District 9 Safety & Health Retreat
On May 15th, we had the first District 9 Safety & Health Retreat at the Crowne Plaza/San Francisco International Airport. There were 30 local union Health & Safety activists, along with 3 CWA staff who participated in the Health & Safety Retreat. These activists represented locals from traditional CWA locals, the News Paper Guild and the IUE-CWA. Geographically the entire District was represented with locals from Southern, Central and Northern California, Hawaii and Northwest Nevada sending activists to the retreat.
There were 4 panels with 2 panelists on each panel:
Local Union Issues (Local union panel)
Wayne Cahill, TNG-CWA, Local 39117
Brian Sutherland, IUE-CWA, Local 89119
Using Joint and Union Occupational Safety and Health
Committees to Identify/Resolve Safety and Health
Issues (local union panel)
Mike Bell, CWA, Local 9421
Penny Knapp, CWA, Local 9417
Occupational Safety and Health as a Mobilizing and
Organizing Tool (local union panel)
Louie Rocha, CWA, Local 9423
Jose Villareal, CWA, Local 9400
Achieving Success in Occupational Safety and Health:
Local Union Needs/Resources
Nobuko Mizoguchi, Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition
Charlie Barrett, CWA Occupational Safety & Health Department
David LeGrande, CWA Occupational Safety & Health Department
There was very lively discussion around each of the panels. Issues that were discussed included hazards faced by our members, setting up effective H&S committees (especially union committees), how to use H&S issues to organize new members and discussing effective H&S collective bargaining language. Nobuko Mizoguchi discussed the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition's "Computer Takeback" initiative where used computers would be recycled in an environmentally sound way instead of being dumped in landfills or being sent to "third-world" countries for recycling. There was also a review of H&S materials available from CWA Safety & Health Department and on the CWA OSH Website.
