U.S. Senate candidate Martha Coakley addresses Massachusetts AFL-CIO members.

Working families in Massachusetts are mobilizing for a huge get-out-the-working family-vote drive for Tuesday’s special U.S. Senate election where Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is running for the seat left vacant by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s death last year.

As Robert Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, says, “This election has been all about working families.”

Martha Coakley has a proven record of fighting for working families, including vigilantly enforced prevailing wage, overtime, employee misclassification, and independent contractor enforcement laws in order to ensure that an honest day’s work would result in a fair paycheck with real benefits.

Coakley supports the Employee Free Choice Act and rebuilding the nation’s economy with job-creating legislation. But in an echo of the Bush-Cheney era, her opponent Scott Brown strongly opposes the workers’ rights bill, health care reform and believes the answer to the economic crisis is more tax cuts for the wealthy.

Here’s a hard-to-believe fact, but one that shows just how out of touch Brown is. He doesn’t think the recession, the financial meltdown or the housing crisis was caused by failed policies, including Wall Street deregulation. “We had plenty of regulations,” he says.

Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Kennedy, is urging voters to back Coakley,

so we can continue the agenda that Ted made the fight of his life—reforming health care, ensuring equality and justice for all, protecting our seniors and rebuilding our economy so everyone can prosper.

If you live in Massachusetts, or neighboring Connecticut, New Hampshire or Rhode Island, and would like to volunteer at phone banks this weekend, call any of these numbers: 978-766-0705; 508-450-3238; or 781-775-0268.

Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

The AFL-CIO today called for the United States and the entire international community, including the global union movement, to “do our utmost to aid our Haitian sisters and brothers in their moment of extraordinary need.”

You can help Haitian workers in distress by donating to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center’s Earthquake Relief for Haitian Workers’ Campaign. Click here to make a donation and here to learn more about how the center is working to help Haitian workers. (More donation options below.)

In a joint statement, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker called on Congress to grant humanitarian relief in the form of temporary protected status to Haitians who are in the United States.

It would be inhumane to send people back to a country utterly incapable of taking care of its own population. 

Read the entire statetment here.

The Solidarity Center is sending a delegation of Haitian labor activists living in the Dominican Republic to Port-au-Prince to assess the situation. The center also is working with unions in the Dominican Republic to establish a donation center with nonperishable goods that will be shipped to their Haitian trade union counterparts. 

The three AFL-CIO leaders urged the union family to provide in-kind assistance to the relief effort. Unions have been called to support and assist the Haitians as we wrote about here, and we will update union actions as we hear about them. Most recently:

• Members of the AFL-CIO Maritime Trades Department unions are crewing ships, including the USNS Comfort that will provide aid.
• The South Florida AFL-CIO is collecting donations of water, nonperishable food items, cleaning supplies and over-the-counter medications to ship to Haiti. The collections are being accepted at the Longshoremen (ILA) Local 1416 union hall at 816 N.W. 2nd Ave. in Miami. The labor council has secured a ship and is looking for volunteers to load containers of the donated goods for shipment. Volunteers should call 305-593-8886. You can send monetary donations made out to Catholic Charities or Operation Helping Hands and send or drop them off at the South Florida AFL-CIO, 2500 N.W. 97th Ave., Suite 201, Miami, FL 33172.

 To learn about what some other unions are doing to provide aid to Haiti, click here.

 Donations also may be made to:

•  Partners in Health: www.pih.org/inforesources/news/Haiti_Earthquake.html or send your contribution to Partners In Health, P.O. Box 845578, Boston, MA 02284-5578.
• Doctors Without Borders: www.doctorswithoutborders.org or call toll free at 1-888-392-0392. USA Headquarters 333 7th Ave., 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10001-5004. 
• American Red Cross International Response Fund: www.redcross.org/org or call toll free at 1-800-REDCROSS or 1-800-257-7575 (Spanish). Contributions also can be mailed to American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, DC 20013 or to your local American Red Cross chapter (specify if you want to make sure your donation will benefit Haiti).
• RN Response Network: www.NationalNursesUnited.org.
• United Way Worldwide Disaster Fund: https://volunteer.united-e-way.org/uwwwdisaster/donate/ or mail checks with the fund reference to United Way Worldwide, P.O. Box 630568, Baltimore, MD 21263-0568.

Those interested in providing volunteer assistance should contact the Center for International Disaster Information, at http://www.cidi.org/.