Walter Frederickson: A tax for the people, not on the people

August 1, 2012 by

Walter Frederickson, R.N.

Earlier this spring, I stood on the steamy streets of Chicago and witnessed a revival that my union brothers and sisters in the Windy City said was a long time coming. I’d been swept into town a day earlier along with hundreds of nurses, union members and others to help National Nurses United (of which MNA is a founding member) launch what quickly became a national movement – the call for a “Robin Hood Tax” on the “Too Big to Fail” banks and Wall Street speculators who created this financial nightmare.

NNU put on a visual spectacle that afternoon, one that included hundreds of nurses dressed in bright red scrub tops, green masks and the type of pointy hats everyone associates with Robin Hood. Dozens of nationally-recognized speakers and musicians took the stage to share their support, and my union friends in Chicago told me it had been far too long since the city had seen this type of peaceful, public protest filling its streets. While I like to think our colorful costumes and pointy hats had something to do with the energy and passion that was unleashed in and around Daley Plaza, the reality is this: People of all stripes are ready to embrace an idea whose time has come.

It’s a simple concept: Putting a small “Financial Trans-action Tax” of less than one-half of one percent on the types of speculative Wall Street financial transactions that created the global economic crisis we’re still trying to recover from.

A simple idea, sure, but one that carries the support of a powerful and diverse group of people, including Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Nobel Prize-winning economists and thought leaders, religious entities and faith leaders, politicians and many more – from nurses to firefighters to AIDS activists to environmentalists to small business owners.

In the U.S., the Robin Hood Tax has the power to raise hundreds of billions of dollars every year. It can provide funding for jobs and put our union brothers and sisters back to work. It can kick start the economy and get us back on our feet. It can provide education, health care and financial support for the least among us by funding social safety net programs. And that’s just for starters!

Best of all, the Robin Hood Tax won’t affect ordinary Americans. It won’t touch our personal savings or other everyday consumer activity such as ATM withdrawals or our use of debit cards. It’s easy to enforce and tough to evade.

This is a tax on Wall Street, which created the greatest economic crisis in our nation since the Great Depression. These are the same people who have returned to record profits and bonuses while ordinary Americans, the 99 percent, continue to pay the price of the 1 percent’s self-created financial meltdown. The Robin Hood Tax is not a tax on the people. Rather, it is a tax for the people.

Take a minute to learn more at www.RobinHoodTax.org. And if you want to don a pointy hat, wear a green mask and take to the streets to let people know about this growing movement, know this – I’m with you!

– Walter Frederickson, RN, is executive director of the Minnesota Nurses Association, a union of 20,000 nursing professionals.

Filed Under: Labor Voices Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

More Than A Memoir: Acuff’s new book defends the ‘absolute necessity’ of organizing

May 22, 2012 by

Stewart Acuff is the author of the new book “Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing.”

In his new book, “Playing Bigger Than You Are: A Life in Organizing,” Stewart Acuff looks back on his 35-year career as a community, political and union organizer, including a stint as organizing director of the nation’s largest labor federation, the AFL-CIO, from 2001 to 2008. Acuff is quick to point out, however, that the book is more than a memoir. It is also a call to arms and a defense of organizing as an “absolute necessity” to the survival of the nation’s labor and progressive movements.

Acuff, who now serves as chief of staff for the Utility Workers Union, is in Minnesota this week promoting his book. He will appear at Common Good Books in St. Paul at 7 p.m. Wednesday, along with local authors Jack Nelson-Pallmayer and Joanne Boyer.

Acuff spoke yesterday with The Union Advocate from Duluth, where he was scheduled to give a reading at the Paul Wellstone Hall. Here are selected excerpts from our interview.

Union Advocate: You’re in Minnesota to promote your new book, a memoir of your career as a community and labor organizer. What lessons or knowledge are you hoping readers gain from your personal story?

Stewart Acuff: Some people describe it (as a memoir), but there’s nothing personal in it. It’s mainly about campaign struggles, fights I’ve been in over the last 35 years… Each chapter is a different struggle and fight and what we did to win. I don’t think I put any losses in it (laughing).

There’s a very interesting chapter on the huge fight we had to unionize the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, which we won. It was actually labor’s biggest victory in the South. There’s a big chapter on my time as a United Nations election observer in Sierra Leone … and how I almost got killed there. There’s a chapter on non-violent civil disobedience, and there’s a chapter on politics… There’s a chapter on strikes. There’s a kind of “do’s and don’ts” for organizers …

It’s getting good reviews. People like it. I also have a website, stewartacuff.com, which is just chock full of poetry I’ve been writing a lot of lately.

UA: I didn’t know you wrote poetry.

SA: I don’t do it regularly. I’m in a spate of it right now. Some writer once said, ‘If you want to write, write everything,’ so I’ve been doing a little free verse poetry for this year and last year… There’s some more personal stuff in there… I’m less careful with it than I was with the books, more expressive. And I will read a little bit of poetry (at Common Good Books).

Acuff’s new book is available on Minneapolis-based Levins Publishing.

UA: Who is your target audience with this book, and what are you trying to tell them?

SA: It’s all progressives. The point is basically, there’s two kinds of power… There’s the power of organized money, which is ruining our country right now. And there’s the power of organized people. And we have got to organize people right now. There’s more of us than there is of them, which the Occupy Movement has re-taught us. If we’re organizing, we can make this a much more just and fair country and society, with prosperity for all.

UA: Why write this book at this point in time?

I was sort of at a good point to look back. I wrote my first book (“Getting America Back to Work,” with University of Minnesota economist Richard Levins), and then I thought, this is a good time to sort of define my career and try to teach my lessons and maybe inspire some young organizers, I hope, and talk to progressives in the country about the absolute necessity of organizing…

There’s probably more truth written in this book about the (AFL-CIO and Change to Win) split than has ever been written before, too. I managed the split for the AFL-CIO, the politics of it and the media of it. I thought this is a time that makes sense to draw some lessons and to talk about it… I’ve been blessed to be in the right place at the right time to watch history. This was probably the right place and the right time to record some of it.

UA: Any highlights from the split that will surprise people or pique people’s interest?

SA: One of the hardest things about the split was that it occurred at the AFL-CIO convention. I was running the floor of the convention, and I had to accept and sign for the letters of disaffiliation from my union, SEIU, and the Teamsters.

One of the unfortunate things about the split, besides the fact that it weakened us, was that it dominated labor news, and it was absolutely the wrong thing for union members and the general public to be talking about – the byzantine, arcane world inside labor. I blame myself every day that I didn’t turn more of those debates and more of those interviews into a discussion about why the labor movement is needed now more than ever and how to rebuild it, instead of just arguing about our inside business.

UA: It’s clear that writing this book required a lot of self-reflection. How difficult was that process?

SA: It was at times a painful process. I’m 57, so I’m obviously closer to 60 than I am to 50, and it’s kind of a reminder that you don’t have that much longer. So it was a very interesting process to write, and it brought back tons of memories, most of them good, some of them not.

UA: You’ve worked at all levels of the labor movement, from local unions to the national AFL-CIO. From your standpoint, is the union movement as committed to organizing workers as it needs to be in order to survive?

SA: No, we’re not. We’re not as committed to organizing as we need to be. And that’s been a struggle for a long time. I spent 10 years working on that, and in two of those 10 years we had the greatest growth we’ve had in a generation. We know we can organize, but it’s damn hard – and it’s really damn hard in a recession.

As the organizing director, I was more concerned with systemic change that would allow workers to organize without as much retaliation and interference from the boss… It’s not enough to win one campaign at a time. We’ve got to change the terrain, we’ve got to change the climate, we’ve got to change the playing field. What stopped us (from passing the Employee Free Choice Act), frankly, were the deaths of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd… We just couldn’t get them to the Senate floor at the same time. I’ve lost a lot of sleep over that.

Filed Under: Organizing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Immigrant workers march on Wells Fargo, accuse bank of betraying their communities

May 14, 2012 by

People line the sidewalk outside Wells Fargo downtown Minneapolis, waiting to close their accounts with the bank.

Hundreds marched through the streets of downtown Minneapolis on May 11, protesting the recklessness and hypocrisy of Wells Fargo’s dealings with Minnesota’s immigrant community.

The march capped a weeklong string of “Occupy”-style protests across the Twin Cities. Organized by the Service Employees union (SEIU) in partnership with several progressive, faith-based and labor groups, the “99 Percent Week of Action” took aim at corporate tax dodgers and irresponsible Wall Street CEO’s with public demonstrations, civil disobedience and street theater.

Aztec dancers open the protest outside Wells Fargo in Minneapolis.

The May 11 event began on the sidewalk outside Wells Fargo’s Marquette Avenue branch, where colorfully dressed Aztec dancers twirled and danced to a lone drummer’s thunderous beat, entertaining dozens of people lined around the block, waiting to close their Wells Fargo accounts.

Javier Morillo-Alicea, president of SEIU Local 26, waved a withdrawal slip in the air as he addressed the crowd of protesters. The union, he said, had removed $72,000 in funds from Wells Fargo and had presented the bank with a petition signed by more than 1,000 people ready to do the same.

“We’ve been trying to get these big banks to listen to us, but they refuse to be good partners in our community,” Morillo-Alicea said. The union leader cited a long list of complaints about Wells Fargo, including the bank’s record of foreclosing on homes owned by immigrants and targeting immigrant communities with offers of “reckless subprime mortgages.”

Rank-and-file union members, meanwhile, said they felt betrayed by Wells Fargo, an institution that markets heavily to immigrant communities but, at the same time, bankrolls several organizations, businesses and politicians working contrary to most immigrant workers’ interests.

“Wells Fargo is the place where thousands of workers have deposited not just our money, but our trust,” said Gerardo Cajamarca, a member of Local 26. “Wells Fargo betrays that trust by financing anti-immigrant politicians. These are politicians that enact laws that hurt us, the 99 percent.

“In the last two years about 2,000 members of SEIU local 26 have lost their jobs because of our broken immigration system. We are here to protest the policies and politics of Wells Fargo and what they are doing to our communities.”

Fany Fonseca, a Local 26 steward, said more and more workers are beginning to connect the dots.

“As an immigrant and a customer of Wells Fargo, I was surprised to learn they are investing in private prison systems like Corrections Corporation of America,” Fonseca said, singling out a Wells Fargo-backed company that lobbied for – and profited from – Arizona’s extreme anti-immigrant law.

“We say enough of profiting off of immigrants,” Fonseca added. “The Latino community has had it. We will no longer work with banks that do not support our communities. Enough is enough!”

Many of the workers waiting to close their accounts at Wells Fargo were Somali immigrants, upset that the bank was refusing to conduct wire transfers necessary to send money to relatives in their native country.

Imam Hassan Mohamud said many families in Somalia depend on support from relatives living abroad. By blocking wire transfers from Somali immigrants to their families, he added, Wells Fargo “puts millions at risk” of starvation and death.

“We cannot let any institution, whether it is Wells Fargo or a government institution, let those people die,” Mohamud said. “My brothers and sisters, war and terror have nothing to do with this situation.”

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Service Employees plan Friday march on Wells Fargo in Minneapolis

May 9, 2012 by

SEIU activists will keep the pressure on Wells Fargo with a rally Friday in Minneapolis.

The Service Employees International Union is urging people who bank with Wells Fargo to take their business elsewhere, citing the bank’s record of bankrolling anti-immigrant and anti-worker forces in Minnesota.

The union, led by SEIU Local 26, will stage a rally at the Wells Fargo Bank downtown Minneapolis (6th St. & Marquette Ave.) on Friday, beginning at 2:30 p.m. Union leaders and activists will urge customers to withdraw money from their Wells Fargo accounts and reinvest it elsewhere.

Gerardo Cajamarca, a member of Local 26, accused Wells Fargo of “hypocrisy” in its dealings with immigrant communities, particularly Latinos. The bank targets immigrant communities through its marketing efforts, the union said, but “is also helping bankroll a for-profit prison system that unfairly targets the same groups.”

The SEIU and its allies also will call out Wells Fargo on Friday for financially supporting politicians like Rep. Michele Bachmann, who co-sponsored a bill that would eliminate birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. The union says it will expose the bank’s record of foreclosing on homes owned by immigrants and targeting immigrant communities with offers of “reckless subprime mortgages.”

Friday’s rally outside Wells Fargo will serve as a follow-up to an action staged by the SEIU and its community organization, Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, on April 17. Activists used the deadline for filing income-tax returns to expose Wells Fargo’s record of avoiding taxes by exploiting loopholes in the tax code and parking profits in offshore tax havens.

“In an election year, when candidates will seek the Latino vote, the public should be made aware, again, of just who is bankrolling whom in ways that are harmful to Latinos and other minority and immigrant communities,” the union said.

The Wells Fargo protest will serve as the culmination of the “99 Percent Week of Action,” targeting major banks like Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank. Read more about the week of action on Workday Minnesota.

Filed Under: Union Events Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,