Indiana AFSCME workers condemn gov’s attack
Author: Eric Brooks
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/14/05 12:58
INDIANAPOLIS — Maintaining her fighting spirit, Ruby James said, “The union is you! It is not something separate from the members. We rally around and fight for fair treatment.”
James, president of Local 3146, Council 62, of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), is fighting for her members in the face of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ termination of union contracts covering 25,000 state employees.
The governor claimed that ending union representation was required in order to fix the state’s problems with providing child welfare and child support services, but James counters that the union would never have stood in the way of implementing changes that helped the children of Indiana.
“If the governor wanted to make Child Welfare better, to make us more efficient and effective, he would have had the total support of the union,” she said. In fact, the union called for many of the initiatives that Daniels is implementing, including increasing the number of caseworkers.
The union had been calling for some time for Child Welfare to have its own budget. While part of the Family and Social Services Administration, child welfare services had to compete with many other services for funding, even though it is charged with protecting children’s lives, a different level of responsibility than other components of the FSSA. Now the governor has implemented the union’s suggestion and broken child welfare and protective services out from FSSA into their own department.
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7380/1/278/