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Vermont

Making Our Communities What They Need To Be

July 15, 2024 Steve Early, Resilience. , , , , ,
The symbols of public-sector infrastructure are often associated with urban areas: major highways and subway systems, for instance; bridges and tunnels; large ports and airports; billions of gallons of fresh water to deliver and hundreds of tons of solid waste to cart away every day. Yet public works departments are no less important in rural areas, where municipal employees and their families, whether members of the National Education Association, the Firefighters union, or the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Workers (AFSCME), are dependent on the same community services they provide. In Middlebury, Vermont, the largest town in rural Addison County, 46-year-old Jeremy Rathbun is one of those public servants.

If The AFL-CIO Gets Away With A Vermont Purge, It Won’t Stop Here

June 27, 2024 Ellen Kaye, Katie Maurice, and Jeremy Rathbun, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Vermonters have a special relationship with direct participatory democracy. The first Tuesday of every March, in towns big and small, citizens gather in person to do the business of their community the old-fashioned way—face to face, one person, one vote. Everyone can have the floor to speak their opinion, from an elected officer to the worker who hauls the garbage. Everyone has the same rights. This type of governance is something that we in the Green Mountain State take seriously and hold dear to our hearts. And it is one of the founding principles of the United! slate of the Vermont State Labor Council.

Vermont Delegates Must Keep Voting Until Results Please AFL Headquarters?

June 5, 2024 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
In some unions, the traditional way of winning approval for a proposed contract with management, that’s not popular with the members, is to hold a series of votes on essentially the same “tentative agreement.”  Rank-and-file militants urging a “No” vote get worn down and demoralized by the prolonged ratification process. By a narrow margin, their less engaged co-workers end up accepting a deal with few noticeable improvements. In the past, “making them vote until they get it right” often replaced rank-and-file mobilization, strike preparation, and collective action in too many unions. That’s why union reformers today try to build organizational capacity in all those areas.

How Reformers Doubled Vermont AFL-CIO Membership

May 23, 2024 Gordon Simmons, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Transforming an existing union into a more democratic and member-run organization has often proven to be a daunting—though possible—task. The pressing need to revitalize organized labor in the U.S., however, depends on such movements. Beginning in 2017, a slate of reform-minded union activists won leadership offices in the Vermont state federation of labor, reinvigorating that organization. Within just a few years, the federation’s membership doubled. Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO, 2017-2023 is two-term president David Van Deusen’s participant-retelling of the emergence of the UNITED reform group.

Vermont Could Become First State To Make Emitters Pay For Climate Damages

May 10, 2024 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. , , , ,
Vermont’s House of Representatives has passed S.259, a state bill aimed at collecting recovery costs for climate-related damages from the biggest emitters, such as fossil fuel companies. The bill, called the Climate Superfund Act, was introduced to create a Climate Superfund Cost Recovery Program, in which fossil fuel businesses would undergo an assessment to determine their share of costs for fossil fuel extraction or refinement actions that led to increased greenhouse gases and related costs in the state. As reported by NBC News, the agency would measure extreme weather linked to climate change in the state and the cost of damages from extreme weather events through attribution science.

The AFL-CIO Can Be Reformed, Locally And From The Bottom-Up!

February 15, 2024 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Changing the leadership, structure, or functioning of any U.S. labor organization is no easy task. Activists and experts have long argued about whether dysfunctional unions are best reformed from the top-down, bottom-up, or some mix of the two approaches.  For the past 65 years, the main locus of union democracy and reform struggles in the U.S. has been local unions, which hold leadership elections every three years and are closest to the membership. Thousands of rank-and-file workers have campaigned for more militant unionism by running for and winning local office.  Some have had the backing of national networks of like-minded dissidents, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a TDU-inspired reform caucus within the United Auto Workers.

Vermont’s New AFL-CIO President Is A Democratic Socialist, Labor Reformer

December 27, 2023 Steve Early, Portside. , , , , ,
Unlike some local and national unions, the AFL-CIO’s state and local bodies rarely hold contested leadership elections with opposing slates offering alternative strategies for reviving the labor movement. Yet in Vermont, there have been two such contests for the state federation in the last four years, both producing a mandate for change. In 2019, a group of local union officers and staff members created a reform slate called “Vermont AFL-CIO United!” Fourteen of its candidates got elected — taking all the top officer jobs and forming a majority on the state labor council’s executive board. Their goal was to revitalize a moribund organization through membership education, mobilization, and direct action, plus greater independence from the Democratic Party.

In A New Climate Reality, Community May Be A Farmer’s Greatest Resource

September 1, 2023 Ellyn Lapointe, Sierra Club. , , , ,
The 10th of July had been a typical day at work for Caroline Hauser until she received an urgent email from the Intervale Center and its farms. They were calling for volunteers. The Intervale Center, a nonprofit farming cooperative in Burlington, Vermont, was bracing for intense rains and flooding forecasted to hit in the next 24 hours. It needed all hands on deck to harvest everything they could before disaster struck. Hauser messaged her manager to say she needed the day off. Hauser has been a Burlington resident since 2015 and a regular volunteer at the Intervale Center since 2019. She and her husband are summer and winter CSA members—she estimates that 80 to 90 percent of their food comes directly from the Intervale’s seven organic farms.

Disaster Recovery Efforts Can Serve More Than One Goal

July 23, 2023 Elizabeth Sawin, Resilience. , , ,
In the aftermath of last week’s floods, my home state of Vermont faces a daunting path to recovery. Flooding damaged homes and businesses. Roads and bridges washed out, and communities have been cut off from the rest of the state. Vermont has walked this path before, after Tropical Storm Irene, and we are not alone in facing a recovery now. As the climate crisis deepens, more places will be spending more time in recovery mode. Recovery isn’t just a difficult task. It’s also one with lasting consequences. Rebuilt infrastructure will — hopefully — stand for decades to come. Over its lifetime, it will influence climate resilience, carbon emissions, health, well-being and social equity.

Growing Worker Co-ops In Vermont

November 23, 2022 The ESOP Podcast, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , ,
Bret Keisling is joined by worker-owners Alex Fischer and Andrew Stachiw who discuss USFWC's (US Federation of Worker Cooperatives) efforts to network and grow worker co-ops in Vermont to further societal goals including economic, racial, and social justice, and working in business as anti-capitalists. Alex and Andrew share their individual and combined passions for democratized workplaces and their beliefs that changing the very structures of jobs, equity and community will transcend society. Each guest also shares their EO A-ha Moment. Further show notes, and all of our past episodes, are available on our website.

Governor’s Claim That He Is Powerless To Stop F-35 Just Got Shown Up

January 18, 2022 James Marc Leas, World Beyond War. , , ,
A leak of thousands of gallons of fuel from the US Navy’s aging underground storage tanks at Pearl Harbor contaminated drinking water and poisoned and sickened thousands of people, including children, driving 3,500 families from their homes, as reported by The Washington Post, January 10, 2022. The fuel-storage facility sits 100 feet above Oahu’s main freshwater aquifer. Did Hawaii follow in the footsteps of Vermont’s Governor Phil Scott and foist wrongful actions by the military or the military-industrial complex on civilians while claiming to be powerless? Just the opposite. Health authorities in Hawaii promptly stepped up to require the Navy to stop the abuse. The state issued an emergency order. Then, when the Navy at first contested, the state held a public hearing.

Why Is The AFL-CIO So Worried About Its Vermont Affiliate?

April 25, 2021 Steve Early, Counterpunch. , , ,
For as long as Richard Trumka has been a national AFL-CIO leader—more than a quarter of a century—his labor federation has been encouraging its local affiliates to revitalize themselves to help reverse union decline. Now nearing retirement as AFL-CIO president, Trumka was part of a “New Voice” slate that challenged old guard officials for control of the organization in 1995, via its first contested election in a century. New Voice candidates promised to work with state and local AFL-CIO councils to make labor’s political action and workplace solidarity more effective. Among the reforms they implemented was hiring more staff to promote picketing and protests by union members under attack by hostile employers.

Medicare-For-All Is Good For Our Towns

February 27, 2021 Jane Katz Field, Brattleboro Reformer. , , ,
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, 30 million people in the U.S. had no health insurance, and about 50 million were underinsured. The pandemic has caused millions more to lose coverage because of losing their jobs. Indeed the pandemic has given us perspective on an array of injustices in our health care delivery system — including the lack of an adequate public health infrastructure, the racial disparities in access to care, the rationing of care based on ability to pay, and hospitals’ concentration on lucrative cardiac and orthopedic services rather than mental health and primary care. The U.S. spends twice as much per capita on health care as other high-income countries that provide universal coverage, and yet our health outcomes are worse.

“This Isn’t Just Something Happening Elsewhere”: Protesters Rally Outside Vermont ICE facility

July 29, 2019 Ross Ketschke, Mynbc5.com , , , ,
Hundreds marched through the rain Sunday afternoon to protest outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Williston. The demonstration was put on by the combined force of dozens of local activist groups including Women's March Vermont, Migrant Justice and the Peace and Justice Center. “If you’re taking children away from their mothers and leaving them in a room with no one to care for them, you need to quit your job,” said Bob Fishel, of Burlington. 

Northgate Apartments Celebrate 30 Years Of Resident Ownership, Affordability

June 15, 2019 By Courtney Kramer, Mychamplainvalley.com , , , ,
Burlington, Vt - Vermont's largest affordable housing community marked a special milestone Saturday with a neighborhood-wide celebration. The Northgate Apartments in Burlington's New North End is celebrating 30 years of housing affordability and resident ownership. "We're celebrating 30 years of ownership, resident ownership," said Linda Romeo, a longtime resident. Romeo has lived at Northgate for the past 48 years. She raised her family there and can remember a time when conditions were poor.
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