NEW YORK MEMBERS RATIFY CONTRACT

Members of the New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF), an affiliate of AFT Public Employees, ratified a new four-year contract in September. Eighty-five percent of the nearly 29,000 members who voted put their stamp of approval on the new agreement, which is retroactive to April 1, 2003.

“Our members recognized the gains and enhancements of this contract,” said PEF president Roger Benson. “Despite a severe state budget shortfall and skyrocketing healthcare costs, we negotiated an agreement that provides a compensation package that is remarkable within this economic environment, plus several benefit enhancements specific to PEF members.”

Details of the ratified agreement are posted at www.pef.org.

AFL-CIO DECLARES ‘BUY UNION WEEK’

Nov. 26-Dec. 5, 2004, has been designated by the AFL-CIO as “Buy Union Week.” The federation’s executive council hopes the “Buy Union Week” campaign will prompt American consumers to “give the gift of good jobs” by buying union-made products and using union services for the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa holidays.

REFORM WORKFORCE TRAINING, SAYS AFT

How can America preserve good jobs, a strong middle class and our nation’s economic strength in the face of low-cost foreign labor, new technologies and new ways of organizing economic activity worldwide?

This is the $64,000 question taken up by the Task Force on Workforce Development, a national panel of academic, business, labor and community luminaries. It was formed two years ago by the Albert Shanker Institute and the New Economy Information Service, with emeritus AFT president Sandra Feldman and Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America, serving as co-chairs.

Among the task force’s recommendations: Update the Workforce Investment Act to target resources on the employed as well as the unemployed and boost the program’s annual appropriation by $3 billion.

Go to www.ashankerinst. org/labor.html to read the task force’s report, “Learning Partnerships: Strengthening American Jobs in the Global Economy.”

DATA SHOW LIVING STANDARDS ON DECLINE

The U.S. Census Bureau dealt a blow to the Bush administration in August when it released data showing that the number of people in poverty as well as the number of people without health insurance rose in 2003—for the third consecutive year.

Specifically, the number of people in poverty has risen 4.3 million to 35.9 million, according to the Census data. Nearly 13 million of those living in poverty are children. Working-age adults, those ages 18 to 64, make up the growth in the number of uninsured, which rose to 45 million in 2003.

“The federal government’s response to these adverse developments has been misdirected,” says Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). “As recent studies indicate, the nation has squandered huge amounts of resources on poorly designed tax cuts that greatly increased budget deficits and further widened gaps between the most well off and everyone else and did so without much payoff in terms of jobs.”

According to CBPP, which analyzed the Census data, the richest 20 percent of households received 49.8 percent—almost half—of the nation’s total household income in 2003. CBPP notes in its analysis, however, that “the Census data missed a large share of the income of very high-income households both because they do not include capital gains income and because they fail to count earnings above

$1 million. All households with earnings of more than $1 million are depicted in the Census data as having earned income of exactly $999,999.”

To review the analysis, visit www.cbpp.org.