For more than 30 years, NCL’s Trumpeter Award has recognized leaders who are not afraid to speak out for social justice and for the rights of consumers. NCL Trumpeter Award recipients are honored for their commitment to raising the voices of consumers and workers to ensure they are heard. Meet this year’s most deserving Trumpeter recipient, International President of the United Mine Workers of America.

On October 4, the National Consumers League will honor Cecil E. Roberts, International President of the United Mine Workers of America, with the 2012 Trumpeter Award. In presenting President Roberts with the prestigious Trumpeter Award, NCL recognizes his incredible efforts to champion the rights of working Americans by organizing on both the grassroots and national levels. His leadership is founded on a passionate conviction to keep workplaces safe and healthful while ensuring fair compensation for workers.

Cecil Roberts, a sixth-generation coal miner and one of the labor movement’s most stirring and sought-after orators, became President of the United Mine Workers (UMWA) of America on October 22, 1995, having served as Vice President of the union since December 1982. Roberts succeeded Richard L. Trumka, who was elected Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO (and who will help present Roberts with the award).

Growing up in a UMWA household on Cabin Creek in Kanawha County, WV, Roberts heard the stories of his family, including a great-uncle, Bill Blizzard, who was a legendary organizer during the West Virginia mine wars of the 1920’s and a UMWA District President under John L. Lewis. Both of his grandfathers were killed in the mines.

After military service in Vietnam and college, Roberts worked for six years at Carbon Fuels’ No. 31 mine in Winifred, West Virginia, where he served as a local union officer. In 1977 he was elected Vice President of UMWA District 17 by a 2-to-1 margin. In May 1981, he was reelected without opposition.

On November 9, 1982, Roberts was elected Vice President of the UMWA International Union, again by a 2-to-1 margin, running on a slate headed by Trumka and including John J. Banovic, who was elected Secretary-Treasurer. The Trumka – Roberts – Banovic team was reelected without opposition five years later.

In 1989, Roberts was the on-the-scene leader, often referred to as field general, and day-to-day negotiator in the UMWA’s militant 10-month strike against the Pittston Co., which had cut off health benefits to its retirees and was trying to walk away from its obligations to the UMWA Health and Retirement Funds. For his role in that successful strike, Roberts received the Rainbow Coalition’s Martin Luther King award as well as awards from Citizen Action and the Midwest Academy.

On November 10, 1992, Roberts was reelected by an 80-percent margin to his third term as Vice President.

In December, 1995, Roberts assumed the UMWA Presidency upon the resignation of Richard Trumka.

In 1996, he reopened the UMWA’s National Agreement for the first time in the union’s history and made significant improvements in the wage agreement.

In August 1997, Roberts was elected by acclamation to the Presidency of the UMWA.

In 1998, he negotiated a new National Agreement that was ratified by the highest percentage in the Union’s history. The agreement included an historic 20-year and out pension provision which has benefitted approximately 5,000 UMWA members to date.

In July of 2001 he became a member of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council. He serves on the Civil and Human Rights Committee; Labor and the Environment Committee; Manufacturing and Industrial Committee; Safety and Occupational Health Committee; Senior Action Committee Strategic Approaches Committee; Political Education Committee; and Article XX Appeals Committee. In October of 2005, he was appointed to the Executive Committee of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council.

In 2000 he was again elected by acclamation as President of the United Mine Workers of America, and in 2001 he negotiated a new National Agreement that provided a first ever 30-year and out pension provision regardless of age which has benefitted approximately 3,000 UMWA members to date.

In 2004 he became the first President in the history of the United Mine Workers of America to be elected by acclamation by the membership for three consecutive terms.

At the end of 2008, he became the 2nd longest standing President of the UMWA, second only to John L. Lewis.

In August 2009, Roberts was once again re-elected by acclamation to his fourth full term as International President.

He is on the board of the American Income Life Insurance Company.

Roberts graduated from West Virginia Technical College in 1987, and received an honorary Doctorate in Humanities from West Virginia University of Technology in 1997.

Roberts is married to the former Carolyn Stewart. They have a son, Kyle, a daughter, Melissa, two grandsons, Aaron and Brandon and two granddaughters, Savannah and Kathryn.

A recent USA Today article brought great news: by 2016, fuel efficiency of our gas-operated vehicles will be required to meet strict new standards. The average by 2025 will be 54.5 mpg! That’s nearly double today’s average of 29.7 mpg and will mean less air pollution and less consumption of oil. In the 1980s and 90s while working for Consumers Union, we joined the environmental groups in lobbying vigorously for stronger “CAFÉ” standards (Corporate Average Fuel Economy.)  The industry – and the United Auto Workers – argued they couldn’t improve fuel efficiency significantly and fought our efforts. We always believed that American engineering smarts and knowhow could meet the design challenges of making a far more fuel-efficient vehicle.

With the advent of hybrid technology, and with battery design and power improving each year, automakers now have the confidence they can meet this CAFÉ goal of 54.5 by 2025. USA Today even quotes UAW president Bob King, who said “these new standards will help propel the auto industry forward by giving American families long term relief from volatile oil process, Lower the total cost of driving will make automobiles more affordable and expand the market for new vehicles.” This is great for the economy, for the auto industry and for consumer’s pocketbook and a long time coming.

By Ayanna Johnson, Health Policy Associate

Ayanna Johnson is a recent addition to the NCL team, where she will work closely to support and promote our health campaigns, including Script Your Future. Ayanna recently completed her MSPH at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she focused her research on improving access to health care for underserved populations.

Hypertension, more commonly referred to as high blood pressure, is a serious health problem for American adults. Nearly 1 in 3 adults has hypertension and 36 million Americans do not have it under control.  When hypertension is left uncontrolled, individuals are at risk for heart disease, stroke, and kidney failure. Every year there are two million cases of stroke or heart attack in America. Almost 800,000 deaths are attributed to heart disease. In fact, heart disease is the leading cause of preventable death for individuals under the age of 65.

Improving medication adherence is important to combat this growing public health problem and economic burden— nearly $444 billion is spent in related health care costs and loss of productivity due to heart disease. On September 5, 2012, Script Your Future joined in the launch of the Team Up. Pressure Down. program to help hypertensive patients more effectively manage and control their high blood pressure – and ultimately prevent one million heart attacks and strokes by 2017.

Team Up. Pressure Down. is a new pharmacy-focused program developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Million Hearts™ initiative co-led by the CDC and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The program offers time-saving resources – from video vignettes to conversation starters– that encourage and support pharmacists in providing counseling services to their hypertensive patients, with the goal of improving medication adherence. A suite of patient education materials, including the Script Your Future wallet card, will also be available through the program to help people with high blood pressure take a more active role in self-management efforts and to encourage increased interaction with their pharmacists.

Last week, the official launch of Team Up. Pressure Down. was held at the HHS building here in Washington, DC. Dr. Regina Benjamin, United States Surgeon General, lent her support to this important cause. As a family physician, Dr. Benjamin has treated a fair share of patients with hypertension, but for her this health problem was personal. She talked about the devastating role that stroke and heart disease played in her family and why this initiative is so important. The tools to help patients adhere to regimens and the medicine to treat high blood pressure are available. Now, it is a matter of ensuring that the health care ‘home’ is functioning from all angles; what better place to start than at the pharmacy. Recent research shows that pharmacist-directed care can improve the management of major cardiovascular risk factors – including hypertension – and has a positive impact on patient health outcomes.

Taking hypertension medicines as prescribed can greatly reduce a patient’s risk for heart attack and stroke, yet 30 percent stop taking their medicines within 6 months and 50 percent stop within 1 year.  It is time to take control of high blood pressure and take medicine as prescribed. Team Up. Pressure Down.!

For more information on Team Up. Pressure Down. email tupd@cdc.gov or visit the Million Hearts™ Web site at https://millionhearts.hhs.gov. Take the pledge to take your meds. Visit Script Your Future today!

This past week I attended the Democratic Convention in Charlotte. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were nominated once again on the Democratic ticket. Charlotte laid out the red carpet for delegates and attendees at the convention. I especially enjoyed meeting seven of America’s Olympic championship girls, including gymnast Gabby Douglas and Soccer player Abby Wambach, who were signing autographs at a special event for kids in downtown Charlotte.

I should note that I also had the opportunity to attend the Republican Convention this month, which I blogged about earlier. So now that I have had the privilege of attending both of the national parties’ conventions, I thought I’d discuss some of my impressions.

First, the focus of both campaigns is decidedly on middle-class voters. It’s all about how tax cuts will affect the middle class, jobs for the middle class, whether the middle class is better off today than it was 4 years ago when President Obama was elected. What I missed was any mention of how people who make minimum wage and are the working poor are doing. They number, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an astounding 47 million. And middle-class jobs are disappearing at an alarming rate, so how do our leaders think we can lift people who are forced to live on low wages out of poverty – because minimum wage workers usually live below the poverty line. As NELP notes, these low wages are “driven in part by the steep erosion of wage standards throughout our economy.”

VP Joe Biden talked about the importance of good, middle-class jobs, but that’s as close as anyone got to the issue.

My Labor Day post addressed the condition of those 47 million low-wage workers. These are the people who are behind counters at airports, train stations, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores. What’s the plan to get American companies to give these folks a path to a better life, and why is no one talking about those millions of workers?

This disappearing middle class is a national crisis, but our politicians don’t talk about it.

I also heard precious little at either convention about global warming and the environmental crisis we face. Senator John Kerry, who ran for President in 2004 on a platform robust with concerns about—and solutions to address—global warming, mentioned the crisis exactly once in his speech at the Democratic Convention. And yet, the Wall Street Journal reported this week (“Record Ice That in Arctic and Greenland”): “The Northern Hemisphere’s largest expanses of ice have thawed faster and more extensively this year than scientists have previously recorded. And the summer isn’t over.” The consequences for climate across the world are enormous; changes in the ice of the far North can raise sea levels and affect weather throughout the hemisphere by altering wind currents, heat distribution and precipitation. But to listen to politicians over the last two weeks, you’d never know we are facing an environmental crisis.

On a more positive note, the conventions gave us a chance to see some amazing people in action. I was struck by the number of articulate and compelling women who spoke at the Conventions.

Ann Romney was smart and thoughtful and an accomplished speaker. I had never before seen her in action, and I was very impressed with her poise. Though I didn’t much care for what South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had to say about Voter ID laws (she supports them), she is an equally effective and attractive speaker.

The Democratic Convention featured a riveting talk by First Lady Michelle Obama, who caused a few commentators to say the next day, “SHE should be running for President.” Jill Biden talked warmly about her VP husband’s lifelong devotion to making life better for the middle class, and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm provided a theatrical performance that won’t soon be forgotten as she described the jobs that were preserved as a result of auto industry loans. All these women—Republican and Democrat—should be a great source of pride for both parties. They are in some ways the best news the parties have to offer and both Republicans and Democrats are smart to give them center stage.

In addition to my list above, there are a number of other issues of national significance neither party chooses to address; consumer protection issues were largely overlooked, as was sensible gun regulation. As we count down the next two months until the election, I hope we can count on voters to ask the politicians some of the tough questions that got short shrift during the Conventions.

Today is Labor Day in America – a time to celebrate workers the world over and take stock of the welfare of America’s workers. The fact is that wages and working conditions for millions of American employees have deteriorated; the once thriving middle class working in union jobs that saw its heyday after World War II, has dwindled as America’s most powerful employers have successfully fought to undermine the labor movement and its ability to negotiate for decent wages and benefits. From 1973 to 2011, the share of the workforce represented by unions declined from 26.7 percent to 13.1 percent.

A few weeks ago I listened to the book on tape version of Nickel and Dimed, the 2001 bestselling account by American author Barbara Ehrenreich –which I read when it came out – chronicling her year-long experience trying to survive on minimum wage jobs. When Ehrenreich published the book 10 years ago, it had a big impact; it seemed everyone was reading it and pledging to do something to improve the plight of minimum wage workers. But the latest edition of Ehrenreich’s book includes a foreword where we are 10 years later. It’s not happy news. Things are worse, not better, for low-income workers. Those low paid jobs were at least plentiful. Today, with employment hovering between 8 and 10 percent depending on where you live, even those lousy jobs with no benefits are hard to come by.

But NCL’s history of advancing the cause of workers continues unabated, and this is a good time to reflect on what we are doing to raise awareness about the quality of life for America’s working families.

• This week Reid Maki of our staff and I read essays and reviewed posters prepared by farmworker teens. These youngsters described waking up at 3 am with their parents, driving 2 or more hours to a field only to spend 12 hours picking fruit for less than minimum wage, all the while subjected to bee stings, ladder tip overs, and relentless beating sun. It’s clear from these poignant stories that the lives of migrant farmworkers – their living conditions, their lack of benefits on the job, their minimal pay – have improved only marginally in the last 50 years. NCL champions the cause of farmworker children through our Child Labor Coalition, working to break the cycle of poverty for low wage migrant farm worker kids by getting them out of the fields and into schools.
• During Restaurant Week in Washington August 13-19, NCL staff distributed flyers in front of local venues facing lawsuits for their poor worker treatment. We called for paid sick days and health care for restaurant workers and an end to the poverty level tipped wage of $2.75 an hour.

When, on August 31st , the Washington Post editorialized in support of Walmart opening in DC’s Ward 4, NCL responded with a Letter to the Editor. (Whether the Post will publish our letter we don’t know.) Walmart is notorious for paying low wages and stinting on benefits and working conditions. The Post claims that Walmart’s promise to hire 300 people and pay $2.5 million in taxes makes them an attractive employer. NCL begs to differ. Our letter to the Post noted that an employee who works Walmart’s definition of full-time (34 hours per week) makes just $15,500 per year. Thousands of people who work full-time at Walmart live below the poverty line and are forced to utilize state subsidized benefits. Walmart employees cost taxpayers more than $1 billion nationwide. We also noted that a Chicago study from 2009 shows that businesses within one mile of a Walmart Supercenter have a 25 percent chance of shuttering in the first year, and a 40 percent chance of shuttering in the second year. “DC doesn’t need Walmart, it needs employers who pay fair wages and benefits to workers and a good corporate citizen and neighbor.”

While NCL strives to draw attention to improving the wages of American workers, we learned that a majority of jobs lost during the economic downturn of the last few years were in the middle range of wages, while a majority of those added during the recovery are low paying, according to the National Employment Law Project. Jobs with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83, accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job growth. The middle third — occupations in fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the beginning of 2008 to early 2010. The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have represented only 22 percent of total job growth.

There are many more examples –few of them uplifting – about the state of labor today, especially for workers at the bottom of the totem poll. What can be done? For starters, for low-income workers, we can support legislation to increase the minimum wage to $9.80 by July 1, 2014. S. 3453 and HR 6211, the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2012, would do that. Raising wages of about 28 million workers, who would receive nearly $40 billion in additional income over the phase-in period, and it would stimulate the economy!

And we can support the right to unionize and frankly, do a far better PR job publicizing the value of unions in improving wages and working conditions across all industries. According to the Economic Policy Institute, Between 1973 and 2011, the median worker’s real hourly compensation (which includes wages and benefits) rose just 10.7 percent. EPI: “ A major factor driving these trends has been the ongoing erosion of unionization and the declining bargaining power of unions, along with the weakened ability of unions to set norms or labor standards that raise the wages of comparable nonunion workers.” EPI’s research is incontrovertible and we need to make that public.

Finally, we need to draw attention to the massive profits that so many American companies enjoy – in 2011 Apple made $25 Billion in profits, Walmart $15 Billion – and yet so few are willing to share that wealth with their workforce without a union in place. What if Walmart raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour – no one will get rich on that but it’s closer to a living wage? Apple could do the same – why not share your riches with the workers?

This Labor Day, we should resolve to redouble our efforts, explain to the public more effectively why laws like the Employee Free Choice Act are needed to promote union membership, we need to demand that companies making billions in profits can well afford to raise the wages they pay to their workforce, and we should commit ourselves to improving the standard of living for all working families.