Changing working conditions for truckers is one of the keys to solving air pollution generated by container operations at the Port of Seattle a panel of experts agreed in a live radio discussion on KBCS' Voices of Diversity September 5.
The panelists included Port of Seattle Commissioner Alec Fisken; Heather Trim an environmental geologist from People for Puget Sound, Heather Weiner, Change to Win; Lucille Ross Meyer, ACORN, and an independent trucking contractor who asked to be called "T". Moderator for the panel was Tom Herriman.
The lively discussion, which included a steady stream of questions and comments for the listener telephone lines, identified diesel truck pollution as a series health hazard for Puget Sound residents. But the 1500 drivers who own their trucks and work as independent contractors don't have the financial means to upgrade or replace their aging trucks. Several panelists described proposals at the Port of Seattle which would improve conditions for the truck drivers, and hold the freight companies and ultimately the shipping lines responsible for cleaning up diesel truck pollution. Listen to the podcast.

Pete Seeger, folk artist-hero revered around the world, has long been criticized for his support of the Communist party in the 1930's. But Seeger denounces Stalin in a new song, "Big Joe Blues," and his disaffection from the Soviets goes back several years according to a New York Times article.

September 1, 2007
This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

A front-page article in The New York Sun yesterday trumpeted what seemed to be a striking fact: Pete Seeger, the quintessential leftist balladeer and a former Communist, had denounced Stalinism.

The article centered on a letter from Mr. Seeger to the writer, Ron Radosh, a historian and adjunct senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. “I think you’re right I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in U.S.S.R.,” Mr. Seeger wrote.

He also included the lyrics to a song he wrote several months ago called the “Big Joe Blues”:

He ruled with an iron hand.

He put an end to the dreams

Of so many in every land.

He had a chance to make

A brand new start for the human race.

Instead he set it back

Right in the same nasty place.

Mr. Radosh, who once studied banjo with Mr. Seeger, said in an interview that he had idolized him, but he has become a dogged critic of Mr. Seeger’s politics. Mr. Radosh wrote that he was “deeply moved” that the singer, “now in his late 80s, had decided to acknowledge what had been his major blind spot opposing social injustice in America while supporting the most tyrannical of regimes abroad.”

But in fact, Mr. Seeger, 87, made such statements years ago, at least as early as his 1993 book, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” In the book, he said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times Magazine, he had apologized “for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.”

But Mr. Radosh said that Mr. Seeger’s comments before had been little noticed and had never gone as far. And Mr. Seeger had never written a song condemning Stalin until now, Mr. Radosh said.

Mr. Radosh said that a public renunciation of Stalin was important because Mr. Seeger had made a powerful impact on the culture. “He’s a cultural figure who’s so identified with that, and is breaking with tradition,” Mr. Radosh added.

If anything, the interest in Mr. Seeger’s views on the Soviet Union shows the durability of cold war ideological debates. But Mr. Seeger, speaking by telephone from his home in Beacon, N.Y., seemed mildly amused by the matter.

“I certainly should apologize for saying that Stalin was a hard driver rather than a very cruel leader,” he said. “I don’t speak out about a lot of things. I don’t talk about slavery. A lot of white people in America could apologize for stealing land from the Indians and enslaving Africans. Europe could apologize for worldwide conquest. Mongolia could apologize for Genghis Khan. But I think the thing to do is look ahead.”

When a documentary filmmaker asked Mr. Seeger to suggest a critic of his views, he suggested Mr. Radosh. But the critical comments were not included in the movie. Mr. Radosh took note of that in his June review of the documentary in The Sun. The film, he wrote, had whitewashed Mr. Seeger’s silence on Communist crimes.

Mr. Seeger said he wrote Mr. Radosh after that to apologize for the exclusion of the critical remarks.

In the letter, which Mr. Radosh provided along with the lyrics, Mr. Seeger gives more insight into his cold war thinking. Mr. Seeger said he had concentrated on showing what the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had accomplished “without using guns.”

“But I still hoped that someone like Khrushchev or Gorbachev could open things up,” he writes. “But I underestimated (and probably still do) how the majority of the human race has faith in violence.” The “basic mistake,” he adds, was “Lenin’s faith in discipline.” He closes warmly: “Well, you stay well. Keep on.”

In the interview Mr. Seeger said Mr. Radosh had made a career out of exposing the crimes of Soviet Communism. He said the focus on his own past was “kind of funny.”

“I’m sure,” he added, “there are more constructive things he could do with his life.”

Link to NY Times Story

It was a bad day when I stopped saving for my daughter's college tuition and started focusing on paying down our monthly debt. Somehow, in the span of a few short years, we went from being a two-income family with health insurance, a home, and life savings to being bankrupt,...

Paula Hall's Huffington Post Blog

Yes, Washington is having a jobs boom. 240,000 new jobs created in the state between 2002 and 2006. Unfortunately, most of the new jobs are in low wage service categories, and don't pay enough to support a family.

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The owner of a car dealership in East Point, Georgia has been accused of killing two employees because they kept asking for pay raises.

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The lone remaining law from the Saddam Hussein regime kept by U.S. occupying powers and the successive Iraqi government is the one that bans worker organizing in the public sector.

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Seattle grocery workers in UFCW Local 21 made this video for YouTube two illustrate the difference between CEO salaries and workers pay.

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Joint Statement from UFW and Three Mile Canyon Farms: THREEMILE CANYON FARMS AND UFW SIGN COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT
07/16/2007

THREEMILE CANYON FARMS AND UFW SIGN COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT

(July 16, 2007, Boardman, OR) Threemile Canyon Farms and the United Farm Workers Union (UFW) announced today that they have entered into a collective bargaining agreement covering dairy and farm workers. The agreement, the first of its kind in Oregon, was ratified this week, bringing to an end all labor disputes between the UFW and Threemile Canyon Farms.

“This is an important milestone for Threemile Canyon Farms”, said Marty Myers, the General Manager at Threemile Canyon Farms. “It allows us to continue putting our values into practice in the form of a formal agreement that respects and protects workers. It also brings an end to all disputes and provides a way for all future issues to be solved peacefully. Lastly, it gives us the opportunity to focus on what we do best: producing healthy, high quality food products and bringing them to market in ways that earn the trust of our customers, neighbors and employees”, said Myers.

“Just as we remember our past,” said Arturo Rodriguez, UFW President, “we recognize that this agreement blazes a new agricultural path into the 21st century. The UFW is proud of our members and this new partnership, building respect for farmworkers. We look forward to working with Threemile Canyon Farms and joining in the promotion of their fine agricultural products. This agreement lays the groundwork for a new period in Oregon’s agricultural heritage providing stability for growers and fairness for farm workers. We honor our entire membership, native-born and immigrant, men and women in this is a new era of cooperation and mutual benefit for both the farm and them”.

The key provisions of the contract are listed below:
1. THREEMILE CANYON FARMS AND THE UNITED FARM WORKERS ENTERED INTO A COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AGREEMENT THAT SPECIFICALLY DEFINES EACH PARTIES RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS.
2. THE AGREEMENT BRINGS TO AN END ALL LABOR DISPUTES BETWEEN THREEMILE CANYON FARMS AND THE UNITED FARM WORKERS.
3. THE AGREEMENT ESTABLISHES AN ORDERLY AND EFFICIENT METHOD TO RESOLVE ALL LABOR DISPUTES.
4. THE AGREEMENT BRINGS TO AN END THE ABILITY OF EITHER PARTY TO TAKE ANY LABOR ISSUES TO THIRD PARTIES NOT ASSOCIATED WITH THREEMILE CANYON FARMS OR THE UNITED FARM WORKERS.
5. THE AGREEMENT WILL ALLOW WORKERS TO PARTICIPATE IN BOTH A MEDICAL PLAN AND PENSION PLAN SPONSORED BY THE UNITED FARM WORKERS.
6. THE AGREEMENT HAS NOW FORMALIZED THE PROCESS BY WHICH EMPLOYEES CAN ADVANCE WITHIN THE COMPANY.
7. THE AGREEMENT INCLUDES LANGUAGE THAT ENSURES THE EMPLOYEES WILL CONTINUE TO WORK IN A SAFE WORKING ENVIRONMENT.
8. THE AGREEMENT PROVIDES THE EMPLOYEES WITH THE ABILITY TO CONTINUE PARTICIPATING IN TRAINING AT THE COMPANY.
9. THE AGREEMENT CLEARLY APPRISES WORKERS OF THE CODE OF CONDUCT EXPECTED OF THEM WHILE EMPLOYED AT THREEMILE CANYON FARMS.
10. THE AGREEMENT ALLOWS THE COMPANY SUFFICIENT FLEXIBILITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE NEEDS OF ITS WORKFORCE.
11. THE AGREEMENT HAS PROVIDED THE COMPANY THE ABILITY TO MERGE THE DAIRY AND THE FARM, HISTORICALLY TWO SEPARATE AND DISTINCT BUSINESS OPERATIONS, INTO ONE INTEGRATED OPERATION.


[note: Threemile Canyon Farms began operations in 2000 and is located on 93,000 acres of Columbia River Basin land just west of Boardman, about 150 miles east of Portland.]

Videos and more info on UFW website

Southern California won a big victory and ratified it with an 87% vote of approval June 24.

LA Times Story

Just ask one of nearly 200 Thai workers who have joined in a federal class-action lawsuit.

FULL STORY FROM SEATTLE WEEKLY

It was a story of hope: a Central American sweatshop transformed into a unionized, worker-run apparel factory, thanks to nearly $600,000 in loans and donations, including help from retailers Gap Inc. and Lands' End and the AFL-CIO.

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The L.A. Hilton, with more than 1,200 rooms, is the second-largest hotel in Los Angeles County. Over the last year, it has become the primary battleground for one of the city's loudest disputes: a union organizing campaign of a dozen airport-area hotels.

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Shortly before he died in 1958, John Neuhaus gave Archie Green a tin tea box containing all but one of the 29 little red Wobbly songbooks published between 1909 and 1956.

Historian completes a labor of love -- 'The Big Red Songbook'
Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, June 18, 2007

John Neuhaus was a strapping Mission District machinist who joined the Industrial Workers of the World -- the radical unionists called the Wobblies -- in San Francisco in 1930. A passionate man who wore lumberjack shirts and had no use for doctors, lawyers and other bourgeoisie, Neuhaus became an ardent folklorist, researching and collecting the potent and piquant songs that Wobblies of many creeds and colors sang around copper mines and hobo campfires, on picket lines and in jail.

Shortly before he died of cancer in 1958 at age 54, Neuhaus gave his friend and fellow folklorist Archie Green a tin tea box containing all but one of the 29 little red Wobbly songbooks published between 1909 and 1956 (seven more have appeared since, the last in 1995) and a World War II ammunition box filled with original sheet music and other material he'd amassed with the goal of publishing a complete Wobbly songbook. Green implicitly understood the job would fall to him.

"I felt morally responsible to do something with his collection," says Green, one of the editors of "The Big Red Songbook," an engaging new anthology (Charles Kerr, $24) that's been in the works for nearly half a century.

It features the lyrics to 250 or so Wobbly songs, rich with references to job sharks, shovel stiffs, capitalist tools and plutocratic parasites. Wobbly wordsmiths such as the fabled Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Haywire Mac and Richard Brazier set their fighting words to popular tunes of the day, gospel hymns, old ballads and patriotic anthems. Green and his co-editors place the songs in the context of the tumultuous times in which they were written and sung.

"I put it off as long as I could," laughs Green, who turns 90 this month. "Eventually, you run out of time, and I knew that if I didn't finish it, nobody would."

A longtime San Francisco shipwright, union leader and labor historian who's a retired University of Texas folklore professor, Green is sitting in the sunny living room of the tidy upper Castro neighborhood house he and his wife, Louanne, bought for $9,000 in 1950, when the neighborhood was filled with blue-collar families. A lively storyteller with wispy white hair and amused blue eyes, he's dressed in pressed khakis and a blue-plaid shirt.

Green grew up in Los Angeles in a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants active in the Jewish socialist group called the Workmen's Circle. He soaked up live cowboy music and jazz with his friend Norman Granz, the late, great record producer. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a philosophy degree, he began working on the San Francisco waterfront in 1940, returning to the shipwright's trade after serving in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II. At 22, he was elected secretary of his local union, which, unlike the Wobblies, never sang songs at meetings.

"Working on the waterfront was like going to graduate school,'' says Green. "The conflict was intense, with the AFL fighting the CIO or vice versa. It was a mixture of Trotskyites and socialists and New Dealers. I was immersed in the ideological controversy from day one. If you went to a meeting and talked out of line, you were likely to be thrown down the stairs. It was a good education. I was better at union politics than I was as a skilled worker."

Green became close with Neuhaus in the early 1950s. The older man passed along Wobbly lore and Green introduced him to Cal's Bancroft Library and the ways of the academic folklore world. Neuhaus was adamant that the Wobbly songs he collected should be sung -- he spent years tracking down their source melodies and talking to old Wobblies. Green disagrees.

"I'm interested in having a record of all the songs," says Green, who thinks many were never actually sung. "It's historically important to bring all the material together. But I don't think most of them will ever be sung, and I don't think they deserve to be sung, because most are unsingable." He notes in his commentary to Brazier's leaden "Come and Get Wise," set to a 1903 Anheuser-Busch beer jingle, "worthy causes do not guarantee good songs."

"How many times can you say, 'One Grand Industrial Union'? After you've said it once or twice, it's repetitive. John was obsessed with getting it correct. He dug up the original sheet music and he'd get pissed off if a guy used the wrong melody. Every progressive is somewhat of a reactionary," Green adds with a smile.

But a handful of Wobbly numbers have become classics, still sung by labor groups and folk singers. They include Hill's sardonic "The Preacher and the Slave" (sometimes known by its famous phrase "Pie in the Sky"), set to the 1868 gospel hymn "Sweet Bye and Bye''; John Brill's "Dump the Bosses off Your Back," wed to the hymn "Take It to the Lord in Prayer''; "Solidarity Forever!," which Ralph Chaplin set to the Civil War tune "John Brown's Body''; and Slim's "Mysteries of the Hobo Life," sung to the melody of "The Girl I Left Behind," a ballad and fife tune popular in colonial America.

"They're memorable tunes," Green says. "The Wobblies didn't pass out sheet music. They didn't bring a piano to the picket line. Sometimes at a meeting there might be a piano or an accordion, but guitars weren't popular then. Guitars came in when the left discovered folk music. Remember, these were not trained musicians -- they were loggers, miners, construction stiffs. They would hear a song at church, or a patriotic or vaudeville song, remember it as best they could and, out of revolutionary zeal, write a song."

Whatever the music -- "The Big Red Songbook" includes pieces set to everything from "Yankee Doodle" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" to the "Toreador Song" from Bizet's "Carmen" -- the songs were meant to prod and praise workers. Each piece, Green writes in his preface, "whether topical, hortatory, elegiac, sardonic or comic served to educate, agitate, and emancipate workers. Songs were intended as arrows to penetrate bourgeois (in Wobbly parlance, "scissorbill'') mentality, and to anticipate a new social order: the commonwealth of toil."

The songs stressed the solidarity and power of the working class, Green says, "it wasn't about the state, or the Communist Party or the worship of Stalin, this murderer who killed more people than Hitler and became a demigod of the left. The Wobblies said no, no one is our leader."

Before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Wobblies and other radicals hailed the Red Dawn, the coming emancipation of workers. In 1918, Wobblies volunteered to help build railroads and other construction projects in the emerging Soviet Union. But as soon as they got there, "they began organizing their fellow workers against the bosses, who were the commissars," Green says. "So among the first enemies of the state to be executed were Wobblies." The Wobblies rejected the communist line and there was a long-standing enmity between them and the other radical American groups. The Wobblies -- whose influence waned in the 1920s, although there's a chapter of younger Wobbly workers in Berkeley -- would have nothing to do with probably the best-known song about one of their own, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," popularized by Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.

The song, which immortalized the Wobbly poet executed by a Salt Lake City firing squad in 1915 after he was convicted of murder, was written at a communist camp in New York in 1936 by Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes.

"The Wobblies wouldn't sing that song because they were conscious of what they called Stalinist methods," Green says. For similar reasons, they wouldn't embrace Woody Guthrie's famed "Union Maid," which was not included in the little red songbook (often subtitled "Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent," which cost a dime) until the 34th edition in 1973. "Instead of thinking of Guthrie as a freedom singer or a freedom fighter, they thought of him as a Stalinist stooge." By the time "Union Maid" made it into the songbook, Green adds, "the song had been sung in radical circles and in labor circles, and the young Wobblies didn't know or didn't care about its historical context. They just accepted Guthrie as a working-class hero a la Walt Whitman."

Green first sang Wobbly songs at the Workmen's Circle school in the late '20s, although he wasn't aware of their origin at the time. He associates the international labor and protest songs he sang with the unsuccessful effort to stop the execution in Massachusetts of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Asked to sing one of the Wobbly songs he learned as a kid, the folklorist breaks into "The Preacher and the Slave," which Carl Sandburg included in his 1927 "American Songbag'':

"Longhaired preachers come out every night/ Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right/ But when asked how 'bout something to eat/ They will answer with voices so sweet: You will eat bye and bye/ In that glorious land above the sky/ Work and pray, live on hay/ You'll get pie in the sky when you die."

"Obviously that made enough of an impression on me between 1925 and '30 that it stuck with me all these years,'' says Green. His heart was with the Wobblies, but he never joined the Industrial Workers of the World. "Like most Americans, I'm a creature of contradiction," he says. "By the time I was ready to join a union, joining the Wobblies would've been a gesture, a good gesture, but for better or worse, the shipwright's union had jurisdiction over my trade."

After Neuhaus' death, Green -- who later made copies of his friend's little red songbooks and gave the originals to the folklore archive at the University of North Carolina, where Green once taught -- nurtured the collection. The only Wobbly songbook he never found was the second edition, a copy of which was sold to UC Riverside by the Argonaut bookstore in San Francisco in the 1950s a few days before Green wandered into the shop. The songbook was apparently stolen from the university and another copy has yet to turn up.

The labor movement is in a weakened state at the moment. But Green, whose two sons belong to the electricians' union, looks ahead. He thinks "The Big Red Songbook" will prove useful not only to those interested in labor history and lore, but to future workers. "The very fact that working people were able to compose and sing and celebrate their past," he says, "will be encouraging when we form new coalitions, if we do."

E-mail Jesse Hamlin at jhamlin@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/06/18/DDG0GQH1PJ1.DTL

Link to SF Chronicle Article

Three prominent unions — SEIU, the farm workers, and UNITE-HERE — have backed the legislation. But that support has been outweighed by opposition from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and virtually all other unions, including auto workers, Teamsters, food and commercial workers, and construction unions.



By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
Published: June 26, 2007

Now that President Bush has rallied Republicans to try again to reshape the immigration laws, supporters of the effort have a new worry. When the bill returns to the Senate floor, probably next week, opposition from labor unions could doom the bill’s prospects by putting pressure on many Democrats to vote against it.

The threat that labor poses to the bill has gone largely unrecognized in part because three prominent unions — the service employees, the farm workers, and the hotel, restaurant and apparel workers — have backed the legislation. But that support, advocates say, has been outweighed by opposition from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and virtually all other unions, including auto workers, Teamsters, food and commercial workers, and construction unions.

“The labor opposition on this bill is extremely important,” said Tamar Jacoby, an immigration expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “For this bill to pass, we probably need 80 percent of the Democrats, if not more, to support it, and if unions are what pull them off the bill or make their support soft, that is a serious threat to the bill.”

The split between the three unions and the rest of labor reflects fundamentally different views of what is best for the future of the labor movement.

Supporters of the bill say that the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in opposing the legislation, is focused on protecting the gains that its mostly middle-class members have made in pay and benefits over the decades. To the labor federation, the big worry is that the bill’s guest worker provision will pull down wages, take away jobs from Americans and exploit immigrants.

The three unions that favor the bill also dislike the guest worker program but are willing to support the bill to pursue a larger goal: a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in this country. The three unions, which represent many janitors, farm laborers and hotel housekeepers, have high percentages of members who are immigrants. They also recognize that it will be far easier to unionize immigrants — perhaps the most fertile ground for labor’s growth — when illegal immigrants are given legal status.

The three unions argue that the best strategy to help the nation’s immigrants is to push forward with the bill, however flawed, in the hope that it will be improved by the House. “We think burying the issue and ignoring it would be a terrible mistake for the country and the economy,” said John W. Wilhelm, president of the hospitality division of Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers. “We don’t support the bill in its present form, but we think that the process is best served if the bill passes out of the Senate and the legislative process continues.”

But the A.F.L.-C.I.O. asserts that the bill is so flawed that it should be killed.

“We really have major concerns, and the concerns increase each day because the bill is getting worse instead of better,” said John J. Sweeney, the labor federation’s president, who called the bill overly punitive. “The bill’s guest worker provisions pit workers against other workers. It creates a new underclass of workers.”

The federation continues to battle the bill despite amendments proposed to address labor’s objections. The Senate voted to halve the guest worker program, to 200,000 workers a year, and to phase it out after five years.

“The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s hostility surprises me,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a liberal group that supports the bill. The service workers’ union and Unite Here, Mr. Sharry said, “are forward looking, they’re trying to figure out how do you improve workers’ rights in an era of globalization and do more than protect aging members.”

Labor’s split over the bill reflects tensions between the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the breakaway Change to Win labor federation; the three unions backing the bill belong to the rival federation.

Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, said the bill would help not only immigrants, but also labor unions.

“We have thousands of members who are undocumented who would have legal status,” said Mr. Medina, the son of a bracero worker from Mexico. “Second, it will allow workers who want to organize to do so without the fear of deportation, and that helps unionization drives. It’s not just a question of helping us as labor; it helps all workers because if you have a significant number of workers without any rights, that suppresses wages for everybody.”

In several European countries, people are legally presumed to want to donate their organs after they die, unless they have indicated otherwise. This legislation has dramatically increased the available of organs available for donation.

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