On the picket line

BART workers vote to strike

The two major Bay Area Rapid Transit unions—Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1555 and Service Employees International Union Local 1021—and one other, with a total of 2,800 workers, voted to strike the week of July 13. Negotiations continued over the July 25-26 weekend, with July 30 set as the final contract date.

Management has offered a four-year contract with $100 million in cuts that would force the workers to bear the brunt of the economic crisis: no raises for three years, unpaid days off and a hike in benefit contributions. The unions have offered a counterproposal that will save $60 million in the first two years of a two-year contract and $760 million over 25 years. The savings comes from postponing lifetime medical benefits for both workers and management from five to 15 years.

CBS5.com reported July 24 that management does not plan to impose a contract if an agreement isn’t reached by July 30, four months after contract talks began, though several sources report such threats. Don’t make the workers pay!

CWA Midwest agreement with AT&T

Nearly 20,000 members of Communications Workers of America District 4 in the Midwest reached a tentative three-year agreement with AT&T on July 15. The agreement includes pay and pension increases in each contract year, including cost of living adjustments, but an increase in some out-of-pocket costs for health care. However, the District 4 bargaining committee notes that “new company-funded health care initiatives and wage increases will result in overall improvement in members’ standard of living by thousands of dollars each year.” In addition, workers will have new transfer opportunities and other employment security gains.

Now the fight continues in other CWA districts whose contracts also expired on April 4 and whose members also voted to strike, including AT&T East, Southwest, West, Legacy T and other AT&T units, as well as AT&T Southeast, where bargaining started July 20. The billion-dollar corporation needs to ante up generous contracts for all its workers!

Midwest teaching staff win rights

More than 23,000 teaching staff at the University of Wisconsin will soon be able to negotiate union contracts, reports the Wisconsin branch of the American Federation of Teachers. On June 29 Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle signed the state’s biennial budget, which included a provision extending bargaining rights to UW faculty, academic staff and research assistants.

This victory ends a 40-year campaign by UW academic workers for the right to join a union. Also on June 29, about 430 instructors and adjunct faculty at Western Michigan University voted to be represented by the Professional Instructors Organization, an AFT affiliate. No wonder they voted union; many WMU instructors have not received a raise in 12 years!

SF Labor Council shows international solidarity

The San Francisco Labor Council expressed international solidarity on July 13 when it voted for two resolutions. One supports House bill 2404 that requires that “not later than Dec. 31, 2009, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a report outlining the U.S. exit strategy for U.S. military forces in Afghanistan” and calls on all California congresspeople and all Bay Area labor councils “to push for an imminent, rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops and bases from Afghanistan.”

The second resolution “denounces the illegal military coup d’etat against duly elected president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya and calls for restoration of the legitimate government headed by Mr. Zelaya” and supports a foreign policy that avoids “adverse harm to our sisters and brothers in Latin America.”