• Victory for Upstate New York Hospital Workers
• Jackson City Workers Reach First Tentative Contract
• Lexington Guild Reaches Tentative Pact after Year-Long Battle
• Nelle Horlander's Legacy: 'She was CWA in Kentucky'
• IN BRIEF:
  • IBM Gets Back at Workers Who Won Overtime Lawsuit
  • CWA Communicators: What's New at The Source
  • NLRB's Anti-Union E-mail Ruling a 'Gift,' Union-Buster Tells Managers
  • EPI: No Stimulus for the Poor in Latest Bush Economic Scheme

Victory for Upstate New York Hospital Workers

"We did it" was the word from CWAers throughout New York State when the Department of Health announced that key hospitals in upstate New York – where CWA members work – would remain open.

The department determined that St. Joseph Hospital in Buffalo and DeGraff Memorial in North Tonowanda will remain open as acute care and emergency facilities, providing critical services for residents and maintaining jobs for workers – including members of CWA Local 1168 in the Buffalo area.

The state government also will provide grants to the Kaleida Health system to relocate the services now provided at Millard Fillmore Gates Hospital to the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus. CWA is continuing to work with Gates Hospital management to make the transition as seamless as possible; the hospital committed that "no jobs would be lost" after the state Berger Commission announced plans in December 2006 to close hospitals throughout the state, said CWA Local 1168 President John Klein. 

"When the closings were first announced in December 2006, CWA started mobilizing across the state to build community and political support to keep the hospitals open," said District 1 Vice President Chris Shelton.

"Members collected tens of thousands of 'We Believe' and 'Save Our Emergency Room' postcards, held news conferences and rallies and in the winter's cold, marched 300 miles from Buffalo to the state capitol in Albany to show legislators that we were determined to keep open these critical facilities," he said.

Local 1168 members Dawn Mele and Pat Sullivan walked the entire distance, joined for most of the journey by Klein, with CWAers providing companionship and support along the way. The marchers braved temperatures as low as 10 degrees, along with rain and driving winds. Shelton and CWA President Larry Cohen joined marchers just outside of Albany.

"We were determined to get our message across to our political leaders that these hospitals are needed, and closing them would be a hardship for many thousands of people," Klein said. 

Jackson City Workers Reach First Tentative Contract

A little over a year and a half since gaining collective bargaining rights in June 2006, Jackson, Mississippi's 1,200 city employees achieved another milepost in their remarkable struggle to organize and improve their jobs, negotiating their first union contract with the city. The workers are represented by CWA's Mississippi Alliance of State Employees (MASE-CWA Local 3570).

The tentative agreement, up for a ratification vote in mid February, "lays a strong foundation and real economic gains for workers who have suffered for years under our city's tight budgets," said MASE-CWA President Brenda Scott.

The workers will have a voice in their pay and benefits. The contract provides for a wage reopener in March/April 2008, and a union seat on the city's insurance committee which determines the cost and coverage of workers' health insurance. The agreement contains payroll dues deduction, rare in public employee contracts, and especially union contracts in Right-to-Work states. The contract provides workers with dues process rights through a grievance procedure and provides time off with pay to up to 15 union stewards while handling and investigating members' grievances.

A majority of the workers have already signed up for union membership. "These workers have demonstrated what can be achieved through sheer determination," commented District 3 Vice President Noah Savant. "When the workers first sought to organize, they did not even have the right to organize," he said. "Now they have not only a union, but bargaining rights and their first tentative agreement."

Lexington Guild Reaches Tentative Pact after Year-Long Battle

After battling a long list of concession demands for more than a year, Lexington (Ky.) Newspaper Guild leaders are urging approval of a tentative five-year agreement at the Lexington Herald-Leader that was worked out with the help of mediation last week.  The local represents 90 newsroom workers who are set to vote on the pact next Tuesday.

The sticking points in recent weeks involved company demands that could have cut health insurance for part-time workers and overhauled personal and sick leave policies for everyone. Under the tentative pact, nothing will change in those areas for at least two years. After that, shifts in part-timers' insurance must be preceded by 90 days' notice and the company would have to bargain over any new leave provision.

The Guild also beat back other severe takeback demands. "The company had wanted to limit overtime, cut wages without bargaining with the Guild, gain the right to replace future employees with freelancers and temps and the right to layoff workers displaced by technology or new processes. It eventually dropped all those proposals," the bargaining team said.

In addition to staving off concessions the local maintained important benefits and won new ones, including what's believed to be the highest Guild night differential in the country -- $10 by the end of 2011 – and having the company pay 50 percent of COBRA health insurance benefits for 60 days in the event of layoffs. Other improvements include seniority benefits for workers who come from other McClatchy-owned papers, longer lay-off notices and higher pay for news assistants who write stories.

TNG-CWA sponsored radio ads and billboards explaining the issues and the local launched a community petition drive to build support for the workers, whose last contract expired at the end of 2006. TNG-CWA President Linda Foley said the local built a support network that was key to its ultimate success at the bargaining table.

"The Lexington Guild achieved this victory with the help of the central Kentucky community, especially the support of their sisters and brothers from CWA Local 3372 who pitched in with people, resources and solidarity," said Foley, who began her newspaper career as a copy editor at the Herald-Leader.

Nelle Horlander's Legacy: 'She was CWA in Kentucky'

A savvy political activist and outspoken feminist, Nelle P. Horlander, retired CWA Kentucky state director, died Jan. 21 at a care center in Louisville at age 78.

"Nelle was a pioneer in the early implementation of our union's nationwide legislative and political programs," said CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Easterling. "She was a close confidant and labor adviser to several Democratic governors and state legislators. She was CWA in Kentucky."

After working her way through two years at the University of Louisville, she gave up her dreams of becoming a doctor or chemist, realizing that those jobs would be filled by men returning from World War II. Instead, in 1949, she became an operator for Southern Bell Telephone in Louisville and immediately joined CWA Local 3310.

Over the years Horlander worked her way through the ranks at the local, serving as steward, secretary-treasurer and treasurer, and in 1969 she was elected local president.

After working to enact the tax referendum that created the Transit Authority of River City, she was in 1973 appointed to its board. She was elected board chair in 1974 – the same year she joined the CWA staff as Kentucky director – and was reelected every year through 1979.

Politically active throughout her career, Horlander served as her state's legislative-political coordinator for CWA and she was a Democratic precinct captain for 30 years.

Active in several women's organizations, she served on the executive committee of the Kentucky Commission on Women until 1993.  Horlander retired from CWA in 1996.

IN BRIEF:

• Apparently still fuming over having to fork over $65 million to settle a lawsuit by technical support employees who charged the company cheated them out of overtime, IBM discovered a way to pay them back. It will be reclassifying 7,600 of the workers as being eligible for overtime, however, it will also be cutting their pay by 15 percent. Despite IBM's claims that overtime would make up for the salary cut, internal IBM documents contradict those claims and indicate that many will lose money.
  
  The move has outraged the workers, according to CWA Local 1701/Alliance@IBM, whose website is overflowing with their reaction: "Thank you IBM for helping me to awaken to the greediness of the corporate world. . .At first I did not want to believe that the company I work hard for was driving me out, but it becomes more obvious as time goes on. This is complete retaliation taken out on the employees," said one 12-year employee.
  
  
   
• Keep up with the latest news and communications tips on The Source, www.cwa-union.org/source, CWA's website for union editors and communicators. Besides including an archive of CWA's weekly newsletters, union communicators can download topical photos, artwork and clipart for their newsletters, listen to or view CWA audio and video files about union campaigns and key issues, or take advamtage of the site's unique "Ask the Experts" to get answers to quandaries or questions about how to be an effective union communicator.
  
  
   
• Corporate America is positively giddy over the NLRB's decision last month to let companies bar employees from using work e-mail accounts to communicate about union business.
  
  "Take this gift from the NLRB and use it well in the coming year," union-bashing management consultant Walter Orechwa is telling his clients. "Complacency will open the door very wide for union organizers. This is one resolution with which I hope everyone can stick."
  
  Orechwa's pitch cautions employers about any "direct solicitation" by union organizers, calling it the "best shot at convincing non-union employees they should join up today.  The most effective method of curbing direct or on-the-job solicitation is to create—and strictly enforce—a no-solicitation, no-distribution policy."
  
  The AFL-CIO reports that Orechwa's Atlanta-based company specializes in anti-worker propaganda that includes "union-avoidance" videos such as "Supervisors Can Keep You Union Free" and flyers describing organizing campaigns as a "Declaration of War." 
  
  
   
• Though many details are yet to come about the Bush administration plan to stimulate the sagging economy, the Economic Policy Institute says one thing is already clear: The poorest Americans will get little or nothing from the $145 billion proposal. 
  
  "While such a rebate can help boost lagging demand by putting more money in consumers' pockets, the White House plan suffers from very poor targeting, and thus fails on two critical criteria: efficiency and equity," EPI says in its weekly economic snapshot, available at www.epinet.org.
  
  Less than 10 percent of the funds will reach the bottom 40 percent of Americans and 55.9 million households will get nothing at all. EPI says that while many of those households don't pay federal income tax, they do pay other taxes, including payroll taxes on their earnings.
  
  "The economic research on effective stimulus is quite clear: there is a greater bang-for-the-buck from rebates targeted at lower-income households than higher-income ones. Given the well-documented increase in income inequality in recent years, excluding low-income households from the rebate also fails on the criterion of fairness."