By Jane VonBergen

– More than 39,000 Verizon employees from Massachusetts to Virginia plan to go on strike at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the union leaders said Monday.

“Unless this company reconsiders its shameful demands… our members will be on strike,” said Chris Shelton, president of the Communications Workers of America, which represents 29,000 of the 39,000 workers.

The employees have been working without a contract since Aug. 1, 2015. Union leaders said they expect to meet with company officials on Tuesday, and last met for negotiations on Thursday.

“No worker ever wants to go on strike. It’s always the last resort,” said Lonnie R. Stephenson, president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which represents 10,000 workers, many in New Jersey.

“Verizon . . . has given us no other option,” he said.

Verizon executives said they’ve been training thousands of non-union Verizon employees for a year to take over union functions if there is a strike.

“We’ve tried to work with union leaders to reach a deal,” Marc Reed, Verizon’s chief administrative officer, said in a statement.

“Verizon has been moving the bargaining process forward, but now union leaders would rather make strike threats than constructively engage at the bargaining table,” he said.

The unions, which primarily work on Verizon’s copper and FIOS wired businesses, are chiefly worried about their jobs being outsourced. In the Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, DC and West Virginia area, 680 call centers jobs are threatened, said Edward Mooney, CWA vice president of that region.

The unions accuse the company of dragging its feet on promises to build out its high-speed FIOS network and say they are increasingly using non-employee technicians to repair facilities.

Verizon’s “wired” business accounts for about 29 percent of its revenues.

Source – http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20160412_Verizon_workers_issue_strike_threat_for_6_am_Wednesday.html

By Harold Brubaker

– Registered nurses at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia have voted to unionized, the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals said Saturday. The vote Friday, 463 to 343 in favor of joining the union, was the fourth victory this year for PASNAP.

Nurses at Delaware County Memorial Hospital, Hahnemann University Hospital, and St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children had previously voted to join PASNAP, which now has 8,000 members in Pennsylvania, including 3,000 new members since January in the Philadelphia region.

A spokesman for the tax-exempt Einstein Healthcare Network said management was disappointed with the election outcome. The National Labor Relations Board will not certify the election until a week has passed. “At this point, I cannot comment as to whether Einstein will be filing objections,” said Damien Woods, Einstein’s director of public relations.

Source – http://www.philly.com/philly/business/20160410_Einstein_nurses_vote_to_unionize.html

By Tom MacDonald

– Prompted by a January boiler explosion in a Philadelphia school that injured a worker, City Council held a hearing on maintenance in city schools.

The explosion prompted an inspection of boilers in Philly schools; 98 percent passed, but 58 percent need minor repairs.

That’s a challenge, said Robert Hunter, the school district’s director of maintenance. His maintenance team is more than 40 percent smaller than it was in 2006 because they cannot find qualified tradesman.

But Hunter has a plan.

“Our goal is to establish an apprenticeship training program to try bring out youth in from the high schools to get into the trades early enough to go through and develop an apprenticeship where they would come out as a certified apprentice,” he said.

“So we are looking at options that way to build a pipeline of workers to bolster those numbers up.”

For now the district is using outside contractors to supplement its own workers.

PhillyLabor Editorial – It should not have taken a catastrophe and a major injury to a top long time employee for the school district to finally make changes. Also, hiring outside contractors is not the answer. Hiring and training more union employees is the answer. Additionally, obviously the boiler that exploded while worker Chris Takimis was working on it obviously had a major problem. How many more boilers have similar problems.

Source – http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/item/92670-philly-school-district-offers-fix-for-lack-of-maintenance-workers

By JULIE PACE and EMILY SWANSON, The Associated Press

– WASHINGTON (AP) – For Americans of nearly every race, gender, political persuasion and location, disdain for Donald Trump runs deep, saddling the Republican front-runner with unprecedented unpopularity as he tries to overcome recent campaign setbacks.

Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks – a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.

Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively, close to 70 percent view him unfavorably. And among whites without a college education, one of Trump’s most loyal voting blocs, 55 percent have a negative opinion.

Trump still leads the Republican field in delegates and has built a loyal following with a steady share of the Republican primary electorate. But the breadth of his unpopularity raises significant questions about how he could stitch together enough support in the general election to win the White House.

It also underscores the trouble he may still face in the Republican race, which appears headed to a contested convention where party insiders would have their say about who will represent the GOP in the fall campaign.

“He’s at risk of having the nomination denied to him because grass-roots party activists fear he’s so widely disliked that he can’t possibly win,” said Ari Fleischer, a former adviser to President George W. Bush.

Beyond their generally negative perception of Trump, large majorities also said they would not describe him as civil, compassionate or likable. On nearly all of these measures, Trump fared worse than his remaining Democratic or Republican rivals.

Not that voters have all that much love for those rivals. But their negative perceptions don’t match the depth of the distaste for Trump. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is seeking to catch Trump in the Republican delegate count, is viewed unfavorably by 59 percent, while 55 percent have negative views of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Another problem for Trump is that his public perception seems to be getting worse. The number of Americans who view him unfavorably has risen more than 10 percentage points since mid-February, a two-month stretch that has included some of his biggest primary victories but also an array of stumbles that suggested difficulties with his campaign organization and a lack of policy depth.

A survey conducted by Gallup in January found Trump’s unfavorable rating, then at 60 percent in the their polling, was already at a record high level for any major party nominee in their organization’s polling since the 1990’s.

Candi Edie, a registered Republican from Arroyo Grande, California, is among those whose views on Trump have grown more negative.

“At first, I thought he was great. He was bringing out a lot of issues that weren’t ever said, they were taboo,” Edie said. Now the 64-year-old feels Trump’s early comments masked the fact that he’s “such a bigot.”

“I don’t know if he’s lost it or what,” she said. “He’s not acting presidential.” Trump’s unpopularity could provide an opening for Cruz, though he is loathed by many of his Senate colleagues and other party leaders. After a big win Tuesday in Wisconsin, Cruz is angling to overtake Trump at the July GOP convention.

Clinton’s campaign believes Trump’s sky-high unfavorable ratings could offset some questions voters have about her own character, and perhaps even give her a chance to peel off some Republicans who can’t stomach a vote for the real estate mogul.

Andrew Glaves, a “hard core” Republican from Bothell, Washington, said he might have to side with Clinton if Trump becomes the nominee, even though she’s out of step with his views on gun rights, his top election issue.

“I’d be willing to take that as opposed to doing so much harm to the country’s reputation,” said Glaves, 29.

More than 60 percent of all registered voters and 31 percent of Republicans said they definitely would not vote for Trump in the general election.

One group that is still with him includes those who describe themselves as both Republicans and supporters of the tea party movement. Sixty-eight percent of them have a favorable view.

Pennsylvania Republican Robert Paradis plans to vote for Trump in his state’s primary this month. The 76-year-old said that while Trump’s uneven temperament makes him cringe “all the time,” he’s hopeful the front-runner’s bluntness can shake up Washington.

“He’s not a politician; he says it the way he feels it,” Paradis said.
___

The AP-GfK Poll of 1,076 adults was conducted online March 31-April 4, using a sample drawn from GfK’s probability-based KnowledgePanel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

Respondents were first selected randomly using telephone or mail survey methods and later interviewed online. People selected for KnowledgePanel who didn’t otherwise have access to the Internet were provided access at no cost to them.

Source – http://www.philly.com/philly/news/politics/20160408_ap_c8a6dc0680d140f18841bb34fd562484.html

By Jane M. Von Bergen

– Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will woo Pennsylvania’s labor leaders this week at the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO’s convention in Philadelphia.

More than 700 labor leaders and delegates will gather in Philadelphia Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in a conference focused on politics – and other worker issues, including raising the minimum wage.

Clinton is expected to speak Wednesday morning at 11:15 and Sanders will address the group on Thursday at 10 a.m.

“Other than New York, we’re the next battle ground,” Richard “Rick” Bloomingdale, president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, said last week.

Also listed in the three-day line-up are former mine worker Richard Trumka, a Villanova Law School graduate and president of the national AFL-CIO, Mayor Kenney, Gov. Wolf, U.S. Rep. Bob Brady (D., Pa) and embattled attorney general Kathleen Kane.

“Politics will play a big role, getting our folks energized to protect what we won at the bargaining table,” Bloomingdale said.

Nationally, 14.8 million workers, or 11.1 percent of the workforce, were union members in 2015, with the number of members up slightly over 2014. In the public sector, 35.2 percent of employees are union members, compared to 6.7 percent in the private sector, according to U.S. Labor Department reports.

In Pennsylvania, 747,000 employees, or 13.3 percent of the state’s workforce, were union members in 2015, up from 703,000, and 13.3 percent in 2014.

Bloomingdale said the conference agenda includes about 65 resolutions – and only four are dealing with politics.

Other issues on the agenda include raising the minimum wage, passing public employee workplace safety laws, and protecting the Pennsylvania state store system from privatization, which union officials say, would lead to lower wages for the system’s workers.

Mayor Kenney and Patrick Eiding, president of the Philadelphia Council of the AFL-CIO, will open the conference at the Sheraton Downtown Hotel Tuesday morning.

Following them to the microphone will be Trumka, Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry Secretary Kathy Manderino, Auditor General Eugene DePasquale and Kane.

Frank Snyder, the secretary-treasurer of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, will lead a political roundtable Wednesday morning, describing the AFL-CIO’s efforts on behalf of the state AFL-CIO’s endorsed candidates. Brady is scheduled to speak Wednesday and Gov. Wolf on Thursday.

Bloomingdale said last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision that protected how public unions collect dues was a reprieve, but that the case got as far as it did “was a real wake-up call for us.”

“We have to get more workers, union or non-union fighting for their own economic justice and fairness.”

In Pennsylvania, public employee union due collection is a legislative issue. The Senate has passed a law saying that the government will no longer collect union dues via payroll deduction from the checks of public employees.

The bill is stalled in the House. If it passes and Gov. Wolf signs it, which is considered unlikely, it’ll be up to the unions to collect dues from their members.

Four local labor leaders will be honored at the convention: Harry Lombardo, president of the Transportation Workers Union of America; Michael Barnes, president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Local 8; Ryan Boyer, business manager of the Laborers’ district council of Philadephia metropolitan area and Eiding.

Source – http://www.philly.com/philly/business/labor_and_unions/20160405_Hillary_and_Bernie_to_address_AFL-CIO_this_week_in_Phila_.html