Checks totaling over $8 million dollars in cost of living increases owed from 2003 to 2007 were mailed out August 5 to DC government workers injured on the job. "Finally these workers -- struggling not only with their work-related injuries, but also inadequate workers comp benefits -- are getting justice," said Wendy Kahn, chief attorney at Zwerdling, Paul, Kahn & Wolly, P.C., which pursued the years-long class action lawsuit on behalf of the injured workers. "Justice delayed is justice denied and for way too many years, it was certainly delayed to these union workers," Kahn added. The long-overdue payments come nine years after the District was sued for refusing to pay cost of living adjustments – or COLAs -- to unionized DC employees out on disability/workers’ comp. Non-union injured workers were receiving COLA payments, but unionized injured workers were not and this discriminatory treatment was finally remedied in the courts in 2015, with the help of the Metro Labor Council, which lobbied the Mayor and City Council to get the worker's comp office to settle the case.
Wendy Kahn will discuss this case on today’s “Your Rights At Work” show at 1pm this afternoon here on WPFW, plus we’ll have longtime union organizer Gene Bruskin on to talk about his new labor musical “Pray for the Dead: A Musical Tale of Morgues, Moguls, & Mutiny.” For all the latest local labor calendar listings, go to dclabor.org and click on Calendar. Here’s today's labor history: On this date in 1884, Federal troops drove some 1,200 jobless workers from Washington D.C. Led by unemployed activist Charles "Hobo" Kelley, the group included young journalist Jack London and William Haywood, a young miner-cowboy called "Big Bill." In 1917, one hundred "platform men" employed by the privately owned United Railroads streetcar service in San Francisco abandoned their streetcars, tying up many of the main lines in and out of the city center. And on this date in 2013, Maine lobster fishers formed a local of the Machinists union as they faced a 40-year low price for their catches. By October, they had signed up 600 members. Today’s labor quote is by Jack London “Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a strikebreaker is a traitor to his God, his country, his wife, his family and his class.” Jack London was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist.
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