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Rabbi Dee confirmed that he was offered the diplomatic role.
By World Israel News Staff
Bereaved husband and father Rabbi Leo Dee has been offered a position with Israel’s Foreign Ministry, The Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday.
Rabbi Dee confirmed that he is in discussions regarding the position of special envoy to Jewish communities around the world.
Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said he was inspired by Dee’s call for unity among Israelis — made during his eulogy for his wife Lucy Dee.
Lucy, 48, and her daughters Maya and Rina – British-Israeli residents of Efrat – were driving in the Jordan Valley on a Friday afternoon when a Palestinian terrorist rammed into their car and proceeded to shoot. The sisters, 20 and 15 years old, were pronounced dead at the scene; the mother was transferred to a Jerusalem hospital in critical condition and died several days later.
“Today the Jewish people have proven that we are one, we are united,” Rabbi Dee said at his wife’s funeral, attended by an estimated 10,000 people from across the country.
“When a simple, quiet family in Efrat is devastated, the whole country hurts.And when a family in Tel Aviv is devastated, the whole country hurts. There’s no greater proof of our unity.”
Although the rabbi was experiencing intense loss, his message was a comforting one, considering that hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been demonstrating regularly in recent months against the new Netanyahu government’s plans for judicial reform. The protests – some of which were labeled ‘Day of Disruption,’ aimed at shutting down the country’ – included language signifying deep division in Israeli society beyond the issue of the reforms, incitement to violence and mob behavior.
In turn, approximately 600,000 people attended a pro-government demonstration in Jerusalem as well, chanting that the majority demands the reforms.
Ahead of Memorial Day for Fallen IDF Soldiers and Victims of Terror, Rabbi Dee appealed to the public not to protest at cemeteries or make political speeches and instead to stress the unity of the Jewish nation.
Earlier this month, following the capture of the two Hamas terrorists responsible for the murder of the Dee women, the rabbi praised the Israeli security forces, adding:
“If the terrorists would have been captured alive, I would have wanted to ask them why they did this. What was their vision for a better world? I asked the Shin Bet if I could speak with their families to ask them that question.”
The post Foreign Ministry offers bereaved husband and father Leo Dee position as special envoy appeared first on World Israel News.
A diesel school bus being converted into an electric school bus. (Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.
“It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with fourteen hundred people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry,” said Maria Somma, organizing director with the USW. “It’s not a single important win. It’s an example of what’s possible — workers wanting to organize and us being able to take advantage of a time and a policy that allowed them to clear a path to do so.” The high-turnout vote was 697 to 435.
At two factories and a warehouse near Macon, the workers build school buses and an array of specialty buses. Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, after Daimler Truck’s Thomas Built Buses. The United Auto Workers (UAW) represent workers at a Thomas Built facility in North Carolina.
The main issues in Georgia were pay and safety. Workers began organizing at the height of the pandemic in the summer of 2020. They overcame a fierce anti-union campaign in a right-to-work state where only 4.4 percent of workers are union members. But Somma adds that workers tapped into local union networks. “People think the South is nonunion, but we have a lot of members in middle Georgia,” she said.
The Steelworkers represent thousands of members in the state — at BASF, which makes chemicals used in plastics, detergent, and paper manufacturing, Anchor Glass, and the paper giant Graphic Packaging International.
Despite receiving torrents of federal subsidy money that was supposed to require it to remain neutral, Blue Bird pulled out all the stops to try to beat the union.
The company received $40 million in rebates as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean School Bus program, part of $500 million handed out last year to replace diesel school buses with ones with zero or low emissions. The funds are part of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed in 2021, which includes $5 billion in funding for clean buses through 2026.
In one particular egregious move, the company allegedly told workers that if they were part of a successful union drive at Blue Bird, no other employers would hire them.
These funds can’t be used to thwart union organizing, but that didn’t stop the company from campaigning against the union. The Steelworkers filed seven unfair labor charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
Among the charges for illegal union busting were polling employees on their union support, threatening to close the plant, telling workers collective bargaining was an ineffective means to settle workplace grievances, and putting up slide shows telling workers to vote against unionization.
In one particular egregious move, the company allegedly told workers that if they were part of a successful union drive at Blue Bird, no other employers would hire them. With a high churn rate, Blue Bird workers often cycle through other manufacturing employers like Frito-Lay, so the threat struck a nerve.
The company also launched a charm offensive, parking food trucks outside the warehouses and unfurling banners that read, “We Love Our Employees!”
When union-busting wallops didn’t do the trick, the company began making improvements — putting in place more predictable schedules, doling out optional overtime, and issuing company handbooks workers had never seen in all their years of employment.
The company even claimed to have patched up a leaking roof that was creating hazardous working conditions.
Most crucially, it boosted pay. “Some people got a $2 adjustment, who were already making high money; some people got eight cents,” said Somma. “And so there was no rhyme or reason to the adjustments that anybody could see.”
Pro-union provisions have been attached to federal funds in the infrastructure package, as well as the $280 billion investment in the semiconductor industry and $370 billion to combat climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act. These include requirements to pay union scale wages on the construction of clean energy facilities and prohibitions against using funds to campaign against unions.
Last month, the EPA proposed its most ambitious new regulations yet for cutting pollution from vehicles by making two-thirds of new cars and trucks sold in the United States all-electric by 2032. Heavy-duty vocational vehicles like school buses have their own standards, aimed at cutting emissions in half by 2032.
Tailpipe emissions from vehicles on roads are the largest source of greenhouse gases. The United States is the second-biggest polluting country after China. Diesel-powered school buses can emit over forty toxic air contaminants, causing asthma and other respiratory issues.
But the government guardrails in the Clean School Bus Program are relatively weak. The EPA, for example, has asked recipients of federal subsidies for clean buses to disclose the benefits they provide their employees, including health insurance, paid leave, and retirement, though disclosing this information is not required.
Still, Somma said workers were able to shine a spotlight on the company’s union busting and charge it with using public money to prevent workers from exercising their rights to organize a union. “This was a campaign that was built by one-on-one conversations and by standard organizing tactics,” she said.
Where the federal policy factored in was once workers filed for a union election. “This is an employer that would have fired workers,” Somma said. “And so while they broke the law, this policy allowed us to calm the employer’s union busting down.”
The organizing spark predated all that.
Jontae Lockett, a ten-year veteran at Blue Bird, remembers the campaign’s origins when the coronavirus was ravaging the country. “We had to report to work like nothing was happening,” he said, and the company didn’t follow social distancing guidelines: “We were working on top of each other.”
Production demands were incessant — without hazard pay, another sore point — slowing down only for a week due to supply chain snags delaying part deliveries.
But the safety issues go beyond COVID. Some days, rain pours through the roof. The company has supposedly made repairs, but the problem persists. “The water is landing on electrical boxes and sockets, computers and fans,” Lockett says, and he worries about getting electrocuted in the sloshing water.
Fed up with their treatment during the pandemic and the disrespect and favoritism supervisors dished out, Lockett and his coworker Patrick Watkins began thinking about building a union.
“You see supervisors talk to a grown man like he’s a child,” Lockett said.
Fed up with their treatment during the pandemic and the disrespect and favoritism supervisors dished out, Lockett and his coworker Patrick Watkins began thinking about building a union.
They began holding weekly committee meetings at churches, parks, and the local library, eventually transitioning to Zoom. Participants grew from a handful to two dozen.
People from different production lines came together to learn about the campaign. They spread union literature and information to the two factories and a warehouse in the complex. Workers also heard from Steelworkers from union plants in other states who came to support their counterparts in Georgia.
In a series of videos posted to YouTube, Steelworkers organizer Alex Perkins interviewed former Blue Bird workers who had left the company and picked up unionized manufacturing jobs. They talked about the difference a union makes.
In one short video, Perkins interviews a former Blue Bird employee, Quenterrious Booze, a USW member at the unionized paper manufacturing giant, Graphic Packaging. He says the union job is better: the pay is much higher and the work isn’t as hard.
The videos countered company union-busting tactics.
A long list of problems spurred Blue Bird workers to unionize. One is a hated attendance point system, where showing up late dings you half a point; six accrued points at any time results in a termination. The company says that points roll off on a monthly basis if there are no absences or lateness, but workers say supervisors command inordinate levels of power, selectively applying the policy.
Paltry vacation time is another sore point. Workers earn two vacation days after working five years at the company and a week off after eight years.
Even these benefits are subject to the whims of supervisors. Lockett said favoritism runs rampant, from who gets hired to who gets their time-off requests approved.
Another complaint: unpredictable schedules. Long days on the assembly line can stretch past ten or twelve hours in the sweltering summer to meet a production quota of thirty-eight buses daily.
At the end of a shift, workers said, a supervisor would keep them on the line longer until the production quota was hit — or tell them they had to come in two hours early the next morning, making it difficult to get kids ready for school or strike a work-life balance.
One more shared grievance: unequal pay.
The hourly wage ranges from $13 for those just starting out to $25 for those with many years at the company — but ultimately, there’s no standardization, leaving pay up to the discretion of supervisors. With a decade in, Lockett is in the upper end of that range. But he finds the system unfair, echoing Teamsters and autoworkers who say lower pay and benefits for newer hires wrecks solidarity.
“We’re building these buses by hand,” said Lockett. “Nobody should be making $13 an hour.”
After Katlyn Pineda was pulled from a hotel pool in Long Island, New York, she suffered “irreversible” brain damage and passed away in May 2023. Authorities have formally charged her mother, 41-year-old Erica Baez, with the little girl’s death.
Baez had been staying with her 5-month-old son and 7-year-old daughter Katlyn at the Marriott Melville hotel property. It was an afternoon when Baez left Katlyn alone at the pool while she stopped at the bar for some food and drink. Hotel staff reportedly saw Baez leaving Katlyn unsupervised and warned her of the danger, but she ignored the warnings and went upstairs to check on her son.
After returning for a second drink, Baez allegedly saw Katlyn floating lifeless in the water. Prosecutors stated that Baez showed more concern for her phone and shoes/socks than her daughter, as she removed them before attempting to rescue her.
It appears that her alleged negligent actions towards Katlyn have come back to haunt her now that she has been indicted with second-degree manslaughter and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child. Both charges may equate to up to 15 years of prison time.
The Suffolk County District Attorney, Raymond Tierney, strongly expressed his thoughts on the matter. He said, “The alleged actions of this defendant were selfish, senseless, and heartless. We are going to do everything we can to ensure that justice is served for little Katlyn, whose short life ended too soon.”
Erica Baez’s next court date is set for May 24.