Local residents testify about impact of healthcare crisis
Where: Unitarian Universalist Meetinghouse, 108 School Street, Bennington, Vermont
When: 7:00 PM, Thursday, February 19, 2009
What: For months, volunteers for the Vermont Workers' Center have been surveying Vermonters from all across the state about their experiences with the healthcare system. The results have been clear: Vermonters believe that healthcare should be a human right, and many are suffering because of lack of access to affordable, quality healthcare. The crisis continues to worsen as the state's budget problems have led to painful cuts to State health programs, exacerbating the crisis for thousands of Vermont families.
On Thursday, February 19, this conversation comes to Bennington as part of the "Healthcare is a Human Right" campaign, which is coordinated by the Workers' Center, to build a movement that can help reform the State's healthcare system so it will guarantee care to all Vermonters regardless of income. This event is also being sponsored by the Bennington Area Regional Council. The testimony about the impact the lack of access to healthcare has had on the lives of area families will be heard by a community listening panel comprised of faith leaders, health professionals and other community leaders.
"It is really exciting that this event is happening," says Charlie Murphy, a Bennington resident who is helping organize the hearing. "People have to come out to build a movement to get the healthcare we need."
Background: After conducting over 1,200 surveys and holding hearings in Brattleboro, Burlington, St. Albans, Lyndonville and Barre, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2008, the Vermont Workers' Center issued a report "Voices of the Vermont Healthcare Crisis: Healthcare Is A Human Right." The report and accompanying video can be downloaded online.
Download print report: http://www.workerscenter.org/healthcare/
Watch 7-minute video: http://blip.tv/file/157451
Bennington Healthcare Human Rights Hearing
Rutland Healthcare Human Rights Hearing
Local residents testify about impact of healthcare crisis
Where: Rutland Regional Medical Center, Conference Rooms 3 & 4, 160 Allen Street, Rutland, Vermont
When: 7:00 PM, Thursday, February 12, 2009
What: For months, volunteers for the Vermont Workers' Center have been surveying Vermonters from all across the state about their experiences with the healthcare system. The results have been clear: Vermonters believe that healthcare should be a human right, and many are suffering because of lack of access to affordable, quality healthcare. The crisis continues to worsen as the state's budget problems have led to painful cuts to State health programs, exacerbating the crisis for thousands of Vermont families.
On Thursday, February 12, this conversation comes to Rutland as part of the "Healthcare is a Human Right" campaign, which is coordinated by the Workers' Center, to build a movement that can help reform the State's healthcare system so it will guarantee care to all Vermonters regardless of income. This Rutland Hearing is also sponsored by the Vermont Psychiatric Survivors Network and Central Vermont Peace & Justice Center. The testimony about the impact the lack of access to healthcare has had on the lives of area families will be heard by a community listening panel comprised of faith leaders, health professionals and other community leaders.
Background: On January 29, over seventy-five people attended a healthcare human rights hearing in Barre and one is scheduled in Bennington on February 19. On December 10, 2008, International Human Rights Day, after conducting over 1,200 surveys and holding hearings in Brattleboro, Burlington, St. Albans and Lyndonville the Vermont Workers' Center issued a report "Voices of the Vermont Healthcare Crisis: Healthcare Is A Human Right." The report and accompanying video can be downloaded online.
Download print report: http://www.workerscenter.org/healthcare/
Watch 7-minute video: http://blip.tv/file/157451
Feb 2: Join Candlelight Vigils Across the State to Stop the Budget Cuts
The State of Vermont has a budget shortfall and Governor Douglas says it should be done without raising new revenue but through program cuts that will primarily affect children, the elderly, and low income Vermonters. Join the Vermont Workers' Center (VWC) and other organizations across the state opposing proposed state budget cuts which will be devastating to thousands of Vermont families. The VWC and other groups are organizing to stop the cuts from happening. On January 23, the VWC released a Statement on the Budget Cuts, which outlined the following principles that should be followed as we face this crisis:
- Public services are necessary for a just and sustainable society.
- Among the roles of government is to guarantee the human rights of all residents.
- A revenue shortfall is a reason to change revenue policy not budget policy.
- Public services, including education, should be funded based on ability to pay, not fees or regressive taxes like property and sales taxes.
- Only by concerted collective action can people ensure that government/public policy serves the needs of the people.
- Healthcare is a human right, and by establishing it as a public good it will not only be more just, but by eliminating the waste of private insurers, we will save tens of millions of dollars.
Locations:
Bennington: Four corners Intersection of Routes 7 & 9, 5pm
Burlington: 108 Cherry Street, 5pm,
Brattleboro: Main Street Post Office,5:30pm
Hardwick: TBD
Middlebury: Traffic Island @ Middlebury Inn, 12 Noon
Montpelier: Pavilion Building, 109 State Street, 5pm,
Morrisville: Lamoille Senior Center, 24 Main St at 4 way stop downtown,5pm
Randolph: Main St in front of Northfield Savings Bank, 5pm
Rutland: Rutland Unitarian Church, 117 West Street, 5pm
St Albans: Taylor Park, 5pm,
St Johnsbury: in front of the Athenaeum, 5pm
White River Junction: Intersection of Routes 5 & 14, 5pm
Please join us and help spread the word far and wide.
More information: email james [at] workerscenter.org or call 272-0882
FEB 3: Community Forum w/Chicago Republic Sit-in Strikers
RECOVERY & RESISTANCE : Sit-In Strikers from Republic Windows & Doors in Chicago
When: 7pm, Tues, Feb 3, 2009
Where: Billings North Lounge, 48 University Place, UVM, Burlington
What: In December, 260 workers at Chicago's Republic Windows occupied their plant for six days, a sit-in strike launched in response to the closing of their plant with only 3 days notice. The Vermont Workers' Center and other Jobs with Justice coalitions along with other community, faith and labor activists from across the country mobilized in support of these workers, helping them win a settlement from Bank of America and Republic owners including severance pay and compensation for unpaid earnings.
As the economic crisis deepens, millions of people face jobs loss and foreclosures. Join the Workers' Center and other groups in celebrating the successful resistance at Republic and launch the broader campaign for an economic recovery that puts human rights before Wall Street.
More info: kate [at] workerscenter.org or call 861-2877
Fletcher Allen Techs Need Your Support
Almost 600 hospital technicians at Fletcher Allen Health Care (FAHC) are organizing to form a union, as the nurses did back in 2002. The techs and nurses are now calling on FAHC Administration to recognize their right to organize and not waste thousands of healthcare dollars on an expensive anti-union campaign. Since they formed a union in 2002 they have improved their working conditions to such a degree that what was a critical nursing shortage virtually disappeared. The union simply made the hospital a better place to work. When they formed a union there were about 1200 nurses, now there are over 1600, and the overall patient care at the hospital has improved dramatically. Now the hospital tech's are organizing for the same reasons, to ultimately create better care at our community hospital. Just like we supported the nurses back in 2002 and have continued over the years during their struggles to improve staffing at the hospital, we need to be support the hospital techs.
Sign this petition either via email (please see directionsbelow) or via the web at:
http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/techs
Visit the web address below to tell your friends about this.
http://www.unionvoice.org/
Here is a Burlington Free Press article about a recent press conference with the Techs calling for the FAHC Admin agree to a Code of Conduct to respect workers' right to organize.
VWC Statement on Budget Cuts
No one doubts that we are living through difficult economic times. For many working-class Vermonters, the current economic crisis is simply an intensification of the long crisis that we have been experiencing long before the recent financial meltdown. For the last several decades, there has been a shift in government and public policy towards helping the rich get richer at the expense of working people. Working people have born the brunt of this crisis in the form of stagnant wages, downsizing and outsourcing, cuts in public services, a dysfunctional healthcare system, and an increasingly regressive tax policy that rewards the wealthy with income tax breaks while driving up fees and regressive taxes like the property tax.
We believe that, in the words of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “[e]veryone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” We believe that these are fundamental human rights, rights that we have by virtue of being human beings, of being born into human society.
A strong and robust public sector is essential to provide all Vermonters the services they have a right to receive in order to maintain basic human dignity. Every other industrialized country, as well as many developing ones, guarantees healthcare – and often other human rights – through the public sector. The profit motive simply cannot be trusted to ensure rights, or, as recent events demonstrate, even economic stability, and private charities do not have the scale or coordination to provide a real social safety net. The last thing we need are cuts to services or more layoffs, but this is exactly what Governor Douglas’s proposed budget would bring us. The current "crisis" is not a budget crisis, it is a revenue crisis caused by repeated give-aways to the wealthy in the form of tax breaks. Using this state revenue crisis to lay off workers and cut services for the people is not only unjust, but will also actively undermine President Obama's efforts to stimulate the economy.
We are facing a worldwide economic and ecological crisis, which demands transformative change. A stimulus package from the federal government that focuses on creating “green jobs” to rebuild our physical infrastructure and make it more environmentally sound and sustainable is absolutely necessary, but it is only part of the solution. We also need to rebuild our social infrastructure, guaranteeing quality healthcare and education for all and rebuilding our tattered social safety net. Relying solely on economic growth to take care of social needs is no longer an option – we can’t afford to be forced into making choices between jobs and the environment as the planet warms.
The Vermont Workers' Center believes that the following principles need to be followed as we face this crisis:
- Public services are necessary for a just and sustainable society.
- Among the roles of government is to guarantee the human rights of all residents.
- A revenue shortfall is a reason to change revenue policy not budget policy.
- Public services, including education, should be funded based on ability to pay, not fees or regressive taxes like property and sales taxes.
- Only by concerted collective action can people ensure that government/public policy serves the needs of the people.
- Healthcare is a human right, and by establishing it as a public good it will not only be more just, but by eliminating the waste of private insurers, we will save tens of millions of dollars.
Human Rights Hearing in Barre
Where: Old Labor Hall, 46 Granite Street, Barre, Vermont
When: 7:00 PM, Thursday, January 29, 2009
What: For months, volunteers for the Vermont Workers' Center have been surveying Vermonters from all across the state about their experiences with the healthcare system. The results have been clear: Vermonters believe that healthcare should be a human right, and many are suffering because of lack of access to affordable, quality healthcare. The crisis continues to worsen as the state's budget problems have led to painful cuts to State health programs, exacerbating the crisis for thousands of Vermont families.
On Thursday, January 29, this conversation comes to Barre as part of the "Healthcare is a Human Right" campaign, which is coordinated by the Workers' Center, to build a movement that can help reform the State's healthcare system so it will guarantee care to all Vermonters regardless of income. The testimony about the impact the lack of access to healthcare has had on the lives of area families will be heard by a community listening panel comprised of faith leaders, health professionals and other community leaders.
Background: After conducting over 1,200 surveys and holding hearings in Brattleboro, Burlington, St. Albans and Lyndonville, on Human Rights Day, December 10, 2008, the Vermont Workers' Center issued a report "Voices of the Vermont Healthcare Crisis: Healthcare Is A Human Right." The report and accompanying video can be downloaded online.
Download print report (1.82 MB PDF file)
Watch 7-minute video: http://blip.tv/file/157451
Victory for Tenants and BLCC on City Lead Ordinance
Report from Ordinance Committee:
Last night, Burlington Livable City Coalition leaders Bekah Mandell and Chris Guros presented the suggested modifications to the lead paint ordinance and our Open Letter supporting the ordinance. The letter had been signed by about fifty supporters, including parents, tenants, union leaders, educators, faith community leaders and health professionals. We also delivered a letter of support for our modifications from the Alliance For Healthy Homes (see attached), a national non-profit organization that specializes in lead paint poisoning prevention. The meeting was long, but we stayed and it was totally worth it.
After hours of deliberation, they voted to pass the ordinance and add our modifications requiring no bare soil at the drip lines and posting a sign to let tenants and neighbors know when work that creates lead hazards is being done. (The new sign will be designed by the Burlington Lead Program and will have skull & crossbones and a big L to signify poisonous lead.) The Committee also passed a resolution to require City staff to explore more fully our suggested modifications for the citywide properties public database on lead paint history, and for requiring dust wipe tests to ensure that children are not exposed to lead dust hazards, and making a Lead Safe standard modeled after the Burlington Lead Program for rental units to have failed lead inspections twice. (The committee specified that the City must come back with the results of their further study on dust wipes by the end of Feb.) The full City Council is expected to vote on the ordinance on on January 5th.
Victory for Tenants, BLCC Coalition:
This was an important first victory for the Healthy Homes Coalition. We completely re-framed the debate, from what usually is a discussion between the City officials and the landlords (and the lines get blurry there, the chair of the Ordinance Committee is a well-known landlord) and brought voice to those--renters and low-income parents--who are usually excluded from the debate. Despite opposition from the Landlord's Association to the City's original proposal, we were able to strengthen the proposal. There is little doubt that if we were not there, what was passed would have been only a somewhat watered-down version of what the City proposed. Together, we have gotten closer to keeping our children as safe and healthy as possible. We are going to keep putting all kinds of pressure on the Council to pass the ordinance and then on the City to both enforce the ordinance as written and get the dust wipes put in, so that we can really start protecting kids.This victory also represents a significant achievement for the Burlington Livable City Coalition as nurses, educators, other union members, and community folks acted in solidarity to support these tenant rights initiatives in the broader struggle for making Burlington a truly livable city for everyone.
Next Steps: Thanks to everyone for your involvement to this point, we need to keep identifying people who care about this issue (you can forward this email to people you think would be interested and have them contact us), everyone should stay tuned about next steps to pass this ordinance at January 5th Council Meeting. Also, please mark your calendars for our next Burlington Livable City Coalition Meeting will be 6pm, January 13 at the VWC.
Join Students, Staff and Faculty to Stop the Cuts at UVM
Lunchtime Forum and Press Conference:
Moratorium on the Budget Cuts and Layoffs, Full Disclosure of UVM's Finances
12-1 pm Wednesday, December 17
Chittenden Room, Davis Center 4th floor, UVM
Sponsored by Students, Staff, and Faculty Together
This week, as President Fogel hands deans their budget-cutting targets, the new coalition Students, Staff, and Faculty Together will hold a lunchtime public forum and press conference to call for
* a moratorium on budget cuts and layoffs
* full disclosure of Vice President Cate's audit and analysis of the university's finances and budget assumptions/priorities
* if cuts must be made, cut from the top
Scheduled for 12 to 1 pm in the Chittenden Room, Davis Center, the press conference will feature speakers from United Staff; UE Local 267, representing UVM's maintenance and service workers; the Student Labor Action Project and Students Against War; plus faculty who support United Academics' call for transparency in budget decisions and stand with students and staff against the administration's announced plans for expanding the student body while imposing a hiring freeze, workload increases, and layoffs.
Human Rights Conference Draws 500 Participants
Burlington - Five hundred people participated in the day-long Ella Baker Human Rights Conference held on Dec 13, 2009. The conference was organized by the Vermont Workers' Center and sponsored by forty-three other organizations.
Excerpts of Closing Remarks - James Haslam, Vermont Workers' Center
First off, I just have to say thank you to all the people who worked with us to make this event happen. We are very excited about the incredible broad-range of groups who came together for this event, many of these groups and individuals we have worked with for years, and many new groups and new faces, who we are just now getting to know and build relationships with.
..when I first started getting outraged by the injustice and suffering that pervades our society, I got really mad and fired up about it, but it took some time before I made the next big step, and I understood that it was not enough to recognize injustice, get mad and complain about it, that it was necessary to make change, become an agent of change. The myth is that the problems are so big that we can't do anything about them. What I have experienced is totally the opposite, that when people get together, there's an enormous impact we can make. We have seen people who have organized for workplace rights and won, very soon start wanting to organize for bigger things, for healthcare as a human right, to end domestic abuse, to end racism. As we learn that together we can take collective action to fight injustice and win improvements in our lives, tremendous amounts of possibilities unfold. At the Workers' Center we have been doing a tremendous amount of organizing with very few resources, and I believe we are only now scratching the surface for what is possible.
The other thing that I have come to learn is that it does start here with our own struggle for justice, our own family, our own neighborhood, our own community, but that we are all connected. Vermont is small, and this planet is actually not that big, the chain of activity that sustains and reproduces is a chain of interdependence. We have realized that we cannot only struggle for livable wages and organizing for rights on the job. The same interests that exploit workers, exploit the planet, make healthcare and anything they possibly can into a commodity to profit from.
So we started asking who benefits from the fact that healthcare is not a human right? Who benefits when workers are divided by race and immigration status? Who benefits from racism and other forms of oppression? It was only a few years ago that after Vermont passed civil unions, and afterwards the right-wing was able to use homophobia to get thousands of working class Vermonters to vote against their own economic interests. Increasingly, those same people will be pitting white Vermonters against undocumented Latino and Latina workers for jobs. We can't let them divide us. Right now public services and public sector jobs are in jeopardy because of budget shortfalls, and people like Governor Douglas will blame unions and public sector workers have it too good and are the problem. Meanwhile we continue to spend $700 million dollars a day on a totally bullshit war in Iraq. That is why we are committed to building a movement for fundamental change, one that is based on human rights, on human needs and ultimately that is based on solidarity.
At the Workers' Center we use that word a lot, solidarity. We have felt that solidarity is at the core of the labor movement, and I think ultimately to build a broad-based movement, solidarity is what it is all about. Solidarity and unity. We have inherited a world which is based on greed and the endless search for profit, and which is based on competition, selfishness and individualism. And right now, we are witnessing that this path is literally threatening the capacity to continue human life on the planet and we are possibly studying our own extinction. The parents we work with at Barnes Elementary School in the Burlington Livable City Coalition recently put up a quote on a mural outside the school that says "Sustainability is another word for Justice". I am motivated in working with you all to build this movement for fundamental change in our community because I believe that is critical for our kids' future. I was also thinking about that word community, we use that a lot too. I thought of what Gandhi once said when he was asked one time about what he thought about Western Civilization, and he said he thought it was a good idea. I think much of that is true about the word "community". Because how can we have a community when people are subjected to live in poverty? How can it be a community when people are divided by racism and homophobia? How can we call it a community when people do not feel safe, when people regularly suffer from domestic abuse and sexual violence? How can we have a community where kids from low-income families are growing up in rental housing that infested with toxic lead paint that creates permanent brain damage? How can we call it a community when healthcare is not a basic right to everyone, but a privilege to some?
That is why it is so important that we have come together for this conference, that we have learned about the broad range of struggles that we face and the justice we need to fight for in order to make our communities live up to that name.
I want to take a few minutes to let everyone know about some Workers' Center campaigns that I hope you can join us in. We've spent a lot of time thinking about how to do our work in a strategic way that facilitates convergence between our struggles and other struggles.
Of course, we must build a movement to guarantee the right of workers to organize, calling for passing the Employee Free Choice Act, and [supporting] the Fletcher Allen Techs [as they organize a union], their struggle like the nurses before them is one which is not only a workers' rights struggle, but their victory will mean safer patient care and a better hospital for the community..
One thing that we ask all of you to do, is join us in the Healthcare Is A Human Right Campaign. This campaign is not just about winning a single-payer universal healthcare system, though we believe that that is necessary. This campaign is about a vision of healthcare based not on profits, but on solidarity and community. A vision that encompasses not only the right to see a doctor when you need to, but the right to a comprehensive public health system that ensures that our homes are free of toxins, that we have access to mental health and recovery services when we need them, that victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence are given the support and safety that they need. This campaign is also about building enough power to make the changes that are necessary to realize that vision. The only way to build that power, and to change what is politically possible, is to have an enormous amount of people involved. We are planning on building a statewide network capable of winning and making HC a HR. In building this network, we have called for a major statewide rally on May 1st at 12 noon on the State House steps in Montpelier. We are asking each on of you to sign up today to come to that rally and help bring people with you. We will organize vans, busses, car pools, everything we can to bring as many people there as possible. Together we will have so many people at the State House people will no longer say that change is not politically possible, and we will have built a network of us connected throughout the state that will keep organizing until we have that system in place and we will keep organizing to make sure it works and stays working. We need to build a mass movement for healthcare as a human right, and all human rights for all people.
One of our major projects is to do that in here in Burlington is the Burlington Livable City Coalition, which works to make this community truly livable for all of its residents. For us it started with struggling for livable wages and workers' rights, with the concept that it made sense for for family supporting jobs and quality public services. We are working with the unions to act in solidarity, to support each others' struggles, to have nurses, teachers,UVM Service & Maintenance workers and UVM faculty, Howard Center, City Market workers all who are in difficult contract negotiations this year, to stand together. We are also working with a group of parents, tenants and educators to win real change on how the City addresses the lead paint that is still poisoning children, especially children of working-class parents in the Old North End. Ultimately, this campaign is about building power for the people who don't traditionally hold power in this city -- workers, tenants, people marginalized by race and class -- to win justice in every aspect of our lives; in the motto of the environmental justice movement, "justice where we live, justice where we play, justice where we work."
In our campaigns we talk a lot about building power. The process of how we build that power becomes an end in itself. This is the organizing tradition of Ella Baker, of leadership development, consciousness-raising, and intersectionality of issues and oppressions. The slow, patient, undramatic work of relationship building. Dealing with all the misdirected anger that exists between different parts of the community. This is why we have put a major effort over the past several years into popular education. In January and February we will be holding our third annual Solidarity School, a three-day intensive workshop for emerging labor and community leaders, which covers organizing, tactics and strategy, people's history and movement-building. This past year the Workers' Center also did a series of one-day workshops on Anti-racism & Building A Social Justice Movement. We had one hundred and seventy people participate and it was so successful that we are going to do it again in 2009, most likely in the fall.
A lot of temporary coalitions are put together for limited goals, such as a good contract or a change in public policy. We believe that we all need to be thinking about our coalition and alliance-building terms of how do we use this struggle as part of an overall strategy to build power? How do we begin to re-conceptualize our own work in a way that incorporates the goals of others, making us all stronger? How do we build a movement where we don't just support each other, but we work together strategically towards a shared vision of justice and human rights, one that is based on solidarity and community? We hope this conference has been a useful contribution to that process. So again, please sign the EFCA cards, make plans to join us on May 1st, and, most importantly, we hope everyone continues the dialogues between organizations and movements that we've had today.