To Hell with 0-0-2!
Come to the Civil Rights March on June 28
Demand a Fair Contract for City Workers Now!
No More “Back of the Bus” Treatment!
Negotiations have started up again on the AFSCME contract. The AFSCME negotiations team’s offer is so weak that some members have mistaken in as another of Kilpatrick’s calculated insults. The main differences from 5-year offer rejected by the members earlier this year are listed below:
This is a pitifully slight improvement over the offer the members rejected earlier this year. It’s embarrassing that AFSCME’s negotiations team would actually ask for this. Locals 207 and 2920 are urging all AFSCME locals to reject this sellout.
Negotiations only started up again because Kilpatrick is in trouble over his crooked cop friends, and the defeat of Gil Hill and three of the four bond issues he tried to slip past the voters. He needs some sort of victory very badly, and he needs the stability offered by a settled contract.
Michigan AFSCME Council 25 President Al Garrett apparently figured he’d offer him the membership’s head on a platter. But Garrent and Kilpatrick were wrong when they said the last contract would pass in “fifteen days”, and they’re wrong again. At a recent convention of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, Garrett actually publicly urged the union officials at the convention publicly defend Kilpatrick against the storm or criticism he’s facing. By contrast a UAW International Vice-President at the convention actually defended city workers against Kilpatrick’s anti-union attacks!
So now Garrett is pushing this sellout to save Kilpatrick’s career. Instead, he should be taking advantage of Kilpatrick’s political problems by mobilizing the members to fight back. City workers are in a strong position right now. The last thing Kilpatrick needs right now is “labor trouble”, especially a city-wide strike.
The NAACP is holding a “March to Freedom” Civil Rights March on Saturday, June 28th on the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Detroit March where Martin Luther King first gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. AFSCME Detroit Presidents voted to attend the June 28th March, and to raise the issue of our contract. All city workers should come to this march with signs demanding that city workers be treated like first-class citizens for a change. City workers deserve the same wages and equipment as the suburban contractors who are taking our jobs.
Kilpatrick is laying off 80 city workers when our neighborhoods deserve more city workers to provide better city services and better parks. The second-class treatment of Detroit city workers means second-class city services for Detroit residents.
We must use this march to demand the economic justice and equality that King gave his life fighting for. It is no coincidence that King died while supporting the AFSCME sanitation workers strike in Memphis, Tennessee.
Local 207 has helped build a new civil rights movement, a movement whose power was announced to the nation on April 1st when 50,000 people marched in Washington, D.C. for affirmative action, integration and equality. This March was organized by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action & Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN).
Though the March was the culmination of months of work, it is just the beginning of a renewed national fight for real integration and equality. Win or lose in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases, BAMN is fighting on to “Realize the Promise of Brown vs. Board of Education.” Brown was the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision which first said that “separate could never be equal.” Brown’s long-delayed promise was that of equal education from pre-school through college.
City workers must make their presence felt at the June 28th March and fight for equality throughout our society, including for Detroit residents and city workers.
Attend Civil Rights March
Saturday, June 28, 10 AM
Starting at Woodward & Warren