PEP, March 2013: Letters to the editor

Public Employee Press

Mail and Media

The First Lady of working people in the hardest years

As unemployment hit 25 percent in the Great Depression and war loomed in Europe, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a daily newspaper column to offer "a vision of stability and hope to workers and the unemployed" and press for racial and economic justice. "My Day" drew 4 million readers nationwide and of course, she joined the union, the Newspaper Guild.

Born into a wealthy family, the niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, and the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt found her calling early on in the settlement movement, helping Lower East Side tenement families.

Many Americans know she championed civil rights - saving the Tuskegee Airmen from budget cuts and arranging for African American opera star Marion Anderson to present a concert from the Lincoln Memorial after she was shut out of a segregated hall - but we are less familiar with her commitment to working people and her lifelong effort to identify workers' rights as basic human rights.

Unusual for a debutante, she investigated and testified on child labor, sweatshop conditions and the need for a system of workers' compensation.

Brigid O'Farrell's book, "She Was One of Us: Eleanor Roosevelt and the American Worker," traces her story from the early 1900s, teaming up with garment workers' unions, through the decades when she put her position as First Lady of New York state and then of the nation to use for social and economic justice.

O'Farrell, the coauthor of "Rocking the Boat: Union Women's Voices, 1915- 1975," provides in-depth documentation of Roosevelt's support for rank-and-file workers. The 1935 cover photo shows her headed underground to see firsthand what it was like to work in a coal mine.

During her later years, Roosevelt participated in the President's Commission on Women and other organizations seeking equality and social justice. Her legacy as a United Nations delegate is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a cornerstone of today's human rights movement and the model for provisions in the constitutions of 90 nations.

—Jane LaTour
Associate Editor, PEP

Bloomberg Sandy policy: "ridiculous"

Reading the January issue of PEP (how on earth do you manage to get it out with no office?), I realize how lucky we in District Council are to have Lillian Roberts running our union, and I am proud that we have re-elected her.

After the devastating blow to our headquarters from Hurricane Sandy, you are back providing the services and benefits we depend on.

Thanks to this tough lady - up from the ranks after starting as a Nurse's Aide - for fighting Mayor Bloomberg's ridiculous refusal to excuse those who could not get to work through flooded streets with no public transportation running.

They push us not to fill the streets and pollute the air with more cars, but when the MTA shuts down they dock our vacation days.

Don't they know - or care - that we desperately need the time off because we are exhausted from "doing more with less" (Bloomberg's favorite words, but they are a lie; the truth is, we are doing less with less and the public is angry!) and from covering the jobs of all the people the mayor has put out of work?

—Sarah Green
Local 1549