ACT is a labor union that represents a nationwide majority of National Guard civilian technicians. National Guard technicians are full-time civilian employees of the Department of Defense. Their primary missions are training the Guard and repairing and maintaining military equipment. Nearly all Guard technicians also are military members of the Guard. Many have served or now are serving in Iraq. One of our national vice presidents, Julie Curtis, has also served in Iraq.

What are Weingarten Rights?

Weingarten rights guarantee an employee the right to Union representation during an investigatory interview. These rights, established by the Supreme Court, in 1975 in the case of J'. Weingarten Inc,, must be claimed by the employee. The supervisor has no obligation to inform an employee that s/he is entitled to Union representation. Click to review the rules of your Weingarten Rights.

Political Action Update

The Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO publishes its Political Action Update roughly 40 times per year, weekly during the legislative session. The current issues is dated April 18, 2008, and contains IFL endorsed candidates, bills to watch, bill status reports, and labor center news.

Do YOU know Mother Jones?

Mary Harris Jones
For a quarter of a century, she roamed America, the Johnny Appleseed of activists. She literally had no permanent residence. "My address is like my shoes," she told a congressional committee. "It travels with me wherever I go." She was paid a stipend by the United Mine Workers and, for a few years, by the Socialist Party. But she always felt free to work in whatever cause most needed her -- striking garment workers in Chicago, bottle washers in Milwaukee breweries, Pittsburgh steelworkers, El Paso streetcar operators, Calumet copper miners. She helped workers fight not just low pay, 12-hour days, and horrifying mortality rates, but also the servitude of company stores and company housing. She also spoke out in defense of IWW leaders on trial for murder in Boise (she was one of the original signers of the Industrial Workers of the World charter), labor activists imprisoned in California, and Mexican revolutionaries in Arizona.
The rock of Mother Jones' faith was her conviction that working Americans acting together must free themselves from poverty and powerlessness. She believed in the need for citizens of a democracy to participate in public affairs. Working families, Mother Jones argued, possessed vast, untapped powers to fight the corporations that bound them to starvation wages and the corrupt politicians who did the businessmen's bidding. But only strong, democratic organizations of citizen-activists, she felt, could achieve real egalitarian change. (Gorn, Elliott, J., Mother Jones: The Woman, May/June 2001, Mother Jones Headlines, Retrieved May 3, 2008 from http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/2001/05/motherjones_gorn.html)

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