Cats, jobs, music, gardens

The cats broke into my room quite early this morning, bringing an end to my plans to sleep in. Maybe it's just as well. I have to finish a grant for Arise this weekend. More than anything, I'd like to be outside working in the garden, but most of that will have to wait for my next unemployment check and a solid block of time.

Last night I went up to the annual May Day event organized by Western Mass. Jobs with Justice which this year took place at the Campus Center Auditorium at UMass. Funny, I've always supported unions but never been in one!-- never any union at the places I've worked.

The speaker this year was long-time community and labor organizer Stewart Acuff. In his speech, he laid the moral and economic foundation for the Employee Free Choice Act, which strengthens the right of workers to unionize.

We gather on this May Day of 2009 at a time of great hope and great promise and a time of great challenge.

How we meet the challenges and opportunities which we face all around us will determine the near term future of our country, the quality of life for our kids and grandkids and possibly even the world.

Though some of us may have been divided in the past, we no longer have the luxury of division.
Workers, trade unionist, advocates and organizers of the poor and immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, LGBT activist, clergy and people of faith, community leaders, seekers of peace and warriors for justice, our individual destiny is bound up in our common destiny.

So we are bound by our common destiny, but we are bound even more tightly by our common values. You see, my brothers and sisters, we believers in justice and progress are bound by the fundamental thread of humanity - as old as the human species and the human spirit.

The Huffington Post has published his entire speech.

As usual, music was a big part of the celebration. Western Mass. is blessed with talent. Tom Neilson, Red Valley Fog, Verne McArthur, Jay Mankita and Jose Ayerve all performed, as well as the WMA contingent of the Raging Grannies.

I'm not on the inside of this, but it seems to be union organizing is ready to make the biggest gains in years.

11 a.m. and a quick glance out the kitchen window: I think my strawberries are flowering and I'm going to go look.

Support workers at the YWCA and its battered women's shelters

I was talking to an old friend of mine the other day, Nancy Lyman-Shaver, about whether she still was planning to write a book about the development of the battered women's movement in Western Massachusetts, which so closely parallels efforts around the country. Unfortunately, much of Nancy's material was lost in a flooded basement, but a very abridged version of the story goes like this: back in the late 60's and early 70's, if a woman was being battered at home, she had virtually no options. There were no battered women's shelters and the 209A restraining order laws did not yet exist. In Springfield, working class feminists rented a house for women who needed a place to flee to, and they staffed it with volunteers for a number of years. It was an effort women undertook willingly, but without funding, it eventually became too much. When the MA Department of Public Health decided to offer funding to agencies willing to operate battered women's shelters, it was, in many ways, the beginning of the end of the battered women's political movement, bureaucratizing essential services to they could be "delivered" more efficiently.

Maybe it was inevitable and necessary, but that bureaucratization has been a mixed blessing. We've replaced a political analysis with one that tends to treat women as part of a social pathology, and that brings with it all the concomitant mandatory "services.". And some battered women's services have even become the oppressors of their women employees.

Springfield's Young Women's Christian Association, which operates the ARCH and New Beginnings battered women's shelters, has been under criticism for some time by many in its workforce. This Thursday, the Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice Workers' Rights Board will be holding a hearing on labor relations at the Y. The following is a press release from Jobs with Justice.

YWCA WORKERS TO TESTIFY TO WORKERS’ RIGHTS BOARD

On Thursday March 12, a panel of the Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice Workers' Rights Board will take the testimony of workers at YWCA of Western Massachusetts and issue a report on labor contract bargaining there. The hearing will be 3:00-5:00pm in Room 220, City Hall, 36 Court Street, Springfield. The public, the press, and the employer are invited to attend. Attendees are asked to come fragrance-free.

The YWCA’s workforce – predominantly women, many of whom are of color – claim it is not living up to its mission of “eliminating racism and empowering women.”

The United Auto Workers Local 2322 has been bargaining a new contract at the YWCA since May 2008. The employer is showing an anti-worker and anti-union animus at the bargaining table and has shown such animus since the workers organized in 2003. Despite being a non-profit social service agency subsidized by tax dollars and tax benefits and public and private donations, the YWCA has spent in excess of $300,000 on the well-known anti-union law firm, Skoler, Abbott & Presser, and has given sizable raises to its Executive Director, Mary Reardon Johnson. It claims there is no revenue to grant its employees decent raises.

UAW Local 2322 President Ron Patenaude will conduct the testimony by YWCA workers and also provide basic information including the YWCA’s many violations of the National Labor Relations Act.

The Western Mass. Jobs with Justice Workers' Rights Board consists of two dozen “public citizens” in Western Massachusetts. The following are on the March 12 panel:

Irene Kimball, Chairperson of the Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice Workers' Rights Board; retired Regional Director, Massachusetts Office for Children

Anne Awad, President/CEO, Caring Health Center Inc, Springfield; Health Systems Consultant; former Amherst Select Person

Kathryn Buckley-Brawner, Director, Office of Peace & Justice, Catholic Charities Agency, Diocese of Springfield

Frances Borden Hubbard, Project Director, Springfield Adolescent Health Project; Retired Professor of Black Studies, Labor Studies, and Public Administration at several universities

Prof. Stephanie Luce, Acting Director, Labor Relations & Research Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Benjamin Swan, Massachusetts State Representative from Springfield and civil rights activist

William R. Toller, Deacon, Holy Cross Church, Springfield; Consultant, Hampden County Sheriff’s Department

E. Henry Twiggs, Chairman, Springfield Inner City Rehab Inc.

Across the U.S., Workers’ Rights Boards act as “the conscience of the community” regarding labor relations, exposing employers' misconduct and also helping workers form unions and reach collective bargaining contracts. There is more information at http://www.jwj.org/projects/wrb.html.

More information about law firms like Skoler, Abbott & Presser is at http://www.americanrightsatwork.org/the-anti-union-network/for-profit-union-busters/for-profit-unionbusters.html.

Jon Weissman, Coordinator,Western Mass Jobs with Justice,640 Page Blvd #101, Springfield MA 01104, (413) 827-0301

Photos: Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone, two Massachusetts feminists.

Today is International Women's Day, and my post is as part of a coordinated effort on the part of Bloggers Unite!,an attempt to harness the power of the blogosphere to make the world a better place. By asking bloggers to write about a particular subject on 1 day of the month, a single voice can be joined with thousands to help make a difference; from raising awareness for cancer, to an effort to better education systems or supporting 3rd world countries. if you're a blogger, check it out!

Bracketed between two wars

I went to Jon Weissman’s retirement party at the end of April. Jon was the contract manager for the National Association of Letter Carriers 46 and is now “retiring” to devote more time to Jobs with Justice.

Jon is one of the most idealistic and down-to-earth people I know. After his colleagues, daughter and wife celebrated him, Jon spoke and tried to sum up some of his conclusions about working for social justice for the past 40+ years. I’m still thinking about much that he said, but one of his comments struck me particularly—that in some sense, his life has been bracketed by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq. Of course, that’s true for me and for most people born in the fifteen years following World War Two.

The Vietnam and Iraq wars have a lot of similarities (don’t get me started) but one key difference is that we had a long lead-up to the Iraq war in which we had (we thought) an opportunity to stop the war before it began.

Another difference is that in the Vietnam war, we were spared the mea culpas of elected officials for a good thirty years. (I think Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the war’s most hated policy-makers, started worrying about getting into heaven.)

(By the way, isn’t it interesting that war architect McNamara became president of the World Bank during the Vietnam war, and war architect Wolfowitz during the Iraq war?)

It drives me wild with rage and contempt to hear John Kerry, John Edwards and their Congressional counterparts apologize for their vote to authorize war in Iraq.

“We were deceived!” they whimper, leaving us to decide if they are lying now or were just that stupid then.

I never bought this damn war from before Day One, and personally knew hundreds of people who felt the same way. Through my listserves I knew thousands more, and hundreds of thousands who protested prior to March 20, 2003.

We all knew we were headed to war within hours of the terrorists’ destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11.

We also knew that Iraq was not behind the 9/11 attacks, that the war was a cover for the neo-con agenda, and doubted greatly that there were weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

We knew that the war would alienate international support, that the war would increase, not decrease, terrorism, and that military and civilian casualties would not be reported accurately.

We also knew that the war would be used an excuse to take away our civil liberties, that secret prisons, torture and prisoner abuse were bound to exist, and that war profiteering would reach new heights.

How come WE knew all this, and Congress and the media didn’t?

Well, the answer, of course, is that many of them did know, but kept their mouths shut and their courage locked away for reasons of political expediency.

I am not the kind of populist who thinks that the “wisdom of the common people” is pure and correct—not with the onslaught of propaganda coming across the airwaves and printed in our newspapers.

I have, however, found that many truly poor people were skeptical of the war from the beginning—furious at the attacks against our country, but so used to being lied to on a daily basis that they take nothing at face value.

The older I get, the less doctrinaire I become. I have no definite answer as to how our government can move into the hands of a well-informed citizenry, or even how a well-informed citizenry can be nurtured under the current circumstances. But I will keep trying to play my part. As Gramschi said, “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

But today, as our military casualties stand at 3,444, and civilian casualties approach half a million, just for once, I want to say, “We told you so.”