Wednesday, September 5th, 2007...7:33 pm
You’ve Got a Friend
I spoke with Rebekah Friend, Executive Director of our state’s AFL-CIO, on Monday. She remarked that I haven’t mentioned her.
Geez, with all of the garbage that gets thrown at me, people want to be mentioned? Who knew?
As it turns out, there is an honor that Friend has managed to garner this week: the Arizona Capitol Times has announced that she will get one of their Leaders of the Year in Public Policy awards. This is the first year that the Capitol Times has given the awards. The ceremony will be on the 26th.
The Capitol Times is giving Friend their “Legislative” award. Their citation said:
Rebekah Friend, Executive Director/Secretary Treasurer Arizona AFL-CIO
Ms. Friend is one of the few female executive directors to head a state AFL-CIO, a group that represents 145,000 in Arizona. She is credited with chairing the Minimum Wage Coalition, which brought Prop. 202 to the 2006 ballot and raised the minimum wage to $6.75 an hour. She is “a leader in the Arizona Union movement and a leader and mentor in the women’s movement.”
The minimum wage effort allowed Friend to play hardball with legislative leadership (they feared that she could lead another initiative drive), and she managed to assure herself a meaningful seat at the table when the state’s workman’s compensation system was revamped. She used her experience as a union negotiator to get what she felt our state’s workers needed when the final bill was written. As a result, Arizona is one of the few states that has indexed workman’s comp benefits.
Congrats, Rebekah.
6 Comments
September 5th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
She’s great. Nice job, Tedski.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
She is amazing! IBEW just featured her in their magazine to union members- over 1 million households…we should all be proud of Arizona’s labor leaders including Rebekah- they work for workers everyday. What is amazing is that she got the award with a REPUBLICAN legislature. That speaks volumes in my opinion and labors work on minimum wage was because the REPUBLICAN legislature refused to even give the bill a hearing.
September 6th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Rebekah Friend rocks! I’m glad you mentioned her!
September 6th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Rebekah is a strong, passionate, and brilliant organizer. Arizona workers and the progressive community are lucky to have her and it is about time she was honored for all the hard work she does.
September 7th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Rebekah Friend deserves all these props and more. She’s one of those rare people who just gets the job done, without the grandstanding. Congrats, Rebekah!
September 25th, 2007 at 7:21 am
[…] don’t have a problem with them giving awards (I wrote about their recognizing Rebekah Friend a couple of weeks ago), but I am concerned when it seems that they doing this at the expense of their doing […]
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