UE NEWS Updates

Raleigh City Sanitation workers, whose courageous job action on September 13-14, 2006 shook the state and energized UE’s fight for public employee rights in North Carolina, on Friday called a press conference and rally at the same spot where they launched that strike, to make the public aware of continuing problems. They were joined by Raleigh city workers from other departments, and their event received major coverage in Raleigh-area news media.

UE Local 170 has been making news in West Virginia and nationally, and in the words of one local TV station, “making waves” over the state’s double standard on pay.

The local is protesting the fact that Governor Joe Manchin is about to receive a 58 percent pay increase while withholding raises for state workers. The union’s fight on behalf of public employees was the subject of a segment on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight program on February 27.

For the 190 paraeducators in the Wallingford Public Schools, the fight for health benefits started long before the recent round of contract negotiations began last July. In a contract survey conducted months earlier by their union, Sub-local 75 of UE Local 222, over half of the members said that gaining healthcare coverage – which their employer had never provided them – was the most important bargaining goal.

A crowd of 400 Motor City labor activists gathered at the IBEW Hall in Detroit on February 9, including the presidents of the Michigan AFL-CIO State Federation and of the Greater Detroit Labor Council. Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), Steelworkers (USW), International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), AFSCME, Musicians (AFM), American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) participated. This was the ninth stop on the two-week Republic Workers’ Victory Tour.