By David Loud
What a year it’s been working on healthcare reform - a milestone year in an ongoing struggle for healthcare justice. It’s worth noting that President Theodore Roosevelt first called for national health care in 1912, and that successive Presidents tried and failed to move this agenda. When President Obama signed the Affordable Health Care Act into law in March, it was the biggest step forward in a century of trying. This law is flawed and incomplete, but it represents a historic victory. As Congressman Jim McDermott has said recently, “That was our D-Day, and now we’re on the beaches.” The opponents of reform would like to push us back into the water in November, and the advocates of reform know that to survive we must fight to defend and improve on what’s been achieved.
A bill to amend the Affordable Care Act to establish a public health insurance option was filed in the House in July. HR 5808 has 129 cosponsors, including Congressman McDermott. Single-payer (a publicly-funded national plan for all) remains the best policy idea, and many are working to promote it at both the state and national levels.
The ongoing rise in healthcare costs will force people to revisit the question of whether we will be able to afford healthcare for all as long as long as private insurance and profiteering have so much power in the system.
I hope all of us will find some way to help keep our country from moving further to the right in the November elections. It would be tragic if understandable disappointments in getting “change we can believe in” since 2008 lead people to allow Republicans to gain the power to push us backwards. Probably more important than anything else will be getting out the vote – persuading people that it does really matter this year, as much as it did in 2008.
(David Loud is a member of PSARA.)
Friday, October 1, 2010
Standing Up for a future we can all depend on
Grocery Store Workers – Standing Up for a future we can all depend on
By Tom Geiger, Communications Director UFCW 21
Our son Isaiah (7) and daughter Naomi (5) will inherit the world we make for them. My wife Aiko and I take that responsibility seriously. Like all parents, we want our kids’ lives to be better than our own.
And fighting for a better future – a future we can all depend on – is just what 25,000 grocery store workers across Puget Sound are doing in the current contract negotiations. These workers – from UFCW 21, UFCW 81, and Teamsters 38 – work in hundreds of stores across the region.
The future we seek is one where workers have: improved wages; quality and affordable health care; a secure pension; as well as scheduling, paid sick days and other policies that are critical to our quality of life.
Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans has been there with the workers every step of the way. PSARA President Robby Stern spoke to over 400 hundred store leaders in February on the eve of our negotiations. Many PSARA members supported our Standing Up for Working Moms events in May and other events since.
Recently, workers and community allies delivered the Grocery Store Bill of Rights to management in all 218 stores. Check out the Bill of Rights at:
http://www.ufcw21.org/grocery2010/bill-of-rights
Whether workers attain a fair contract depends primarily on the level of their unity and action combined with the level of public support. That combination has not been higher anywhere in the nation than it is here in Puget Sound.
By Tom Geiger, Communications Director UFCW 21
Our son Isaiah (7) and daughter Naomi (5) will inherit the world we make for them. My wife Aiko and I take that responsibility seriously. Like all parents, we want our kids’ lives to be better than our own.
And fighting for a better future – a future we can all depend on – is just what 25,000 grocery store workers across Puget Sound are doing in the current contract negotiations. These workers – from UFCW 21, UFCW 81, and Teamsters 38 – work in hundreds of stores across the region.
The future we seek is one where workers have: improved wages; quality and affordable health care; a secure pension; as well as scheduling, paid sick days and other policies that are critical to our quality of life.
Puget Sound Alliance for Retired Americans has been there with the workers every step of the way. PSARA President Robby Stern spoke to over 400 hundred store leaders in February on the eve of our negotiations. Many PSARA members supported our Standing Up for Working Moms events in May and other events since.
Recently, workers and community allies delivered the Grocery Store Bill of Rights to management in all 218 stores. Check out the Bill of Rights at:
http://www.ufcw21.org/grocery2010/bill-of-rights
Whether workers attain a fair contract depends primarily on the level of their unity and action combined with the level of public support. That combination has not been higher anywhere in the nation than it is here in Puget Sound.
Sick Days for All Workers
New coalition aims for a healthier Seattle through paid sick days for all workers
By Alex Stone
It should be as fundamental a standard as the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week. Yet one million Washington workers can’t take a single paid day off from work when they – or their children or their elderly parents – get sick.
Among them is Amber, a 22 year old Seattle-area mother with a 3 year old son. Amber’s current job as a kitchen staffer doesn’t offer her paid time off to care for her son when he gets sick. “When my son was sick, I had to call in sick because he couldn’t go to daycare,” Amber says. “I had to take two days off without pay and I regretted it because I have bills to pay and now I am behind”.
Amber’s story is commonplace in the food service industry, where just 16% of employers offer full-time workers paid sick days, and only 2% offer them to part-time employees. It's no wonder nearly half of "stomach flu" related outbreaks are linked to ill food service workers.
According to the most recent national data, 38% of all workers and two-thirds of the lowest-paid 25% have no paid sick leave. And some grocery and hospital workers – who in theory get sick leave – have to be out two or three days without pay before they can take it.
In 2006, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to adopt minimum paid sick days standards. The law allows all workers in the city to accrue paid sick days – up to 5 days in businesses with fewer than 10 employees and 9 days in larger companies. Since then, both Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee, WI have adopted, but not yet fully implemented, similar measures. New York City and Philadelphia have active campaigns, and a paid sick days bill is before Congress.
The Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce is laying the groundwork for paid sick days legislation here by organizing a broad coalition of businesses, community organizations and individuals who support paid sick days for Seattle workers.
A citywide paid sick days standard will benefit public health, allowing workers like Amber to stay home when she or her son get sick. It will promote family economic security by ensuring workers and their families can care for basic health care needs without jeopardizing a day’s wages. It will create healthier workplaces, hospitals, and childcare facilities by limiting the spread of disease. It will lower health care costs by enabling workers to seek preventive care for themselves and their loved ones. Business owners who provide paid sick leave have found that morale, productivity, and customer satisfaction all go up.
There are millions of stories just like Amber’s. Do you have one? Please share it on the Seattle Healthy Workforce website, Help Seattle join other cities in caring for working families. Visit http://seattlehealthyworkforce.org/ to learn more.
(Alex Stone is Communication Manager for the Economic Opportunity Institute.)
By Alex Stone
It should be as fundamental a standard as the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week. Yet one million Washington workers can’t take a single paid day off from work when they – or their children or their elderly parents – get sick.
Among them is Amber, a 22 year old Seattle-area mother with a 3 year old son. Amber’s current job as a kitchen staffer doesn’t offer her paid time off to care for her son when he gets sick. “When my son was sick, I had to call in sick because he couldn’t go to daycare,” Amber says. “I had to take two days off without pay and I regretted it because I have bills to pay and now I am behind”.
Amber’s story is commonplace in the food service industry, where just 16% of employers offer full-time workers paid sick days, and only 2% offer them to part-time employees. It's no wonder nearly half of "stomach flu" related outbreaks are linked to ill food service workers.
According to the most recent national data, 38% of all workers and two-thirds of the lowest-paid 25% have no paid sick leave. And some grocery and hospital workers – who in theory get sick leave – have to be out two or three days without pay before they can take it.
In 2006, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to adopt minimum paid sick days standards. The law allows all workers in the city to accrue paid sick days – up to 5 days in businesses with fewer than 10 employees and 9 days in larger companies. Since then, both Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee, WI have adopted, but not yet fully implemented, similar measures. New York City and Philadelphia have active campaigns, and a paid sick days bill is before Congress.
The Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce is laying the groundwork for paid sick days legislation here by organizing a broad coalition of businesses, community organizations and individuals who support paid sick days for Seattle workers.
A citywide paid sick days standard will benefit public health, allowing workers like Amber to stay home when she or her son get sick. It will promote family economic security by ensuring workers and their families can care for basic health care needs without jeopardizing a day’s wages. It will create healthier workplaces, hospitals, and childcare facilities by limiting the spread of disease. It will lower health care costs by enabling workers to seek preventive care for themselves and their loved ones. Business owners who provide paid sick leave have found that morale, productivity, and customer satisfaction all go up.
There are millions of stories just like Amber’s. Do you have one? Please share it on the Seattle Healthy Workforce website, Help Seattle join other cities in caring for working families. Visit http://seattlehealthyworkforce.org/ to learn more.
(Alex Stone is Communication Manager for the Economic Opportunity Institute.)
Low-income housing is scarce and costly
Housing for low-income renters is becoming increasingly scarce, and what rental housing exists is becoming increasingly costly, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports.
In 2009, 5.6 million households with incomes below the poverty level paid at least half their income for rent and basic utilities, newly-released Census data show. That’s 1.7 million more households than paid that share of their income in 2003.
Job losses account in part for the 1.7 million increase. A major factor is that while home prices have fallen by nearly 30% since the market peaked in 2006, rents have actually risen by an average of 11% over the same period. Federal rental assistance programs have helped, but funding for them has fallen far behind the growing need.
One indication of the deepening crisis is that in 2009 about 325,000 children lived at least part of a year in a homeless shelter, up 12% since 2007.
“Two or three times as many children were homeless if you count those living temporarily in hotels or motels, doubled-up with other families, or on the street…separate data from the (U.S.) Department of Education suggest,” the CBPP reports.
In 2009, 5.6 million households with incomes below the poverty level paid at least half their income for rent and basic utilities, newly-released Census data show. That’s 1.7 million more households than paid that share of their income in 2003.
Job losses account in part for the 1.7 million increase. A major factor is that while home prices have fallen by nearly 30% since the market peaked in 2006, rents have actually risen by an average of 11% over the same period. Federal rental assistance programs have helped, but funding for them has fallen far behind the growing need.
One indication of the deepening crisis is that in 2009 about 325,000 children lived at least part of a year in a homeless shelter, up 12% since 2007.
“Two or three times as many children were homeless if you count those living temporarily in hotels or motels, doubled-up with other families, or on the street…separate data from the (U.S.) Department of Education suggest,” the CBPP reports.
Where workers run the show
By Will Parry
The United Steelworkers, the nation’s largest industrial union, has announced a potentially historic collaboration with the world’s largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.
The objective of the union is to bypass the greed of financial speculators and private capital and take the burning issue of job creation into its own hands.
The union has the world’s most experienced cooperative enterprise as its partner. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) has championed economic democracy and social entrepeneurship for more than 50 years.
Begun in 1956 in a small shop making kerosene stoves, MCC has been built into a network of some 260 cooperatives employing 100,000 worker-owners in 40 countries. Its products include high-tech machine tools, motor buses, household appliances, and a chain of supermarkets. Its annual sales exceed 15 billion Euros.
The Steelworkers are proceeding cautiously.
“We’ve made a commitment here,” said Rob Witherell of the union’s Organizing Department. “But for that reason, we want to make sure we get it right, even if it means starting slowly and on a modest scale.”
The union is seeking viable small businesses in appropriate sectors whose owners are interested in cashing out. At the same time, it is lining up financial institutions – credit unions and cooperative banks – with a focus on productive investment.
“It can get complicated,” Witherell said. “Not only do you have to fund the buyout, but you also have to figure out how to lend the workers the money to buy in, so they can repay it at a reasonable rate over a period of time and still make a decent living.”
Once the start-up problems are resolved and workers begin running an enterprise they own, the payoff is dramatic. The worker-owners cannot be fired. In regular assemblies, they hire and fire their managers, as well as set the general policies that govern the firm’s direction.
A worker-owner can “cash out” upon retirement, but his or her share cannot be sold. It is available only for purchase by a new worker-owner at the enterprise.
The workers also determine the income spread between the lowest-paid worker and the highest-paid manager. In the U.S. today, that ratio is 400 or more to one. In Mondragon cooperatives, the ratio currently averages about 4.5 to one.
The core Mondragon model starts with a school, a credit union, and a shop, all owned by the workers. These three basic components enable the cooperative to rely on its own resources for financing and training.
Mondragon principles are already being applied in Cleveland, a city hard hit by the current economic crisis. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly “green” operation, is up and running in the depressed Glenville neighborhood, where the median income is about $18,000.
The laundry is the first of ten major cooperative enterprises in the works in Cleveland. A second green, employee-owned enterprise – Ohio Cooperative Solar – opened last fall. It is undertaking large-scale installations of solar panels on the roofs of Cleveland’s largest non-profit health, education and municipal buildings. Its role in the city’s weatherization program ensures its worker-members year-round employment.
As the Steelworkers launch cooperative enterprises, they will insist that the Mondragon formula be modified in one respect: The worker-owners will be organized into the union, and the union will negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the management team.
“What we are announcing,” said Josu Ugarte, president of Mondragon International, “represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complementary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”
Somebody has to check banker-capitalist greed. Somebody has to create living-wage union jobs. Somebody has to plant the flag of worker-controlled industry in U.S. soil.
Stay tuned. The Steelworkers are serious.
The United Steelworkers, the nation’s largest industrial union, has announced a potentially historic collaboration with the world’s largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.
The objective of the union is to bypass the greed of financial speculators and private capital and take the burning issue of job creation into its own hands.
The union has the world’s most experienced cooperative enterprise as its partner. The Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) has championed economic democracy and social entrepeneurship for more than 50 years.
Begun in 1956 in a small shop making kerosene stoves, MCC has been built into a network of some 260 cooperatives employing 100,000 worker-owners in 40 countries. Its products include high-tech machine tools, motor buses, household appliances, and a chain of supermarkets. Its annual sales exceed 15 billion Euros.
The Steelworkers are proceeding cautiously.
“We’ve made a commitment here,” said Rob Witherell of the union’s Organizing Department. “But for that reason, we want to make sure we get it right, even if it means starting slowly and on a modest scale.”
The union is seeking viable small businesses in appropriate sectors whose owners are interested in cashing out. At the same time, it is lining up financial institutions – credit unions and cooperative banks – with a focus on productive investment.
“It can get complicated,” Witherell said. “Not only do you have to fund the buyout, but you also have to figure out how to lend the workers the money to buy in, so they can repay it at a reasonable rate over a period of time and still make a decent living.”
Once the start-up problems are resolved and workers begin running an enterprise they own, the payoff is dramatic. The worker-owners cannot be fired. In regular assemblies, they hire and fire their managers, as well as set the general policies that govern the firm’s direction.
A worker-owner can “cash out” upon retirement, but his or her share cannot be sold. It is available only for purchase by a new worker-owner at the enterprise.
The workers also determine the income spread between the lowest-paid worker and the highest-paid manager. In the U.S. today, that ratio is 400 or more to one. In Mondragon cooperatives, the ratio currently averages about 4.5 to one.
The core Mondragon model starts with a school, a credit union, and a shop, all owned by the workers. These three basic components enable the cooperative to rely on its own resources for financing and training.
Mondragon principles are already being applied in Cleveland, a city hard hit by the current economic crisis. The Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly “green” operation, is up and running in the depressed Glenville neighborhood, where the median income is about $18,000.
The laundry is the first of ten major cooperative enterprises in the works in Cleveland. A second green, employee-owned enterprise – Ohio Cooperative Solar – opened last fall. It is undertaking large-scale installations of solar panels on the roofs of Cleveland’s largest non-profit health, education and municipal buildings. Its role in the city’s weatherization program ensures its worker-members year-round employment.
As the Steelworkers launch cooperative enterprises, they will insist that the Mondragon formula be modified in one respect: The worker-owners will be organized into the union, and the union will negotiate a collective bargaining agreement with the management team.
“What we are announcing,” said Josu Ugarte, president of Mondragon International, “represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complementary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”
Somebody has to check banker-capitalist greed. Somebody has to create living-wage union jobs. Somebody has to plant the flag of worker-controlled industry in U.S. soil.
Stay tuned. The Steelworkers are serious.
Fighting to regulate the big boys
By Steve Dzielak
Most U.S. Senators win arguments or get legislation passed relying on horse-trading, muscle and bluster. Not Maria Cantwell. The junior senator from Washington State does her homework, then fights for what she believes is right.
Ask smart people in DC who is the toughest, best-informed Congressional combatant for effective financial regulation. Few will say House and Senate financial committee chairs Barney Frank or Chris Dodd. The answer you’re more likely to get is the junior senator from the Evergreen State.
Dismayed by what she’s seen to date, Cantwell continues to push the Obama administration for systemic financial reforms. "If there are people at the Treasury and the White House who think that the way to get the economy going again is not to close these loopholes, that’s disgusting," she said.
During last year’s committee work on healthcare, Cantwell salvaged some of the cost-containment goals of the doomed public option. Her amendment, modeled on a Washington State program, allowed all states to negotiate the terms of insurance coverage for those eligible for subsidies, and for others buying in on their own. But the most lasting impact of her diligent approach to public policy is likely to come from her fight for the regulation of derivatives— those abstract securities based mathematically on real economic transactions.
"There's a few people in the administration,” Cantwell said at a hearing in May, “who are slow-walking, thinking we're all going to forget about this regulatory reform that is needed, I can assure you that we're not going to forget."
Cantwell, 51, grew up in Indiana. The daughter of a Congressional staffer, she moved to Seattle and at 28 won a seat in the state legislature. In 1992, she became the first Democrat in 40 years to win in the First Congressional District.
She lost her seat in the 1994 Republican landslide. Offered the top marketing job in RealNetworks, she was quickly promoted to executive vice president.
She resigned in 2000 to make her Senate run, beating incumbent Slade Gorton by 2,229 votes. Serving on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at a time of soaring electricity rates, she mastered the details of electric-power regulation, which led her directly to derivatives abuses.
In 2007 and 2008, when oil prices were spiking, Cantwell led an effort to have regulatory agencies investigate market-rigging. Many industry pros scoffed at the idea, but Cantwell continued to raise the issue, and in 2009, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) concluded that she was right.
A few months into the Obama presidency, Cantwell pressed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to empower the CFTC to monitor trades to curb their volatility. Geithner balked, but Cantwell pressured the White House. One observer said she “played hardball like few liberals do anymore.”
In May, Geithner made explicit commitments to give new powers to the CFTC, but as Cantwell later said, “It’s not unheard of in D.C. to feign a commitment and then not fight hard to have the legislation pass.” Sure enough, in June, the Treasury Department released a white paper weaker than Geithner’s earlier commitments, and the financial reform legislation Geithner sent to Congress in August was weaker yet.
The loopholes were widened further by the House Financial Services Committee and were not resisted by the administration “The Treasury Department should be ashamed of themselves,” Cantwell said.
“Treasury has gone back on their original commitment,” Cantwell says. “The battle lines have been drawn.”
Most U.S. Senators win arguments or get legislation passed relying on horse-trading, muscle and bluster. Not Maria Cantwell. The junior senator from Washington State does her homework, then fights for what she believes is right.
Ask smart people in DC who is the toughest, best-informed Congressional combatant for effective financial regulation. Few will say House and Senate financial committee chairs Barney Frank or Chris Dodd. The answer you’re more likely to get is the junior senator from the Evergreen State.
Dismayed by what she’s seen to date, Cantwell continues to push the Obama administration for systemic financial reforms. "If there are people at the Treasury and the White House who think that the way to get the economy going again is not to close these loopholes, that’s disgusting," she said.
During last year’s committee work on healthcare, Cantwell salvaged some of the cost-containment goals of the doomed public option. Her amendment, modeled on a Washington State program, allowed all states to negotiate the terms of insurance coverage for those eligible for subsidies, and for others buying in on their own. But the most lasting impact of her diligent approach to public policy is likely to come from her fight for the regulation of derivatives— those abstract securities based mathematically on real economic transactions.
"There's a few people in the administration,” Cantwell said at a hearing in May, “who are slow-walking, thinking we're all going to forget about this regulatory reform that is needed, I can assure you that we're not going to forget."
Cantwell, 51, grew up in Indiana. The daughter of a Congressional staffer, she moved to Seattle and at 28 won a seat in the state legislature. In 1992, she became the first Democrat in 40 years to win in the First Congressional District.
She lost her seat in the 1994 Republican landslide. Offered the top marketing job in RealNetworks, she was quickly promoted to executive vice president.
She resigned in 2000 to make her Senate run, beating incumbent Slade Gorton by 2,229 votes. Serving on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at a time of soaring electricity rates, she mastered the details of electric-power regulation, which led her directly to derivatives abuses.
In 2007 and 2008, when oil prices were spiking, Cantwell led an effort to have regulatory agencies investigate market-rigging. Many industry pros scoffed at the idea, but Cantwell continued to raise the issue, and in 2009, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) concluded that she was right.
A few months into the Obama presidency, Cantwell pressed Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to empower the CFTC to monitor trades to curb their volatility. Geithner balked, but Cantwell pressured the White House. One observer said she “played hardball like few liberals do anymore.”
In May, Geithner made explicit commitments to give new powers to the CFTC, but as Cantwell later said, “It’s not unheard of in D.C. to feign a commitment and then not fight hard to have the legislation pass.” Sure enough, in June, the Treasury Department released a white paper weaker than Geithner’s earlier commitments, and the financial reform legislation Geithner sent to Congress in August was weaker yet.
The loopholes were widened further by the House Financial Services Committee and were not resisted by the administration “The Treasury Department should be ashamed of themselves,” Cantwell said.
“Treasury has gone back on their original commitment,” Cantwell says. “The battle lines have been drawn.”
Two added to PSARA Executive Board
The PSARA Executive Board approved the appointment of two new members to the Board at the September meeting. These appointees will stand for election for a two year term at the December membership meeting,
Vivian Lee is a retired Senior Manager for women's health programs in federal Region X of the US Public Health Service. She now volunteers at the UW promoting diversity and scholarship fundraising. She is active in the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization for health screening in underserved populations. She is active in social justice organizations and in organizations that address issues of disparity.
Mary Anderson is currently working as a Daily Money Manager and Advocate for older adults and disabled persons. She worked as a litigation paralegal for 12 years. She currently represents PSARA on the Advisory Council to Seattle/King County Aging and Disability Services.
Steve Dzielak resigned from the Board as he is moving to the east coast to be of assistance to a friend. PSARA is grateful to Steve for his years of dedicated service.
Vivian Lee is a retired Senior Manager for women's health programs in federal Region X of the US Public Health Service. She now volunteers at the UW promoting diversity and scholarship fundraising. She is active in the Mary Mahoney Professional Nurses Organization for health screening in underserved populations. She is active in social justice organizations and in organizations that address issues of disparity.
Mary Anderson is currently working as a Daily Money Manager and Advocate for older adults and disabled persons. She worked as a litigation paralegal for 12 years. She currently represents PSARA on the Advisory Council to Seattle/King County Aging and Disability Services.
Steve Dzielak resigned from the Board as he is moving to the east coast to be of assistance to a friend. PSARA is grateful to Steve for his years of dedicated service.
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