Activists Fight Back on Many Fronts

[Omaha Steve]

http://broadcastunionnews.blogspot.com/2011/04/activists-fight-back-on-many-fronts.html

Saturday, April 2, 2011

From Wisconsin to Connecticut, the struggle to protect the rights of public employees and the communities they serve continues. While conservatives scapegoat public employees for budget deficits, activists show it's a smokescreen to further enrich the wealthiest of Americans and big corporations. And it's those tax dodging corporations that are becoming the targets of the widening protests.

In "Connecticut Public Employee Activists Fight For Pension Justice," James W. Russell describes the hard-fought campaign for a defined benefit package, one which pits state workers against the powerful financial services industry. On September 22, 2011 an arbiter ruled in favor of Alternate Retirement Program (ARP) members that they had been unfairly steered as new employees into their plan when the much better traditional pension plan was available. They had not been given sufficient information to make informed choices nor had they been told that their decisions, once made, would be irrevocable.

As a remedy, the arbiter ordered that ARP members be allowed to voluntarily transfer to the pension plan using accumulations from their defined contribution plans to purchase credit for years of employment.

Mazher Ali provides the historical context of decades of declining union power and widening inequality in "Class, Race & the Attacks on Public Employees."

Mazher Ali wrote; the Wisconsin uprising has become as loud a wake-up call as there has ever been that working America is under attack. Attempts by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority to steal away the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers – as a false premise for the state’s budgetary hardships – has triggered a national uproar by labor rights supporters. The top 10 percent of U.S. households own nearly three-fourths of the country’s total wealth; 34 percent is held by the top one percent alone. Some among this very wealthy elite have a profit-lust so insatiable that it’s causing the American middle class to fade from existence, as income stagnates and the unemployment crisis continues.

FULL story at link.

[Omaha Steve]

1. Kicked by original authors request

He knows my email address. :-) Now IF I can just get him to sign up.