UNIONS BUILD COALITION TO COMBAT

STATE GOVERNMENTS’ AGGRESSION

By Mark Gruenberg

PAI Staff Writer

WASHINGTON (PAI)—A wide-ranging coalition of unions, including the Fire Fighters, AFSCME, the Service Employees, the Teachers and the AFL-CIO, have created a coalition to combat state governments’ aggression against workers, their collective bargaining rights, their job protections and their pensions.

The coalition is creating a national campaign to defend workers, both on the air – in cable and TV ads, radio and more – and in the streets through “boots on the ground,” Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger told Press Associates Union News Service.

The unions involved have pledged $30 million combined to the effort, he said. But more importantly they are working on plans to mobilize their members to counteract what the IAFF chief calls “a battle of proportions I haven’t seen in 40 years” -- the most coordinated, comprehensive anti-worker campaign in decades.

That anti-union anti-worker nationwide drive, state by state, is fueled by millions of dollars in Right Wing money, AFL-CIO staffer Naomi Walker, who tracks state and local developments, told the Fire Fighters Legislative Conference on March 14.

The Right Wing funders, she said, include the wealthy Koch brothers, a pair of Right Wing anti-union oil men from Kansas City who set up a front group called Americans for Prosperity. They also include Right-Wing foundations, the Chamber of Commerce, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the new fund-raising machine established by chief GOP Bush political operative Karl Rove, she added.

The Right Wing coalition’s first shot, though not the one that caught the nation’s eye in Wisconsin, came in Alabama in December, Schaitberger said. The legislature, at the behest of retiring GOP Gov. Bob Riley, jammed through a law in the waning days of the year banning unions of public workers from collecting dues by paycheck deductions.

A GOP-run Florida senate committee approved a similar bill March 14, 5-4.

Riley’s measure was aimed at cutting off funding for the Alabama Education Association, the state’s largest union and an influential force in the state Democratic Party. But the legislation hit all public worker unions, including IAFF’s state affiliate. “That cut off the income stream” of his union’s affiliate and others, Schaitberger said.

The Fire Fighters’ board, in an emergency session in January, quickly decided to make state and local action a top priority, he said. It also found out the Right Wing plan encompassed far more than one state and far more than one particular worker issue.

(continued)

Press Associates, Inc. (PAI) – 3/18/2011

(coalition, cont. –2)

Walker laid out the dimensions of the struggle in her speech to the Fire Fighters, after Schaitberger said earlier that unions are now tracking some 500 anti-worker measures of various shapes, sizes and descriptions in virtually every state.

Those include right-to-work bills filed by GOP legislators in Missouri, Minnesota, Indiana and 11 other states, “paycheck deception” bills in 21 states, and bills curbing or eliminating collective bargaining rights in 20 states, including Ohio and Wisconsin.

The coalition’s unions and their members are battling all of these and more, and on a wide range of fronts, Schaitberger said. They have some help, he told his 800 delegates earlier in the day: Democratic governors in Minnesota and Missouri have vowed to veto the right-to-work bills in their states. The Missouri bill is stalled.

And the IAFF heard from Ohio GOP state senator Bill Seitz, who refused to vote for GOP Gov. John Kasich’s bill stripping collective bargaining rights – and more – from all 400,000 state and local workers. State senate GOP leaders promptly bounced Seitz from the labor committee, to get Kasich’s bill passed. It won the full senate by one vote.

“Under the bill it is an unfair labor practice for public employees to communicate with or engage in direct dealing with public officials” about subjects of bargaining, or subjects that may be open to bargaining, Seitz said via a Skype broadcast. “That’s unconstitutional and frightening,” he added. Seitz said he’s lobbying his House GOP colleagues against it. He got a standing ovation.

So did one of the 14 Wisconsin Democratic state senators, Don Erpenbach, who decamped to Illinois for three weeks to try to prevent Right Wing GOP Gov. Scott Walker from stripping 200,000 workers there of their bargaining rights. Erpenbach, who spoke in person, got two rousing ovations from the crowd. He said Walker’s real aim, and that of his backers, is “a hostile corporate takeover” of the government: Smashing unions, privatizing prisons and schools and forcing neighbors to fire each other.

But even with help from some politicians, the union coalition faces a massive task in battling the coordinated Right Wing attack and mountain of anti-worker legislation, Schaitberger says. It also can’t be cast as just an union struggle, he warns.

“We’re trying to change our language – not talking about unions and our members, but talking about the threat” to everyone’s rights, he explains.

Otherwise, the Right Wing could divide the 87% of the workforce who are non-union from the union workers, he notes. “We’re trying to make it a fight not about dollars, but about people, that they’re trying to eliminate the middle class,” he told PAI.

“How do we decide which ones to contest? It’s like when we’re” responding to bad fires, Schaitberger told PAI. “You have to perform triage.” ###