Listen: Working Families Against Corp. Giveaways and More!
‘Stop the Corporate Millionaires’ Tax Cut: Labor and social justice group send a clear message to NJ Gov. Phil Murphy. Photo by Bob Hennelly
By Bob Hennelly
This week on the Stuck Nation Labor Radio Hour, we visit with Antoinette Miles, the interim director of the New Jersey’s Working Families Alliance. Last month, she was the master of ceremonies at a rally in front of the Legislative Annex down in Trenton that drew a couple of hundred labor, social justice and environmental activists protesting Gov. Phil Murphy’s plan to let the state’s 2.5 percent Corporate Business Tax Surcharge lapse on corporations that make more than a million dollars in annual profits—not exactly your small businesses.
The state’s labor, social justice, and environmental activists want the state legislature to direct the revenue from the CBT to NJ Transit which is facing a billion dollar shortfall that may require service cuts and a fare hike that will hit the state’s working poor, elderly and disabled that rely on mass transit the hardest.
The high energy protest included activists from New Jersey Policy Perspectives, CWA, HPAE, the state’s largest nurses’ union, Citizens Action, Make the Road New Jersey, the Domestic Workers Alliance, Immigrant Resource Center, and the League of Conservation Voters who all stood behind a larger than life mock check made out to Walmart, Amazon, and Exxon for $1 billion from the State of New Jersey.
This push by Gov. Murphy to give these multinationals a tax break comes as the state faces slowing revenues and the loss of billions in federal COVID aid. Antionette updates us on the Working Families Alliance’s efforts to make sure these multinationals, who really cashed in during the pandemic, pay their fair share.
In Part II of our labor get together, we hear from 1199 SEIU Vice President Tracey Harrison about the latest on what’s going on with 1,800 workers at two branches of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York State that are schedule to go on strike for 17 hours on Wednesday December 13, after little progress in more than three months of talks.
Work-Bites’ Steve Wishnia did a really comprehensive story on this troubling situation that recounts how URMC management has so far refused to raise the starting wage to a living wage. The union cites a Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator, which estimates that a living wage for a family of three in the Rochester area would be $19.16 an hour. Members of 1199 SEIU, which represents 1,500 caregivers and patient-service workers at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, and SEIU Local 200, with 300 to 400 building and food-service workers at URMC’s River Campus, voted almost unanimously last month to authorize a strike.
Tracey Harrison is also joined by Judy Danella, president of United Steelworkers NursesLocal 4-200, who have a tentative deal with the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital after being out on strike since Aug. 4th.
Listen to the entire show below: