In this message:

• Rainier School & Community Health Care Improve Relations and Morale
• Local Elected Officials Demand the Troops and the Money Come Home
• Living-Wage Paid Roofers to Start Work on Luxury Tacoma Condo
• Welcome New JwJ Elected Leaders

JwJ Spotlight Helps Lead to Better Working Conditions . . .  
Rainier School and Community Health Care Staff Unions and Managers Improve Relations and Morale

Tensions between management and union workers at Rainier School and Community Health Care (CHC) had led to rallies, strikes, and low morale several years ago.  JwJ activists might recall that the top managers of both of these organizations won respective Pierce County JwJ Grinch of the Year contests.  While receiving a Grinch award delivery from JwJ activists is not exactly the most joyous aspect of the Holiday season for a manager, such a confrontation can sometimes lead to acknowledging a crisis and searching for ways to improve a difficult relationship.  We are excited to applaud both David Flentge CEO of CHC, and Neil Crowley Superintendent of Rainier School, for courageously demonstrating how well collective bargaining and union-management relations can work in the last few years.  To support these changes, our volunteer JwJ webmaster will be removing these past Grinch delivery accounts from our webpage.

Rainier School
Through the school staff’s state employee union WFSE Local 491, work-site leaders and managers initiated several union-management meetings to clear the air and find common ground.  Neil Crowley and Anita Delight, Regional Manager, joined in these meetings and helped to work through issues.  Union members suggested concrete steps to address issues that had driven down morale and these suggestions were taken seriously.  Emerging from these sessions, management:

• Substantially increased front-line staff recruitment, sending workers to job fairs and staff trainings
• Improved the staffing to patient ratio from when most staff did mandatory overtime to now most staff not doing any overtime
• The facility started back up the all-staff newsletter with positive morale boosters and employee recognition
• Spent $2000 on Holiday Party with patients and community after missing the event the previous year

Community Health Care
To help heal tensions, CEO David Flentge asked worksite union leaders of SEIU 1199NW to build relations with frontline staff and union leaders.  As a result, Flentge took a tour of the clinics with worksite union member leader Tom Franks, President Diane Sosne, and staff Organizer Lisa Harlow.  On the tour, President Sosne asked members about workplace issues. 

After the tour, Flentge went into collective bargaining with elected union leaders from the frontlines eager to work on how to improve patient care and working conditions.   CHC Management hired an attorney-negotiator that was not anti-union.  Throughout the bargaining process the CHC management team worked hard to generate creative and responsive proposals that met the needs of both union members and the agency.  Negotiations moved quickly and arrived at a new union contract ratified by an overwhelming majority of CHC members.  Post negotiations, the management team has continued to work diligently to maintain a respectful relationship with SEIU 1199NW members.   Flentge has made it very clear that the management team will continue to work hard to resolve conflicts in the work place rather than escalate them.  Workplace improvements included:

• Health Benefits:  Maintenance of healthcare benefits for the life of the contract, health care premium cost increases held to $5 in 2006 and 2007 and none in 2008, an additional medical insurance plan created to reduce dramatically the cost of insuring dependents
• Raises of 3% in 2006 plus a 1% fair market adjustment for MA’s, LPN’s, Professional Billers, and Collection Clerks;  3.5% in 2007 plus a .5% fair market adjustment for MA’s;  3.5% in 2008 
• Holiday pay of 10 hours for employees on ten-hour shifts
• Union leave increased to 12 weeks
• Continuing Education money for 8 hours can be used for Union trainings
• No discrimination for sexual orientation

This is the kind of management model that increases productivity and results in quality patient care of which the entire Rainier School and Community Healthcare communities can be proud
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Local Elected Officials Demand the Troops and the Money Come Home 
The U.S. Government has been at war in Iraq since 2003. In that four years time frame our government has spent $423 billion on the Iraq war. Tax dollars that normally would have gone to healthcare, education and affordable housing instead are being diverted to pay for this war. In Washington State $10 billion have been diverted to the war. In Seattle alone almost one billion dollars has been diverted.

That means that Washington residents are losing out on affordable and quality healthcare, education, housing and living wage jobs.

On March 19th, the fourth anniversary of the war, Jobs with Justice, with its membership organizations, organized a march called “Ending the War Begins at Home.” Over 3,500 people came out on a rainy Seattle day to protest the war and congratulate the Seattle City Council for passing an anti-war resolution, and MLK Jr. County Executive Ron Sims and County Council Chair Larry Gossett for signing a proclamation against the war (click on the links above to read the resolutions).

As Executive Ron Sims (pictured left), Council Chair Larry Gossett and the Seattle City Council acknowledge how this expensive war is preventing them from providing vital services to our communities, their voices are being added to the thousands of Washington residents who oppose this war and are pressuring Senator Cantwell and Senator Murray to end all funding for the Iraq war.
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Living-Wage Paid Roofers to Start Work on Luxury Tacoma Condo 
Tacoma luxury condominium developer Prium Companies has taken an important step to create more living wage jobs for local residents.  Recently, Prium dropped a poverty-wage paying roofing company and requested from Roofers Local 153 in Tacoma a list of union roofing contractors to do all of their work.  The Roofers union runs an effective training apprenticeship program that provides opportunities to low-income community members to attain guaranteed living wage jobs.   This is significant because many Tacoma developers operate on the backs of poverty-wage paid and out-of-town workers and Prium would be the first developer using a union roofing company on a major downtown Tacoma condo project. 

Prium has requested bids from union apprenticeship-operating contractors to roof the Chelsea Heights Condominium project on 6th and J Street.  The Chelsea Heights project like much of the Tacoma high-end development is subsidized with our tax-dollars through a ten year property tax exemption.   The building will be a 78 condo unit, 20000 Sq. Ft. commercial space, 4 story structure and much roofing work is expected.  Confirmation of a union contractor is yet to be determined. 

Much of the Downtown Tacoma and the Hilltop’s development are creating poverty-wage jobs despite constructing luxury condos and high-end commercial buildings.  Jobs with Justice has prioritized establishing more socially responsible development that reverses the growing poverty in Pierce County as opposed to the current corporate and government pattern driving us into greater poverty.  Tacoma Catholic Worker and the Pierce County Building Trades Council are anchor organizations in this campaign that has brought together leaders from over 15 local organizations. 

Last December, a delegation of community leaders met with top executives of Prium Hyun Um and Peter Ansara to discuss our goals and invite the company to partner with us on this campaign.  While we have not secured a partnership yet, we recognize Prium’s positive steps can signal other developers to do the right thing.  We expect developers to demonstrate much more progress reversing poverty caused by current development practices.

Largest Home Builder Commits to Higher Job and Training Standards
Developer Quadrant, a Weyerhaeuser subsidiary, has verbally agreed to set goals of hiring at least 30% locally, at least 15% through career training courses, at least 14% through contracts to minority-owned businesses, and at least 8% through women-owned businesses for building the Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) Salishan Area 3 project.

Quadrant CEO Peter Orser and VP Benjamin Conwell negotiated the understanding with the ECLN, a gathering of organizations such as A. Phillip Randolph Institute, Pierce County Building Trades Council, Black Collective, Laborers, Tacoma Catholic Worker, and JwJ.  The agreement requires that the training courses be state-certified apprenticeship programs and that 30% of the hires are Salishan Section 3 residents.  Priority for other hiring will go to “residents of THA’s other public housing developments, participants in Youthbuild programs, and low and very low-income residents living elsewhere in the City of Tacoma.”

Our JwJ Pierce County Organizing Committee sent statewide Executive Board member Lisa Lance to meet with Quadrant at the THA Oversight Committee meeting on April 12.  Lisa explained what we are and do, and gave examples of how we have held corporations accountable to meet our local community’s need for living wage jobs and workforce housing.  The people who swing the hammers should be able to live in the buildings they make, especially if we subsidize them with our tax-dollars like at THA.  That is far from the case in most Tacoma development projects over the last 10 years.  Quadrant expressed interest in building a positive relationship with JwJ.

Quadrant still needs to sign the binding contract and begin to fulfill the terms.  This would be a significant victory and shift for a major developer to commit specific goals to the community on creating living wage jobs, training opportunities, and hiring local residents.  We expect other developers operating locally and the Tacoma City Council to embrace this standard.

Look for JwJ’s Greater Tacoma Social Responsible Development campaign to launch a series of exposés on who benefits and who suffers from the current development scheme and what are the better alternatives already employed in cities and counties across our nation.
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Welcome New JwJ Elected Leaders 
WA State JwJ is proud to welcome as new Statewide Executive Board members Shelby Mooney from Office and Professional Employees Int'l Union Local 8 as Treasurer, Lynne Dodson from American Federation of Teachers - WA State as At-Large Labor Representative, Lila Zucker from the Student Labor Action Project at the University of Washington as At-Large Student/Youth Representative and Ben Freitag from the Laborers Northwest Regional Organizing Coalition as the MLK Jr. County Organizing Committee Representative.

We also thank our outgoing elected leaders for all of your leadership over the past two years: Treasurer Mary Ann Schroeder, At-Large Labor Representative Rodolfo Franco, At-Large Student/Youth Representative Rachel Taber, and MLK Jr. County Organizing Committee Representative Catherine Pottinger.  We're so grateful for the time and hard work these committed individuals have put in to make JwJ stronger and more effective.
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