Sunday, January 22, 2012

IN's weekend warriers fight RTW in churches, schools and in the snow



Weekend protests and a raucous Town Hall meeting are leading up to what is expected to be the biggest rally yet in Indiana on Monday.

Television ads, like the one above, are running both for and against the heinous right tright-to-work-for-less bill.

Today, Indiana congregations joined the fight against right-to-work-for-less. After Sunday services, churches -- in Evansville, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis and South Bend -- are hosting letter-writing sessions encouraging House Speaker Brain Bosma and other legislators to kill the bill.

Teamsters on Saturday gave Republican lawmakers an earful at a Georgetown town hall meeting at an elementary school. Reported the Courier-Journal,

“Indiana doesn’t need it,” Jeffboat employee Jim Kincaid, a member of Teamsters Local 89, said of the bill. “Any state it goes to it’s destroyed the economy. It’s just union busting.”
“We’ve got to stop the right-to-work stuff,” agreed Georgetown resident Bill Miller, also a member of Local 89. “It’s plain old simple union busting. They can wrap it up however they want.”
And in Fort Wayne, according to the Journal Gazette,
More than 150 people braved frigid weather Saturday to protest attempts to make Indiana a right-to-work state.
Despite a temperature of 20 degrees, the raucous crowd on the Courthouse Green downtown listened to speakers and chanted against moves in the General Assembly to prohibit unions and employers from agreeing to require all employees covered by a union contract to pay union dues.
Teamsters at Local 364 in South Bend got this urgent letter from their principal officer, Bob Warnock:
The battle to protect workers’ rights, wages, pensions and healthcare is continuing  in Indiana.  There is much that can be done from your home in northern Indiana.  This Monday, January 23, we need everyone to again call, write and e-mail your State Senators and Representatives.  We need this done every day, all week long.  Please ask your family, friends and co-workers to help.  Ask them to vote against “Right to Work for Less” and support a Hoosier referendum.
And the AFL-CIO sent this out on Sunday morning:
Sometime over the course of the next 10 days, both the State Senate and the House are expected to vote on final passage of their “right to work” bills – and the vote remains incredibly close.
Your phone calls, emails, meetings and participation have paid off. Against all odds, because of the work you continue to do, we have a good chance of defeating these bills on an up or down vote.
However, we can’t let up now. The other side certainly isn’t.
On Monday, the State Senate could move its RTW bill for a final vote and the House will take up amendments on their version of the bill. We must be at the Statehouse all day and until they finish to remind those lawmakers who they truly work for.
It is critically important that you come to the Statehouse on Monday and every day possible next week. This fight is not over – Gov. Daniels’ secret donors are dumping more money into TV and radio – because they know they are in trouble. And, while we can’t match the corporate fat-cats in money, we can beat them with boots on the ground.
We can win this fight.