Beirne Board Creates 70 New Scholarships

Members of the board of directors of the Joseph Anthony Beirne Memorial Foundation got a $210,000 infusion of new money from CWA’s general treasury at the foundation’s annual meeting on March 16 — and promptly turned the funds into 70 additional first-year scholarships valued at $3,000 each.

“This means,” explained CWA President Morton Bahr, who also serves as president of the foundation, “that 100 first-year scholarships will be granted to deserving students for the 1998-99 school year, in addition to 30 second-year scholarships.”

Normally, the Beirne Foundation awards 30 first-year and 30 second-year partial scholarships valued at a total of $180,000.

The additional monies were available from the AFL-CIO Union Privilege program’s agreement with Household Finance on its MasterCard program, Bahr explained. Board members also voted to extend eligibility to grandchildren of CWA’s active or retired members.

John B. Kulstad, assistant to Executive Vice President M. E. Nichols and the staff person assigned to administer the Beirne Foundation, said the Union Privilege money may be a “one-time only” bonanza for the foundation. However, he said that CWA locals are responding well to a plea late last year to pump up contributions to the foundation and he is hopeful that funding will improve over the next year.
Members of the board of directors approved new grants for:

• The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training ($2,500 a year for three years), which has conducted 124 interviews as part of an oral history project on labor and diplomacy. Of the 124 interviews, 45 transcripts have been finalized and the funds will go toward completing the remaining transcripts.
  
• The American Labor Museum/Botto House National Landmark ($5,000), which sought funding from the Beirne Foundation to research CWA’s first big strike — the 1947 nationwide strike by the National Federation of Telephone Workers, CWA’s predecessor. Noting that women were fully two-thirds of the 345,000 strikers, the museum says the strike is historic as the largest ever job action by women workers. Museum officials say they will focus on the strike in New Jersey, which used a law banning utility strikes to impose fines on the union of $10,000 a day for each day the strike continued, as well as individual fines up to $500 and 30-day jail sentences. After the three top leaders of the all-women operators union in New Jersey were arrested for defying the law, a threatened city-wide strike in Newark persuaded the legislature to eliminate the jail sentences and lower the fines. Eventually, the state attorney general dismissed criminal charges against the three women.
  
• WorkingUSA, a new pro-labor magazine, ($6,000). The magazine — with a distinguished editorial advisory board — seeks to “be a forum for discussion and advocacy on the challenges facing working people today at a time when anti-labor forces too often control the public debate,” according to the editors. The magazine is published six times a year. It was started in 1997. The editors sought funding to help develop future articles on such subjects as the importance of close ties between labor and the religious community, coping with technology and automation, and lessons learned from union and environmentalists teaming up. A cover article in the January-February 1998 issue features “Militancy in the Magic Kingdom: Lessons from the Disney Strike of ‘41,” a piece of particular interest to NABET-CWA members embroiled in a long-running saga to win a new contract from Disney’s ABC-TV unit. Individual subscriptions are available at $45 a year by calling 1-800-541-6563.

Board members also okayed continuing grants for:

• The Working Group ($15,000), sponsors of the “Not in Our Town” campaign, which began in 1995 with support from the Beirne Foundation, and which, directors said, “continues to inspire communities to act against hate violence.” The resulting videos, based on how the people of Billings, Mont., banded together to fight hatred and aired on PBS stations nationally, even inspired state attorneys general in West Virginia, Florida and Arizona to create “Not in Our State” campaigns. The Working Group plans to use the Beirne Foundation funds to develop “Community Action Kits” for use by schools, community and civic organizations, unions, churches and synagogues.
  
• The National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice ($5,000), which has as its mission to educate and mobilize the U.S. religious community to support issues and campaigns to improve wages, benefits and working conditions, especially for low-wage workers. The organization, founded in 1997, hopes to see 10 new religion-labor groups created in 1998, with organizational meetings planned in Sacramento, San Diego, Hartford, Richmond, Miami, New Orleans, Wichita, Jackson, Birmingham and Charlotte.
  
• The Federation of Trade Unions-Burma ($1,200), to assist the group to continue publication of “Labor Rights.”

Directors of the foundation and members of the board, in addition to Bahr, are CWA Secretary-Treasurer Barbara J. Easterling; Executive Vice President M.E. Nichols; Maureen Houston, a daughter of the late president; Monsignor George Higgins, a leading labor advocate within the Catholic Church and a personal friend of Beirne during his lifetime, and Glenn E. Watts, CWA President emeritus.