Writing on Shalom Rav, a website run by his rabbi, Brant Rosen, Hamer says he immediately went to the school’s principal who set up an emergency meeting where he convinced the committee to move the prom, even though it meant giving up a $3,000 deposit. The students are making up the $3,000 through fundraisers. Hamer writes:

I proceeded to relay some facts: i.e. that Congress workers made $8.80 an hour with minimal benefits while the standard is now $13.20 with significant benefits. Also, I made it clear to the committee members that having prom at the Congress would misrepresent Northside as a place where liberal thinking and cultured morals abound.

And there was the practical matter that supporters of the workers might put up a big picket line at the hotel and that the pool of teacher chaperons would immediately diminish since the teachers, who belong to the largest union in the city, probably would not cross the picket line.

Why would a teenager, whose thoughts at this time of the year turn toward graduation and senior parties, think about a group of mostly immigrant hotel workers? Here’s Hamer’s answer:

Everything in my religious spirit, my religious being, tells me that to stand by while injustice occurs would be the wrong thing to do. Thankfully, the discussion …ended with the decision that our own financial burdens should never take precedence over the daily struggles of working class families that are less fortunate than we. When I got home I said the Shema (an affirmation of Judaism and a declaration of faith in God).

Hamer also is an alumnus of Or Tzedek , the teen social justice summer program of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs.  At Or Tzedek, he engaged with a variety of social justice issues, learned about organizing and gained tools to create social change. Since that summer, he has been taken on many endeavors through Or Tzedek, including the Congress strike.

Hamer’s commitment to justice comes naturally from his faith and training. Rabbi Rosen says the Jewish religious tradition is “rife with imperatives about protecting workers, paying a fair living wage and making sure workers’ rights are protected.” He adds:

It is foundational to who we are. And one tenant of our faith is worker and immigrant justice. We are well aware of our history in this country and the benefits of the union movement. Our job now is to realize that not long ago these were issues we dealt with as part of our common experience.

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Today, on what would have been Chávez’s 82nd birthday, President Obama issued a statement hailing the former Farm Workers president as “an educator, environmentalist, and as a civil rights leader who struggled for fair treatment and fair wages for America’s workers.”

Chávez’s rallying cry, “Sí Se Puede”—”Yes, We Can,” was more than a slogan, it was an expression of hope and a rejection of those who said farm workers could not organize, and could not take on the growers. Through his courage, César Chávez taught us that a single voice could change our country, and that together, we could make America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation.

The AFL-CIO is supporting efforts to create a national holiday to honor Chávez. Last year during the presidential campaign, Obama said we should have a holiday for Chávez.

It’s time to recognize the contributions of this American icon to the ongoing efforts to perfect our union.

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The latest to sign on in support of the Employee Free Choice Act include a wide diversity of religious beliefs. The range of faiths represented illustrates the widespread support for the bill, which is backed by 73 percent of Americans.

For example, the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA, which represents more than 100,000 local congregations and 45 million persons in the United States, has endorsed the bill.  

Sojourners/Call to Renewal, the national faith-based movement for social justice and an end to poverty, has come out in support of Employee Free Choice.

 Both the Muslim American Society Freedom (MAS Freedom) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council also have joined the fight to allow workers to decide for themselves how to choose a union.

The Jewish Labor Committee also is behind the bill, saying in its statement of support that “for workers who decide to unionize, the current law is stacked against them.”

  Other groups to recently announce support for the bill are:

• Center of Concern; 
• Irish Apostolate USA; 
• Lutheran Volunteer Corps;
• Unitarian Universalist Service Committee; and
• Nebraskans for Peace.

Click here for a complete list of who’s backing the Employee Free Choice Act.

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Casino workers in Atlantic City, N.J., are stepping up their battle for a first and fair contract. The workers, members of the UAW/Atlantic City Dealers Union, today began running radio and newspaper ads in Atlantic City letting the public know about their struggle. The ads coincide with the launch of a new website, http://fairdealforacdealers.org, which chronicles the workers’ campaign and solicits stories from casino workers. 

Two years ago, casino dealers at Caesars in Atlantic City voted for representation by the UAW. Full- and part-time dealers and slot techs at Tropicana, Trump Plaza and Bally’s also have voted to form their own unions, but casino operators have either refused to bargain or stalled the negotiating process.

At the website, the union members make it clear they are ready to bargain, saying:

We are ready to work with the casinos to improve our jobs so we can keep providing the best possible service to our customers. But the companies are refusing to meet us halfway—either refusing to meet, or engaging in stalling tactics.

The ads point out that everyone loses when workers are treated unfairly. They point out that the CEO of Bally’s and Caesars “is playing the corporate greed game” by cutting dealers’ hours, cutting retirement benefits, stripping seniority and refusing to bargain.

Yet the CEO of Bally’s and Caesars paid himself $39 million last year with plenty of perks. When Bally’s and Caesars play games with casino dealers—it’s no fun for anybody. And everybody loses.

Under the Employee Free Choice Act, the workers would have a contract by now. The proposed legislation would allow either side to request federal mediation if they cannot agree on a deal after 90 days. After 30 days of mediation, if there is still no agreement, the dispute would be referred to binding arbitration.

Last week, casino workers from Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Detroit and Connecticut joined together to carry out a broad organizing, bargaining and communications agenda.  The new Gaming Workers Council, which includes the UAW, Transport Workers (TWU) Gaming Division, the AFL-CIO and SEIU, also will reach out to other partners to support a common agenda on behalf of workers in the casino industry.

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The global economic crisis cannot be successfully resolved if the solution leaves out workers who are discriminated against because of their race or ethnic origin. As unemployment rises around the world, so, too, are the incidents of racial, ethnic and gender discrimination in the workplace, according to the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). Today, on the International Day for the Elimination of Racism,  the ITUC is mobilizing its members—some 170 million workers in 157 countries—to bring attention to the need to eradicate racism in the workplace.

In today’s global economy, the ITUC says, millions of men and women are currently deprived of jobs, denied promotions or are poorly paid, harassed and intimidated because of their race or ethnic origin.

The global union movement is calling on the world’s leaders, who will meet in coming weeks at a United Nations conference on racism, to make a “solid commitment” to eliminating all forms of discrimination. The ITUC statement makes it clear governments must play a role in eliminating discrimination.

Discrimination based on color, ethnic origin, culture or religion is an insidious and changing phenomenon, difficult to quantify and to combat. Nonetheless, a show of real political will by all those concerned could lead to a world free of discrimination.

Governments must work to create decent work, jobs that pay good wages, and provide health care and retirement security and safe working environments, says ITUC General Secretary Guy Ryder:

Decent work is one of the keys to tackling the global economic and financial crisis. Racism and discrimination are incompatible with the notion of decent work.

Last year, the ITUC adopted an action plan to fight discrimination in the workplace as well as in the union movement. The plan includes integrating the fight against racism into trade union policies and raising awareness among trade union leaders to ensure equal treatment and equal rights among all workers within their own ranks. It also calls for recruiting and organizing migrant workers and workers from discriminated groups. Click here to read the entire action plan.

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually on March 21. On that day in 1960, police opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration in Sharpeville, South Africa, against the apartheid “pass laws.”

In proclaiming the day in 1966, the U.N. General Assembly called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.

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There’s a woman named Elizabeth Warren…who did a great deal of study around this. And she made a simple point…if you bought a toaster, and the toaster blew up in your face, there would be a law, a consumer safety law, that would protect you from buying that toaster. But if you get a credit card that blows up in your face, that starts off at zero-percent interest…and suddenly, it’s 29 percent; and if you’re late two days, suddenly you just paid another $30—well, somehow that’s okay.

I think generally having some consumer safety, some consumer protection around credit cards, is important.

Obama was referring to one of the COP’s recommendations to Congress in its recent report on the need for regulatory reform of the financial system. Those recommendations reflect many reforms proposed by the AFL-CIO.

In a post at Credit Slips, Christian Weller shows why new credit card laws are needed. He reports that in the fourth quarter of 2008, credit card companies charged off—declared as uncollectible—a whopping 6.3 percent of their debt. This is the second-largest charge-off rate since the Federal Reserve began collecting this data in 1980.

Weller says one of the reasons for the charge-offs is the credit card companies’ greed:

Credit card companies milked every last dollar out of their preferred customers, the so-called “revolvers”—people who carry a balance and make some payments. Higher interest rates, increased fees, and fewer perks were typically in store for these card holders when defaults surged…a number of credit card companies are raising their fees, cutting back on perks associated with their cards, and raising interest rates right now.  Apparently, bilking the customer in the current quarter beats making sure that the customer can still pay the bills next quarter.

In his comments, Obama also reminded consumers to be “more thoughtful” in the way they use credit cards.

I think a lot of people have learned their lesson with credit cards. And credit cards can be an important convenience. But generally speaking, if you’re just running up your credit card and you don’t think that there’s a bill to be paid, you’ve got problems. So all of us, I think, have to be more thoughtful about how we use them, and ultimately we’ve got to take responsibility if we are going on shopping sprees that we can’t afford.

On the other hand, it’s also important that we have consumer safety laws, and that’s something that I want to promote and get done as President of the United States.

Obama’s remarks came the same day Warren and the COP held a hearing on international comparisons on bank bailouts. During the hearing, AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers, a member of the COP, said the Bush administration policies of buying time in hopes that the nation’s banks and financial markets would return to rational business practices did not work. He adds:

The Obama administration now faces the choice of continuing a failed strategy based on mistaken assumptions, or looking to the lessons of history to craft a new strategy consistent with the values of responsibility, transparency and shared sacrifice that President Obama has rightly asked our nation to embrace. 

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In a recent interview with National Public Radio (NPR), AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, a member of President Obama’s White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, pointed out that the current recession is worse than the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s when it comes to job losses. Says Trumka:

This recession began in December of 2007, and we’ve already lost more jobs as a percentage of total employment than in the entire ‘73 or ‘80-’81 recessions.

This recession also affects jobs in more industries than previous downturns, Trumka adds.

You have manufacturing jobs, you have construction jobs—all of those are similar, but you also have a lot of white-collar jobs that are going this time that weren’t as bad in those past recessions.

Click here to hear the full NPR interview.

One troubling similarity between the current recession and the Great Depression is that both began with a banking crisis. In the NPR interview, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke says:

It was the financial crisis and the collapse of banks and other institutions in late 1930 and early 1931 that made the Great Depression “great.” And so we must have a commitment to stabilize our banking system to prevent the failures of any large systemically critical firms.

Trumka says it isn’t just the banking system that has failed. It is a deregulated financial system that has failed.

We came out of the Great Depression with the knowledge that a strong middle class America and a regulated banking system was the correct approach to correcting the corse of the economy. When we began deregulating the banking system and ignoring the health and growth of America’s middle class, we started down the slippery slope again.

Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee yesterday, AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers laid out strategies the union movement sees as the most effective for saving the banking industry. Silvers told the House panel:

Systemic crises in financial markets harm working people. Damaged credit systems destroy jobs rather than create them. Pension funds with investments in panicked markets see their assets deteriorate. And the resulting instability undermines business’ ability to plan and obtain financing for new investments—undermining the long-term growth and competitiveness of employers and setting the stage for future job losses.

You can read Silvers’ testimony here.

Since 2006, the AFL-CIO has urged Congress to act to reregulate shadow financial markets and address systemic risk. The Congressional Oversight Panel, of which Silvers is a member, has made several recommendations to prevent future banking crises, recommendations which the AFL-CIO supports:

• There should be a body charged with monitoring sources of systemic risk in the financial system. The AFL-CIO believes the regulation should be the responsibility of a coordinating body of regulators, led by the chairman of the Federal Reserve. This body should have its own staff, resources and expertise to monitor systemic risk in institutions and products throughout the financial markets.
• The new regulatory body should be fully accountable and transparent to the public. We should not identify specific institutions in advance as too big to fail, but rather have a framework where larger banks are required to keep more capital on hand and pay more on insurance funds on a percentage basis than smaller firms.
• Systemic risk regulation cannot be a substitute for routine disclosure, accountability, safety and soundness, and consumer protection regulation of financial institutions and financial markets.
• Effective protection against systemic risk requires that the shadow capital markets—institutions like hedge funds and products like credit derivatives—must not only be subject to oversight but must also be brought within a framework of routine capital market regulation by agencies like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
• We must create a global regulatory floor for financial markets.

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