Welcome to Union City Radio for Monday, June 22. This is Chris Garlock, with the Metro Washington Council’s round-up of local labor news, updates and history.
After the House voted last week to grant President Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate trade deals, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said that “Workers’ resolve is firmer than ever,” and pledged that “We will fight at every level and in every way to protect American workers and our economy by rejecting Fast Track and this corporate trade deal.” The vote was the first in a complicated series of moves by Obama and Republicans to reverse the previous week’s overwhelming vote against the president’s trade agenda. The DC Nurses Association and Children’s School Services have settled a new contract that includes a 3% across the board wage increase, increases in education benefits, and a commitment to address shared nursing leadership issues. On today’s labor calendar, Caroline Fredrickson discusses her book “Under the Bus: How Working Women Are Being Run Over” today at 12:30pm at the AFL-CIO; go to dclabor.org and click on calendar for details. In this week's labor quiz; how much more were weekly median earnings for a two-income, union family in 2014 than for a nonunion family? Is the union difference $12, $23, $66, $400, or $727? Go to unionist.com and click on Labor Quiz and you could be next week's winner! Here’s today’s labor history: 86 passengers on a train carrying members of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus were killed, and another 127 injured in a wreck near Hammond, Indiana in 1918. Five days later the dead were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois, in an area set aside as Showmen’s Rest, purchased only a few months earlier by the Showmen’s League of America. On this date in 1922, violence erupted during a coal mine strike at Herrin, Illinois; 36 were killed, 21 of them non-union miners. Today’s labor quote is by John L. Lewis: “The union miner cannot agree to the acceptance of a wage principle which will permit his annual earnings and his living standards to be determined by the hungriest unfortunates whom the non-union operators can employ.” Lewis led the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960.
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