49th Annual Bean Feed, May 28

The South Central Federation of Labor’s Committee on Political Education will hold its 49th annual COPE Bean Feed on Wednesday, May 28 at 6:00 p.m. at the Madison Labor Temple, 1602 S. Park Street. For only $4.50, you get all the beans, hot dogs and potato salad you can eat. The meal will be served from 6:00 to 7:15 p.m. The proceeds pay for SCFL COPE activities such as phone banks and mailings to unionists in Dane, Dodge, Columbia, Jefferson, Sauk and Iowa counties.

Labor Tells Phil Woodman: Rethink Unionbusting!

Area union leaders are taking issue with Phil Woodman after learning the Big Box grocery retailer has engaged a Vermont-based union busting law firm. According to UFCW Local 1473, Woodman is using the firm to deny his workers the benefits of union representation, a benefit they’ve enjoyed for over thirty years.

Grubb, Quist & Associates, a firm Phil Woodman met up with at a “union avoidance” seminar, is spearheading an effort to decertify the union in the Madison, Janesville, Beloit and Onalaska stores.

“Woodmans has good prices but it also has good union people as employees,” wrote Dave Poklinkoski in a letter to Phil Woodman, March 17. “Now we hear that you are engaging a union-busting law firm to carve up their union-earned wages and benefits.”

Poklinkoski, the president of IBEW Local 2304 which represents workers at MG&E, offered Woodman the following advice: “Take the money spent on union busting attorneys and cut your losses, sooner rather than later. Take that money and invest it in the people who make your company ‘better,' as your commercial claims.” Poklinkoski is one of many union supporters to express such sentiments recently. Read more ...

New DVD on Madison's Labor History Available

As work progresses on the Madison Labor History Mural project, the South Central Federation of Labor has released a new DVD, Madison Labor: Building a City, Building a Movement. The DVD includes The Early Years (30 min.), originally produced in 1985, and Madison: A Union City, 1985-2005 (15 min.) which brings Madison’s labor history up to date. Read more about the Madison Labor History Mural project and the DVD, which is available for $25, here.

Local 39’s Contract Halts CUNA Layoffs

Labor relations between CUNA Mutual and OPEIU Local 39 took an unexpected turn for the better leading to a new four-year contract with improved job security language which union members approved by a 382-171 vote, April 21. Until the recent turn of events, job cuts and outsourcing had been spiraling out of control at the company, one of Madison’s largest employers. The new agreement establishes a one-year moratorium on layoffs at CUNA Mutual, and a voluntary buy-out plan that will allow the company to cut labor costs without wreaking havoc with people’s lives. Read more ...

Woodman’s Strategy: More Fear and Deceit

Here's the latest report from UFCW Local 1473: Our Union Sisters & Brothers employed at Woodman's Food Markets in Janesville, Beloit and both Madison stores are being subjected to a continuous onslaught of shameful and deceitful tactics to turn honest, hard working members against each other and their Union. In an attempt to deceive the Woodman's employees, supervisors and managers are pressuring and lying to workers on the clock in order to file another anti-union petition. Read more ...

More ULP Charges Piled Upon Superior Linens

Another round of unfair labor practice charges have been filed against Superior Linen, adding to its extended record of denying workers their organizing rights at two industrial laundries in Madison and Cudahy. The new charges allege that the employer held captive audience meetings where workers were threatened with the loss of wages and benefits because several had provided previous testimony to the National Labor Relations Labor (NLRB) about the company’s abuses. Further, the company continued to intimidate and isolate union supporters, accusing them of “lying” in testimony they had provided to NLRB. Read more ...

Labor Scores Local Wins in April 1 Vote

Despite a major disappointment in the statewide race for Wisconsin Supreme Court, organized labor fared well in local races in the spring elections, April 1. Labor-supported candidates won in 13 of 17 races for the Dane County Board of Supervisors, adding one seat to a progressive majority. Labor’s effort also shined in Dodge County ... Read more ...

SCFL’s Dodge & Jefferson Chapters Growing Labor

BY JIM CAVANAUGH, SCFL PRESIDENT | The merger of the South Central Federation of Labor with the labor councils in Dodge and Jefferson Counties is off to a promising start. Early on, delegates to the Dodge County Central Labor Council determined that creating a Dodge County Chapter of SCFL, as provided by the SCFL Constitution, was the best way to maintain and increase labor’s presence in that county. Jefferson County union leaders recently came to the same conclusion and have scheduled a meeting in May to pursue this objective. Read more ...

Konopacki Book Depicts History of American Empire

By Al Hart and Gary Huck, UE News | Madison-based labor and political cartoonist Mike Konopacki – close friend and collaborator of United Electrical's cartoonist Gary Huck – has produced a brilliant book-length graphic adaptation of a major portion of Howard Zinn’s classic A People’s History of the United States. Created in collaboration with Zinn and edited by labor journalist Kathy Wilkes, Konopacki’s A People’s History of the United States tells, in pictures and text, the story of U.S. government and corporate policies of controlling other people's countries …. Read more ...

Corporate Tax ‘Heaven’ Hurts State’s Workers

By Phil Neuenfeldt, Wis. AFL-CIO Sec.-Treas. | Wisconsin has many traditions that we enjoy – tailgate parties, Labor Day picnics, community festivals and fish fries. But there’s a new tradition that we don’t enjoy at all: the state budget debates that ask which public services to cut and by how much. It’s a lose-lose political battle that pits senior citizens against kindergarten pupils, working people against the unemployed, technical college students against small business owners. In the end, we all lose because a strong economy requires quality public structures and a skilled workforce. Fortunately, some state leaders are looking to modernize how the state collects revenue, which will make the tax system fairer to working families. Read more ...

McCain Revealed: Not Ready To Fix Our Economy

Working men and women across the country will tell you that our economy is in trouble. The mortgage crisis has resulted in record foreclosure filings, health care costs are skyrocketing and families are working harder than ever to make ends meet. It’s a widely accepted fact that we’re headed into a recession. But John McCain has not shown any real interest in correcting this situation. Read more ...

AFL-CIO Responds to McCain Economic Plan

BY JOHN SWEENEY, AFL-CIO PRESIDENT | Sen. John McCain's economic proposals badly missed the mark, offering little more than a repackaging of President Bush's failed economic agenda. For months, Sen. McCain has ignored the economic crisis facing working families, opting instead to join President Bush in burying his head in the sand while hoping our economy magically improves. Read more ...

Medical Tourism?! Let’s Get Serious!

By David Newby, Wis. AFL-CIO President | “Consumer-driven health care”, “medical tourism” – remember those words. Because this is the future of health care in this country if the conservatives get their way. Consumer-driven health insurance is high-deductible insurance with incentives to “shop” for the best health care deals we can find, to save money. And now we hear that these health care “plans” will soon want us to shop for health care not in our own communities but in low-wage countries abroad for the best deals! Read more ...

AFL-CIO Links CEO Pay With Mortgage Crisis

Brand new CEO pay numbers released by the AFL-CIO last month on its Executive PayWatch website, (www.paywatch.org) show how pay packages for top executives at financial companies helped create the sub-prime mortgage crisis. The PayWatch website includes a comprehensive database of scandalous overall CEO pay figures at American companies. Read more ...

From past issues of Union Labor News ...

Woodman’s Hires Firm To Try to Bust Union

Union busting efforts and possible violations of federal labor law at five Woodman’s foods locations in Janesville, Beloit, Madison and Onalaska are being challenged by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1473. On January 9, at the urging of union busting consultants hired by Woodman’s, a group of employees filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that seeks to eliminate workers’ union representation. UFCW Local 1473 considers the filing (which is possibly defective) a management-driven attempt to break the union and the solidarity of over one thousand of its members. Read more ...

Carry on State’s Legacy, Pass Healthy Wisconsin

By Adam Thompson, Progressive States Network | Wisconsin has a storied history of firsts when it comes to enacting sorely needed reform. From women's suffrage and equal rights, to worker's compensation benefits, to conservation of natural resources, Wisconsin has always been at the cutting edge of struggles for reform on issues of historic national importance. Now, as legislatures across the nation are grappling with the fast-growing crisis of unaffordable health care, Wisconsin has another chance to build on its rich tradition of national leadership. Last June, the State Senate passed a legislative package called Healthy Wisconsin that would have made Wisconsin the first state in the nation to guarantee quality and affordable health care for all of its residents. The bill was blocked in the conservative-led Assembly. Read more ...

Disaster Capitalism Wrecks World’s Economies

By Sue Vilbrandt, Union Labor News | For those feeling lost in corporate media spin, a new book by Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, provides a new narrative for our times and a lens through which to view this period in history. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is a fascinating, alarming and ambitious look at how American style free-market fundamentalism took root around the world, with crisis providing the point of entry. Taking readers through the last fifty years – from Chile and Argentina to Russia, from Poland and South Africa to Iraq and New Orleans – Klein demonstrates that, in the real world, freedom (meaning the free market) and democracy seldom march hand in hand. Read more ...

“Naomi Klein has written the most important and necessary book of her generation … so important and so revelatory a book that it could very well prove a catalyst, a watershed, a tipping point in the movement for economic and social justice.”

– Actor Tim Robbins

Dirty Linen Aired at St. Mary’s Opening

As St. Mary’s Hospital held an “open house” December 1 to dedicate its $170 million expansion, labor and faith activists gathered outside in the cold to decry the hospital’s “closed heart” attitude toward the working poor and uninsured.

More than fifty supporters turned out in near blizzard conditions to march around St. Mary’s perimeter behind a banner with the words: “Sweatshop Linens Used Here.”

Protesters pointed to the paltry amount of charity care that the hospital provided to the uninsured last year, saying it is less than 20 percent of the estimated $22 million in annual tax exemptions the hospital receives, supposedly to enable its charity care. Read more ...

La Hacienda Obstinate, WRC Sustains Boycott

On November 7, the Workers Rights Center along with the workers who were cheated out of wages and overtime pay at La Hacienda restaurant engaged in a mediation session with the restaurant’s owner and his legal representatives. Initially the restaurant regressed (twice) from an offer it had made at a previous mediation session in September. After several hours the restaurant moved off its regressive positions and moved forward a little, but not any where near making the workers whole. Read more ...

Bill Would Regulate ‘Independent Contractors’

A bill curbing the misuse of “independent contractors” in the construction industry, SB 228, passed in the State Senate by a wide margin last month and could become law as soon as early next year. Wisconsin hopes to join at least two other states – Illinois and Ohio – in tightening up regulations that allow companies to operate in what has essentially become a “black market” for construction labor. “This is a growing cancer on the industry, one that will lead us in a race to the bottom in wages and benefits – if it isn’t stopped,” says Mark Reihl, executive director of the Wisconsin State Council of Carpenters, a driving force behind the legislation. Read more ...

Real Debate Over Healthy Wisconsin Starts Now

While the Healthy Wisconsin health care reform plan is no longer in the State Budget, the debate over the proposal is just getting started. As battle lines are drawn, it becomes an argument between a free market, everyone-for-themselves ideology and one that recognizes that we-are-all-in-this-together.

Union Labor News attended one such debate between Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President David Newby and Assembly Rep. Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa), a registered nurse who chairs the Assembly’s Health and Health Care Reform Committee. The hour-long debate was held on the UW Campus, October 16, sponsored by a student chapter of the American Medical Association. Read more ...

Pols Report Abuses at Superior Health Linens

A new report has been released detailing significant problems at Superior Linen’s Madison plant ranging from health and safety problems to violations of the county's Living Wage Ordinance and workers' right to unionize. The report is a follow-up to a public panel convened by Dane County Board Chair Scott McDonell and County Executive Kathleen Falk, June 27, where politicians heard directly from the workers about conditions inside the plant. “I was very moved, both by the testimony and the courage shown by the workers who spoke out,” said County Board Chair Scott McDonell. Read more ...

Just What is SCFL and What Does it Do?

By Jim Cavanaugh, SCFL President | Since early December the national AFL-CIO, in what’s called the “New Alliance” process, has been working with Wisconsin labor leaders to study the Wisconsin labor movement and to make recommendations for structural changes that will improve its effectiveness. As I have participated in this process, it has become clear to me that many union leaders do not have a very thorough grasp of what labor councils do, or have the potential to do. Hence, I thought I’d summarize what the South Central Federation of Labor (SCFL) is and some of what it does. Read more ...

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The South Central Federation of Labor is offering four $1000 scholarships to union members or their children. Winners are determined by a lottery drawing. Scholarship applicants (or a parent or guardian) must belong to a union affiliated with the South Central Federation of Labor. Students attending an accredited two or four year college are eligible. The application deadline is Friday, July 18, 2008. Click here for the rules and application form.

This year the Dodge Chapter of South Central Federation of Labor is also offering two $500 scholarships based on merit to graduating high school seniors. The application deadline is May 1, 2008. Click here for rules and application form.