Andrew stern new york gay

Anti-gay and anti-trans agitators have been making news by boycotting major corporations running Pride campaigns and stocking rainbow merchandise. While many corporations make profit-based calculations to decide whether to continue their support for the queer community, in for In These TimesDoug Ireland described how queer and trans workers were winning labor and gay rights battles by organizing across communities.

Skip to content. Published in July InDoug Ireland wrote:. Tracy Cleverly worked at the Salt Lake City franchise of a national restaurant chain, where she received positive evaluations and a promotion. She got along well with her co-workers and manager, who knew she was lesbian.

Jesse Shaw worked as a social worker in a Whitfield, Miss. She brought to work photos of herself, her female partner and their two dogs to show a co-worker who had asked to see them- and left them on her desk. Ten days later she was fired. After learning he was gay, co-workers repeatedly verbally harassed him and slashed his tires.

Lewis complained to management, but the harassment worsened. And in just the past six months, new chapters have started pulling themselves together in Chicago; Louisville, Ky; St. Petersburg and Orlando, Fla. That this was all accomplished entirely andrew stern new york gay volunteers, both union staffers and rank and file, makes it all the more noteworthy.

In Atlanta, whose airport is a major hub, there was a drive to organize flight attendants at AirTran formerly ValuJet. The response was terrific. Andrea Demajewski, the CWA staff organizer spearheading the campaign baptized WashTech and a Pride at Work activist, has been using an Internet chatroom for gay techies to identify gay Microsoft workers and bring them into the organizing drive.

The first major gay-labor coalition in the history of the modern American gay movement began in in San Francisco, when Bay Area Gay Liberation BAGL, then the largest local gay group decided to support a strike by municipal workers. Now, a majority of our contracts have sexual orientation in their non-discrimination clauses, and increasing numbers include domestic partnership benefits for same-sex couples.

Sign up for our weekend newsletter. A weekly digest of our best coverage. In some places with a history of strong labor-gay cooperation, smart new-breed labor leaders are helping to organize Andrew stern new york gay at Work. The Georgia case in which Cracker Barrel fired a cook for being lesbian is portrayed in the superb documentary Out at Work, which also featured members of the United Auto Workers and AFSCME who suffered discrimination; the film has been used by Pride at Work as a major organizing tool.

Pride at Work, its leaders underscore, is firmly in the progressive camp, both within the labor movement and the gay community. But the labor movement still has a long way to go. Only a few national unions have followed the lead of AFSCME in making gay and lesbian issues a permanent and formal part of shop steward training programs.

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