providence, Rhode Island
REGISTER NOW!
The 2008 JwJ National Conference will attract a diverse group of more than 1,000 labor, community, student, and religious activists from across the country and the world for sessions on building power for workers, health care for all, immigrant rights, the campaign for a floor wage in Asia, student and youth organizing, low-income worker organizing, music, art, fun, and more!
For more than a decade, the Jobs with Justice National Conference has provided activists with a space to come together to celebrate our victories, share our experiences, learn new skills, and build stronger relationships. Year after year this inspiring gathering brings together leaders and activists from around the country and the world who are working to build powerful coalitions for workers' rights and economic justice. The conference combines skills-building and information-sharing workshops with issue-focused strategy sessions to provide opportunities for participants to deepen their commitment to Jobs with Justice at a national level, and to take concrete plans of action back to their local coalitions. In addition to plenary sessions with distinguished speakers and skills-building workshops, the JwJ conference is an opportunity to celebrate the work that local coalitions have done over the last year and to have some serious fun! At each National Conference, we also identify a local campaign where national presence can make a difference and we organize an action to call attention to the campaign.
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