AFSCME Women Share Organizing Stories at White House Forum
by Gonzalo Baeza | March 28, 2011
With a massive anti-worker offensive being waged across the country, AFSCME public service workers participated in a U.S. Department of Labor event recognizing the importance of labor unions in improving the lives and safety of workers. U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis hosted “Women Organize!” a Women’s History Month forum with women workers and organizers. The event honored the legacy of the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire, in which 146 young immigrant workers – mostly women – lost their lives in a raging sweatshop fire in New York City.
Deanna Vizi, a Genoa, Ohio, child care provider and member of AFSCME Council 8, talked about the three year fight of 3,500 providers like her to win union recognition.
“Being a union member is important to me,” says Vizi, who has provided publicly funded and subsidized child care services for the past 10 years. “Although I have a voice, many voices together are better heard. Having the support of our union gives me peace of mind, because although I work independently, I know thatI have an entire team ready and willing to support me at any time.”
Vizi was joined by Latonya Johnson, a child care provider from Milwaukee since 2002 and president of Local 502 (Council 48). Johnson was one of the organizers behind the successful campaign of more than 7,000 licensed and certified child care providers throughout Wisconsin to form their union Child Care Providers Together/AFSCME.
“Child care in Wisconsin for the longest time had been an uneven power struggle. We had rules and regulations put in place without providers’ input,” Johnson said. “It made it hard for providers to do their job. People got fed up. It was time for a union.”
Also in attendance was Megan Burger, a tour guide at the U.S. Capitol and interim president of Local 658 (Council 26). Burger is one of 138 tour guides and visitor assistants who voted overwhelmingly to be represented by AFSCME in October 2010, the culmination of a long fight for safety, security and better conditions.
According to the National Women’s Law Center, women make up 56.8 percent of all government workers. At the state government level, they comprise 51.7 percent of the workforce, and they make up over 60 percent of local government workers.
In this current war of attrition against public sector workers, they have already lost 320,000 jobs, among other things, because most of our teachers, nurses and public-sector clerical workers are women.
As AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee remarked in his recent Firedoglake blog on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the event “was a turning point in the development of broad public support for the reforms that America desperately needed if it was to be free of the corporate abuses and excesses of the Gilded Age.Today, one hundred years later, this terrible and tragic event can still teach a new generation about the need to pull together, to organize and to fight for the common good.”
