Saturday, February 4th, 3:00 pm, Classroom 1, Richardson Law
Book talk – Class Struggle Unionism with Joe Burns
Joe Burns is a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer with over 25 years experience negotiating labor agreements. He is currently the Director of CollectiveBargaining and General Counsel for the Association of Flight Attendants, CWA. He graduated from the New York University School of Law. Prior to law school heworked in a public sector hospital and was president of his AFSCME Local.
Burns is the author of Class Struggle Unionism. He is also the author of Strike Back: Rediscovering Militant Tactics to Fight the Attacks on Public Employee Unionsand Reviving the Strike: How Working People Can Regain Power and Transform America.
Sunday, February 5th, 3:00 pm, Classroom 1, Richardson Law
Bargaining/Negotiations Workshop with Joe Burns and Eric Gill
Eric Gill is the elected leader and Financial Secretary-Treasurer of UNITE HERE Local 5, Hawaii’s hospitality, food service, and healthcare workers union. A Local 5member since 1976, Eric has led the 10,000-member union since 2000. In 2012, Eric and other Local 5 members joined with 90 community leaders to form AiKea,an alliance of community and civic organizations focused on building a social and political movement to improve the future of Hawai’i. Central to the success ofLocal 5 and UNITE HERE’s program has been the union’s internal committee-building program that has produced a generation of effective worker leaders, trainingthem to become effective organizers.
Also a Vice-President of the UNITE HERE International Union, he has been a central figure in UNITE HERE’s various national campaigns, including the 2018 7-citystrike against the Marriott Corporation and the national electoral campaign to defeat Trump. Eric is currently driving a program to improve the union’s ideologicaltraining in class consciousness and analysis for the most advanced leaders in the workplaces and on the union staff.
