The new Medicare prescription drug benefit (also known as Medicare Part D) will start up on January 1, 2006. That's just six months away, but most Medicare beneficiaries know very little about the benefit or how to get it.

The law defines reciprocal beneficiaries as two adults who are legally prohibited from marrying under state law.

This broad definition encompasses not only same-sex domestic partners but adult brothers and sisters, a widowed parent and a grown child, aunts and nephews, etc.

Those persons entering into a reciprocal beneficiary relationship must register their relationship as reciprocal beneficiaries with the Department of Health.

The Hawaii Family Leave Act and the US Family and Medical Leave Act allow covered workers to take leave to care for a family member with a “serious health condition.” Under the federal law, a “family member” is defined as spouse, children, and biological parents.

ILWU Oahu members and retirees joined other unions and supporters of a mass transit system for Honolulu at a rally at City Hall on July 7, 2005. Much of the rally was directed at Governor Lingle who had threatened to veto a bill passed by the legislature that would fund the mass transit system.

SAN FRANCISCO—The ILWU’s International Executive Board, the union’s highest governing body between International Conventions, met in San Francisco March 30-April 1, 2005.

BASRA, IRAQ (6/29/05)—Originally organized under the British in the early 1920s, the Iraqi oil union has always been the heart of the country’s labor movement.

“Iraq’s two biggest strikes, in 1946 and 1952, were organized by oil workers,” Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the newly reorganized General Union of Oil Employees, told officers and members of the ILWU during a visit to the West Coast by himself and Hassan Juma’a Awad, the union’s president.

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in the door, its presence spread rapidly. Within weeks, it had taken over the financial functions of Basra’s civil administration. Workers, in order to get paid, had to take their time sheets to local KBR offices for approval. Those who had fled the advancing troops had to get company permission to return to their jobs.

the Iraqi National Accord of outgoing Prime Minister Issad al Allawi, and a party of Arab nationalists.

The FWCUI condemned the balloting. “Its purposewas to impose the American project on Iraq, and give legitimacy to the government imposed by the occupying coalition,” President Falah Alwan said.

The FWCIU is allied with the small Workers Communist Party of Iraq. The oil union, which took no position on the election, is independent both of other union federations and of political parties.

Shop steward Zonette Tam had been working for 10 years toward a nursing degree while balancing her job and family life. Then on May 31 the ILWU Local 142 member received the news—she had won an AFL-CIO Union Plus scholarship. As a worker who helped organize her shop into the ILWU, the win was especially sweet.

“I had been on a career path to get a LPN [Licensed Practical Nurse] degree, but I got accepted into the nursing program at Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa and now this scholarship puts me over the top,” Tam said. “I can go for my RN and a bachelor’s degree.”

HONOLULU—Education is an essential part of ILWU rank-and-file democracy. The ILWU believes that working people are fully capable of acquiring all the skills needed to run their own union.