Sam Zell had another tough greeting from construction workers as he arrived at a speaking engagement in Manhattan April 7. “Whose City? Our City!” called out roughly 400 union members outside the Taj Pierre Hotel. “Whose Jobs? Our Jobs!” Recently, union workers protest whenever Zell steps up to a speakers podium in New York City. Demonstrations began after negotiations broke down last year between unions and Zell’s Equity Residential Properties Trust to build 111 luxury apartments at 500 West 23rd Street. “We are not going away,” said Bill Hohlfeld, labor-management coordinator for the Metallic Lathers Union, Local 46, which organized the protests and is carefully tracking Zell’s schedule. When Zell spoke at the Harmonie Club in Midtown Manhattan on an icy winter morning December 14, two dozens construction workers lined the sidewalks, blowing traffic whistles and chanting slogans. When Zell spoke at the New York Public Library November 4 as part of the Bloomberg Real Estate Briefing, 100 workers turned up in the rain.

At the Taj Pierre, protesters wore the jackets and hardhats of several construction unions, including Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers, the Laborers International Union of North America, and the Ironworkers, including Local 46. Union members handed out leaflets describing Zell’s “shocking record of irresponsible practices,” including “Hazardous Buildings and Tenant Abuse at Equity Residential.” Zell had come to town to sit on a panel at New York University’s 16th annual REIT Symposium. Traded on the New York Stock Exchange, real estate investment trusts like Equity Residential include many of the largest developers in the country and have become increasingly important players in New York City, buying hundreds of existing buildings and development sites. For example, 500 West 23rd Street was a stalled development begun by local developer Shaya Boymelgreen until Equity bought the site.

Zell’s development companies have used union labor in the past. For 500 West 23rd Street, unions offered a 20 percent savings on usual union labor costs, including wages, benefits, and other work rules. But Equity Residential backed away from the deal. Non union contractors are now finishing the apartment tower, which topped off in January. Zell’s company has several other construction projects planned for the City. Local 46 has pledged to keep up pressure on the developer. Labor activists have also started a website equityresidentialwatch.info to document Equity Residential’s “record of poor conduct, tenant abuses and building safety issues.” The website is full of headlines like: “Chicago Better Business Bureau Gives an F Rating to Equity Residential,” and “Tenant Survey Results… Inadequate Security.”

SAFETY IN THE WORKPLACE

Invite you to a presentation with

Assemblyman Rory Lancman
Chair of the NYS Assembly Subcommittee On Workplace Safety

Joel Shufro, Executive Director – NYCOSH

John Samuelsen, President – TWU Local 100

John Delgado, Business Manager
Construction & General Building Laborers Local 79

Matthew A. Funk, Esq.
Pasternack, Tilker, Ziegler, Walsh, Stanton & Romano, LLP

May 6, 2011 — 8:00 AM – 10:30 AM

MILBERG, LLP – One Penn Plaza, 50th Flr., New York

Contact:

Neal Tepel (646) 591-6484

Neal@tepel.org

Lou Gordon (212) 219-7777

Loug@balconynewyork.com

Light breakfast and refreshments provided. Seating is limited.

Sponsored by

Statement of PEF President Ken Brynien on contract negotiations

Albany -The New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF) is very familiar with the tentative contract agreement announced today between Council 82 and the state of New York. The state offered PEF a similar proposal.

PEF has not accepted the state’s initial offer because it would impose an unfair burden including long-term hardships on our members and their families. The state’s proposal would require an average PEF member to give up as much as $10,000 in salary and benefits every year of the contract. Additionally, the state made it clear that accepting these concessions would not ensure PEF members would not be laid off anyway.

PEF has a counter proposal on the table that would achieve the savings the state needs for this fiscal year. We are willing to accept short-term hardships for what may very well be a short-term fiscal crisis. The Council 82 agreement in no way sets the groundwork for our continuing negotiations. It should be noted that the bargaining unit that agreed with the governor represents less than 1 percent of the state work force and is a very specialized unit that has been working without a contract since 2005.

PEF is the state’s second-largest state-employee union, representing 56,000 professional, scientific and technical employees.

Nurses Association to address educational advancement for nurses at annual Lobby Day on April 12

Tuesday, April 12, is the New York State Nurses Association’s annual Lobby Day at the State Capitol in Albany. More than 2,000 RNs and nursing students from throughout the state will meet with lawmakers to discuss legislative issues affecting nurses.

“The registered nurses of New York state hope to bring to lawmakers’ attention, concerns that affect quality patient care and nursing practice. Given the current political climate, it’s now more important than ever that nurses advocate for their patients and themselves,” said Tina Gerardi, MS, RN, CAE, CEO of the Nurses Association.

Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther is scheduled to brief attendees on the current legislative climate in Albany at 10:05 a.m. in the State Plaza Convention Center. Nurses Association President Karen A. Ballard, MA, RN, FAAN, will welcome the nurses at 10 a.m.

Educational advancement for nurses remains a top priority for the association. An increasingly complex healthcare environment emphasizes the need for advanced nursing education. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report on The Future of Nursing (2010) states as one of its four key messages, that “nurses should achieve higher levels of education and training through an improved education system that promotes seamless academic progression.”

Nurses increasingly work in collaboration and coordination with other healthcare professionals and as their clinical and technical roles expand, they must attain increased competencies if they are to deliver high-quality care. The Nurses Association supports legislation that would require future professional nurses to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing within ten years of their initial licensure.

Other legislative priorities for the year include lobbying for safe nurse staffing ratios (A921) that decrease patient complications and employee burnout, establishing safe patient handling programs (A1370-A/S2470-A) to ensure safer environments for both patient and caregiver, and promoting a healthy workplace (A4258/S4289) to address workplace bullying and mistreatment in the healthcare setting.

Iannuzzi Elected to Third Term as NYSUT President

NYSUT delegates also vote to return full slate of incumbent officers

NEW YORK, April 9, 2011 — Richard C. Iannuzzi was elected Saturday to his third term as president of New York State United Teachers.

Iannuzzi’s election capped off a full slate of NYSUT incumbents who were returned to their respective offices during the union’s 39th Representative Assembly: NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta of New York City, Vice Presidents Maria Neira of New York City and Kathleen Donahue of Hilton and Secretary-Treasurer Lee Cutler of Newburgh. All terms are for three years.

Iannuzzi, a resident of Smithtown who taught 34 years in Long Island’s Central Islip School District, has made ending the achievement gap and expanding the union’s social justice role the cornerstones of his presidency. He was first elected in 2005 to succeed Tom Hobart, who led NYSUT for 33 years.

Iannuzzi will begin his latest term at a critical juncture for the labor movement, as issues like collective bargaining and seniority are under attack nationwide, and as public K-12 and higher education in New York struggle to cope with the devastating effects of more than $1 billion in cuts by state government.

Those cuts, in fact, come at a time when there are 15,000 fewer teachers and support staff in New York state public schools than two years ago, and as districts statewide expect to lay off at least 10,000 more employees in 2011-12.

Iannuzzi said he was grateful to the delegates for their support and valued the confidence that members have placed in him at this pivotal time. Addressing the attacks on labor nationwide, Iannuzzi told RA delegates:

“The road ahead will continue to be challenging. You know the issues and the challenges. … The battle will be fought here and won here. Not won or lost here, but won here. And that’s because of each of you and the work you do.”

NYSUT’s annual Representative Assembly is the union’s largest policy-making body, and was attended by some 3,000 delegates, staff and visitors this week. Delegates debated more than 50 resolutions, passing measures aimed at enhancing public K-12 and higher education, improving conditions in the workplace and expanding access to health care and other benefits for both active and retired members.

WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? WHO STANDS FOR THE BOTTOM 95 PERCENT OF AMERICANS?

by Bill Ayres

In case you have not noticed it, there has been an economic recovery. In the past two years the stock market has had a dramatic recovery, with the Dow-Jones Industrial average almost doubling. Corporate profits were $1.659 TRILLION in the third quarter of 2010, the highest on record and 28 percent higher than a year ago. CEO salaries are once again in the superstar category and they have just had the Bush tax cuts extended. The top five percent of earners are doing quite well and the top one percent is doing extraordinarily well.

Big business takes care of its own and so does our government. After all, the super rich are the biggest contributors to campaigns for the Republican Party and increasingly for the Democratic Party.

In the meantime, we still have almost 9 percent unemployment, almost half of which is long –term (more than six months). The real number is 15 percent when you count those working part time who want to work full time and those who have left the workforce as discouraged workers. Behind those astronomical numbers are millions of tragic stories that we all know and which many of us live. Most economists do not see those numbers dropping very soon. Why? Why do we have another jobless recovery? Why does our economy pay half of our workers pitifully low wages? Last year the median annual wage for American workers was less than $ 27,000. Try feeding and housing a family or even one person on that.

With all this business profit you would think that companies would be hiring millions of workers including ones they let go when the economy hit rock bottom. Not so! Since then almost half a million of the net jobs created were temp jobs. Why? Nearly half of all the income that the top 500 companies make these days comes from overseas. They are registered as American businesses often with familiar names but increasingly they rely on foreign investments for their profits and they often pay little or no taxes on that income.
The great breakthrough for many of them during this Great Recession is that they learned they can do more with less in America, especially less full time workers with hefty benefit packages. They laid off millions of workers at the start of the downturn and found that they can do very well with less full time workers, more part time workers and requirements that their employees perform at a higher level than ever before for the same or less money. Who stands with American workers in our time of dire need?

Obviously not big business, they do not see it in their best interest. They used to when they needed workers but now they need less and less American workers. Many of us are becoming expendable.

The federal government has not seen fit to create massive numbers of new jobs, has not invested sufficiently in green jobs and infrastructure, has not made it any easier to join a union and has not sent any of the corporate criminals to jail who created this whole financial mess that has also cost millions of additional jobs around the world.

The federal government does not stand up often enough for American workers. More and more, they stand for their high roller supporters. Whose side are they on?

In 1970 some 25 percent of American workers belonged to a union, made 20 to 25 percent more income and had much better benefits than non-union workers.

Now only about 7 percent of non-government workers are in unions and the 25 percent of government workers in unions could soon be an endangered species if ultra conservative governors with budget deficits have their way and create a climate that will strangle the unions.

Unions which used to stand for workers still do but even as they continue to be a political force for worker rights their numbers have dwindled.

So, if business does not stand for the 95 percent of us and the Democratic Party only partially supports us and labor unions continue to lose power, who stands for the vast majority of Americans who are not the super rich and the super stars?

Is there any one force that can stand up against the power of unjust globalization, multi-national corporations that do not have our best interests at heart, unpunished financial criminals and politicians that are on the take?

There is only one answer, the people, the 95 percent of us who have been left out of the action and face worse times ahead. Community organizing on a mass level among citizens across the country around common themes and goals is a daunting task but it can be done and was done during the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement.
There are already many movements that sometimes work together on issues: hunger, poverty, health, workers rights, immigration, jobs, housing, childcare, women’s rights, civil rights, food, agriculture, nutrition, the environment and more.

All too often however, we work in silos and we do it from the top down not from the grassroots up.

It is time that we unite, agree on an agenda for real change, agree to disagree where we can not find common ground, work for bottom up change in local, state and federal government policy and law and learn to tell our story framed to reach a variety of our constituents.

We certainly have many deep disagreements but the future of our nation is at stake. Nothing less than a national movement that unites many movements and thousands of community and state based organizations will succeed.

If we truly believe that America is the land of the free and the home of the brave we must get off our couches and organize for a real economic recovery and revival. Whose side are you on?

Bill Ayres is a noted author, activist and the Executive Director of World Hunger Year, Inc. www.whyhunger.org

In Times Square, the revolution starts now

by Liza Frenette – Representative Assembly Reporter – April 9, 2011

unionists rallied five thick blocks around Times Square Saturday to stand strong for workers’ rights. Crowds teemed with teachers, teamsters, actors, auto workers, artists, sheet metal workers, plumbers, transportation workers, stage hands, professors, child care workers and more.

Starting with beleaguered Wisconsin, they called out the name of every state where the middle class is being muddied.

Speakers blasted “The Revolution Starts Now” and Springsteen’s “No retreat, baby, no surrender” as crowds cheered, sang and stomped, visiting tourists stood on double-decker buses to snap photos of the throngs, and firefighters held pro-union signs from the windows of ladder trucks dashing down Broadway.

View the video

The rally was organized by the New York State AFL-CIO, whose president Denis Hughes pledged to his union brothers and sisters: “We will not be pushed around! We will fight back. We will stand up and fight for the middle class. We are the labor movement and we are one!”

Led by NYSUT President Dick Iannuzzi and his newly re-elected team of officers, thousands of NYSUT members marched to the rally after the closing session of the union’s Representative Assembly, shouting “THIS is what democracy looks like.”

Unionists were seeing red and they were wearing red: t-shirts, ties, armbands, headbands, hats, sweaters, feathers and even dog vests. They hung banners over barricades proudly claiming their union affiliations: Cortland United Teachers, United Teachers of Northport, Commack TA, Massapequa Federation of Teachers, Wappingers Congress of Teachers and of course, the United Federation of Teachers and the Professional Staff Congress, who call the city home. NYSUT members on Long Island chartered an entire train that brought hundreds in for the midtown Manhattan rally. Some came in groups with their locals, others arrived as a party of one.

Iannuzzi was one of the first union leaders to address the crowd, which stretched from the dais near 42nd Street as far as the eye could see. “What we’re facing is an attack on working conditions, whether it be overcrowded classrooms or overcrowded docks,” Iannuzzi said to a canyon bedecked with waving signs and banners. “We hear this garbage about how it has to do with deficits, but it’s an attack on collective bargaining.”

“This is the Square where workers and worker families speak truth to power!” shouted Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We are telling the demonizers and the dehumanizers we are one and will not let them stifle our voice.”

Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, pointed out that the very same people who caused the economic melt-down asked for and are receiving tax cuts. “What kind of crazy world is this?” he asked.

Of the threats against labor, “There are times in life that are do-or-die moments,” Van Roekel said. “This is one of those moments.”

Referencing his roots as a teacher, UFT President Michael Mulgrew prophesized that 20 years from now, teachers will be teaching how 1 percent of the country that already owned just about everything tried to steal more from the rest of the country, “but the workers rose up and stopped them.”

“You will be in that story!” he told the crowd.

PSC President Barbara Bowen also invoked her profession as a teacher, quoting poet William Blake, who said: “Pity would be no more, if we did not make someone poor.” That is what’s happening now, Bowen said: Society chooses to make some of its members poor. “Stop the war on workers!” she demanded.

The “sleeping giant” has been awakened as the labor movement roared its support for a program that interspersed public and private sector leaders, all speaking to one theme: “We Are One!”

“If you want to test our resolve, then you bring on that fight!” said Gary LaBarbera of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.

“We’re not ever going to give up on the American worker and American products!” promised Julie Kushner, director, UAW Region 9A.