Union members, mom-and-pop store owners and the soft-drink kings came together in support Monday to protest the proposed 2-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks, which Mayor Nutter says can help close more than half of the city’s estimated $150 million deficit for the 2011 fiscal year.

http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/news-and-opinion/Protestors-Soda-Tax-Will-Destroy-City-89112582.html

Members of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Pilgrimage for Peace and Justice, a coalition of social justice groups, will walk through Winston-Salem, N.C., today to demand fair treatment for tobacco farm workers who suffer low wages and poor working conditions.

For nearly three years, FLOC has asked Susan Ivey, CEO of Reynolds American, the parent of R.J. Reynolds, the nation’s second-largest tobacco company, to meet and work toward ending the abuses that occur in the tobacco fields. To date, Reynolds has refused to even speak with members of FLOC.

Although Reynolds does not directly employ the farm workers on its contract farms, Reynolds sets the terms with its contract growers and profits from the farm workers’ labor.

The nation’s tobacco farm workers live in poverty, and many suffer from nicotine poisoning and exposure to deadly pesticides and harsh conditions in the fields, according to FLOC. In recent years nine field workers have died in North Carolina tobacco fields, most of them due to heat stroke, the union says.

Says FLOC President Baldemar Velásquez:

The fact that farm workers still live in extreme poverty and are vulnerable to many work-related illnesses is not only a tragedy but a moral disgrace hidden from the eyes of most Americans. FLOC will campaign until Reynolds Tobacco commits to joining us in addressing this national shame.

In 2008, Velásquez spent a week working as a field laborer at a North Carolina farm to see firsthand the conditions of tobacco workers. Read his column on his experience here. For more information on the Reynolds campaign, click here.

For more than 20 years, the Pilgrimage for Peace and Justice, an organization of some 30-plus faith groups and allies, have sponsored a 100-mile walk through cities in North Carolina in support of social justice issues.

Just because health reform has been signed into law doesn’t mean the falsehoods have stopped.

(Seattle, WA) As a part of its Puget Sound public relations blitz, Waste Management (WMI) has been tossing around figures, claiming first that area sanitation workers are paid on average $77,000 annually and that the union is holding out for wage increases of 25 percent. Now WMI has inflated its own numbers, asserting that the company is offering to pay union garbage drivers $100,000 a year.

“WMI is grossly inflating these numbers in an effort to obscure the real issue at hand – the company’s disregard for the dangers that garbage haulers face every day to protect the public health,” said Teamsters Local 174 Secretary-Treasurer Rick Hicks. “The bottom line is that the Union is proposing the same economic package that a local company, CleanScapes, already offers sanitation workers who perform the same work.”

According to Hicks, sanitation workers at WMI regularly report company retaliation for workplace injuries and intimidation for reporting safety hazards. They say they are discouraged from filing L & I workers’ compensation claims and forced to work mandatory overtime.

“A sanitation worker is more likely to die on the job than firefighters or police officers,” said Local 117 Secretary-Treasurer Tracey A. Thompson. “Workers are regularly exposed to rotting meat, maggots, syringes, asbestos, and blood products. In the fifth most dangerous job in the United States, workers see WMI’s practices as a threat to their own personal safety and to the safety of the communities they serve.”

Monica Zebley, a garbage driver at a WMI facility in Kirkland, is one of countless sanitation workers in the region who have been hurt on the job.

"After getting injured, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t sleep at night,” Zebley said. “When I went to management to report the injury, they asked me to quit. I had to get a lawyer just to file a claim with L & I.”

“A lot of our drivers are working 50-60 hours a week, which is usually forced overtime – that increases our chances for accidents,” said garbage driver Roderick Holmes. “We just want to make it home each night, with 10 fingers and 10 toes, to our families.”

Thompson and Hicks say that before the threat of a labor dispute, WMI was unwilling to hire new drivers, electing instead to force garbage and recycling drivers to work 10 to 12 hours a day.

“Under normal circumstances, hiring new drivers would help boost the local economy and take the pressure off of these workers. Now with a looming strike, WMI would rather exploit the local labor market to find temporary strikebreakers than keep decent jobs in this region,” Thompson said.

Hicks points out that the cities in our region, as the customers of waste companies, have a responsibility not just to make sure that the waste is picked up, but also to ensure that the companies doing the work are performing it with experienced drivers who will not pose a danger to our communities.

“Importing strikebreakers from out-of-state and hiring temporary replacements does not fulfill that requirement,” Hicks said.

Death and taxes. For most of us, those are the two sure things in life. But not if you work on Wall Street.According to news reports this week, even though our tax dollars are still being funneled into their coffers, big Wall Street banks like…

Local 866 represented employees at the Chantrey Salon, located in a Bamberger’s department store in Newark, N.J. In this photograph, Doris Emmons, the chief steward at Chantrey, is preparing to comb out a customer’s hair after drying. January 1965

Three members of Local 832 in New York City are shown being sworn in to new jobs of responsibility after their promotions. Taking part in the ceremony are (left to right): New York City Sanitation Commissioner Frank J. Lucia; Elsie A. Knight, Vice President of Local 832, and the newly promoted members—Esther Sperling, Margaret Holden and Mollie Grossbach. March 1965

Central Florida JwJ joined the Central Florida AFL-CIO as part of a nationwide effort to demand good jobs and a stop to bank bailouts. On Friday March 26th, a group of 30 people started leafletting in front of a Wachovia Bank located on Wall Street in Downtown Orlando. As people leaflettted, a representative was there on behalf of big bankers to thank customers for their hard earned tax dollars in bankers’ pockets. At the end, a delegation walked into the local branch to deliver the Crook of the Month Award.

The Teamsters Training and Development Department will conduct a three-day Teamsters Leadership Academy (TLA) on advanced bargaining strategies for Teamster representatives on June 8-10 in Denver.

Last year, we ran a story about Peggy Robertson of Colorado. Robertsons’ health insurer, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth, had required that she be sterilized to receive health insurance. Peggy later testified before a Senate HELP subcommittee on …