Bus will leave the Louisville office promptly at 7:50 a.m. and will return at 6:30 p.m.
For more detailed information please call 502 363-4074
IN THE PUBLIC SERVICE FIGHTING FOR OUR PENSIONS
In a conference call Tuesday night with US Vice-President Joe Biden and AFSCME International Geral McEntee, it was made absolutely clear that AFSCME and Public Sector Employees are in the fight of their lives. WE MUST TAKE ACTION AND THE TIME IS NOW! This is no joke!!! For you and your families sake please go to www.afscme.org/jobsnow andclick on the leave message box to leave a message to all members of congress. Follow the instructions and tell them to PASS THE JOBS ACT NOW! Then email me back at wandads2003@yahoo.com and say "I DID IT!" Then share with every Kentuckian you know to do the same. The clock is ticking. Tell Mitch McConnell and others to do the right thing for Kentucky Families and put them back to work by creating new jobs NOW!!!
Wanda Mitchell-Smith
Check out our Election Endorsements on the left side of the page for our Union endorsed candidates.
As we celebrate Labor Day 2011, working families face greater attacks on their economic security than at any time since the days of the robber barons in the late 19th Century. In state houses across the country, politicians backed by Wall Street billionaires are attacking fundamental reforms that union members fought and won over many decades, reforms like collective bargaining, child labor laws, safety regulations and even the right of workers to vote. In the U.S. House of Representatives, right-wing forces have passed legislation to eliminate Medicare, undermine Social Security and increase the taxes paid by working families while giving massive benefits to corporations and the very rich.
Rather than pulling together to find real solutions to our problems, anti-worker billionaires and the politicians they fund are mobilizing to transfer all the burdens of taxation onto working families. Under the budget bill supported by all except nine Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate, taxes would increase for the working middle class while the wealthiest one percent would find their taxes cut in half. Millionaires would be taxed at a lower effective rate than anyone working nine to five for a paycheck. That’s not a real solution, and it does nothing to create jobs.
We fought for reforms . . .
Unions opposed these measures. The labor movement worked long and hard to enact reforms like the progressive income tax, Social Security and Medicare. On Labor Day and every day, we need to remember that winning those victories – and so many others – was not a day at the beach or a walk in the park. When unions fought for collective bargaining rights, for the eight hour work day, to expand non-discrimination laws, to restrict the use of child labor and to enforce workplace safety regulations, we were always opposed by Wall Street. Yet, today, too many Americans take those reforms for granted. But many realize how important these reforms were. And they are mobilizing to oppose the concerted efforts underway across the country to repeal them, along with other policies and laws that have promoted social and economic justice.
In Maine, for example, union members fought Governor Paul LePage and his allies who tried to make an end run around child labor laws. We fought their efforts to eliminate restrictions on the hours children can work and to lower wages for teenagers by more than $2 an hour. We are fighting the efforts of right-wing legislators in more than a dozen states who are trying to undermine the Voting Rights Act by requiring voters to obtain government issued identity cards before they can cast a ballot. These misnamed “Voter ID” laws are part of an orchestrated effort to disenfranchise more than 21 million Americans – including many senior citizens – who do not have government-issued identification.
Some politicians want to undermine long-established reforms . . .
We’re calling out the radical proposals by top candidates running for president to undermine long-established reforms backed by America’s labor movement. Texas Governor Rick Perry, for example, honestly believes that America should consider repealing the ability of citizens to vote for their U.S. senators. He’s wrong. Michelle Bachmann calls for an end to the minimum wage. She’s wrong. And Ron Paul says we should eliminate FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and go back to the time when thousands died when hurricanes hit them. He’s dead wrong.
During the last decade, the CEOs at America’s largest corporations have cut nearly 3 million jobs in the United States while adding more than 2 million overseas. They’ve increased their own salaries to obscene levels, while freezing and cutting the pay of their workers. Left to their own devices, they would continue to act irresponsibly and drive our economy through the ditches created by their greed and irresponsibility. They would eliminate every reform that protects their workers or keeps them from hoarding every dollar earned by the increased productivity of America’s workers. Only strong unions stand in their way. Just as we fought for important reforms in generations past, we are fighting for America’s working men and women today.
Working men and women are fighting back . . .
It is heartening, on Labor Day, to reflect on the efforts of working men and women across the country who are mobilizing in numbers not seen in a generation to protect their interests. We see it in Ohio and Wisconsin, where working families have formed a powerful Main Street Movement to fight the efforts of special interests to undermine their ability to provide for their families. Last month in Wisconsin, for example, voters turned out in massive numbers and replaced two Wisconsin state senators who had voted to eliminate the right of collective bargaining that public employees in the state had won more than a half century ago. Working families in Ohio collected more than a million signatures to put a citizens’ veto on the ballot this fall to overturn Draconian anti-worker legislation pushed through in Ohio by their right-wing governor and his Wall Street allies.
Now, more than at any time in recent years, workers are aware of how the deck has been stacked against them. Yet the focus of too many politicians has not been on pulling together to find real solutions or creating good jobs or helping working middle class families hold on to their homes and their dreams for the future. Instead, they are giving even more power to the greedy interests who created the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. These are the same forces that in earlier times created sweatshops, sent children into mines, denied more than half the country the right to vote and hand-picked corrupt senators to represent them on Capitol Hill.
By pulling together in the past, America’s working families set our nation on a different course. This Labor Day, we are sending the powerful CEOs and their political allies a new message: We will not turn back the clock. We are prepared to fight for the future.
AFSCME represents more than 1.6 million public employees and health care workers and retirees throughout the United States. They include employees of state, county, and municipal governments, school districts, public and private hospitals, universities and non-profit agencies who work in a cross section of jobs ranging from blue collar to clerical, professional and paraprofessional. AFSCME is organized into more than 3,500 local unions, most of them affiliated with one of 60 district councils. Local unions and councils have their own constitutions, elect their own officers and administer a wide variety of local affairs. The International Union coordinates issues of concern to all AFSCME members and provides research, legislative, legal, organizational, educational, public relations and other services.
In Indiana and Kentucky, AFSCME Council 62 represents over 17,000 public and health care workers. The union’s membership is evenly divided between health and hospital employees, blue-collar workers and social service/counseling professionals. AFSCME Council 62 represents employees from Louisville, Kentucky to Gary, Indiana and in between. The union’s central office is in Indianapolis where state employees as well as those working for the City of Indianapolis, Indianapolis Public Schools, Wishard Hospital, IUPUI, and Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library to name a few are all represented by AFSCME Council 62. Throughout the two states the union represents employees in over seventy-six state, county, municipal, school, and health care jurisdictions.
STRUCTURE-
AFSCME Council 62 has over 80 affiliated local unions in Indiana and Kentucky. AFSCME Council 62 was chartered in Indianapolis, IN on June 15, 1963. The union’s Executive Board and Director are elected by convention every four years. Each local union elects its own officers and sets its own dues rate and all full dues paying members have a right to attend meetings and vote on all local activities – including their contracts.
HISTORY- AFSCME began as a number of separate locals organized by a group of Wisconsin state employees in the early 1930’s. By 1935 there were 30 locals which became a separate department within the American Federation of Government Employees. In 1936, AFSCME was chartered by the American Federation of Labor. By 1955, at the time of the AFL-CIO merger, AFSCME had 100,000 members. The following year, the Union merged with the 30,000-member CIO Government and Civic Employees Organizing Committee. In 1957, AFSCME moved its headquarters from Madison, Wisconsin to Washington, D.C. Recent organizing successes, including Indiana’s state employees, have brought the union’s membership past the 1.3 million mark.
AFSCME HISTORY 2010.pdf
