Tom Kertes (born January 4, 1973) is an American-born Canadian human rights activist.
Tom Kertes was media strategist for the United Workers Association's successful living wages campaign at Camden Yards. The association claimed that workers at Camden Yards were paid less than the state and federal minimum wage . For over three years the United Workers Association fought to secure living wages at the stadium . On September 6, 2007 the Maryland Stadium Authority voted to pay cleaners the Maryland living wage rate of $11.30 per hour. Adoption of the living wage policy occurred days after a scheduled hunger strike of 11 workers and 4 allies had been postponed , following positive remarks by Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley .
Tom Kertes worked with the United Workers Association as a volunteer advisor starting in 2003, as communications organizer in 2006 and as a consultant in 2007.
Tom Kertes has worked with the poor people's economic human rights movement since 2002. He has worked with the University of the Poor's School of Labor, which is part of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Tom Kertes has also worked with Friends and Residents, an organization of public housing residents in Washington, D.C. fighting HOPE VI development of their neighborhood. Starting in 2003 he worked with the United Workers Association, an organization of low-wage workers in Maryland.
Prior to his work with the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Tom Kertes owned Children's Garden, a children's book and toy store in Silverdale, Washington. The store closed in 2001 due to losses after snow melt from a snow storm damaged over $200,000 in inventory.
In 2012 Tom Kertes helped launch the Campaign for Child Care Equity at UBC as a grassroots organizer and a union member of BCGEU Local 303 . The campaign seeks to achieve gender pay equity for the early childhood educators employed by UBC . He is also an organizer with Liberation Learning , an organization of child care workers in British Columbia .
In 2009 Tom Kertes moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada where he currently works as a community organizer in the child care sector .
In 2007 Tom Kertes moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in response to human rights violations by the United States government and so that he could live in a country where marriage between same-sex couples is recognized . He became a Canadian citizen in 2014 and is a dual citizen of the United States and Canada .
Tom Kertes was Policy and Communications Advisor to the College of Early Childhood Educators in Ontario, Canada's first self-regulatory organization for early childhood educators .
Collective bargaining is a process of negotiation between employers and a group of employees aimed at agreements to regulate working salaries, working conditions, benefits, and other aspects of workers' compensation and rights for workers. The interests of the employees are commonly presented by representatives of a trade union to which the employees belong. The collective agreements reached by these negotiations usually set out wage scales, working hours, training, health and safety, overtime, grievance mechanisms, and rights to participate in workplace or company affairs.
M&T Bank Stadium is a multi-purpose football stadium located in Baltimore, Maryland. It is the home of the Baltimore Ravens of the National Football League. The stadium is immediately adjacent to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the home of the Baltimore Orioles. Often referred to as "Ravens Stadium", M&T Bank Stadium officially opened in 1998, and is currently one of the most praised stadiums in the NFL for fan amenities, ease of access, concessions and other facilities. The listed capacity for M&T Bank Stadium is 71,008.
Labor rights or workers' rights are both legal rights and human rights relating to labor relations between workers and employers. These rights are codified in national and international labor and employment law. In general, these rights influence working conditions in relations of employment. One of the most prominent is the right to freedom of association, otherwise known as the right to organize. Workers organized in trade unions exercise the right to collective bargaining to improve working conditions.
The Change to Win Organizing Center (CtW) is a coalition of American labor unions originally formed in 2005 as an alternative to the AFL-CIO. The coalition is associated with strong advocacy of the organizing model. The coalition currently consists of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT); Service Employees International Union (SEIU); and United Farm Workers (UFW). Communications Workers of America (CWA) is affiliated with both CtW and AFL-CIO.
Florence Elizabeth Riefle Bahr was an American artist and activist. She made portraits of children and adults, including studies of nature as she found it. Instead of using a camera, more than 300 pen and ink sketchbooks catalog insights into her life, including her civil and human rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s. One of the many important captured events included the Washington D.C. event where Martin Luther King, Jr. first gave his I Have a Dream speech. Her painting Homage to Martin Luther King hangs in the (NAACP) National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's headquarters. She created illustrations for children's books and painted a mural in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) for the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Harriet Lane Home for Children. Her works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the 1930s. In 1999, she was posthumously awarded to the State of Maryland's Women's Hall of Fame, as the first woman artist they recognized.
The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) is a national community organizing network established in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and businessman and founder of the Chicago Sun-Times Marshall Field III. The IAF partners with religious congregations and civic organizations at the local level to help them build organizations of organizations, referred to as broad-based organizations by the Industrial Areas Foundation, with the purpose of strengthening citizen leadership, developing trust across a community's dividing lines and taking action on issues identified by local community leaders.
Kate Bronfenbrenner is the Director of Labor Education Research at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. She is a leading authority on successful strategies in labor union organizing, and on the effects of outsourcing and offshoring on workers and worker rights.
Hotel Workers Rising is long-term organizing campaign, created by UNITE HERE in 2006, aimed at organizing and mobilizing hotel workers to win improvements in the workplace. Demands include higher wages, better benefits, safer workloads, and the right to unionize freely.
Dennis McDermott, was a Canadian trade unionist, Canadian Director of the United Auto Workers from 1968 to 1978 and president of the Canadian Labour Congress from 1978 to 1986.
Jill P. Carter is an American politician who represents Maryland's 41st legislative district of Baltimore City in the Maryland State Senate. She previously represented the same district in the Maryland House of Delegates. She was elected to the Maryland legislature in 2002 and took office in January 2003, resigning in 2017. She was appointed to the state Senate on May 4, 2018. She won the 2018 primary election, receiving 54% of the vote, handily defeating Martin O’Malley's son-in-law, educator J.D Merrill and former senator Nathaniel T. Oaks and faced no opposition in the 2018 general election.
Thomas Edward Perez is an American politician and attorney who has been the Chair of the Democratic National Committee since February 2017. Perez was previously Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (2009–2013) and United States Secretary of Labor (2013–2017).
Carl Murphy was an African-American journalist, publisher, civil rights leader, and educator. He was publisher of the Afro-American newspaper chain of Baltimore, Maryland, expanding its coverage with regional editions in several major cities of the Washington, DC area, as well as Newark, New Jersey, a destination of thousands of rural blacks in the Great Migration to the North.
The United Workers Association is a human rights organization led by low-wage workers in Maryland in the United States. The organization was founded in 2002 by a group of homeless men and women in Baltimore. In 2004 the United Workers Association launched a campaign to secure living wages at the Oriole Park at Camden Yards, targeting Baltimore Orioles team owner Peter Angelos by demanding that he pay cleaners a living wage.
Tom Hucker is an American elected official and a Democrat from the U.S. state of Maryland. He served from 2007 until 2014 as a member of the Maryland House of Delegates from District 20, which includes Takoma Park and Silver Spring neighborhoods including Hillandale, Woodmoor, White Oak, Indian Spring, East Silver Spring, Park Hills, Sligo Park Hills, Long Branch, Seven Oaks/Evanswood, Sligo-Branview, Burnt Mills, Burnt Mills Hills, South Four Corners, Franklin Knolls, Montgomery Knolls, Clifton Park Village, Oakview, Quaint Acres, and parts of Colesville in Montgomery County.
Kav La'Oved is an Israeli non-profit association, founded in 1991. Its objective is to protect the rights of disadvantaged workers. It provides information, advice, and legal representation for the most deprived workers in Israel – migrant workers, Palestinian workers and Israeli low-wage earners.
Lillie May Carroll Jackson, pioneer civil rights activist, organizer of the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. Invariably known as "Dr. Lillie", "Ma Jackson", and the "mother of the civil rights movement", Lillie May Carroll Jackson pioneered the tactic of non-violent resistance to racial segregation used by Martin Luther King Jr. and others during the early civil rights movement.
Benjamin Todd Jealous is an American civil rights leader and social impact investor. He served as the president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 2008 to 2013. When he was selected to head the NAACP at age 35, he became the organization's youngest-ever national leader. The Washington Post in 2013 described him as "one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders."
Calvin B. Ball III is an American Democratic politician who serves as the county executive of Howard County, Maryland. He is the first African-American to hold this office. On Thursday, November 9, 2017, Ball announced his candidacy for County Executive for the 2018 Election. On November 7, 2018 Ball won against incumbent Republican Allan Kittleman. He was sworn in as the new County Executive on December 3, 2018.
Cheri Lynn Honkala is an American anti-poverty advocate, co-founder of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) and co-founder and National Coordinator of the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. She has been a noted advocate for human rights in the United States and internationally. She is the mother of actor Mark Webber.
Gabriel Acevero is a Trinidadian-American organizer, activist and politician representing Maryland's 39th House district. On November 6, 2018, Acevero finished in first place with 31% of the vote and became the first openly gay Afro-Latino, and one of the youngest people, elected to the Maryland House of Delegates. A self-described Democratic Socialist, his candidacy was endorsed by labor unions, immigrant rights advocacy groups and Senator Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution. Acevero is a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.