Donkees
Donkees's JournalBernie Sanders Workers Become First Presidential Campaign Staff to Ratify Union Contract
Bernie 2020 Inc., Press Release
May 08, 2019
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON, D.C. (May 8, 2019) — In a groundbreaking development, Bernie Sanders campaign workers — now proud UFCW Local 400 union members — ratified the first collective bargaining agreement by a presidential campaign.
In taking this historic step forward, they are also revolutionizing the nature of presidential campaign work, which has traditionally been known for its 24/7 demands and difficult working conditions.
Their contract sets new standards for their field, doing so in a way that will dramatically improve their quality of life without hindering the Bernie 2020 campaign’s ability to compete for votes and delegates.
The contract sets clearly defined wages and benefits along with the opportunity for employees to earn performance raises. Field organizers, who will eventually constitute the vast majority of campaign staff, will have 100 percent of their health care premiums paid for by the campaign. And interns in the national headquarters will make a minimum of $20/hour along with full medical benefits. All hourly employees are entitled to overtime pay. In addition to health insurance, the contract provides broad coverage for mental health care services.
And in keeping with Senator Sanders’ emphasis on fighting income inequality, the contract puts a cap on management pay proportional to union employees’ salaries. Pay transparency provisions and a pay equity review process are also established for employees who feel they are being unfairly underpaid.
The first-of-its-kind agreement also includes robust anti-discrimination provisions as well as comprehensive protections for immigrant and transgender workers. And it establishes employee-led Labor Committees to address ongoing working conditions and other issues with management.
All of this was made possible due to the adoption of fair labor practices by the Bernie 2020 campaign. On February 26th, the campaign agreed to remain neutral in the organizing campaign and to recognize Local 400 if a majority of workers signed union cards. This milestone was reached on March 15th, making it the first presidential campaign staff in history to unionize. Contract negotiations commenced shortly afterward, led by a committee of staff from the campaign. Negotiations were productive and the collective bargaining agreement was ratified on May 2nd by a majority vote of union employees.
“This was a model experience in every respect,” Federici said. “First, Senator Sanders walked the talk on unions, agreeing to a truly democratic process — neutrality and card check — that every responsible employer should embrace. And then, the campaign engaged in good faith bargaining, recognizing that it’s in their own interest to have well-treated employees empowered to operate at the top of their games. I urge every other campaign to follow their lead.”
http://www.ufcw400.org/2019/05/08/bernie-sanders-workers-become-first-presidential-campaign-staff-to-ratify-union-contract/
Bernie Sanders: Rideshare drivers deserve better pay and better job protections
By Bernie Sanders : May 8, 2019 10:45 a.m.
Excerpts:
We can no longer accept a situation in which a tiny handful of Americans become extraordinarily wealthy by paying their workers starvation wages. Today, the median worker at these ride-sharing companies makes $8.55 an hour. And yet in 2017, Lyft’s CEO made more than $41 million and Uber’s CEO was paid $45 million last year. Additionally, Uber executives this week are expected to become instant millionaires from the company’s multibillion-dollar-initial-public offering on Wall Street. In the world’s wealthiest nation, we must take a stand: We must declare that people who work for multibillion-dollar companies should not have to work 70 or 80 hours a week to get by.
And yet we must also understand that these workers are not merely being poorly paid, like so many other workers in America. These so-called “gig economy” workers are also being denied basic workplace protections and a fighting chance to obtain higher wages. That is because they are among the nearly 16 million workers who are paid as “independent contractors,” even though they are working full time.
And now, shock of all shocks, Donald Trump — the man who campaigned as a champion of workers — is actively helping the companies rip off the workers.
Trump’s administration not only rescinded previous rules designed to classify gig economy workers as full time employees, his Labor Department just this past week issued a “get out of jail free card” to employers such as Uber and Lyft to let them keep classifying their workers as “independent contractors.” That makes it harder for these workers to join unions, and harder for workers to sue when they are being fleeced.
These rulings are a threat to all workers in America — and they must be reversed.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Open-Forum-Rideshare-drivers-deserve-better-pay-13828990.php
Vermont PBS: Beyond Bernie 4. Burlington's Socialist Mayor
Published on May 9, 2018
https://www.vermontpbs.org/beyondbernie/
The 1980s introduced Ronald Reagan and his conservative politics to the nation. But in true Vermont fashion, the state’s biggest city swung to the left voting Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed Socialist, into the mayor’s office by a mere 10 votes. Since then, Burlington has been a bastion of progressive politics setting an example for the state and the nation.
The making of Bernie Sanders: How a hitchhiking campaigner pushed a vision that remains ...
...remarkably unchangedBy Nathan McDermott, Andrew Kaczynski and Gregory Krieg, CNN
Updated 8:02 PM ET, Tue May 7, 2019
'Why doesn't television reflect the real suffering and misery of life?'
Excerpt:
In the 1970s, Bernie Sanders, then in his 30s, ran -- over and over again in Vermont -- and lost repeatedly, never cracking double digits. In a series of quixotic bids at statewide office as a member of the self-described "radical" Liberty Union Party, he railed against corporate titans and promised to eliminate laws regulating drugs, homosexuality and, before the Supreme Court stepped in, abortion.
He campaigned in a local prison and spoke forcefully about racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The government, he said during a talk about desegregation busing, "doesn't give a sh** about black people."
Unlike so many other public figures with long careers or winding arcs, Sanders did not arrive at this moment of national reckoning through a personal or political "evolution." He broke through, instead, with an uncompromising, insistent vision of radical upheaval -- and a taste for conflict with the forces determined to keep him on the fringes.
The consistency of Sanders' message over time has become a cornerstone of his presidential pitch. This account, which spans parts of seven years in the 1970s, was drawn from a CNN KFile review of thousands of pages of archived Liberty Union Party files and newspaper articles newly available online, as well as interviews with longtime acquaintances and onlookers.
Many of the speeches, editorials and interviews featured here are nearly indistinguishable from what Sanders might have said just the other day, out on the presidential hustings, although the sharper edges of his message have slightly softened over time. He is still fighting, as the 2020 primaries near, many of the same battles he first joined during his early campaigns as a member of the Liberty Union Party in the 1970s.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/07/politics/kfile-bernie-sanders-vermont-1970s/index.html
'They Underestimate Me at Their Own Peril': Sanders Says GOP Will Regret Hoping for His Nomination
"There's a long history of the establishment and GOP underestimating Bernie Sanders," said Sanders speechwriter David Sirotaby Jake Johnson, staff writer
Published on Tuesday, May 07, 2019
Excerpts:
Bernie Sanders wants Republicans to believe he would be easy to beat in 2020.
Politico reported on Tuesday that Republicans in Congress watching Sanders are "practically cheering him on" in the Democratic presidential primary, arguing that a self-described democratic socialist cannot possibly defeat President Donald Trump in the general election
"I would suggest they underestimate me at their own peril and I hope they do," said the Vermont senator, who consistently leads Trump in hypothetical general election matchups.
Sanders told Politico that, contrary to the view of many in the GOP, a bold and unapologetic progressive agenda will bolster the Democratic Party's chances of taking back the Senate and the presidency in 2020.
"If you have strong progressive candidates we'll do just fine," Sanders said.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/07/they-underestimate-me-their-own-peril-sanders-says-gop-will-regret-hoping-his
Bernie Sanders leads all other Democratic candidates in New Hampshire primary survey
https://twitter.com/yanquetino/status/1125820808268374016
The Long Shot - How Bernie became Bernie
By Matthew Karp TODAY 8:45 AM
Excerpts:
Compared with the leading Democrats of his generation and of the generations that followed, Bernie Sanders lacks a certain courtly polish. He grew up in a rent-controlled three-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn, where his father, like Warren’s father, worked as a salesman. But unlike Warren—or Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Beto O’Rourke—Sanders did not nurture his political ambitions on the campus of an Ivy League university. (If elected in 2020, he will be the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter without a graduate degree.) At 38 years old—an age when Joe Biden was already fighting school integration in the Senate and Harris was enlisting millionaire donors to back her run for San Francisco district attorney—Sanders was working for the American People’s Historical Society of Burlington, Vermont, on a documentary about Eugene Debs.
If the social milieu of Sanders’s formative years was distinctive, his political education was even more so. At the University of Chicago, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, read Marx and Lincoln and Dewey in the library basement, and fought for civil rights as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality. For the young Bernie, real politics was what happened outside the corridors of power: After being arrested at a Chicago sit-in, he told the writer Russell Banks, “I saw right then and there the difference between real life and the official version of life. And I knew I believed in one and didn’t believe any more in the other.”
This description by Weaver could serve as shorthand for Sanders’s entire career in politics. Journalists and academics worship at the shrine of originality, but for a social democrat in the late 20th century, consistency has proved the rarer virtue.
From Weaver to Ocasio-Cortez, nearly every progressive figure today is urging the Democrats to reclaim the bold mantle of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Sanders rounds out the introduction to Where We Go From Here with a quotation from another president who led an even bolder movement and whose election spurred an even greater transformation. The hoariest words in American history—Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg vow to defend “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”—are also, Sanders reminds us, some of the most radical. To overthrow an entrenched oligarchy and claim a “new birth of freedom” based on democratic equality for all: That would be a political revolution worth fighting for.
https://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-jeff-weaver-2016-campaign-books-review/
🌎 Senator Sanders' Influence - Climate Mobilization
Bernie Sanders’ influence
☀️ Climate action leader Bill McKibben was one of five persons that Bernie Sanders appointed to the 15-man committee that was gathered to prepare the Democratic Party’s program platform. They fought hard, and over an extended process they succeeded to add more and more to the text. ... A line was drawn, however, at his call for a total ban on fracking.❎ Much because of Bernie Sanders, there has been so much talking about climate change in the Democratic primary, and commentators now believe that climate action – unlike in 2008 and 2012 – will become a central part of the election campaign.
https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/democratic-party-platform/
☀️ Our organizers successfully intervened in the 2016 Democratic primary elections, bringing WWII-scale Climate Mobilization into the discussion by successfully lobbying presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to embrace the idea.
In July 2016, the need for WWII-scale mobilization was adopted into the Democratic Party Platform thanks to Climate Mobilization advisor and ally Russell Greene who was appointed to the platform committee by Bernie Sanders. This commitment was reaffirmed in August 2018 when Democratic National Committee passed a resolution calling for “a national social and economic mobilization” to “address the climate emergency” and “restore a safe climate.”
https://www.theclimatemobilization.org/about-us/
☀️ The platform acknowledges the scale of the threat to be so large that it will require a leadership response from our country on the scale of our national mobilization to confront the threat of fascism during World War II.
The Democratic platform now contains language that brings shape to the enormity of the climate crisis, and thanks to Sander’s Policy Director Warren Gunnels, climate leader Bill McKibben, filmmaker Josh Fox and many others begins to point towards policy that we must implement if we are to transition away from fossil fuels and begin to draw down carbon sharply on the path to 100% clean, renewable energy and zero net greenhouse gas emissions.
We got as high up on this particular part of our climb as we could – and we put down a marker. And for that, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Senator Bernie Sanders and the millions of voices of the political revolution. It does not mean it is enough. The policy falls short. But that’s not what party platforms are for. That’s what movements are for.
Now – we must recognize where we are – and climb higher. Much higher. And fast.
We are in an emergency. There is no time for gradualism. We must mobilize.
https://climateemergencydeclaration.org/democratic-party-platform/
Powerful testimony from a farmer's daughter with her dad who met privately with @BernieSanders
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