Thank You! Leslie is Elected to the NEA Board of Directors

Press Release
Washington, DC July 18, 2008:

NEA Contact: Staci Maiers 202.822.7823
Iowa Contact: Tom McLaughlin 712.326.8557 Fax 712.366.8340 lesliefornea@blogspot.com

Iowa’s Leslie Dake Elected with Other New Board Members at NEA Annual Meeting & Representative Assembly

Dake will help shape policy for 3.2 million-member National Education Association as an Education Support Personnel Member At-Large.

WASHINGTON-Iowans can be proud of one of their native daughters, Leslie Dake of Sioux City, Iowa. Dake, a fiscal secretary at Sioux City North High School, was elected as one of the 10 at-large members-one from higher education and nine education support professionals- for three-year terms to serve on the National Education Association’s Board of Directors.
"Keeping the connection inside the classroom and within our schools and universities is what helps NEA deliver one message with many voices," said NEA President Reg Weaver. "These educators who have been elected to the NEA Board of Directors are active in their communities and true advocates for public education. Together, they will work with NEA to ensure that every child has access to a great public school."

“Leslie represented Iowa and our profession well in front of almost 10,000 delegates and 5,000 guests,” said Lewis Central Teacher Tom McLaughlin, manager of Dake’s Campaign. “We whisked Leslie from state delegation to state delegation to carry her message of ‘shaping an education system we can all be proud to serve.’ It was very exciting to watch Leslie shine on the national stage. She will represent education support professionals and the education profession well as she works to make a ‘living wage’ a reality and shape changes in the ‘so-called No Child Left Behind Act.’”

"I am honored to serve on the NEA Board," Dake said. "I am especially excited about serving with such a talented group of new NEA Board members. Each of them is a wonderful person. I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work.

The election is one of the many actions the nearly 10,000 NEA delegates have made over the six-day Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly. During the convention, delegates discuss, debate and vote on critical issues facing public education.

The Board of Directors and NEA's nine-member Executive Committee are responsible for the general policies and interests of the Association. The Board of Directors consists of at least one director from each state affiliate, as well as an additional director for every 20,000 NEA active members in the state. The Board may also include at-large representatives of ethnic minorities, administrators, classroom teachers in higher education, and active members employed in education support positions.

The following active members were elected to ESP at-large positions:

Leslie A. Dake, Sioux City, Iowa. Dake is currently a secretary at Sioux City West High School and has served at the local, state and national levels of NEA. Her goals include continuing to work to elect pro-public education lawmakers at all levels of government and "providing meaningful professional development and a competitive living wage for all education employees."

Arthur L. Goff, Cobb, Ga. Goff is a paraprofessional at the Cobb County School District. He is a prior member of NEA's Board of Directors, and has co-chaired NEA's Black Caucus. He will continue to focus on making changes to NCLB and decreasing the dropout rate.

Veronica Henderson, Baltimore, Md. Henderson has been an ESP with the Baltimore County Public Schools for almost 30 years. She is a prior member of NEA's Board of Directors and was NEA's 2007 Education Support Professional of the Year. She will continue to work on issues such as unrealistic and unfunded NCLB mandates and the recruitment and retention of educators.

Marguerite Jones, Seattle, Wash. Jones is a special education assistant with Seattle School District #1, where she has worked for 39 years. She plans on working to close the achievement gaps and will address the under funding of NCLB.

Marie Knutson, Amery, Wis. Knutson is a kindergarten paraeducator in the Amery School District. She is currently president and ESP program director of her local association. "I … believe that our greatest priority is lobbying Congress to fix the health care crisis."

Jim McClure, Painesville Township, Ohio. McClure works as a material handler at Mentor Public Schools, where he has worked since 1985. He has served as local association president since 2004. Among McClure's priorities are "fixing and funding NCLB, fully funding special education, and ensuring professional salaries and health care for teachers and ESPs."

Donna Nielsen, La Porte, Ind. Nielsen has worked as a school bus driver for La Porte Community Schools since 1987. She has served three terms as chair of Indiana State Teachers Association's State ESP Council. Nielsen's primary issues are "a living wage for ESP colleagues" and affordable health care.

Jolene E. Tripp, Redlands, Calif. Tripp is a bus pass coordinator and former school bus driver for the Redlands School District. Tripp feels there is a "real lack of respect and acknowledgement of how vital public education is."

E. Jameel Williams, Vance County, N.C. Williams is currently a teacher assistant and school bus driver for the L. B. Yancey Elementary School in Henderson, N.C. He has been Vance County Education Association president for four years. Williams believes that "quality education for our students and fair professional employment are a must. Salaries must reach the national average in order for educators to survive without working two or three jobs."

Sally Pestana, professor of health sciences at the University of Hawaii, was elected to the at-large higher education position. She ran unopposed. Her top priorities include transforming the No Child Left Behind Act, securing a living wage for all members and ensuring affordable quality health insurance for all members.

For more information and a full listing of scheduled events:
www.nea.org/annualmeeting or see Leslie’s site at www.lesliefornea.blogspot.com

# # #

The National Education Association is the nation's largest professional organization, representing 3.2 million elementary and secondary teachers, higher education faculty, education support professionals, school administrators, retired educators and students preparing to become teachers.

MEET THE CANDIDATE, OUR FRIEND, LESLIE DAKE--A VOICE OF REASON FOR ESPs

Leslie Dake, a tireless advocate for worker's rights has chosen to throw her hat in the ring at this year's NEA Representative Assembly and repay the Association for the investment it has made in her by serving our nation's Education Support Professionals.

An advocate for a strong 'living-wage' program throughout the nation, Leslie understands the vital role that ESPs play in our nation's schools. In the lunch room, on the bus, maintaining our schools, scheduling our schools and students, providing needed assistance to special education students, helping bulging classrooms succeed are amongst a few of the roles that the ESPs of America play each day.

Leslie wants to be your voice and make sure that your concerns become the concerns of your union brothers and sisters in the NEA. Those working shoulder to shoulder with us are our best partners in ensuring that we are afforded a living wage.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America--A Story of the Working Poor and the Need for a Living Wage

The New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked about books of the year, Nickel and Dimed has already become a classic of undercover reportage.Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity — a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.

Review:

"Ehrenreich's scorn withers, her humor stings, and her radical light shines on." The Boston Globe

Review:

"Ehrenreich is passionate, public, hotly lucid, and politically engaged." Chicago Tribune

Review:

"We have Barbara Ehrenreich to thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor so clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived. As Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism." Dorothy Gallagher, New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four." Diane Sawyer

Review:

"Nickel and Dimed is an important book that should be read by anyone who has been lulled into middle-class complacency." Vivien Labaton, Ms. Magazine

Review:

"[Ehrenreich's] account is at once enraging and sobering....Mandatory reading for any workforce entrant." School Library Journal

Review:

"Jarring, full of riveting grit....This book is already unforgettable." Susannah Meadows, Newsweek

Synopsis:

Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages. Social critic Barbara Ehrenreich joined them, moving into a trailer and working as a waitress, hotel maid, and Wal-Mart sales clerk. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and duality.

Living Wage Facts at a Glance

Living wage ordinances have been enacted in over 70 localities. The NEA & State Affiliates must be aggressive in creating a systematic plan for all of our state affiliates. The time for a meaningful national campaign is now.

* A living wage ordinance requires employers to pay wages that are above federal or state minimum wage levels. Only a specific set of workers are covered by living wage ordinances, usually those employed by businesses that have a contract with a city or county government or those who receive economic development subsidies from the locality. The rationale behind the ordinances is that city and county governments should not contract with or subsidize employers who pay poverty-level wages.

* The living wage level is usually the wage a full-time worker would need to earn to support a family above federal poverty line, ranging from 100% to 130% of the poverty measurement. The wage rates specified by living wage ordinances range from a low of $6.25 in Milwaukee to a high of $12 in Santa Cruz.

* In addition to setting wage levels, many ordinances also have provisions regarding benefits (such as health insurance and paid vacation), labor relations, and hiring practices.

Living wage ordinances provide much needed raises for low-income workers.

* Wages for the bottom 10% of wage earners fell by 3.9% between 1979 and 1999.

* The number of jobs where wages were below what a worker would need to support a family of four above the poverty line also grew between 1979 and 1999. In 1999, 26.8% of the workforce earned poverty-level wages, an increase from 23.7% in 1979.

Living wage ordinances can ensure that pay for contractual workers does not fall behind the pay of city workers.

* The trend toward privatization of services formerly provided by public sector workers is well documented.

* These privatization efforts have often resulted in decreases in wages for the private sector workers in the same job categories. A study by the Chicago Institute on Urban Poverty, which compared the wages and benefits of Chicago city employees to contractual employees for low-skill jobs, found that privatization led to compensation losses for entry level workers ranging from 25% to 46%.

* Since government agencies disproportionately hire (and advance) female and minority workers, these changes have meant the loss of relatively high-quality jobs for these workers.

*Living wage ordinances promote responsible economic development policies.

* Living wage ordinances have the potential to counteract the destructive race to the bottom wherein cities and counties try to attract businesses by offering larger subsidies than their neighbors. The more prevalent living wage ordinances are, the less firms will be able to shop around for the cheapest locality on the basis of cutting wages.

* Recent research focusing on the number and quality (in terms of wages and benefits) of jobs created by tax incentives has found that many economic development subsidies are not tied to job quality. A study of tax incentives in Minnesota by Good Jobs First found that 72% of subsidized jobs paid below the average for their corresponding industry.

* Some detractors argue that the living wage will create a "hostile business climate." But most living wage ordinances cover too small a proportion of the labor force to have such a profound effect. Most living wage ordinances cover less than 1% of the local workforce. In addition, for most firms, the increase in labor costs is expected to be less than 2% of total production costs.

Living wage ordinances have no negative effects on a locality's contracting process.

* An EPI evaluation of a living wage ordinance in Baltimore found no significant cost increase to the city. The 1.2% cost increase for the contracts examined was less than the rate of inflation for the same period.

* An evaluation of the Baltimore ordinance by the Preamble Center also found that the ordinance did not reduce the competitiveness of the contract process. The small decrease in the number of bids per contract wasn't high enough to lower competitiveness or raise contract costs.

* Even if the costs to contractors do increase, it is still profitable for these firms to do business with the city. Most firms will choose to sacrifice some of their profit margins, which are estimated to range from 10% to 20% of production, since wage increases from the ordinance only amount to an estimated 2% of production costs.

There is no evidence of job losses as a result of living wage ordinances.

* The EPI evaluation of Baltimore's living wage ordinance found no job loss as a result of the ordinance. The workers interviewed for the study reported no changes in the number of hours they worked after the ordinance went into effect.

* Employers interviewed for the study reported that although wages increased, these costs were absorbed by improvements in efficiency. By raising wages, they decreased employee turnover rates, which decreased recruitment and training costs.

A History of the Living Wage Movement

The Living Wage Movement
Building Power in our Workplaces and Neighborhoods

In 1994, an effective alliance between labor (led by AFSCME) and religious leaders (BUILD) in Baltimore launched a successful campaign for a local law requiring city service contractors to pay a living wage. Since then, strong community, labor, and religious coalitions have fought for and won similar ordinances in cities such as St. Louis, Boston, Los Angeles, Tucson, San Jose, Portland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Oakland -- bringing the national living wage total to 122 ordinances. Today, more than 75 living wage campaigns are underway in cities, counties, states, and college campuses across the country. Taken collectively, these impressive instances of local grassroots organizing is now rightfully dubbed the national living wage movement, which syndicated columnist Robert Kuttner has described as "the most interesting (and underreported) grassroots enterprise to emerge since the civil rights movement … signaling a resurgence of local activism around pocketbook issues."

In short, living wage campaigns seek to pass local ordinances requiring private businesses that benefit from public money to pay their workers a living wage. Commonly, the ordinances cover employers who hold large city or county service contracts or receive substantial financial assistance from the city in the form of grants, loans, bond financing, tax abatements, or other economic development subsidies.

The concept behind any living wage campaign is simple: Our limited public dollars should not be subsidizing poverty-wage work. When subsidized employers are allowed to pay their workers less than a living wage, tax payers end up footing a double bill: the initial subsidy and then the food stamps, emergency medical, housing and other social services low wage workers may require to support themselves and their families even minimally. Public dollars should be leveraged for the public good -- reserved for those private sector employers who demonstrate a commitment to providing decent, family-supporting jobs in our local communities.

Many campaigns have defined the living wage as equivalent to the poverty line for a family of four, (currently $9.06 an hour), though ordinances that have passed range from $6.25 to $13.00 an hour, with some newer campaigns pushing for even higher wages.

Increasingly, living wage coalitions are proposing other community standards in addition to a wage requirement, such as health benefits, vacation days, community hiring goals, public disclosure, community advisory boards, environmental standards, and language that supports union organizing.

Although each campaign is different, most share some common elements. Often spearheaded by ACORN, other community groups, union locals, or central labor councils, living wage campaigns are characterized by uniquely broad coalitions of local community, union, and religious leaders who come together to develop living wage principles, organize endorsements, draft ordinance language, and plan campaign strategy. The campaigns usually call for some degree of research into work and poverty in the area, research on city contracts, subsidies and related wage data, and often cost of living studies.

In addition, the strength of living wage efforts often lies in their ability to promote public education through flyering, petitioning, rallies, demonstrations targeting low wage employers, low-wage worker speak-outs, reports, and press conferences. Because most current living wage campaigns seek to pass legislative measures, campaigns also include lobbying and negotiations with elected officials such as city and county councilors, the mayor's office, and city staff.

Living Wage campaigns also provide opportunities for organizations that work to build a mass base of low income or working people to join-up, organize, and mobilize new members. Community organizers and labor unions can look to build membership during the campaign with neighborhood door-knocking, worksite organizing, house visits, neighborhood and workplace meetings, petition signature gathering, etc. and after the campaign on workplace and neighborhood living wage trainings, implementation fights with city agencies, and through campaigns targeting specific companies to meet or exceed living wage requirements.

So, what makes a collection of local policy decisions merit the title of a national "movement"? In short, both the economic context that gives rise to these efforts and the nature of the campaigns themselves make them important tools in the larger struggle for economic justice.

First, consider the economic realities facing low income people today: the failure of the minimum wage to keep pace with inflation (it now buys less than it did in the 1960's); the growing income gap between the rich and the poor; massive cuts in welfare and downward pressure on wages resulting from former recipients being forced into the labor market with no promise of jobs; the growth of service sector jobs where low wages are concentrated; the weakening of labor unions; rampant no-strings-attached corporate welfare that depletes tax dollars while keeping workers poor. The list goes on. Living wage campaigns have arisen in response to all these pressures.

Given this context, living wage campaigns have the potential to have benefits that go beyond the immediate benefits to affected low wage workers and their families. Wherever they arise, living wage campaigns have the potential to:

o Build and sustain permanent and powerful community, labor, and religious coalitions that promote greater understanding and support of each other's work and create the potential to influence other important public policy debates

o Provide organizing opportunities that strengthen the institutions that represent and build power for low and moderate income people: community groups, labor unions, religious congregations

o Serve as a tool of political accountability, forcing our elected officials to take a stand on working people's issues, as well as engaging low and moderate income people in the political process

o Build leadership skills among low-income members of community organizations, unions, and congregations

o Raise the whole range of economic justice issues that gave rise to the living wage movement and affect the ability of low income families to live and work with dignity and respect

Despite the concerted efforts of business interests who consistently oppose these campaigns, "living wage" has become a household word and an exciting model of a successful local grassroots strategy. With new campaigns springing up every month, this movement shows no signs of slowing down.

We encourage you to join in the fight.

The Five (Difficult) People You Meet at Work ... and How to Get Along With Them

Dealing With Difficult People at Work
The workplace, like anyplace you bring a bunch of people together, is a jumble of many different personalities. In addition to coworkers who are easy to work with, you will also find difficult people at work. What sets the workplace apart from many other places is that everyone -- even the difficult people -- must cooperate in order to be productive. Here are five types of difficult people you may meet at work and advice for getting along with each one.


The Chatterbox

Let's start with your most affable coworker. The chatterbox usually means well. She is friendly and wants to share all her thoughts (every last one of them) with you. She isn't trying cause harm to anyone ... her incessant talking is just keeping you from concentrating on your work. Here are some things you can do to quiet down your chattering co-worker so you can get your job done.

Rather than risk insulting your colleague, put the blame on yourself. Tell your coworker you have trouble concentrating while you are listening to her very engaging stories. You'd love to hear them at some other time, just not while you're working. Then, if you truly enjoy her company, have lunch with her once a week.

The Gossip

The gossip seems to know everything about everyone and he wants to share it. Should you listen to what your gossiping colleague has to say? Yes, you should listen to it since it is often a good way to hear news that may not make it through more formal information channels. The problem with gossip is that it carries both elements of truth and untruth, so view it with a cynical eye. Listen to your gossipy coworker quietly. Don't become a gossip too. However, if the gossip being shared is of a very personal nature, for example he shares with you news of another coworker's marital problems, change the subject or say that you don't feel right discussing someone behind his back.

More About Workplace Gossip

The Complainer
There's always one person in a group who can never find anything about which to be happy. If she's not complaining about her health or her family, she's complaining about her job, the company, or your boss. Of course, some of her complaints may be legitimate, but the incessant whining is getting on your nerves. Generally, the complainer isn't looking for advice so offering it probably won't do any good. Change the subject whenever the bellyaching begins. Your colleague should get the hint after you do this repeatedly.

The Delegator

In almost every workplace you'll find someone who wants to share his work with his colleagues. We're not talking about those who have a legitimate reason to delegate work to others, for example managers or team leaders. We are speaking of those who either can't do all the work they have been given or don't want to do it. If team work is encouraged in your office and you have time to help your colleague you should. However, if managers are the only ones who have the authority to delegate and you already have your hands full, then you have to turn down the request. Tell your coworker you have your own work with which to deal.

The Credit Grabber

The credit grabber does not acknowledge any help she receives from others. She accepts all the praise for a project without mentioning that she didn't do it alone. The first time this happens, consider it a mistake. Mention it to your colleague and ask her to let others know about your participation. If she doesn't, or if this happens again, make sure you let others know about the role you played in getting a project done. Then, unless you are mandated to work with this person, refuse to help out again.

More About Dealing With Difficult People at Work

Topics to Avoid Discussing at Work

Ways to Annoy Your Coworkers

Toward a More Civil Workplace

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