Carol Rothman, Secretary-Treasurer

As I write this, a hundred thousand public sector workers and their supporters continue demonstrating in Madison, Wisconsin. Reports are that the state’s governor, Scott Allen, “signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit”—but he’s hell-bent on solving the crisis he created on the backs of union members. Not content with the unions’ offer to pay more for their health care and pensions, he will settle for nothing less than the decimation of their collective bargaining rights.

Anti-collective bargaining legislation is expected in other states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nevada, Tennessee—and has already been proposed in Indiana, where the Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) has taken up the battle. CWA has called on members to participate in rallies in 29 states and to lend their voices wherever collective bargaining rights are under attack.

All of which provides a timely context for the actions taken at our sector conference.

The message of the 2011 Sector Conference was change—what change is necessary at the national and local levels for the Guild to outlast the devastating downturn in our industry and the outrageous action we are seeing in government today. Delegates endorsed a multi-faceted approach to insure that the national union can continue providing resources and services to our members.

More importantly, they agreed on plans for change at the local level, with ideas emerging from every committee. The Sector Executive Council will be offering a time frame for accomplishment of all of the goals, reported elsewhere in this edition. But I’d like to focus on a few that represent little or no cost to locals and immeasurable benefit to the union as a whole.

For some time I have been requesting per capita payment and membership figures from locals, but the response has been lackluster. The Sector Conference now requires locals to provide this information. It won’t add to anyone’s workload and can be as simple as an email, fax or letter listing the monthly amount each local pays and the number of members the per cap represents. The collective data bolsters our sector in our budget talks with CWA. Some locals have already begun to comply and I ask those that haven’t yet to join them.

Shortly, we will present a schedule for transferring to our electronic dues system all locals not already using electronic delivery. Again, there is no cost or software required for locals, and in most cases the current data can be transferred seamlessly to the new format. Several locals are already part of the system, and just as many are investigating using it. The system also will provide benefits to locals, including grievance tracking and mailing list capabilities.

To improve our communications platform, we are seeking writers from each local to provide us with stories; moreover, we’ll offer a stipend to activists, laid-off members or freelancers who take on the job. Hoping to create a culture of organizing in locals, we will publicly recognize the most successful local organizing drives. We also will reinstitute the diversity survey of local leadership that was a mainstay of our human rights and equity program for many years.

And, as if anticipating what is now happening to workers across the U.S., the Sector Conference established a political action fund to support lobbying on issues affecting journalism and labor. We are asking locals to contribute an initial $1 per member to seed this fund in 2011. The amount asked is minimal, but we know that crossing the cultural divide that keeps Guild members from supporting political battles is monumental. Nonetheless, we cannot stand by and watch our collective bargaining rights attacked and possibly eliminated. Join the fight now.