A new year brings with it lots of hope.

Let’s hope 2010 brings a health care reform bill that does not penalize working families with a tax on their coverage. Because right now, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert aptly describes it, there is a ”middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version” of the health care reform legislation.

The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.

Jon Walker at Firedoglake took a look at a report released in December by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which found the health care tax “will result in most people getting worse health insurance from their employer, insurance that covers less.” Walker translates the report’s conclusions this way:

Your employer will reduce what your current insurance plan [covers] and put in place high co-pays and deductibles. The result is that many people with employer-provided health insurance will see their insurance get much worse. For younger, healthier employees, possibly getting less comprehensive insurance but maybe higher wages (I think it is very doubtful that there is a pure dollar for dollar passthrough), this might be a decent deal. For older, less healthy employees this is a very bad deal. They will be forced to pay much more out-of-pocket for their health care.

More cost, less coverage for working families. Yet portraying the tax as only affecting ”Cadillac plans,” purposely obscures how it will harm America’s working families. 

Or, as Herbert puts it:

The tax on health benefits is being sold to the public dishonestly as something that will affect only the rich….

For most of us, the world of thoroughbred horse racing begins and ends with the Triple Crown, those few weeks in the spring when the world’s best horses run in the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont stakes.

But beyond the glamour that gilds the top of the horse-racing world, there’s a dirty secret that tarnishes racing’s carefully crafted image—the fate of the run-out and worn-out horses at the bottom-rung tracks far from Churchill Downs or Pimlico.

Every year, thousands of horses are shipped across U.S. borders to slaughterhouses in Canada or Mexico, while thousands more are neglected, abused or abandoned.

There are humane alternatives. Jim Tremper, a member of the New York State Public Employees Federation (PEF), an AFT affiliate, has been running the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation’s (TRF’s) horse farm at the Wallkill Correctional Facility for the past 25 years. That work is the centerpiece of the new documentary “Homestretch,” much of it filmed at Wallkill, now available on DVD.

Tremper is a vocational instructor at Wallkill, where he says the horse farm serves a dual purpose. First, it’s a place where horses can rest and get rehabilitated after often being severely abused. Second, the foundation’s work helps the inmates who feed, exercise, treat and train the horses to learn responsibility and redevelop a sense of trust. The goal for both inmate and horse is to find a new life on the outside.

Our goal is to help the inmates become better citizens upon their release and provide much needed care to the retired thoroughbreds.

In the latest issue of the PEF Communicator, he says he hopes the documentary will reach “the right audience.”

The people who don’t know what is going on when a race horse is finished with its career. This film could change the mindset and show what can be done with these animals when they can no longer race. They still have the power to rehabilitate.

The film chronicles the pairing of the inmates and rescued, end-of-career race horses as they come together to care for and save each other, says the filmmaker, Sheri Bylander. Tremper, says Bylander

allowed me to become an insider in a way that’s very necessary for a documentary. From the minute I set foot on the farm, his compassion for the inmates and horses become clear.

The goal of “Homestretch” is to raise the public’s awareness of abuse and cruelty that many horses face at the finish line of their careers. Tremper says the film already has had an immediate impact on the inmates working with the horses at Wallkill.

The loved the attention. They loved being in the spotlight. They developed a deeper meaning in the work they do with the horses. The filming helped them realize their work is necessary, important and special.

Click here for more information on the film or to purchase a DVD of “Homestretch.”

Here’s your chance to take a look at the work world as seen through the lenses of 15 members of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) and choose what you think are the top photographs in the IBEW’s 2009 Photo Contest.

The finalists—out of more than 300 submissions—offer a fascinating and, at times, stunning perspective of the varied work IBEW members perform every day. Among the photos are:

* A dizzying look down past the feet of a worker perched high above the ground in a lattice framed electrical tower;

* A spectacular sunrise over a power plant in the Nevada high desert;

* An abstract wall of heavy-duty yellow linesmen’s gloves; and

* Four workers balanced atop two power poles directing a helicopter delivery of a large crossbeam.

Click here to check out the other 11 photographs and vote for your top three. After you pick, you can see the results from the voting thus far. Each visitor is only permitted to vote once, so choose carefully. The vote closes Jan. 10.

Winners will be announced later this month. The winners and honorable mentions will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Electrical Worker and we’ll showcase the winner here as well.

Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier starred in the 1961 movie “A Raisin in The Sun.”

One night before the Screen Actors (SAG) honor Hollywood’s finest performers, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will pay tribute to five actors who won SAG’ s highest honor: the Life Achievement Award. TCM’s four-film prime-time presentation airs Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, the night before a live broadcast of the 16th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards—the nation’s largest and only nationally televised all-union awards show.

TCM’s tribute will begin at 8 p.m. EST with the 1935 comedy short “Tit for Tat,” starring Stan Laurel, who received the Life Achievement Award in 1963. Next up, Jack Lemmon, who was honored by SAG in 1989, stars in the Neil Simon comedy “The Out-of-Towners” (1969). Sidney Poitier, honored in 1999, and Ruby Dee, honored in 2000, star in the dramatic adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s play “A Raisin in the Sun” (1961). And the night closes out with 1998 honoree Kirk Douglas in the suspenseful Western “Last Train from Gun Hill” (1959).

This year’s Life Achievement honoree is television and film actress Betty White. She will receive the award during the SAG Awards ceremony, which will be simulcast live on TNT and TBS Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010, at 8 p.m. EST/PST, 7 p.m. CST and 6 p.m. MST. SAG represents nearly 120,000 actors in film, television, industrials, commercials and music videos.

SAG’s Life Achievement Award is awarded not only for career achievement but also for humanitarian accomplishment. As a Lifetime Achievement Award winner, White joins such previous honorees as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (1985), Elizabeth Taylor (1997), Edward Asner (2001), Clint Eastwood (2002), Shirley Temple Black (2005), Julie Andrews (2006), Charles Durning (2007) and James Earl Jones (2008).

In a recent edition of GRITtv, host Laura Flanders brings together three panelists for a talk about the economy, the labor movement and political organizing.

In one of the highlights of this episode, Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew, does a great job of explaining our broken labor laws and how they’re preventing millions of workers from exercising their basic freedom to form a union:

You’ve got to remember that one of the reasons it’s so hard to organize in the workplace is that there’s a whole industry out there that has developed to stop people from organizing. There are polls all the time asking, “Would you like to join a union,” “Would you be interested in bargaining with your boss,” that sort of thing, and mostly, people think that’s a good idea—but that doesn’t mean you get to have a union just because you want one. There’s a whole bunch of structural impediments in your way.

For one thing, it’s very easy for management to bring consultants in to try and figure out how to keep it from happening. They have compulsory meetings with staff, they do one-on-one meetings with employees, they do all these things leading up to a union election to make sure a union doesn’t win.

All very true, and it’s why we need to pass the Employee Free Choice Act—to reform our broken labor laws and give everyone the chance to bargain for a better life.

You can watch the whole conversation here.

Ironworker John Sferazo built decks for first responders with disabilities to view wildlife.

John Sferazo, a retired member of Ironworkers Local 361 from Brooklyn, N.Y., was one of the first responders after the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001. Like many of the firefighters, police officers, reservists and other union members who worked in the devastation of the bombed out World Trade Centers, Sferazo suffered psychological and physical damage, including the loss of more than one-third of his breathing capacity.

But despite his adversity, Sferazo is actively working to build a top-rated wildlife and nature program in Maine, which he is opening for hunting to veterans and first responders with disabilities.

In 2000, Sferazo, a member of the Union Sportsmen’s Alliance, purchased a parcel of land in Maine known as Owen’s Marsh. A former asphalt plant, the site had been reclaimed, including the construction of a dam, which created a deep-water marsh. Five weeks after Sferazo purchased the property, the dam breached, releasing a 73-acre wall of water.

“I can’t explain the amount of waterfowl—ducks, herons, egrets—utilizing this body of water,” Sferazo told the Ironworker magazine.

 So the breech ripped my heart out. The reason I purchased the property went down the highway, more or less.

Sferazo began again to reclaim the property. With help from friends and colleagues, Sferazo, who holds an environmental sciences degree, planted organic matter to replace the washed-away topsoil. Then he added flora, wintergreens and other winter food sources for deer and other browsers like moose and the snowshoe rabbit.

He even took advantage of nuisance beavers, allowing the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to release them on his property. 

He tells the magazine:

I wanted these little convicts on my property because they’re going to do their job—build dams. Dams contain a body of water, which provides habitat for birds, moose, and other animals.

In conjunction with the Pine Grove Program, which helps heroes who have survived man-made or natural disasters through nature therapy, Sferazo opened his property to veterans and first responders with disabilities.

He says:

It gives them the edge they need because of their disability, such as being confined to a wheelchair.

What we’re doing through Pine Grove is giving these people the opportunity to let the pressure valve go off through time spent outdoors.

Patients at Dana-Ferber enjoy a Christmas visitor.

The children at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund Clinic are enjoying a jollier holiday celebration than usual, thanks in part to the more than $27,000 union construction and trades workers collected for the institute’s annual Winter Wonderland.

The donation helped deck out the more than weeklong Wonderland for children being treated for cancer and included visits from Santa, gifts, arts and crafts and holiday meals.

The workers are building a 14-story, 275,000 square foot, state-of-the-art outpatient clinic and research center next to the Jimmy Fund Clinic. The Yawkey Center for Cancer Care is set to open its doors in early 2011.

This fall, Mike Morgan, with Plumbers and Pipe Fitters (UA) Local 537, posted a flier on the job site asking the workers to donate an hour of their salary to the kids at the clinic. The money started rolling in, and the donations are continuing, says Morgan.

It was amazing how much money we raised, when we presented the check they expected about $500, but we raised more than $27,000 and the money keeps pouring in. We are so happy to be able to help in any way and it is just a small way to help these children.

Many of the union craftspeople are closing out their work at the project. Some even knew they would have no more work after the project, but wanted to help anyway.

Lisa Scherber, director of activities for the Jimmy Fund Clinic, says the clinic was shocked at the amount the workers were able to raise.

Our mouths dropped when they handed us the check. Now we have money not only for the Winter Wonderland, but for programs and gifts throughout the year for the children. It is also amazing to see such a giving spirit in these tough economic times, especially in the construction industry, but the union construction folks have always been generous and willing to help. These programs bring such joy to these children facing cancer.

Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Council, says the generous donation is

just one of the examples of how the union building trades members not only do high-quality work on projects, but give back to the communities in which they work. The building trade unions and their members have been helping out many charities during these tough economic times.

In March, we reported how workers on the Yawkey Center project were helping raise the spirits of the Jimmy Fund kids. Each day, young cancer patients would write their names on posters and place then in the clinic’s windows. The members of Ironworkers Local 7 would spray paint the names on the I-Beams before hoisting them into place as the children watched. Says Morgan:

We want the children to know that we were thinking of them at the beginning of the project and we won’t forget about them and will keep them in our hearts when the job is finished.

In this cross-post from the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), Dick Meister, a San Francisco-based columnist, highlights the successful effort of Wisconsin unionists to make labor history part of the state’s model public education standards and highlights the need for action to ensure similar laws are passed elsewhere.

Despite the importance of unions in our lives, our schools pay only slight attention to their importance—or even to their existence.

Little is done in the classroom to overcome the negative view of organized labor held by many Americans; little done to explain the true nature of organized labor.

There have been many attempts to remedy that situation, none more promising than the steps taken recently in Wisconsin with enactment of a law that makes the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining part of the state¹s model standards for social studies classes in the state¹s public schools.

The law does not mandate the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining, as its sponsors had wanted. But it amounts to just about the same thing by requiring the state superintendent of public instruction to make the subjects part of the state’s educational standards and to provide schools and teachers assistance in teaching labor subjects.

The Wisconsin Labor History Society, the state AFL-CIO and other labor and educational groups worked a dozen years to finally win enactment of the law, the first such state law anywhere. But the History Society fully expects other states to follow Wisconsin’s example.

The importance of including labor history in the classroom was underscored effectively in the latest issue of the American Federation of Teachers journal, American Educator.

“With the key protections for workers that unions have gained under attack,” said a journal article, “there is a greater need for the next generation to understand the real role of working men and women in building the nation and making it a better place.”

James Green, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, explains that, in studying labor, students learn important lessons—above all “the contributions that generations of union activists have made to building a nation and democratizing and humanizing its often brutal workplaces.”

Fred Glass, communications director of the California Federation of Teachers, provides an ideal primer for students studying labor. His summary is an excellent guide to what they should know about labor—a guide to what we should all know. Said Glass:

Some people interpret the decline of organized labor as if unions belong to the past, and have no role to play in the global economy of the 21st century. They point to the numbers and say that workers are choosing not to join unions anymore.

The real picture is more complex and contradicts this view. Most workers would prefer to belong to unions if they could. But many are being prevented from joining, rather than choosing not to join.

Glass concludes:

Unions remain the best guarantee of economic protection
and political advocacy for workers. But as unions shrink, fewer people know what unions are, and do. And fewer remember what unions have to do with the prosperity of working people.

That’s what our schools should be teaching, and presumably what they’ll be
teaching in Wisconsin shortly, thanks to the new law there. If we¹re
fortunate, more states will soon follow suit.

This year, opponents of health care reform hit new lows in promoting misleading, inaccurate or flat-out dishonest information. The worst of these lies was the scam that health care reform would create “death panels” whose members would judge whether to end seniors’ lives.

The website PolitiFact called the death-panel myth the “Lie of the Year,” and the watchdog group Media Matters named its originator, Betsy McCaughey, as “Health Care Misinformer of the Year.” 

The vicious, absurd fairy tale of “death panels” got its start in July, when McCaughey, a former New York lieutenant governor, claimed on the air that, in a reformed health care system, seniors would be mandated to attend counseling sessions where they’d be told how and when to end their lives.

Despite being entirely invented, the claim spread rapidly—first among right-wing pundits and talk show hosts, then among anti-reform elected officials and finally bubbling up into mainstream press reports. 

It was former Alaska governor and onetime vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin who really pushed the lie into the wider debate. In a post on her Facebook page, Palin—never noted for her adherence to the facts or her policy expertise—introduced the phrase “death panels” in an attack on health care reform. It was a deliberate, groundless scare tactic meant to create anxiety about health care reform, and the term “death panel” spread to the floor of the U.S. Congress and the front pages of newspapers. 

The “death panel” myth was at the heart of the loud and angry disruptions at town hall meetings over the summer, as extremists armed with disinformation (and sometimes organized by corporate-funded front groups) tried to scare lawmakers away from passing health care reform. Union members helped fight back—with reasoned arguments and civility—against the campaign of lies and noise, and set the nation back on the path to health care reform. 

It’s also worth mentioning PolitiFact’s runners-up for “Lie of the Year”: 

• Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck claimed that John Holdren, President Obama’s top science adviser, “has proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.”
• Orly Taitz claimed that a birth certificate showed that President Obama was born in Kenya. 

Against opposition this hostile to the truth, we need to fight even harder. 

For some great, comprehensive examinations of how the death panel smear emerged and spread, check out PolitiFact and Media Matters.

Royetta Sanford, left, is mentoring future union leader Carrie Meyers-Herron, right.

When Royetta Sanford retired as director of the Electrical Workers (IBEW) Human Services Department, she did not stop working to improve the lives of working people. Instead, she has begun to train the next generation of union leaders.

Sanford has volunteered to share her knowledge and experience to mentor Carrie Meyers-Herron, a recipient of the Union Leaders of the Future Scholarship.

Says Sanford:

I’m mentoring because I feel it is one of the only ways we can move forward getting women and minorities in the mainstream of the labor movement.

This is a great, well-organized program with some real bright talent, a lot of people with capacity to be good leaders. I want to give back to the movement and do whatever I can to make it stronger and more diverse.

The future leaders scholarship helps active union members who are women or people of color gain skills and knowledge to move into union leadership. Providing annual rewards of up to $3,000, the scholarship program is sponsored by the Union Plus Education Foundation, an arm of Union Privilege.

Meyers-Herron, a member of AFT Local 2665 in Palatine Bridge, N.Y., and president of the Galway (N.Y.) Central School District’s teachers association, says:

It’s nice to be hooked up with a mentor who has done union work for so long. She reassures me.

Meyers-Herron, who met Sanford for the first time in September, hopes to take master’s level courses in labor relations. She will stay in contact with Sanford monthly on balancing tasks and getting her perspective on issues facing teachers in a time of tightening budgets.

Sanford is one of 12 experienced union leaders who agreed to mentor the scholarship winners.

The others are: 

• Transport Workers President James Little.
• MaryBe McMillan, secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina State AFL-CIO.
• Christine Trujillo, president, New Mexico AFT
• Sharon Cornu, executive secretary-treasurer, Alameda (Calif.) Labor Council.
• RaeLene Brown, secretary-treasurer of the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Central Labor Council in Modesto, Calif.
• Davida Russell, president, AFSCME Local 744 in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.
• Connie Cordovilla of the AFT Human Rights and Community Relations Department.
• David Carpio of the AFL-CIO Political Department.
• Mary Finger, retired vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
• May Ying Chen, retired vice president of Workers United.
• Greg Hamblet, retired vice president of UFCW.

Since 1992, Union Plus has awarded more than $2.8 million in scholarships. This year 13 unionists representing 10 unions received more than $33,000 in scholarships.