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The Community Supports the Employee Free Choice Act
Click here to sign on to support the Employee Free Choice Act or click here to sign up your organization as an endorser. This morning Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and This Land is Their Land, moderated a press event and roundtable discussion on low-wage workers and the effects of the economic crisis on Capitol Hill. Other speakers included Senator Sherrod Brown (Ohio), AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, President of the of Institute for Women's Policy Research Heidi Hartmann, President of the National Organization for Women Kim Gandy, Ai-Jen Poo of Domestic Workers United, and Joanna Moon, a dealer at Trump Plaza casino who has been trying to win a first union contract with the UAW for two years. Read more about the panelists and see photos from the event here. Following up on the discussion, community leaders from Jobs with Justice in six states gathered to lobby their Senators for the Employee Free Choice Act. Leaders from Maine, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Virginia, and Missouri delivered the message to their own Senators and other Senators that the community cares about workers' rights and wants to pass the Employee Free Choice Act! Moderator: Barbara Ehrenreich. Journalist, historian, and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of fourteen A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, Ehrenreich has been a columnist at the New York Times and Time magazine. In 2004, she received the Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Prize for Creative Citizenship, given annually to an American who challenges the status quo “through distinctive, courageous, imaginative, socially responsible work of significance.” Ehrenreich’s next book, forthcoming from Metropolitan Books in the winter of 2007, is a history of the celebration of communal joy. Ehrenreich lives near Key West, Florida. Speakers: Steve Husson works for Food and Medicine, a Jobs with Justice local affiliate in Bangor, ME. He was a truck driver at DHL and has experienced first-hand why workers need the Employee Free Choice Act. He is also the author of a recent report titled “Where Are They Now? Stories of outsourced manufacturing workers in Eastern Maine trying to make a living in a largely non-union service economy.” Former-DHL driver during organizing campaign Ai-jen Poo is the Lead Organizer for Domestic Workers United, an organization of nannies, housekeepers and elderly companions in NY. She is on the Coordinating Committee of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. Heidi Hartmann is the President of the Washington-based Institute for Women's Policy Research, a scientific research organization that she founded in 1987 to meet the need for women-centered, policy-oriented research. Dr. Hartmann is also a Research Professor at The George Washington University. Dr. Hartmann is a co-author of Survival at the Bottom: The Income Packages of Low-Income Families with Children, and many other reports. Joanna Moon has worked at Trump Plaza for the past 25 years. Even though Johanna and her co-workers at Trump Plaza casino voted overwhelmingly to form a union with the UAW and prevailed against a company challenge against the vote, management refused to bargain a contract. So the workers filed an action against the company with the National Labor Relations Board, which ordered Trump to negotiate. But the corporation continues to delay, and two years after forming a union, the workers still have no contract. Kim Gandy is serving her second term as president of the National Organization for Women, elected by the group's grassroots members in 2001 and again in 2005. She has served as a national officer of NOW since 1987 and in state, local and regional leadership positions since 1973. Kim currently serves on the National Workers Rights Board. Gandy also is president of the NOW Foundation, chair of NOW's Political Action Committees, and serves as the principal spokesperson for all three entities. Gandy oversees NOW's multi-issue agenda, which includes: advancing reproductive freedom, promoting diversity and ending racism, stopping violence against women, winning LGBT rights, ensuring economic justice, ending sex discrimination and achieving equality for women. Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has a long history of standing up for low-wage workers and for all workers, most recently representing Ohio in the US Senate. From his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement to his book "Myths of Free Trade," Sherrod is building a bipartisan coalition for a new trade policy to strengthen America's middle class, to provide opportunities for American manufacturing, and to protect workers rights, the environment, and product and food safety. Senator Brown has also served on the National Workers Rights Board. Arlene Holt Baker’s experience as a union and grassroots organizer spans more than 30 years. On September 21, 2007, she was approved unanimously as Executive Vice President by the AFL-CIO Executive Council, becoming the first African American to be elected to one of the federation’s three highest offices and the highest ranking African-American woman in the union movement. In her position, Holt Baker builds on her legacy of inspiring activism and reaching out to diverse communities to support the needs and aspirations of working people. |
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Today, April 22, 2009, delegations of Jobs with Justice leaders from Colorado, Indiana, Maine, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are in Washington, DC to 
The panel discussed the Employee Free Choice Act and how its passage would directly impact their lives. Participant Steve Husson interviewed over 100 former mill workers in Eastern Maine. He spoke about the changes they have experienced as they struggle to adjust from a unionized industry to a non-union, low wage service sector as well as his own experiences as a worker trying to organize a union at DHL. 