The Maine AFL-CIO has announced this year’s winners of the Working Class Hero, Solidarity, President’s and Edie Beaulieu awards, which will be presented at our Biennial Convention on Thursday October 26 - Friday October 27th. Winners include:
Working Class Hero Award: Pat Carleton, USW 9 retired & Maine AFL-CIO Vice President, for being a tremendous local union leader, doing the spade work of building the labor movement and singing with the best of them!
Solidarity Award: Maine Health Interpreters, MSEA-SEIU 1989 for unanimously winning their union, standing together for themselves and the patients they serve and fighting for a better healthcare system for all of us.
President’s Award: Ellen Campbell, Machinists S89 retired, for more than fifty years of work as a labor paralegal helping thousands of workers through their most difficult situations and for building her union.
Edie Beaulieu Legislative Award: Sen. Mattie Daughtry (D – Brunswick) for leading legislative campaigns to strengthen our freedom to organize and to guarantee workers paid family medical leave and for centering working class issues as a legislator.
For the next few weeks we will profile each of the award winners, starting with Senator Mattie Daughtry (D-Cumberland). Senator Daughtry has a 100 percent pro-labor voting record on our Working Families Legislative Scorecard, having voted for every one of our labor priorities as Senator. She has been outspoken in her support of workers organizing and striking, including IAMAW Local S6 members at Bath Iron Works and Little Dog employees.
As Senate chair of the Labor and Housing Committee in 2022, she played an important role in passing legislation to put labor standards on renewable energy projects, strengthen apprenticeships and establish a logging dispute resolution board to handle complaints over wage violations, payout amounts, contracts violations, or disputes related to hiring.
As Assistant Democratic Leader, Senator Daughtry has done a tremendous job uniting her caucus around labor priorities. She was the lead sponsor of our bill (LD 1756) to ban mandatory anti-union meetings in the workplace. She was a leader in passing Maine’s landmark paid family leave law was also crucial in building support for a bill to improve patient safety by requiring strong nurse-to-patient staffing ratios in hospitals.