Northrop Grumman won’t close La. shipyard

Some good news for Gulf Coast

Commanding Officer Curtis Jones of the USS New York, right, talks with workers who helped build the vessel at the Northrop Grumman shipyard in Avondale, La.

Battered by Hurricane Katrina and then by the BP oil spill, the nation’s Gulf Coast area can use all the good news it can get these days. And good news it got when Northrop Grumman Corp. recently announced it wasn’t going to close its shipyard in Avondale, La., in 2013 after all.

Despite demand for U.S. Navy military ships declining, the decision means roughly 5,000 workers at the shipbuilding site near New Orleans will keep their jobs to meet the Navy’s demand for double-hulled oil tankers through 2014. The company will consolidate Avondale operations with its shipyard about 125 miles away in Pascagoula, Miss.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and Metal Trades Department President Ron Ault went to New Orleans to join with local community members and Avondale shipyard workers in a rally as part of the Save Our Shipyards campaign at Avondale.

While demonstrators were celebrating the shipyard staying open, they also reaffirmed the need for a long-term solution to the precariousness of the shipyard’s viability.

“The AFL-CIO applauds the Navy’s recent efforts at Avondale to protect American jobs and maintain the shipbuilding industry in the U.S.,” said Holt Baker. “The shipyard industry is a vital lifeline to the Gulf Coast region. This region has been pummeled by disaster after disaster, and the working community in Louisiana cannot afford the massive economic crisis that would result if this shipyard closes,” she said.

Ault said the shipyard staying open couldn’t have happened without persuasive efforts with the Navy by Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Rep. Charles Melancon, D-La.

“This is also an opportunity to examine the status of shipbuilding – America’s only remaining heavy manufacturing industry – and make policy changes that will make it more viable in the future,” Ault said.

Joan Silvi

Delta flight attendants voting for ‘mutual respect’

Perhaps Delta Air Lines flight attendants are thinking the third time will be the charm.

They began voting in September on whether to join the Association of Flight Attendants. Voting was expected to end Nov. 3.

This is the third vote in eight years and has huge ramifications for an airline Associated Press calls “the only big U.S. airline that is mostly nonunion.” A “yes” vote by a majority of Delta flight attendants could mean eventual unionization of the airline’s entire 50,000-member workforce.

A vote whether to unionize is also expected to be held by ground workers at Delta in the next few months.

Flight attendants held two previous, unsuccessful votes on whether to unionize. But now that Delta and Northwest have merged, the 20,000 flight attendants include 7,000 already unionized Northwest attendants. And, unlike the other votes, due to a rule change by the Obama administration, this voting process will not count neutral or not sure votes as “no” votes.

A “yes” vote by a majority of flight attendants could mean the beginning of a new work culture at Delta.

As attendant Danny Valdez told the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, unionization would mean “a relationship based on mutual respect.”

Joan Silvi

Mr. Colbert goes to Washington

Comedy Central host testifies on behalf of farm workers

Some would say there’s often unintentional comedy in the hallowed halls of Congress thanks to legislative debates that devolve into dysfunction of comedic proportions.

But this time, the comedy on Capitol Hill came from the outside, brought by one of the most well-known, and arguably brilliant, satirists today – Stephen Colbert.

The Comedy Central TV host of “The Colbert Report” testified in September before a House Judiciary subcommittee about immigrant farm workers, and the United Farm Workers’ (UFW) “Take Our Jobs” campaign.

Colbert spent a day on a farm to show viewers what the work was like. His day of hard labor was part of the campaign’s plan of asking U.S. citizens to do the work of immigrant field hands, all in an effort to show how hard the work is, how undesirable it is to legal U.S. residents and why undocumented farm workers should have legal status if they continue their farm work.

“... It seems like some of the least powerful people in the United States are migrant workers who come and do our work but don’t have any rights as a result. But yet we still invite them to come here and at the same time ask them to leave. ... Migrant workers suffer and have no rights,” Colbert testified.

A UFW spokeswoman called the national exposure Colbert gave to their campaign “invaluable in making our point – as only he can – that immigrant farm workers are crucial to supplying the food this great nation enjoys every day, in addition to bringing attention to the plight of farm workers in America.”

Joan Silvi

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