You Can Help Stop the New NAFTA
January 30, 2014: Corporate lobbyists are stepping up efforts to “fast-track” the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, as unionists and environmental groups push back in opposition.
The TPP is being negotiated in secret, with direct input from trans-global corporations seeking to undermine labor and environmental protections.
Read what the TPP is about: Warnings from NAFTA
The IBT is asking Teamsters to ask members of Congress to oppose fast track.
Remembering Pete Seeger
January 28, 2014: TDU and workers everywhere lost a friend with yesterday’s passing of Pete Seeger, the legendary folk singer and social activist.
Seeger, who died yesterday at the age of 94, was a role model for putting his principles into action. He stood up to McCarthyism, supported the Civil Rights movement, worked to clean up the Hudson River and was a strong supporter of unions and workers’ rights.
Throughout his life, Seeger lent his name and his voice to support grassroots movements—including Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
When asked to support a fledgling group of Teamsters working to reform our union and open it to the members, Seeger didn’t hesitate. He headlined a TDU benefit concert in Detroit, drawing a crowd of 1,500 fans to support Teamster reformers right in Hoffa’s home town.
Solidarity Forever, Which Side Are You On? These weren’t just lyrics to Pete Seeger. They were his guiding principles. In TDU, we try to live up to them.
Click here to read more about Pete Seeger’s life and legacy.
Staples Plucks Postal Jobs
Staples’ latest ad slogan is “What the L?” That sounds like what postal workers said when they found out the retail chain planned to steal their work.
The Long Island, New York, local of the American Postal Workers Union didn’t waste any time after the news broke in November. Members voted to boycott Staples and ask their friends and neighbors to do the same.
- See more at: http://labornotes.org/2014/01/staples-plucks-postal-jobs#sthash.z5DvwQft...Staples’ latest ad slogan is “What the L?” That sounds like what postal workers said when they found out the retail chain planned to steal their work.
The Long Island, New York, local of the American Postal Workers Union didn’t waste any time after the news broke in November. Members voted to boycott Staples and ask their friends and neighbors to do the same.
Click here to read more at Labor Notes.
Please call your US Senators now!
A nationwide call-in mobilization is now underway to press Congress to renew federal unemployment insurance, and every single call matters! The U.S. Senate returns today and your Senators need to hear from you right now.
More than 1.3 million Americans were abruptly cut off of their federal unemployment benefits last week after attempts to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program were blocked by Republicans in both the House and Senate. Another 72,000 unemployed jobseekers lost access to those federal benefits this past week, and an additional 72,000 will lose unemployment insurance this week and every week until the program is restored and lost benefits are paid retroactively.
A bi-partisan 3-month reauthorization of federal EUC benefits is set to be the Senate's first order of business. It is co-sponsored by Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Senator Dean Heller, a Republican from Nevada, and would give Congress time to craft the provisions of a full-year renewal.
Please call 877-267-2485 to reach your U.S. Senators. Tell them to renew federal unemployment insurance and restore this vital lifeline for more than 1.3 million Americans now!
The Reed-Heller bill has the support of all 53 Democrats and 2 Independents, but 60 votes are needed to even allow the bill to come up for debate. At least four Republican Senators will be needed to join Sen. Heller in favor and allow an up-or-down vote on the bill. It is crucial that both of your Senators hear from you -- but it's particularly critical if he or she is a Republican.
Please call 877-267-2485 to reach your U.S. Senators. Tell them to renew federal unemployment insurance and restore this vital lifeline for more than 1.3 million Americans now!
Call today, call tomorrow, call the next day -- and every day until the renewal of federal unemployment benefits passes!
The expiration of federal EUC benefits is causing severe hardship for the more than 1.3 million Americans and their families who had these vital benefits shut down December 28. Many unemployed jobseekers and their families will swiftly slide into poverty and homelessness unless these benefits are restored and EUC is renewed. The Senate must do the right thing and act responsibly on behalf of the American people, their unemployed constituents and the nation's economy.
Please call 877-267-2485 to reach your U.S. Senators. Tell them to renew federal unemployment insurance and restore this vital lifeline for more than 1.3 million Americans now!
Once it passes the Senate it would then go to the House. So, you can also call 877-267-2485 to reach your member of the House of Representatives! Please call now -- and keep calling each day until we get action!
Thanks so much for making the calls!
Labor Notes' Year-in-Review
Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
DIRECT TO VOTERS
As layers of corporate cash further insulated politicians from people’s needs, unions and worker groups had some success putting questions to voters directly. In New Jersey they overruled the governor’s veto and put a higher state minimum wage into their constitution, while Minnesotans raised income taxes on the well-to-do.
Transportation and hospitality workers at Seattle-Tacoma airport and the surrounding town voted in a $15 minimum, paid sick leave, and the ability to sue if hotels steal tips from banquet workers. In Seattle, socialist Kshama Sawant won a city council seat and shamed the two mayoral candidates into supporting a $15 city minimum.
Minimum wage ballot questions are expected in 2014 in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Massachusetts, where nurses are also running an initiative for safe staffing ratios.
Ohio unions ran independent candidates—after municipal officials tore up an agreement on city contracts and personally scabbed on a Teamster sanitation strike. The labor independents won two dozen city council seats in Lorain and three nearby towns.
With their voting rights under attack, North Carolinians mobilized against an anti-worker (and anti-woman, anti-civil rights) legislative assault by bringing thousands of protesters to the state capitol every week for “Moral Mondays,” with close to a thousand arrests.
Immigration rights activists mobilized locally all year, including brave human blockades against deportations, most recently in Los Angeles, D.C., and New Jersey. But none of this was enough to get a bill through the House—not even the Senate’s compromise, with its poison pill of more indentured guestworkers.
The mother of all secret deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is still under negotiation. TPP would gut nations’ rights to pass legislation limiting corporate predators. But the sheer outrageousness of TPP’s reach, along with the secrecy around it, generated grassroots opposition, including from a few unions. Congress looked likely to vote on a “fast-track” for TPP in January.
NEW METHODS
Unions tried new angles on organizing—some promising, others vaguer.
Some attempted city-wide organizing: in Pittsburgh with a “community union”; in Boston with a multi-campus organizing drive by college adjuncts; and in the Twin Cities, where joint actions knitted together struggles against banks and employers.
Anti-eviction campaigns were bolstered by union support in Minneapolis, Portland, Detroit, and Boston—including by home-based childcare providers, fighting off both eviction and the job loss that would come with it.
Emboldened by the Chicago Teachers’ 2012 strike, teachers rose up against the corporate reform agenda. Seattle teachers refused to give yet another standardized test. Los Angeles teachers fought the promise of iPads for every student, a wedge to bring in more tests and corporate curricula.
Newark teachers elected a slate to fight two-tier and merit pay. Chicago teachers continued to anchor a widening movement against school closings, driving Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s poll numbers down to only 2 percent “strongly approving.”
Labor-community coalitions sometimes won the day. One Brooklyn hospital sits on land coveted by high-end condo developers—a constituency used to getting its way. But rather than give a résumé workshop, the New York State Nurses picketed with the surrounding community and refused to give up even after the bosses re-routed patients… So far they’ve saved the hospital.
Among the fuzzier new directions were the AFL-CIO’s enthusiastic but amorphous outreach to community groups and the UAW’s bid to get Volkswagen to allow organizing at a Tennessee plant—in order to install a German-style “works council” for union-management cooperation. Where’s that leading?
$15: DEMAND OF THE YEAR
The same question came to mind as fast food workers walked out of restaurants—and briefly occupied some—in hundreds of cities in December, in a Service Employees-funded effort. A year of protests and strikes demanding “$15 and a union” have made low wages an issue politicians are finally scrambling to address, or at least explain away.
While the demand for $15 has made a small dent, the demand for a union seems as far off as ever. Between small shops, large turnover, and hostile labor law, signing a contract with McDonald’s or Pizza Hut sounds farfetched.
But fast food workers have been winning small victories: getting workers rehired after retaliatory firings, winning air conditioning in unbearably hot kitchens. In Chicago, Whole Foods workers securing a day off for Thanksgiving by holding “Strikesgiving” on the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
The good old-fashioned strike also worked in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, where Walmart workers unassociated with recent organizing walked out to protest low hours and a tyrannical supervisor. With most of the shift out, management caved to their demands.
ASKING MORE
While retail workers struggled for more hours, others from nurses to postal and UPS workers protested as employers crammed more into those hours.
Auto workers, forced onto an Alternative Work Schedule that obliterates weekends and evades overtime pay, demanded their union fight the schedule. They got no satisfaction, but demanding a higher standard from union officials seemed to be in fashion.
When Machinists union higher-ups, following secret negotiations, pushed surprise mid-contract concessions on 31,000 Boeing workers, the membership tore up the ransom note and said no, two to one. Boeing had threatened to take its new 777X plane out of Washington state if workers didn’t cave. Now a slate is challenging the Machinists’ national leadership.
And a reform slate took over the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, promising transparency in negotiations, a strong 2015 contract fight, cooperation with the other three postal unions, and outreach to customers to save USPS from privatization.
Nobody would say the U.S. labor movement is doing well—we’re down to 11.3 percent and concessions are still rampant. But the alarming slide in living standards, while politicians assure us the economy has recovered, has stirred union members, and brought out voters, to demand better.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
DIRECT TO VOTERS
As layers of corporate cash further insulated politicians from people’s needs, unions and worker groups had some success putting questions to voters directly. In New Jersey they overruled the governor’s veto and put a higher state minimum wage into their constitution, while Minnesotans raised income taxes on the well-to-do.
Transportation and hospitality workers at Seattle-Tacoma airport and the surrounding town voted in a $15 minimum, paid sick leave, and the ability to sue if hotels steal tips from banquet workers. In Seattle, socialist Kshama Sawant won a city council seat and shamed the two mayoral candidates into supporting a $15 city minimum.
Minimum wage ballot questions are expected in 2014 in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Massachusetts, where nurses are also running an initiative for safe staffing ratios.
Ohio unions ran independent candidates—after municipal officials tore up an agreement on city contracts and personally scabbed on a Teamster sanitation strike. The labor independents won two dozen city council seats in Lorain and three nearby towns.
With their voting rights under attack, North Carolinians mobilized against an anti-worker (and anti-woman, anti-civil rights) legislative assault by bringing thousands of protesters to the state capitol every week for “Moral Mondays,” with close to a thousand arrests.
Immigration rights activists mobilized locally all year, including brave human blockades against deportations, most recently in Los Angeles, D.C., and New Jersey. But none of this was enough to get a bill through the House—not even the Senate’s compromise, with its poison pill of more indentured guestworkers.
The mother of all secret deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is still under negotiation. TPP would gut nations’ rights to pass legislation limiting corporate predators. But the sheer outrageousness of TPP’s reach, along with the secrecy around it, generated grassroots opposition, including from a few unions. Congress looked likely to vote on a “fast-track” for TPP in January.
NEW METHODS
Unions tried new angles on organizing—some promising, others vaguer.
Some attempted city-wide organizing: in Pittsburgh with a “community union”; in Boston with a multi-campus organizing drive by college adjuncts; and in the Twin Cities, where joint actions knitted together struggles against banks and employers.
Anti-eviction campaigns were bolstered by union support in Minneapolis, Portland, Detroit, and Boston—including by home-based childcare providers, fighting off both eviction and the job loss that would come with it.
Emboldened by the Chicago Teachers’ 2012 strike, teachers rose up against the corporate reform agenda. Seattle teachers refused to give yet another standardized test. Los Angeles teachers fought the promise of iPads for every student, a wedge to bring in more tests and corporate curricula.
Newark teachers elected a slate to fight two-tier and merit pay. Chicago teachers continued to anchor a widening movement against school closings, driving Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s poll numbers down to only 2 percent “strongly approving.”
Labor-community coalitions sometimes won the day. One Brooklyn hospital sits on land coveted by high-end condo developers—a constituency used to getting its way. But rather than give a résumé workshop, the New York State Nurses picketed with the surrounding community and refused to give up even after the bosses re-routed patients… So far they’ve saved the hospital.
Among the fuzzier new directions were the AFL-CIO’s enthusiastic but amorphous outreach to community groups and the UAW’s bid to get Volkswagen to allow organizing at a Tennessee plant—in order to install a German-style “works council” for union-management cooperation. Where’s that leading?
$15: DEMAND OF THE YEAR
The same question came to mind as fast food workers walked out of restaurants—and briefly occupied some—in hundreds of cities in December, in a Service Employees-funded effort. A year of protests and strikes demanding “$15 and a union” have made low wages an issue politicians are finally scrambling to address, or at least explain away.
While the demand for $15 has made a small dent, the demand for a union seems as far off as ever. Between small shops, large turnover, and hostile labor law, signing a contract with McDonald’s or Pizza Hut sounds farfetched.
But fast food workers have been winning small victories: getting workers rehired after retaliatory firings, winning air conditioning in unbearably hot kitchens. In Chicago, Whole Foods workers securing a day off for Thanksgiving by holding “Strikesgiving” on the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
The good old-fashioned strike also worked in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, where Walmart workers unassociated with recent organizing walked out to protest low hours and a tyrannical supervisor. With most of the shift out, management caved to their demands.
ASKING MORE
While retail workers struggled for more hours, others from nurses to postal and UPS workers protested as employers crammed more into those hours.
Auto workers, forced onto an Alternative Work Schedule that obliterates weekends and evades overtime pay, demanded their union fight the schedule. They got no satisfaction, but demanding a higher standard from union officials seemed to be in fashion.
When Machinists union higher-ups, following secret negotiations, pushed surprise mid-contract concessions on 31,000 Boeing workers, the membership tore up the ransom note and said no, two to one. Boeing had threatened to take its new 777X plane out of Washington state if workers didn’t cave. Now a slate is challenging the Machinists’ national leadership.
And a reform slate took over the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, promising transparency in negotiations, a strong 2015 contract fight, cooperation with the other three postal unions, and outreach to customers to save USPS from privatization.
Nobody would say the U.S. labor movement is doing well—we’re down to 11.3 percent and concessions are still rampant. But the alarming slide in living standards, while politicians assure us the economy has recovered, has stirred union members, and brought out voters, to demand better.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
DIRECT TO VOTERS
As layers of corporate cash further insulated politicians from people’s needs, unions and worker groups had some success putting questions to voters directly. In New Jersey they overruled the governor’s veto and put a higher state minimum wage into their constitution, while Minnesotans raised income taxes on the well-to-do.
Transportation and hospitality workers at Seattle-Tacoma airport and the surrounding town voted in a $15 minimum, paid sick leave, and the ability to sue if hotels steal tips from banquet workers. In Seattle, socialist Kshama Sawant won a city council seat and shamed the two mayoral candidates into supporting a $15 city minimum.
Minimum wage ballot questions are expected in 2014 in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Massachusetts, where nurses are also running an initiative for safe staffing ratios.
Ohio unions ran independent candidates—after municipal officials tore up an agreement on city contracts and personally scabbed on a Teamster sanitation strike. The labor independents won two dozen city council seats in Lorain and three nearby towns.
With their voting rights under attack, North Carolinians mobilized against an anti-worker (and anti-woman, anti-civil rights) legislative assault by bringing thousands of protesters to the state capitol every week for “Moral Mondays,” with close to a thousand arrests.
Immigration rights activists mobilized locally all year, including brave human blockades against deportations, most recently in Los Angeles, D.C., and New Jersey. But none of this was enough to get a bill through the House—not even the Senate’s compromise, with its poison pill of more indentured guestworkers.
The mother of all secret deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is still under negotiation. TPP would gut nations’ rights to pass legislation limiting corporate predators. But the sheer outrageousness of TPP’s reach, along with the secrecy around it, generated grassroots opposition, including from a few unions. Congress looked likely to vote on a “fast-track” for TPP in January.
NEW METHODS
Unions tried new angles on organizing—some promising, others vaguer.
Some attempted city-wide organizing: in Pittsburgh with a “community union”; in Boston with a multi-campus organizing drive by college adjuncts; and in the Twin Cities, where joint actions knitted together struggles against banks and employers.
Anti-eviction campaigns were bolstered by union support in Minneapolis, Portland, Detroit, and Boston—including by home-based childcare providers, fighting off both eviction and the job loss that would come with it.
Emboldened by the Chicago Teachers’ 2012 strike, teachers rose up against the corporate reform agenda. Seattle teachers refused to give yet another standardized test. Los Angeles teachers fought the promise of iPads for every student, a wedge to bring in more tests and corporate curricula.
Newark teachers elected a slate to fight two-tier and merit pay. Chicago teachers continued to anchor a widening movement against school closings, driving Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s poll numbers down to only 2 percent “strongly approving.”
Labor-community coalitions sometimes won the day. One Brooklyn hospital sits on land coveted by high-end condo developers—a constituency used to getting its way. But rather than give a résumé workshop, the New York State Nurses picketed with the surrounding community and refused to give up even after the bosses re-routed patients… So far they’ve saved the hospital.
Among the fuzzier new directions were the AFL-CIO’s enthusiastic but amorphous outreach to community groups and the UAW’s bid to get Volkswagen to allow organizing at a Tennessee plant—in order to install a German-style “works council” for union-management cooperation. Where’s that leading?
$15: DEMAND OF THE YEAR
The same question came to mind as fast food workers walked out of restaurants—and briefly occupied some—in hundreds of cities in December, in a Service Employees-funded effort. A year of protests and strikes demanding “$15 and a union” have made low wages an issue politicians are finally scrambling to address, or at least explain away.
While the demand for $15 has made a small dent, the demand for a union seems as far off as ever. Between small shops, large turnover, and hostile labor law, signing a contract with McDonald’s or Pizza Hut sounds farfetched.
But fast food workers have been winning small victories: getting workers rehired after retaliatory firings, winning air conditioning in unbearably hot kitchens. In Chicago, Whole Foods workers securing a day off for Thanksgiving by holding “Strikesgiving” on the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
The good old-fashioned strike also worked in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, where Walmart workers unassociated with recent organizing walked out to protest low hours and a tyrannical supervisor. With most of the shift out, management caved to their demands.
ASKING MORE
While retail workers struggled for more hours, others from nurses to postal and UPS workers protested as employers crammed more into those hours.
Auto workers, forced onto an Alternative Work Schedule that obliterates weekends and evades overtime pay, demanded their union fight the schedule. They got no satisfaction, but demanding a higher standard from union officials seemed to be in fashion.
When Machinists union higher-ups, following secret negotiations, pushed surprise mid-contract concessions on 31,000 Boeing workers, the membership tore up the ransom note and said no, two to one. Boeing had threatened to take its new 777X plane out of Washington state if workers didn’t cave. Now a slate is challenging the Machinists’ national leadership.
And a reform slate took over the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, promising transparency in negotiations, a strong 2015 contract fight, cooperation with the other three postal unions, and outreach to customers to save USPS from privatization.
Nobody would say the U.S. labor movement is doing well—we’re down to 11.3 percent and concessions are still rampant. But the alarming slide in living standards, while politicians assure us the economy has recovered, has stirred union members, and brought out voters, to demand better.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/2013/12/2013-review-aiming-higher-labor-tries-...Lean meanness stalked workplaces. The political and economic outlook continued dismal. But the year was marked by workers trying new things and setting higher standards, for their employers, their unions, and—in the case of low-wage workers—their pay.
Unemployment ticked down slightly, but the jobs created paid worse than ever. Mainstream media reported with amazement that jobs that once paid the bills, from bank teller to university instructor, now require food stamps and Medicaid to supplement the wages of those who work every day.
California Walmart worker Anthony Goytia spoke for many when he said it’s no longer paycheck to paycheck for him and his co-workers, but payday loan to payday loan.
When long-awaited provisions of Obamacare kicked in, the promise of covering the uninsured was blighted by perverse incentives for employers to cut hours. Businesses that didn’t want to give insurance cried crocodile tears, so Obama delayed their fines by a year. But when unions objected that the new law unfairly undermined their multi-employer funds, the administration stonewalled.
DIRECT TO VOTERS
As layers of corporate cash further insulated politicians from people’s needs, unions and worker groups had some success putting questions to voters directly. In New Jersey they overruled the governor’s veto and put a higher state minimum wage into their constitution, while Minnesotans raised income taxes on the well-to-do.
Transportation and hospitality workers at Seattle-Tacoma airport and the surrounding town voted in a $15 minimum, paid sick leave, and the ability to sue if hotels steal tips from banquet workers. In Seattle, socialist Kshama Sawant won a city council seat and shamed the two mayoral candidates into supporting a $15 city minimum.
Minimum wage ballot questions are expected in 2014 in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Massachusetts, where nurses are also running an initiative for safe staffing ratios.
Ohio unions ran independent candidates—after municipal officials tore up an agreement on city contracts and personally scabbed on a Teamster sanitation strike. The labor independents won two dozen city council seats in Lorain and three nearby towns.
With their voting rights under attack, North Carolinians mobilized against an anti-worker (and anti-woman, anti-civil rights) legislative assault by bringing thousands of protesters to the state capitol every week for “Moral Mondays,” with close to a thousand arrests.
Immigration rights activists mobilized locally all year, including brave human blockades against deportations, most recently in Los Angeles, D.C., and New Jersey. But none of this was enough to get a bill through the House—not even the Senate’s compromise, with its poison pill of more indentured guestworkers.
The mother of all secret deals, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, is still under negotiation. TPP would gut nations’ rights to pass legislation limiting corporate predators. But the sheer outrageousness of TPP’s reach, along with the secrecy around it, generated grassroots opposition, including from a few unions. Congress looked likely to vote on a “fast-track” for TPP in January.
NEW METHODS
Unions tried new angles on organizing—some promising, others vaguer.
Some attempted city-wide organizing: in Pittsburgh with a “community union”; in Boston with a multi-campus organizing drive by college adjuncts; and in the Twin Cities, where joint actions knitted together struggles against banks and employers.
Anti-eviction campaigns were bolstered by union support in Minneapolis, Portland, Detroit, and Boston—including by home-based childcare providers, fighting off both eviction and the job loss that would come with it.
Emboldened by the Chicago Teachers’ 2012 strike, teachers rose up against the corporate reform agenda. Seattle teachers refused to give yet another standardized test. Los Angeles teachers fought the promise of iPads for every student, a wedge to bring in more tests and corporate curricula.
Newark teachers elected a slate to fight two-tier and merit pay. Chicago teachers continued to anchor a widening movement against school closings, driving Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s poll numbers down to only 2 percent “strongly approving.”
Labor-community coalitions sometimes won the day. One Brooklyn hospital sits on land coveted by high-end condo developers—a constituency used to getting its way. But rather than give a résumé workshop, the New York State Nurses picketed with the surrounding community and refused to give up even after the bosses re-routed patients… So far they’ve saved the hospital.
Among the fuzzier new directions were the AFL-CIO’s enthusiastic but amorphous outreach to community groups and the UAW’s bid to get Volkswagen to allow organizing at a Tennessee plant—in order to install a German-style “works council” for union-management cooperation. Where’s that leading?
$15: DEMAND OF THE YEAR
The same question came to mind as fast food workers walked out of restaurants—and briefly occupied some—in hundreds of cities in December, in a Service Employees-funded effort. A year of protests and strikes demanding “$15 and a union” have made low wages an issue politicians are finally scrambling to address, or at least explain away.
While the demand for $15 has made a small dent, the demand for a union seems as far off as ever. Between small shops, large turnover, and hostile labor law, signing a contract with McDonald’s or Pizza Hut sounds farfetched.
But fast food workers have been winning small victories: getting workers rehired after retaliatory firings, winning air conditioning in unbearably hot kitchens. In Chicago, Whole Foods workers securing a day off for Thanksgiving by holding “Strikesgiving” on the busiest grocery shopping day of the year.
The good old-fashioned strike also worked in Hialeah Gardens, Florida, where Walmart workers unassociated with recent organizing walked out to protest low hours and a tyrannical supervisor. With most of the shift out, management caved to their demands.
ASKING MORE
While retail workers struggled for more hours, others from nurses to postal and UPS workers protested as employers crammed more into those hours.
Auto workers, forced onto an Alternative Work Schedule that obliterates weekends and evades overtime pay, demanded their union fight the schedule. They got no satisfaction, but demanding a higher standard from union officials seemed to be in fashion.
When Machinists union higher-ups, following secret negotiations, pushed surprise mid-contract concessions on 31,000 Boeing workers, the membership tore up the ransom note and said no, two to one. Boeing had threatened to take its new 777X plane out of Washington state if workers didn’t cave. Now a slate is challenging the Machinists’ national leadership.
And a reform slate took over the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, promising transparency in negotiations, a strong 2015 contract fight, cooperation with the other three postal unions, and outreach to customers to save USPS from privatization.
Nobody would say the U.S. labor movement is doing well—we’re down to 11.3 percent and concessions are still rampant. But the alarming slide in living standards, while politicians assure us the economy has recovered, has stirred union members, and brought out voters, to demand better.
Man Dresses as Boss for Halloween, and Suffers the Conquences
A man who dressed up as his boss at a company Halloween party tells Salon the stunt got him interrogated and suspended for four days – and he has a tape recording to back him up.
“It was meant to be satirical, meant to be fun,” said Bo Whitener, who ships products from a Georgia distribution center for the pharmaceutical company McKesson. He told Salon the stunt was “really a way to come out and say we’re here and we mean business.” The company did not respond to requests for comment regarding the incident or the audio recording.
The costume saga started when Whitener, a leader in a still-ongoing effort to win Teamsters union representation at the Georgia facility, showed up to a McKesson Halloween party dressed up as company CEO John Hammergren. Whitener told Salon he gave out chocolate coins and told co-workers, “You’re not going to get any money here until you get a union.” (Reuters reported that Hammergren’s compensation — including “a $159 million lump-sum pension payment” if he retired — stirred controversy at McKesson’s July shareholder meeting.)
Whitener said fellow employees “were thrilled with it.” But Whitener and the Teamsters allege management ejected him from the party with a threat to call the police, and then interrogated and suspended him once he returned to work — only bringing him back after the union filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
An audio recording provided to Salon by the Teamsters captures what the union says is a Nov. 4 meeting between Whitener and McKesson assistant director of operations Peter Maxfield. Over the course of the conversation, which lasts over an hour, Whitener is told, “I thought you had a pretty good costume” but “what I’ve heard is that, you know, the costume was disrespectful, demeaning of one’s character.” He is asked a series of questions about his Halloween stunt. Among them:
“Tell me a little bit about what happened at the costume contest.”
“How did that [referencing Hammergren’s annual salary] incorporate into your character? … What did you personally say?”
“Can you give me an example of something you said in there?”
“How did your colleagues take it? … Did they think it was funny?”
“Were people laughing?”
“How many people did you talk to?”
Remembering Ron Carey
December 11, 2013: Five years ago today, Ron Carey, the first democratically-elected General President of the Teamsters, passed away.
Fast Food Workers Strike In Day of Protest
December 5, 2013: Today fast food workers went on a one-day strike demanding higher pay in more than 50 cities across the country.
The growing “Fight for $15” movement is mobilizing fast food workers and their allies in labor and the community to demand an end to dead-end, poverty-level wages and that the $200 billion-a-year industry provide living wages to its hundreds of thousands of workers in the fast food sector.
Click here to read a report on today’s strike from Labor Notes.
Making Change at Walmart
It's on – this Thursday, fast food workers like me are going on strike across the country.
And it’s going to be bigger than ever before, with community members joining us at protests and rallies in hundreds of cities across the country!
Find out if there’s a rally near you and sign-up to show up on Thursday. Together, we’ll send the fast food giants a loud and clear message.
I’m going on strike because I can’t make ends meet for me and my 12-year old boy on the $8.35 I make at McDonald’s – it’s just 10 cents more than minimum wage here in Peoria, Illinois.
I’m striking because not only can McDonald’s afford to pay us more, but time and time again they’ve shown just how out of touch they are with what it’s like to work for them – and try scrape by on poverty wages.
And we’re ALL going on strike because we know that folks like you are right there with us. We couldn’t do it without you: join me and say “I’m in!” for Thursday’s nationwide strike and protests!
The outpouring of support we’ve seen so far has been amazing, but we’re only getting started. As we get ready to walk off our jobs again we need you to have our backs.
We’ll be in touch with what’s next,
Maria Trisler
Low Pay is Not OK
P.S. If you can’t make it to a rally on Thursday, you can still say you’re with us. Tell the fast food chains it’s time to pay $15 an hour and spread the word after you have.
Protesting Poverty Wages at Walmart
November 25, 2013: Walmart workers and their supporters are planning to kick off this year's holiday shopping season with protests at 1,500 Walmart stores around the country on Black Friday.
Last year, 30,000 supporters participated in Black Friday actions at Walmart and workers walked off the job in 46 states, according to OUR Walmart, the union-backed group that is organizing the actions.
This year, Our Walmart is hoping for even more supporters to turn out.
Click here to find a Black Friday Protest near you.
Walmart made $17 billion in profit last year—but pays wages that are so low that the Walmart store in Canton, Ohio organized a food drive so that their “associates” could have Thanksgiving Dinner.
Most Walmart store employees make less than $25,000 per year, just over the poverty line which is set at $23,550 for a family of four. Walmart defines a “full-time job” as 34 hours a week.
Low wages at just a single Walmart store could cost taxpayers $900,000 per year, because workers use social safety net programs like food stamps and government subsidized health care to make ends meet, according to a May study from congressional Democrats.
Protests have already been in several cities this month. In Los Angeles, more than 50 Walmart workers and supporters were arrested in what organizers described as the largest single act of civil disobedience in the retailer’s history.
Last week the National Labor Relations Board charged Walmart with violating labor law, for the retaliations.