National Labor Relations Board | Be a Seed for Change

Can you imagine handing millions of dollars to a corporation charged with everything from racial discrimination and poverty wage rates to union busting and price gouging?

Neither can the students of the University of Washington.

That’s why they started a campaign to urge UW President Phyllis Wise to cut the university’s contract with food service provider Sodexo, an international human rights abuser. Click here to sign their petition.

http://www.change.org/petitions/stand-with-40-uwashington-students-who-were-arrested?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&alert_id=iJpiuKFvCW_TyRIWBJMSA

The world’s 22nd largest employer, Sodexo has a record of human rights violations that has been condemned by the National Labor Relations Board and Human Rights Watch. In the last decade alone, they’ve been accused of:

•Failing to provide safety equipment required by Colombian law, such as hardhats, to workers at their Carbones de la Jagua coal mine.

•Segregating Guinean employees, including managers, from European and other non-Guinean staff during meals at an iron mine in Simandou.

•Paying U.S. workers such low wages that they qualify for federal anti-poverty programs and denying requests for overtime.

•Intimidating—and retaliating against—workers in the U.S., Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Morocco in response to attempts to unionize.

What’s more, Sodexo has a nasty habit of cheating clients. One Sodexo scheme to squeeze extra cash from New York’s public institutions resulted in a lawsuit and a $20 million settlement.

Yet President Wise isn’t budging.

Over the past seven months, UW students have led protests, delivered letters, and met with administration officials in an effort to prevent their tuition dollars from flowing into Sodexo’s deep pockets.

Rather than engaging with students, UW officials are throwing up barriers to dialogue.

In fact, UW officials chose to arrest 40 students attending sit-ins rather than talk to them.

UW students need public support to break the gridlock.

To stand with Washington students and pressure President Wise to cut UW’s contract with Sodexo, sign here:

Repost …

This week the House will vote on Republican scorched-earth budget cut proposals that would amputate critical government services working families rely on every day. They want to slash education—from Head Start to Pell Grants for college. Cut food safety inspections. Cut job safety inspections. Cut investments in infrastructure. Cut the money to send out Social Security checks. And eliminate hundreds of thousands of middle-class jobs.

This week the U.S. House will be voting on extremist budget proposals that essentially would shut down critical services for working families this fiscal year. House Republicans claim it’s deficit control. It’s not. It’s an all-out assault on America’s middle class and naked political payback to CEOs who poured millions into the 2010 elections.

Sign the petition telling representatives to stop wasting time on outrages like this.

>> http://act.aflcio.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=JwmLLkAvQ9Z2eaO7KyjEHVAYly69wHrp

Then, forward this message to your friends and urge them to sign, too. http://act.aflcio.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=Bw132snZIJsEpBwz1ZhVLumJZ0bcS%2BhP

This isn’t “fiscal responsibility” or “deficit control.” It’s a bald-faced attack on America’s middle class as political payback to CEOs who poured millions into the 2010 elections. CEOs don’t like job safety regulations, so the politicians they elected will cut the funding and fire the inspectors. CEOs don’t want environmental safeguards, energy improvements or curbs on health insurance companies, so their politicians will just defund the programs.

Sign the petition. Tell representatives: Get to work creating jobs and reviving our economy and stop wasting time on outrages like this.

Then, forward this message to your friends and urge them to sign, too. http://act.aflcio.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=JwmLLkAvQ9Z2eaO7KyjEHVAYly69wHrp

The Republican proposals would propel us squarely in the wrong direction—toward an America we do not want to be. If we don’t stop this budget insanity now, services ordinary Americans count on could cease for months or fail to function at all in this fiscal year.

Think about what America will be like with no occupational safety and health inspections or investigations of workplace fatalities and disasters. No National Labor Relations Board elections to enable working men and women to have a stronger voice on the job, collectively bargain, or choose whether to form a union. No certainty about when the Social Security checks will arrive.

This isn’t about deficit control. It’s about legislating working America out of the way of limitless corporate profits.

Stop this budget insanity. Sign the petition. Tell representatives: Get to work creating jobs and reviving our economy and stop wasting time on outrages like this.

Then, forward this message to your friends and urge them to sign, too. http://act.aflcio.org/salsa/track.jsp?v=2&c=Bw132snZIJsEpBwz1ZhVLumJZ0bcS%2BhP

The budget madness isn’t limited to the federal level. In state after state, Republican legislators and governors whose election campaigns raked in the corporate contributions are ignoring the job crisis and playing politics-as-usual with the lives of working families. They’d rather take modest pensions and collective bargaining rights away from public employees than win them for working families struggling without. Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin is so determined to make people with decent middle-class jobs suffer and end collective bargaining for public employees that he’s told the National Guard to be ready in case working people strike or rise up.

Wow.

And if that’s not extreme enough, a Missouri state senator, Jane Cunningham (R), proposes ending the ban on employing children younger than 14 and limiting the hours children may work.

Don’t let the budget insanity go any further. Let’s stop it now.

Sign the petition. Tell representatives: Get to work creating jobs and reviving our economy and stop wasting time on outrages like this.

Then, ask your friends to sign, too.

Thank you for taking action.

In solidarity,

Manny Herrmann

Online Mobilization Coordinator, AFL-CIO