1,000 CHOOSE CWA—In Bothell, Wash., 934 Cingular call center workers joined the Communications Workers of America through a majority sign-up Nov. 4. They will be represented by WashTech/CWA Local 37083 in Seattle. The workers are among the more than 12,000 who have joined CWA since August under an agreement reached by CWA and Cingular after the Cingular/AT&T merger. The company agreed to honor the workers’ freedom to form a union when a majority signs authorization cards. Also, 113 Delaware State Police civilian employees overwhelmingly voted to join CWA Local 1301.

ON PACE TO JUSTICE—Twenty-eight transportation workers at Pace University voted to join AFT Oct. 20. The workers drive campus shuttle buses on the New York state school’s several campuses.

SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS BOOST MEMBERSHIP 5 PERCENT—Some 680 school principals, assistant principals and supervisors joined the School Administrators in the past year, giving the union a 5 percent boost in membership. The new members formed five new locals: Educadores Puertorriquen en Acción/AFSA Local 105 in Puerto Rico, Texas School Administrators Network/Local 33, Oak Park (Mich.) Department Chairs Association/Local 104, Queen Anne’s County (Md.) Administrators and Supervisors Association/Local 102 and Thompson (Conn.) Association of School Administrators/Local 106.

SOLIDARITY CHARTERS READY TO ROLL—The AFL-CIO announced Nov. 16 it will implement its Solidarity Charter program to allow local unions affiliated with the Change to Win (CTW) coalition to join AFL-CIO state federations and central labor councils via “Solidarity Charters” and enjoy full voting and participation rights. The local unions will pay regular per capita tax on their membership just as other affiliated local unions do. Members of CTW unions may run for and hold all offices in the state and central labor councils. The Solidarity Charters are expected to strengthen the American union movement at the community level, where its organizing, political and issues mobilization programs are implemented. While some details must still be finalized with CTW national unions, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said he is confident remaining issues will be resolved.

DELPHI UNIONS SAY ‘NO DEAL’—The six unions representing 33,000 hourly workers at Delphi Corp. vehemently rejected the company’s latest “final offer” that would slash 24,000 jobs in three years and force workers to take huge pay cuts and accept major increases in health care costs. At the same time, Delphi, which declared bankruptcy Oct. 8, plans to reward some 500 “key employees” with up to 10 percent of the company’s stock and cash bonuses of $87.9 million. “Delphi’s contract proposal was not designed to be a framework for an agreement but a road map for confrontation,” said UAW President Ron Gettelfinger. “[The offer] is ridiculous and they know it’s ridiculous,” he said. The six unions—the UAW, IUE-CWA, United Steelworkers, Electrical Workers, Machinists and Operating Engineers—formed the Mobilizing@Delphi coalition to coordinate their fight against Delphi’s assault on working families and their communities. 

GM JOB CUTS ‘UNFAIR, DISAPPOINTING’—General Motors Corp.’s (GM’s) announcement Nov. 21 it will eliminate 30,000 jobs by 2007 “is not only extremely disappointing, unfair and unfortunate, it is devastating to many thousands of workers, their families and their communities,” said Gettelfinger, and UAW Vice President Richard Shoemaker, who heads the union’s GM department. “While GM’s continuing decline in market share is not the fault of workers or our communities, it is these groups that will suffer because of the actions,” they said. “Workers and their unions have worked hard to improve product quality and productivity at GM facilities in the United States and Canada, and these efforts have produced strong gains in both these critical areas,” Gettelfinger and Shoemaker said. “General Motors cannot shrink itself to prosperity. GM’s return to prosperity depends on it offering products that consumers find attractive, exciting and want to buy,” they said. 

TRACKING CORPORATE BEHAVIOR ONLINE—Working America, the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, added new features to its unique online database that gives the public easy access to information on corporate behavior. Job Tracker 2.0, with information on 60,000 corporations, allows workers to find out which companies in their communities export jobs and examine those employers’ track records on health and safety and workers’ rights. The database also provides the latest information on the salary of the company’s CEO. “You can’t get this range of information anywhere else even though so many corporate employers are failing our communities,” said Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. Job Tracker 2.0 is available at www.workingamerica.org/jobtracker.

WAL-MART FORMS LOBBYIST ARMY—While working families in Maryland are mobilizing to override Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s (R) veto of the Fair Share Health Care Act, The Washington Post reported Nov. 17 that Wal-Mart has hired a huge army of lobbyists to fight back. The legislation, vetoed in May, would require large employers in the state to spend 8 percent of their payroll on worker health care costs or contribute to a special health care fund. The bill passed both houses of the state legislature but fell one vote short of the three-fifths majority needed to override a veto. “They’ve hired the largest cadre of lobbyists in recent history in Annapolis to try to influence this legislation. It really comes down to whether the legislature is going to succumb to the money and special interests,” said House Speaker Michael Busch (D). Working families around the nation will fight to win Fair Share Health Care Acts when most state legislatures resume business in January. Also on state agendas is the Health Care Disclosure Act, which would expose corporations such as Wal-Mart that push workers to use taxpayer-funded health care by paying low wages and providing unaffordable health benefits. For more information, visit www.walmartcostsyou.com.

MORE FOR US, NONE FOR YOU—The Republican-controlled Congress, which has blocked a raise in the minimum wage three times this year, voted Nov. 18 to give itself its eighth pay raise since the minimum wage was last raised in 1997. While millions of minimum wage workers continue to struggle on $5.15 an hour, the congressional pay raise, approved as part of the fiscal year 2006 Transportation-Treasury Appropriations bill, will give lawmakers a $3,100-a-year pay hike. Minimum wage workers who work full-time earn just $10,700 a year. Members of Congress, though, will be making $31,600 a year more than they did in 1997. Congress is home for a long Thanksgiving Day recess. Call your lawmakers’ local offices and send them a message that you are outraged by their priorities. You can find the local office numbers for your U.S. representative at www.house.gov and for your senators at www.senate.gov. Want more outrage? Read on....

BUDGET CUTS PASS, TAX BREAKS STALL—U.S. House Republican leaders twisted just enough arms shortly after midnight Nov. 18 to eke out a 217–215 vote win for a Bush administration-backed $50 billion package of spending cuts in vital working family programs. But House leaders postponed until December the House vote on a $70 billion package of tax cuts largely for the wealthy, failing to pass the measure as planned before the Thanksgiving recess. The Senate approved its version of the tax cut bill in another after-midnight vote Nov. 18. On Nov. 11, Republican leaders postponed a vote on the House spending cuts because they didn’t have the votes, but a week’s worth of arm-twisting and a few minor changes produced the win. The House bill would cut billions from Medicaid health services for poor children and long-term care patients, student loan programs, child support enforcement, foster care and Social Security disability payments and food stamps. The Senate passed a slightly smaller spending cut bill and its own tax cut package. But observers expect the House version with the huge tax breaks for the wealthy to be the final product of a House-Senate conference after Thanksgiving. For more information, visit www.aflcio.org.

‘AMTRAK BOARD MUST GO’—The nation’s transportation unions called for the immediate resignation of Amtrak’s board of directors after it abruptly fired David Gunn, CEO of America’s passenger rail system, Nov. 15. The board members—all appointed by President George W. Bush—are ignoring the public interest in a blind rush to privatize Amtrak, said Ed Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department. Wytkind urged Congress to “step in before the current board destroys Amtrak as we know it and saddles the states and passengers with an unprecedented transportation crisis.”

AGREEMENT REACHED AT BOEING—Members of the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, an affiliate of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Employees, are voting on a tentative agreement with Boeing Co. If approved, the new three-year deal would provide pay increases of at least 15 percent to 17 percent for some 17,550 engineers and technical workers in Washington State, California and Oregon. The agreement also maintains the current company medical plan for active employees and retirees.

LIVE CHRISTMAS ARRIVES AT RADIO CITY—Live music, not canned, is back at Radio City Music Hall’s annual “Christmas Spectacular” after members of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada Local 108 ratified a new agreement following a 16-day lockout. The agreement was reached after talks resumed Nov. 14 with the help of a mediator and the contract was ratified Nov. 20. During the lockout of the 35 musicians, the management of Radio City Music Hall put on the show with recorded music. The new agreement includes pay and benefit increases and continues overtime protections. Before the lockout, the musicians said, Radio City Entertainment, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp., wanted to cut the musicians’ base pay of $133 per show, which is about $40 less than what standard Broadway musicians are paid.

DEC. 10 ACTIONS MUSHROOMING—More than 1,000 workers will rally Dec. 9 in St. Louis to demand that Gov. Matt Blunt (R) restore the collective bargaining rights he took from state employees as one of his first acts as governor earlier this year.  In Rock Island, Ill., on Dec. 10, the Quad-City, Illinois and Iowa Federation of Labor and local civil rights, religious, women’s and community groups will hold a hearing about immigrant workers, workers fired for trying to form a union and people who lost loved ones in nonunion, unsafe workplaces. The protest and hearing are part of a week of rapidly multiplying actions around the world to restore workers’ rights and the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively.  Throughout the week of Dec. 5–10, workers, joined by allies and elected leaders, will hold rallies, town hall meetings, candlelight vigils and teach-ins to expose the obstacles workers face when seeking to join unions and showcase strategies for overcoming those barriers. The events are part of the largest mobilization ever for workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. The massive global push marks Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the 1948 ratification of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which includes workers’ freedom to organize.  Meanwhile, former Polish President, union leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa endorsed the global Dec. 10 actions and called on his fellow Nobel laureates to join him in calling for every nation to “at long last truly protect and defend workers’ rights, including the right to form a union and bargain collectively.” In a Nov. 16 letter, Walesa reminded the laureates that in many countries, including the United States, workers are unable to exercise the fundamental right to form unions. You can get involved by visiting www.aflcio.org/D10.