“Before I joined a union, I was earning $10 an hour,” SEIU 32BJ José Ventura testified Tuesday night at a Montgomery County Council hearing on raising the county’s minimum wage. “I could not get a raise, no matter how hard I worked. Life was very hard." Ventura lives in Silver Spring and cleans offices in Friendship Heights. Like Ventura, most of the speakers supported Council member Marc Elrich’s new version of a bill to raise the minimum wage in Montgomery County. Fight for $15 coalition members are urging County Council members to pass a strong bill excluding training wage amendments and any expansion of the existing “opportunity wage” for young workers. The coalition is looking for a sixth vote to give them a veto-proof majority; County Executive Ike Leggett vetoed the previous bill. Read more here: In D.C.’s Wealthiest Suburbs, It’s Round 2 in the Fight for $15 Electrical Workers Local 26 celebrated its 125th anniversary at a gala event last Saturday at the MGM National Harbor. In 1892, the year Local 26 got its charter, Washington, D.C. was comprised of dirt roads, cow pastures, and only a few of the monuments that stand today. By 1894, Local 26 members had illuminated the U. S. Capitol for the first time in history. Click here to find out more about Local 26. photo by Susan Flashman "Whenever working men of one country are sufficiently well organized to demand higher wages or shorter hours, they are met by the threat of the employer to hire cheaper foreign labor, and this evil can only be removed by the international organization of the working class." - Odger was a trade unionist and co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association (see Today's Labor History)
The International Workingmen’s Association is founded in London. It was an international organization trying to unite a variety of different left-wing, socialist, communist and anarchist political groups and unions. It functioned for about 12 years, growing to a membership declared to be eight million, before being disbanded at its Philadelphia conference in 1876, victim of infighting brought on by the wide variety of members’ philosophies - 1864 Compiled/edited by Union Communication Services |