On the picket line

Big victory in Illinois

The Services Employees won a hard-fought, many-year struggle to organize 49,000 child-care workers in Illinois on April 7. The vote to join the union was a landslide: 13,484 to 359. The workers, who are paid by the state to care for 200,000 children of low-paid workers, have been fighting to unionize for many years. But the state refused to recognize their right to join a union until this March.

“We expect this vote in Illinois will be the catalyst for more than half a million family child care providers across America [to join] our union,” says Anna Burger, SEIU secretary-
treasurer. SEIU’s membership will now jump to 1.8 million.

Westchester bus drivers win

It took nearly seven weeks of pounding the pavement for 568 bus drivers in New York’s Westchester County to win a decent contract on April 20. Members of Local 100 of the Transport Workers will receive a 12.75-percent raise over the course of four years.

But an even bigger issue was lowering the retirement age with full benefits. The union argued that it should be lowered from 62 to 57, because many drivers incur serious injuries after working behind the wheel for years. The drivers were able to negotiate it down to 59. The agreement also included an increase in health-care benefits.

Sign vs. Wal-Mart censored

The outdoor advertising arm of Clear Channel, the giant radio network that promotes right-wing ideology, refused to accept a union-sponsored billboard opposing Wal-Mart on New York’s Staten Island. “This absolutely is censorship,” says Michael Mareno, secretary-treasurer of Local 342 of the Food and Commercial Workers. The billboard would have shown a fire-breathing Godzilla standing near the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge with the following statement: “The Wal-Monster will destroy Staten Island businesses and devastate our quality of life.”

The union has vowed to find a way to post a compromise anti-Wal-Mart billboard near the ferry terminal connecting Staten Island to Manhattan. Unfor tunately, unlike in Queens where a coalition of unions, elected representatives and community groups were recently able to send Wal-Mart packing, a number of prominent politicians on Staten Island are backing the mega-store.