AFGE Delegates March On Capitol, Campaigning For Natl., Union Causes
Wednesday, February 12, 2014(Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO)
Waving signs ranging from “America deserves a raise” to “Stop destroying good federal jobs,” hundreds of AFGE members marched on Capitol Hill on Feb. 11, campaigning for national and union causes. The parade, from the union’s legislative conference to the Capitol’s West Front, preceded worker lobbying on issues ranging from tax fairness – more taxes on the rich – to arming and protecting federal prison corrections officers against violent inmates.
The 285,000-member union has a long list of
causes it
advocates to help the U.S. “get out of this swamp,” as AFGE President J.
David
Cox told the marchers. The whole point, he added, is to create “shared
prosperity, not austerity.”
For the last several years, AFGE and other
federal worker
unions have been fending off GOP-inspired budget cuts that slash not just the
programs the workers run, but their pay, in the form of increased pension
contributions without future payments, coupled with a 3-year federal pay
freeze.
Now they plan to go on the offense, and the
march and
lobbying lawmakers is a big part of that effort.
Specific AFGE goals include closing
regional pay gaps
between federal workers and their equivalent private counterparts, eliminating
the two lower tiers in what is now a 3-tier pension system, preserving federal
payment for “lost time” that AFGE shop stewards must use to handle
grievances or
participate in bargaining, killing a GOP scheme to ban automatic dues
deductions, increasing insourcing of federal jobs, and “capping
taxpayer-funded
contractor compensation.”
“We have a common struggle and a fight
against
privatization” of public services, added new Postal Workers President Mark
Dimondstein, a guest speaker at the rally.
National issues the unionists advocated
included raising
the minimum wage, paid family and parental leave, and tax fairness, such as a
financial transfers tax on stock and other transactions, and elimination of
so-called “carried interest.” That “lets
hedge fund managers pay taxes at lower rates than their secretaries,” Cox
says.
And the marchers had another message for those lawmakers
who turn a deaf ear to their causes, or the country’s: The workers will
remember in November. “We’re telling
them to ‘Stop it!’” union Vice President Augusta Thomas said.
“Start taking money from the rich and stop
making us poorer than we already are. We
gotta fight and we gotta go to the polls and get these sons-of-bitches out of
there.”
- Mark Gruenberg, PAI