AFSCME

Mitt Romney’s campaign is proving that while money can’t buy you love, it can buy a whole lot of ads. But they come at a tremendous cost: His campaign spent more in January than it brought in. According to spending reports, Romney’s Presidential campaign and the super PAC supporting him raised $13.1 million in January, but spent $32.7 million. Maybe Romney needs a refresher course in Accounting 101.

When it comes to fundraising, he is particularly weak among small donors, the people who provide small, but often regular, donations to a campaign. Although they don’t have deep pockets, these donors are a good barometer of how broad a candidate’s support is among regular folks. They tend to be enthusiastic door-knockers and phone-bankers, and they can contribute multiple times without ever reaching limits on contributions to federal candidates.

It’s no surprise that small donors are Romney’s Achilles’ heel. After all, he’s made countless comments that make it clear working families are not among his favorite constituents. One of the most telling was “corporations are people.”  

In contrast, small donors are the backbone of President Obama’s campaign. In fact, nearly half of what his campaign raised in 2011 came from individuals giving $200 or less.

If Romney faces Obama in the general election, the former Massachusetts governor better hope that the Supreme Court rules that corporations can grow legs, walk into the voting booth and cast ballots for him. Those may be the only votes Romney can count on. 

This week, The Simpsons aired its 500th episode. Chronicling the life and the hilarity of a working family from the fictional town of Springfield, this animated sitcom has often taken on issues important to workers.

The best work-related episode and arguably the best Simpsons episode EVER, “Last Exit to Springfield,” aired in 1993. In that episode, Homer Simpson becomes the president of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant union and leads the workers in a strike to get their dental plan back. Montgomery Burns, the plant owner, tries again and again to break the union’s spirit, but they remain united.

Here are some memorable lines from that episode:

Carl: What do we want?
All: More equitable treatment at the hands of management!
Carl: When do we want it?
All: Soon!

Mr. Burns: We both want a fair union contract.
Homer: (thinking) Why is Mr. Burns being so nice to me?
Mr. Burns: And if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours.
Homer: (thinking) Wait a minute. Is he coming onto me?
Mr. Burns: I mean, if I should slip something into your pocket, what's the harm?
Homer: (thinking) My God! He is coming onto me!
Mr. Burns: After all, negotiations make strange bedfellows. (chuckle, wink)
Homer: (thinking) Aaahh! Sorry, Mr. Burns, but I don't go in for these backdoor shenanigans. Sure, I'm flattered, maybe even a little curious, but the answer is no!

Lisa: Do you really think you can get our dental plan back, dad?
Homer: Well, that depends on who's the better negotiator, Mr. Burns or me...
Bart: Dad, I'll trade you this delicious doorstop for your crummy old Danish.
Homer: Done and done!

In the end, the union wins back its dental plan, but not before Homer’s daughter, Lisa, sings her epic protest song:

The corporate interests behind the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) think the way to break the strength of unions is to undermine worker solidarity. That’s why they’re pushing right-to-work-for-less legislation in Arizona and other statehouses across the country. Their biggest success occurred this month in Indiana, which became the 23rd state to adopt the anti-worker measure. Now they’re gunning for workers in Minnesota.

One day after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels signed the bill into law, two Minnesota state senators announced they, too, would introduce legislation to put a right-to-work-for-less measure before voters in November. If approved, it would change the state’s Constitution so workers who receive the benefits of a union contract (but don’t want to join a union) can keep those benefits without having to pay their fair share for representation.

We call those workers “free riders” because they take, for free, what others are willing to pay for.

Supporters of such legislation argue that it’s only fair to let workers decide if they want to pay dues. The Minnesota lawmakers also contend it will make the state more attractive to companies that want to locate or expand there.

But ALEC, the Mackinac Center and other groups pushing right-to-work-for-less legislation behind the scenes understand that it’s really not about fairness. They simply want to undermine the middle class by breaking the power of workers to stand up for their rights and lowering wages and benefits for everyone across the board – within and outside of a union.

“It’s an assault on the American belief that everyday people deserve decent wages, health care, and to be able to retire with dignity,” AFSCME Council 5 Exec. Dir. Eliot Seide said in a broadcast interview with Esme Murphy, Sunday morning anchor for WCCO-TV in Minnesota.

Seide, also an AFSCME International vice president, called the effort to pass right-to-work-for-less “a straight attack on collective bargaining, on stifling workers’ voices in the workplace, and it’s meant to hurt workers. It’s not meant to improve the lives of workers.”

For proof, Seide noted that Minnesota workers make, on average, $5,500 more than workers in states where the right-to-work-for-less is the law. “We also have lower poverty. We have better education. We have better health care. We have better quality of life.”

For evidence for his claims, check out the websites of AFSCME Council 5 and Council 65.

It’s not just earnings that are hurt by right-to-work-for-less laws. It’s also retirement security. Experts have found that pensions in right-to-work-for-less states were significantly lower – 4.8 percent lower.

That may be OK with corporations and the right-wing lawmakers who do their bidding, but it is not OK for the working middle class. As The New York Times said recently in an editorial, “Voters, unionized or not, should recognize the new “right to work” push for what it is: bad economics and cynical politics.”

They’re phoning it in and it’s making them stronger. AFSCME members from across Wisconsin are joining together in teletownhall meetings to discuss anti-worker attacks and effective ways to fight back.

Council 24 held a teletownhall recently in advance of the state issuing sweeping changes in the personnel system that could negatively affect membership. Members discussed what the changes might bring and what needed to be done to prepare. As a result, scores of members volunteered to recruit new members, and many more signed up to work on the recall of Gov. Scott Walker.

A Council 40 teletownhall dealt with a string of victories achieved since Walker’s collective bargaining rights grab. In this new venue, member action has helped save hundreds of jobs, fight privatization, protect health care and preserve workplace rights.

“This is a new ballgame,” Sec.-Treas. Lee Saunders told callers on one of the recent calls. “But you’ve adapted. You’re writing a new chapter for our union, and inspiring AFSCME members across the country. We’re standing with you. The nation is watching you. Keep fighting.”

Council 40 member Christine Kistner told callers how she and members across the state were able to defeat a privatization plan that would have wiped out hundreds of income maintenance jobs. “It was a grassroots effort, led by the members,” said Kistner, a member of Local 1240 and council vice president. “You can’t make change sitting on the sidelines.”

Another piece of legislation threatening hundreds of county highway worker jobs was killed after members sent 2,000 emails and made countless phone calls.

These teletownhalls are yielding not only discussion of strategy, but spurred recruitment of new membership and increased participation on union Facebook pages – an effective tool for membership mobilization.

AFSCME has also developed an iPad application to help organizers record member signups in an efficient, organized and secure manner. The app, specifically designed to comply with current Wisconsin law, allows members to provide critical contact information and renew their recurring PEOPLE contributions to ensure this summer’s recall campaigns and the November elections in Wisconsin are well-funded and victorious.

Cash-strapped states are offered a deal they may find hard to refuse: sell their prisons to Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest operator of for-profit prisons, and get back plenty of cash to remedy their states’ budget problems.

And what’s in it for CCA?  A 20-year management contract and assurance that the state will take steps to keep the cells full – 90 percent full, to be exact. That’s the only way the deal will ensure that CCA’s growing business in incarceration will remain profitable.

Read more in this excellent “cash for prisons” piece in the Huffington Post, and a follow-up story about the money behind prison privatization.

In 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King took his struggle for black workers and their families to Memphis, Tenn., because he understood the connection between civil rights and workers’ rights. It was there that the 1,300 sanitation workers of AFSCME Local 1733 went on strike to demand respect, fairness, and a voice in the issues that mattered to them.

The sanitation workers weren’t simply fighting for better pay and safer working conditions. When I had the privilege of representing our members at the ceremony dedicating the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, in Washington, D.C., I spoke about how these men were asserting a claim on our democracy.

As we observe Black History Month 2012, AFSCME members from coast to coast are asserting the same claim. We are protesting the politicians’ callous disregard for struggling families and their failure to demand that the wealthiest Americans do their fair share. AFSCME members are also partnering with other groups to overturn restrictive voter laws designed to keep millions away from the polls. We’re taking part in a Main Street Movement and exercising our power through solidarity.

Many families are still experiencing the worst of George W. Bush’s recession – a recession that was deeper and lasted longer than previously thought. President Barack Obama understands the plight of those who are working two or three jobs to pay the bills.

The President’s jobs agenda would prevent nearly 300,000 teachers, firefighters and police officers from being laid off and put men and women to work modernizing public schools and rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and waterways. It would provide a tax credit that encourages businesses to hire the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who in many cities are the hardest hit by unemployment.

Attacks on voters’ rights and the refusal of the President’s opponents in Congress to join him in creating good jobs both come from the same place: a disregard for working people, a quest to bust as many unions as possible, and a higher loyalty to the rich and well-connected. Ultimately, the goal is to push the American dream – a dream that the labor movement helped inspire – further out of the reach of families that work hard and play by the rules.

That’s why the President is standing up for good jobs, and it’s why his administration is reviewing restrictive laws that could disenfranchise as many as 5 million voters – laws that are 21st century versions of poll taxes and literacy tests.

The members of our union worked hard in 2008 to get out the vote for candidate Barack Obama. With our endorsement of the President’s re-election, we look forward to knocking on doors, phone banking, driving voters to the polls, and doing all we can to ensure the President’s victory in November. 

“They’re not finished with us yet.”

That’s one of the key lessons for labor following last November’s overwhelming repeal of an Ohio law that would have stripped collective bargaining rights from 350,000 public service workers in the state, says Joseph P. Rugola, executive director of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees OAPSE/AFSCME Local 4.

Rugola, also an AFSCME International vice president, made his comments this week during a panel discussion on the politics of collective bargaining in the public sector hosted by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, a program at Georgetown University that draws on its academic and research capabilities “to find new approaches in improving labor and workplace relations.”

Referring to right-wing politicians and corporate backers of Gov. John Kasich’s anti-worker law, Senate Bill 5, Rugola said, “Whatever they learned from the rebuke that they suffered last November, to them, is only a tactical setback. It’s not a strategic setback. They view it as a skirmish in a battle that is part of a larger war” against the middle class.

He was joined on the panel by Joseph McCartin, associate professor of history and director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative; Craig Becker, visiting associate professor of law at Georgetown Law and former member of the National Labor Relations Board; Mahlon Mitchell, state president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin; and Eleanor Clift, contributor for Newsweek and The Daily Beast.
“The bottom line is we best not celebrate much” from the Ohio victory “because they are much emboldened by developments around the country,” Rugola said. “Their long-term goal is to get us out of the way.”

Rugola said the labor movement can defeat a concerted effort by the enemies of collective bargaining if it learns the key lessons that made the Ohio victory possible. They are: start early on any campaign to get a repeal initiative on the ballot, display message discipline during that campaign, and foster solidarity among unions and coalition allies.

“We did something I think is probably a first. We scared away the big right-wing money. They never invested,” he said. “The other side will not spend a dime unless they know that they’re going to profit from it in an immediate way.”

That made a huge difference in the outcome, he said, “because they couldn’t compete with us down the home stretch.”

Defeating those who want to undermine worker rights is possible, “when we’re doing things in a smart way, in a right way,” Rugola said.

From the backwards ideology that brought America the Koch brothers, comes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is not new, though it has flown under the radar, employing extreme secrecy to mask its corporate backers.

ALEC got its start in 1973, crafting legislation for conservative state legislators to push back home. For the past year, ALEC’s agenda has been blatant: suppress the minority vote, destroy health care reform, privatize public services such as prisons, and take down unions. Most recently, the organization has been pushing that agenda in Florida, Minnesota, Kansas and Arizona.

Twitter is taking note:

ALEC can be beaten. In fact, a prison privatization bill which the organization created and pushed in Florida was defeated just this Tuesday.

SAN JOSE, Calif. – In an historic union election, 280 private sector EMS professionals in Santa Clara County voted overwhelmingly to build their own local with AFSCME. 

EMS workers at the emergency medical services company, Rural/Metro – including paramedics, emergency medical technicians, and vehicle supply techs – are now part of the same national union that represents 20,000 EMS workers nationwide. They join the ranks of the uniformed paramedics and EMTs of the FDNY.

With four options on the ballot, last night’s vote count clearly showed that Northern California EMS workers are ready for national unity. One hundred and thirteen voted to join AFSCME, and not a single worker voted against forming a union. Check out video of members reacting to the big win here:

"The support we got from other AFSCME locals during this process is just amazing,” said Samantha Tennison, a paramedic with Rural/Metro. “It feels good knowing that EMS workers on the East Coast and around the country have our backs. This is going to unite EMS workers nationwide.”

After being a part of a small, absent, unaffiliated union, EMS workers across Northern California are building their own AFSCME local with strength, accountability, and democracy so they can begin to address the issues that affect their jobs and the services they provide.

“It really hit us home, because we relate to the same issues they currently face. It was important for me to come out here and share with them our history,” said Oren Barzilay, an EMT with Local 2507 in New York City. In recent weeks, he and many of his colleagues came to California to lend a hand in the organizing effort.

On the heels of this victory, another 2,000 private-sector EMS workers at in Northern California have already filed for the election to join their coworkers in United EMS Workers, AFSCME.

A new book recounts the historic 2011 uprising in Wisconsin in support of American public service workers, how that massive protest helped fuel the Occupy movement and ultimately energized the 99%.

In Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street author John Nichols describes in vivid detail how the protests in Wisconsin took the establishment by surprise. Nichols calls it the new politics of protest.

“The way it would work before was that people would get together, make their case, and go home,” Nichols said at a book signing Wednesday in Washington, D.C. “But what the powers weren’t counting on (in Wisconsin) was the people would come back. They had to be made afraid that people would come back, and that’s exactly what happened in Wisconsin. People had a grievance and they came back and they stayed and wouldn’t back down.”

Nichols makes a comparison between what happened in Wisconsin and what had been occurring at the same time, on the other side of the globe. “Wisconsin was watching what was happening in Egypt, that after 18 days, one of the most powerful dictators in the world stepped down. Wisconsinites thought, ‘Well, if Egypt can stop Hosni Mubarak, then Wisconsin can stop Scott Walker.”

Nichols, a journalist with The Nation magazine, told the packed gathering at restaurant-meets-community center Busboys and Poets that he has reported around the world, “but I’ve never seen anything like what I saw in Wisconsin.”

Students, organized labor and Wisconsinites connected in an unprecedented way in their fight to stop the governor. Nichols calls their work “transformative politics” and said it has taken root in other cities and towns and represents a new chapter in the labor movement. It is what AFSCME members refer to as their Main Street movement.

He added however, that the struggle continues. “It is going to be ongoing, this fight against working-class America. But Wisconsin and other examples showed what we can do if we push them, if we come together and don’t back down.”

A new poll of Ohio voters claims a majority of participants support becoming a “right-to-work” state, but a closer look shows that questions were overly simplified and biased in favor of the anti-worker legislation.

The Quinnipiac University poll posed this question to participants:

“Indiana recently became a ‘right-to-work’ state, meaning that workers can no longer be required to join a union or pay dues or fees to a union as a condition of employment. Do you think that Ohio should become a ‘right-to-work’ state or don't you think so?”

The poll does not correctly define what right-to-work really is, and only shows that respondents did not understand that it means reduced wages for all workers, less likelihood of employer-sponsored health care and pensions, and would have absolutely no impact on job growth.

As a result, 54 percent of respondents said they favor right-to-work, compared to 40 percent who oppose it. (Six percent had no opinion.) Most Republicans said they support it and a majority of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Independents would not.

Ohioans this past fall overwhelmingly rejected the anti-worker Senate Bill 5/Issue 2 by a 61 to 39 percent vote and in the past have defeated right-to-work-for-less initiatives. Ohioans oppose such measures once they understand what they really mean, and elected officials on both sides of the aisle say that pursuing a right-to-work law in Ohio would be foolish.

Even Governor Kasich weighed in, saying recently, “If people in this state feel that you need right-to-work, I don’t think people even know what that is.”