The endorsement process took place at the State Labor Federation’s political meeting, held at the Richmond Marriott in Richmond, VA.

Virginia AFL-CIO President Doris Crouse-Mays stated, “Particularly during a time of economic distress, working men and women need a Senator who understands the very real challenges they face in their daily lives. Our endorsement of Tim Kaine is based upon his commitment on issues of top concern to Virginia’s working families: creating jobs; investing in infrastructure and education; ensuring quality, affordable health care; and improving the quality of life in our communities.”

“My number one priority in the Senate will be creating good-paying jobs and ensuring fairness in our economy,” said Tim Kaine. “In Virginia, we’ve worked hard to create an environment where business and labor work with, not against, each other, and I want to help facilitate that same partnership all across this country as a U.S. Senator.”

“Through investments in education and workforce training we can build a lasting talent economy that will drive growth for generations to come. I am honored to have the endorsement of Virginia’s working families, and I am committed to fighting with them to ensure a stronger economy.”

Tim Kaine grew up working in his father’s union-organized ironworking shop. That experience taught him that businesses succeed when management and employees operate as a team and all parties have a stake in the outcome. This track record of fairness and inclusion is one he carried with him as a Mayor and Governor.

As Governor, Tim Kaine fought for educational investments and workforce training to strengthen our economy. He helped make it easier to start businesses in the Commonwealth, cut taxes for hundreds of thousands of working Virginians, and spearheaded the largest investment in higher education construction in Virginia’s history. Tim Kaine respects the freedom to form unions and bargain for middle-class living standards and understands the struggles of working people. He believes in finding common ground to solve our nation’s problems.

The Virginia AFL-CIO will coordinate a grassroots campaign to educate members on labor’s position in this race. The campaign will consist of member mailings, worksite flyers, phone bank operations and a “labor-to-labor” program, where union members visit other members in the area to discuss endorsed candidates.

The Virginia AFL-CIO represents 150,000 union members in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Virginia AFL-CIO speaks for labor collectively in Virginia and advances labor’s political and public positions. It represents a consensus of labor’s priorities, policy and opinions. Endorsements are made by a two-thirds majority vote of the members of the Virginia AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education (COPE) representing unions affiliated with the State Labor Federation

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Stumping for president, Republican candidates have finally figured out that the public cares more about job creation than deficit reduction. But their solutions involve luring corporations back to this country from overseas by eliminating regulatory policies that could make working conditions here alot more similar to those offshore. A recent Jon Stewart segment shows just what that would entail.

Pointing to recent news reports that describe the slave-like conditions at China’s Foxconn factory, where 800,000 workers make iPhones, iPads, Kindles and most other Apple products, Stewart notes that most Apple products are made in China,

the Communist country where corporations get the respect they deserve.

So, to compete with China, Stewart continues,

we’ve got to make our factories look more like this Foxconn.

At Foxconn,

• Employees live in dormatories eight to a room…often roommates, though, won’t know each other’s names.
• A worker described assembling a part 5,200 times a day
• Employees can work 35 hours straight
• Until recently, workers were paid 31 cents an hour
• A growing number of workers are killing themselves, or trying to. The company installed nets around buildings to try and catch “jumpers.”

And, if a Foxconn workers try to improve their dire working and living conditions by seeking to join a union, they get 12-year prison sentence.

Or, as Stewart asks about Foxconn versus prison:

What’s the difference?

Photo credit: Glen Besa, Sierra Club- VA Chapter

More photos.

This study, commissioned by the board of the San Diego Unified School District, looked at a Project Stabilization agreement (also known as a PSA or a PLA) between SDUSD and the San Diego Building Trades Council. The agreement covered the modernization of 161 schools, and the construction or refurbishment of 12 others.

Corporations pay to join ALEC. ALEC writes model legislation that benefits those corporations through favorable tax breaks, deregulation or limiting competition.

ALEC pays for Virginia legislators to attend their annual meeting in sunny San Diego while taxpayers foot the registration fees.

ALEC shares model legislation with politicians. Then the legislators come home and introduce these bills as if they wrote them, thereby hiding the true authors: corporate friends.

Just one case is Delegate Barbara Comstock’s House Bill 33 modeled after ALEC’s Open Contracting Act.

This is one of many examples of multi-national corporations ghostwriting legislation and hijacking Virginia’s democratic process.

If you are fed up with politicians putting corporate interests ahead of working families in Virginia, join our rapid response team.  

While this cozy relationship works wonders for out-of-state corporate interests and the legislators they buy off, it does enormous harm to real life people who live, work, study and raise families in Virginia.
In nearly every case, these bills weaken the influence of regular working people.

These ALEC laws routinely:

• Take away the rights of workers, make it harder to join unions and destroy collective bargaining rights.
• Reduce access to voting 
• Turn our public education system over to for-profit entities.

Things move lightning-fast at the General Assembly and often we have just a day or two to mobilize on an issue.  That’s where rapid response comes in: by contacting our Delegates and State Senators on key issues at key times, we will remind them that they represent real constituents, not wealthy campaign donors like the Koch Brothers.

Download PDF of Flow-chart for “How ALEC Works”

It’s been a long year and we simply can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done: educating and mobilizing, participating in events, making lobby visits, making phone calls, writing letters, doing precinct walks, rallying, and so much more…Thank You.

We hung together to push back on the attacks working people faced this year; Attacks on workers’ rights and protections, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, health and safety standards, and the very right to organize and bargain collectively.

Despite the struggles of the last year, there have been many accomplishments we can celebrate.

You helped strengthen Virginia’s workers compensation system for the first time in 20 years.

UFCW Local 400 along with their allies got a strong and comprehensive Big Box bill passed in Loudoun County.

Nationally, 40,000 TSOs chose to join our labor family as AFGE won one of the largest organizing campaigns in years.

Affiliates across Virginia stood with our CWA brothers and sisters during their strike against Verizon as they showed enormous courage, strength and unity and held the line for the right to bargain for good middle class jobs.

Just this week, the Machinist workers at the Danville Swedwood plant approved their first contract.

We held rallies in every corner of the Commonwealth in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in Wisconsin as hundreds of us were joined by our community allies to stand up for the rights of workers.

In the last few months, we also witnessed an inspiring movement take hold. Occupy Wall Street started in Liberty Plaza and has spread to hundreds of cities across the country. It is a movement that shares many of the same goals we’ve been battling for for decades. At its most basic, it is a fight for fairness and justice.

We belong to the labor movement because we believe that people who work for a living, deserve safe and fair workplaces, family sustaining wages, a few days off for vacation, the ability to go to a doctor and to one day retire with dignity.

In the New Year, we start a General Assembly session working with a tough House of Delegates and a State Senate split 20-20. We know we’ll encounter a lot of the same anti-worker bills we see every year and probably face some new surprises as well.

What we’ll need is the only thing that ever works in Virginia and that is to work collectively as one labor movement to improve the quality of life for our members, their families and all workers.

From Richmond Times Dispatch OP-ED

For rural America, broadband is the bridge to our nation’s economic mainstream, but of today’s 20 percent of the national population that lacks broadband access, the vast majority live in rural areas. Bringing high-speed Internet access to rural-broadband have-nots is today’s greatest telecommunications policy challenge.

Now a single means of meeting that challenge is at hand. AT&T has pledged that its merger with T-Mobilewill result in broadband reaching more than 97 percent of the population within six years, connecting 55 million Americans who lack the service today. President Obama has set a national goal of universal broadband deployment, defined as reaching 98 percent of our population, within five years. Now one company alone, with approval of the pending merger, will almost enable that goal to be met, leaving a far smaller gap to be filled with government grants and loans and other private investment.

It’s the promise of far broader rural economic opportunity achieved with private investment that leads me to support the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. With the merger, wireless broadband with 4G LTE service will arrive in our rural regions, and it will arrive at speeds rivaling today’s fastest wired connections.

The achievement of bringing broadband service to communities that are the hardest to reach — whether in the mountains of Southwest Virginia or other remote areas of our country — will meet our greatest telecommunications challenge and bring new economic opportunity to millions of rural residents.

Our leaders in Congress have been working hard to find ways to help, but the proposed trade deals with Colombia, Korea and Panama could undermine their work. These trade deals hurt our working families by outsourcing jobs and can perpetuate attacks on workers’ rights in both signing-countries.

Tell Congress: Stop offshoring jobs. Vote “NO” on all three unfair trade agreements

Free trade with Korea, for example, would be the largest deal of its kind since NAFTA. The consequences of this deal includes 159,000 lost jobs, hitting manufacturing the hardest. Because of the good wages and benefits that traditionally accompany manufacturing, this is a particularly dangerous prospect for Congress to consider as our economy struggles to create sustainable, family-wage jobs. This deal also includes huge loopholes that could lead to illegally labeled goods from China and possibly even North Korean sweatshops.

The trade deals will reward Colombia, despite their atrocious record on human rights. On average, a trade unionist is murdered in Columbia nearly every week and it is very rare for the murderers to face punishment. It’s unlikely Congress and the White House would be pushing for a deal in a country where CEOs were murdered on a weekly basis.

The deal with Panama has many of the same problems as the other deals and would allow foreign investors to bypass our country’s labor, health and workplace safety laws. Panama is also one of the most popular tax-havens for international corporations and a trade deal will only make it easier for big corporations to avoid their tax obligations, while we foot the bill.

Past trade deals like NAFTA have left working people in the dust and these proposed deals are not an improvement. Stand up for American workers and tell Congress to stop these trade deals and find a better solution to resolve our economic crisis:

Click here to send our Congressional delegation a message.

Millionaire couple Philthy and Meg A Rich visited Rep. Cantor’s office last week to deliver a check from the Rich Super PAC thanking the Congressman for being a true champaion of the very, very rich. By walking out of budget talks and protecting them from paying their fair share, Rep. Cantor showed who he goes to bat for in Washington. Philthy Rich noted, “Eric Cantor is willing to let the entire country go into default just so we rich don’t have to pay more taxes. What a hero.”

Acknowledging the critics of Mr. Cantor, Philthy explained, “Of course, there are trouble makers and there are naysayers who say Mr. Cantor may be going too far. Sure, he wants to get rid of Medicare, Medicaid, food inspections, funding for clean air and clean water. In short, the things workers rely on. Well, to them, I say, ‘quit whining.’

Earlier in the afternoon, AFGE members who work at the U.S. Defense General Supply Center and McGuire VA Medical Center were joined by their brothers and sisters of the Building and Construction Trades, CWA, UFCW, and other affiliates of the Central Virginia Area Labor Federation to deliver hundreds of petitions urging the Congressman to fight for the good jobs and vital services working people depend on.

Retiree from McGuire VA Medical Center Joyce Smith told his aides that, “Senior citizens did not create this deficit, federal employees did not create this deficit and it should not be cleaned up on our backs.” Jack McMurchy, Area Vice President of NARFE, explained, “We have people who put their lives on the line. People who work for the FBI, CIA, and the civilians who work for the Defense Department overseas, they’re wearing uniforms. We’ve contributed to our retirement over 30 years and even if they took everything we’ve worked for, it still wouldn’t put a dent in the deficit.”

AFGE Local 1992 President Lucy Lewis detailed the impacts that Rep. Cantor’s anti-worker agenda would have on middle class workers, “This is an attack on each and every one of us. The veterans who are coming back, their services are being affected. Social security benefits that people worked their whole lives for, those are being affected. All of the federal workers who have given their careers to serve our military, we’re being affected. We can’t accept it and we have to stand together as one and fight these attacks.”

“Represenative Cantor should be concentrating on jobs in Virginia and putting people back to work,” noted Toney Rigali President of the Virginia Building and Construction Trades. Andy Thomas (UA) added, “It’s time to do the right thing and do the job you were elected for.”

Virginia AFL-CIO President Doris Crouse-Mays concluded, “instead of walking away from the budget negotitations, he should have stayed and fought for the working people and middle class in Virginia.”

More than 50 union members and their families celebrated the Fourth of July representing the Northern Virginia Labor Federation in the Dale City (VA) Independence Day Parade. Among the unions represented were AFT, CWA,
IAFF, IBEW, IUOE, OPEIU, SIU, SMWIA and UFCW. UAW-made pickups were decorated with “We Are One” signs.

“We had a wonderful group representing Labor in the parade,” noted NoVA Labor President Daniel Duncan. “We were very well received, especially when we tossed out union-made candy.”

NoVA Labor has marched in the parade for more than 20 years.