 Metro workers are rallying Saturday at noon over funding and safety issues. Led by ATU Local 689, other unions as well as political and community allies are expected to turn out to support demands for dedicated funding for Metro to ensure long-term maintenance, upkeep, and expansion and make Metro safe for riders and workers. “No one knows the system better than our members, who are the front line workers of the system,” says Jackie Jeter, president of Local 689. Among those speaking tomorrow are Dion Baker, a Metro Train Operator who will talk about the faulty and outdated radio equipment he's forced to use, and DC Circulator Bus Operator “Tiny” Burke who has witnessed dangerous cost cutting while the outsourced company he works for makes a profit. Also in attendance will be policy makers including Metro General Manager Paul Weidefeld, WMATA Board Chair Jack Evans, and Chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) Roger Berliner. The rally will be held at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation at 213 East Capitol Street Northeast.
 "The name of the game is to talk to people. If you don't talk to people, you can't get started...You knock on twenty doors or so, and twenty guys tell you to go to hell, or that they haven't got time. But maybe at the fortieth or sixtieth house you find the one guy who is all you need. You're not going to organize everything; you're just going to get it started.”
Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers.  July 29
The Coast Seamen's Union merges with the Steamship Sailors’ Union to form the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific - 1891 A preliminary delegation from Mother Jones' March of the Mill Children from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, publicizing the harsh conditions of child labor, arrives today. They are not allowed through the gates – 1903 (The Autobiography of Mother Jones: Mary Harris Jones—“Mother Jones”—was the most dynamic woman ever to grace the American labor movement. Employers and politicians called her “the most dangerous woman in America” and rebellious working men and women loved her as they never loved anyone else.) Nineteen firefighters die while responding to a blaze at the Shamrock Oil and Gas Corp. refinery in Sun Ray, Texas - 1956 Following a 5-year table grape boycott, Delano-area growers file into the United Farm Workers union hall in Delano, Calif., to sign their first union contracts - 1970 July 30 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Social Security Act of 1965, establishing Medicare and Medicaid - 1965 Former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa disappears. Declared legally dead in 1982, his body has never been found - 1975 United Airlines agrees to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees and retirees worldwide - 1999 July 31 Members of the National Football League Players Association begin what is to be a 2-day strike, their first. The issues: pay, pensions, the right to arbitration and the right to have agents - 1970 Fifty-day baseball strike ends - 1981 The Great Shipyard Strike of 1999 ends after Steelworkers at Newport News Shipbuilding ratify a breakthrough agreement which nearly doubles pensions, increases security, ends inequality, and provides the highest wage increases in company and industry history to nearly 10,000 workers at the yard. The strike lasted 15 weeks - 1999 - compiled/edited by David Prosten at Union Communication Services.
|
