Drivers who move Asian goods from southern California docks pulled a 36-hour strike ending today, charging three employers with unfair labor practices including retaliation for organizing.

Port truckers in the huge L.A.-Long Beach ports are largely immigrants. Most lease their vehicles from the companies that employ them, with payments deducted from their paychecks. Also deducted are charges for parking, diesel fuel, and insurance, including insurance on the cargo.

“Last Friday I only got less than $200,” striker Daniel Linares said, “for working six days a week, from early in the morning to 4 or 5 in the afternoon.”

Sometimes he makes $400-$500, he said, but even so, “this job is a sweatshop on trucks. It’s a miserable wage, not even close to a living wage. The company is making millions of dollars and giving us crumbles.”

One of the companies, Pac 9 Transportation, was also charged with falsely claiming that its employees are independent contractors. Standing in front of the Pac 9 entrance an hour before his shift would have begun, Linares explained there’s nothing independent about his relationship with management.

“We are under dispatch,” he said. “They give us a load, we go to the port and get the load. We have to take that to a destination [a warehouse or railyard]. They give us another load to take from that destination to the port. They keep us back and forth.

“When we are stuck inside the port, they don’t let us leave the port.”

Pac 9 drivers have filed claims with the California Labor Commission charging the company with essentially stealing more than $7 million that should have been wages. They are striking to demand the company recognize them as employees, so they can unionize with the Teamsters.

Strikers at Green Fleet Systems and American Logistics, who are employees, are already organizing with the Teamsters. They say management has retaliated with harassment, which is illegal. Workers at all three companies have filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.

A Minority

As in the Walmart and fast food strikes that have captured the attention of labor activists this year, today’s port trucking strikers are a small minority of the workforce. Linares, who is from El Salvador, estimated that 15 of the about 150 drivers at his company would strike. “The rest say we are dreamers,” he said. “They say we are crazy fighting for our rights.” The Teamsters said about 100 drivers were striking altogether.

He said strikers planned to picket at the company entrance yesterday to delay fellow drivers from entering but not actually block them. Today, strikers planned to escalate by following trucks as they left the port and to throw up picket lines when the trucks stopped—reviving the “ambulatory picketing” used by the Teamsters in their decisive 1934 general strike in Minneapolis.

Because he’s paid by the load, Linares says, Pac 9 dispatchers are indifferent when he’s stuck inside the port for five or six hours, waiting for containers to be moved from ship to truck, making no money: “I call the company and say I’m stuck, two hours passed and I haven’t been served. They tell me to stay.”

And why is service sometimes slow inside the ports? In Linares’s view, it’s because the union members there have control over their work. “They’re hourly,” he explained. “They have unions and good benefits and everything.”

Apparently “being your own boss” is not the American dream these immigrants came seeking. Strikers are just looking for a chance to join the proletariat.

For more detail on the strike and on port truckers’ conditions, read here. For more on misclassification of employees as independent contractors, where immigrants are again the victims, read here.

Making Change at Walmart, a coalition of Walmart associates, small business owners, religious leaders and other members of the community that are fighting to make change at the nation's largest employer, announced today the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will prosecute Walmart for its "widespread violations of its workers’ rights." The decision will provide additional protection for Walmart’s 1.3 million employees when they are speaking out for better jobs and working conditions. 

The coalition was advised Monday that the NLRB ‘s General Counsel  is prepared to prosecute a complaint against Walmart for illegal firings and disciplinary actions involving more than 117 workers, including those who went on strike last June.

The decision addresses allegations of threats by managers and the company’s national spokesperson discouraging workers from striking and illegal disciplinary actions against workers who were on legally protected strikes. Workers could win back pay, reinstatement and the reversal of disciplinary actions as a result of the decision; and Walmart could be required to inform and educate all employees of their legally protected rights.

“The Board’s decision confirms what Walmart workers have long known: the company is illegally trying to silence employees who speak out for better jobs,” said Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs With Justice and American Rights at Work. “Americans believe that we have the responsibility – and the right – to speak out against corporate abuses of workers, and this proves we’re finally being heard, and making kinks in Walmart’s armor. Customers, clergy and community members from across the country are standing with Walmart workers bravely calling for better jobs and a stronger economy for all of us.”

UFCW International President Joseph Hansen agreed with Gupta:

Today, the government confirmed it will prosecute Walmart for illegally firing and disciplining workers who just exercised their rights.  Quite frankly, enough is enough. Walmart workers are sick and tired of empty statements and unenforced policies and it is time for Walmart to obey the law.

The decision was a response to charges filed last year against Walmart managers who threatened and discouraged workers from going on legally-protected strikes as well as illegal firings and disciplinary actions stemming from a protest at the company's June shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Tiffany Beroid, a Walmart worker from Laurel, Md., explained why the workers are standing up:

Working at the largest employer in the country should mean making a decent living. Those days are long gone. Walmart continues to show that it’s afraid to have real conversations about creating better jobs, but would rather scare us into silence. But change at Walmart is too important to our economy and for our families for us to stop speaking out.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said he was proud that AFL-CIO is committed to supporting the brave Walmart workers who are standing up for their rights:

Walmart and the Walton family will have a choice: they can choose to stand with the American people and strengthen our economy or continue a race-to-the-bottom business model that hurts workers and our economy.  They can choose to honor their workers' rights; to ask Walmart to publicly commit to improving working conditions or continue their pattern unlawful retaliation against those who speak out.

Meanwhile in L.A., truck drivers went on strike against Walmart and other companies for similarly denying rights to their employees, including misclassifying workers and firing union activists, in the latest wave of actions against the retail giant.

Don't forget to check out  www.BlackFridayProtests.org.

Rhode Island Hospital worker Nick Williams was so angry that his new supervisor was his union business agent’s brother that he came home from work and Googled “Teamsters 251 sucks.” And that was the turning point that led to rank-and-file Teamsters taking over the local that covers all of Rhode Island.

Williams had found the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) website run by two 251 rank-and-filers. On October 31 all 10 candidates on their slate, United Action, were elected, with about 53 percent of the vote. They won despite an entrenched leadership group that had been in office since 1993—and despite threats by a Teamsters International vice president who said on YouTube, “They need to be punished.”

The 5,200 members of Local 251 work at dozens of employers, but more than 2,000 of them are the non-nursing staff at Rhode Island Hospital. At the local’s second-largest employer, UPS, two drivers had toiled for years, opposing bad contracts, organizing members to turn down excessive overtime, and running, unsuccessfully, a partial slate in 2007.

But the two drivers, Matt Taibi and Matt Maini, hadn't cracked the hospital. Until Williams joined their team.

Williams describes the state of the union at the hospital as “in bed with management.” Business agents would, with the collusion of managers, create well-paid jobs for their friends—sometimes even “no-show” jobs whose duties did not include reporting for work.

When the contract was near expiration, and its last and largest raise was due, BA’s would simply sign away the raise with a Memorandum of Agreement that members weren’t allowed to see, in violation of the Teamsters constitution.

Maini said the hospital had fired more than 400 workers in two years—and the union always advised members who were up for termination to resign. “Everyone knew someone who got screwed by the BA,” Williams said.

“The hospital had essentially been taken for granted by the local for 20 years,” said Taibi, who will be the union’s new top officer, secretary-treasurer, come January 1.

HE’S BACK

The person who’d originally brought the union to the hospital, back in 1993, was Paul Santos, who worked in the shipping department. Santos had been a steward but resigned, disillusioned. Most people at the hospital saw him as the person they trusted most on union questions.

Sandra Cabral, who works with medical records, says she “never cared for the union because I felt I was paying monthly for favoritism.” In January this year she was approached by a co-worker about TDU. She was interested off the bat, but “when she told me Paul was involved, I said I’m going to check this out.”

After Santos joined the dissidents, TDU grew from 10 members in the local to 100. Santos will be Local 251 president.

Early this year, the TDUers collected signatures for three bylaw changes. They wanted elected stewards, rather than appointed; elected rank-and-file members on negotiating committees; and any increase in officers’ salaries to be voted on by the membership.

Secretary-Treasurer Joe Bairos enjoyed combined salaries of $187,999 last year, from the local, the New England Joint Council, and the international union, as well as a car and an expense account.

The February union meeting saw 600 or 700 people come to debate the bylaws—up from a usual attendance of 40. More than 800 came to the March meeting, and had to vote in shifts, chanting about solidarity and democracy in the parking lot.

Because the incumbents mobilized, too, the bylaw changes won a majority but not the required two-thirds.

MISTAKEN IDENTITY

The next phase of the United Action campaign, with Williams as manager, brought 300 to 500 members each to a meatball dinner, a comedy night fundraiser, a picnic.

Williams says that when they’d go to neglected companies to campaign, the members would be hostile, thinking they were from the union. “But when they heard what we had to say, out of 130 in that barn, we got 100 for our email list,” he said.

The insurgents had the advantage of help from a TDU staffer on campaign strategy and logistics and from a TDU attorney who more than once backed the incumbents down from illegal actions.

After they take office the new officers will cut their salaries to free up $250,000 a year for member education and training, Taibi said. They will reintroduce the bylaw changes and plan an aggressive contract campaign at Rhode Island Hospital next year.

Cabral, soon to be recording secretary, is in charge of setting up a women’s committee. She says she wants to see hospital housekeepers—mostly women—receive equal pay with the men in environmental services.

At UPS, where 10- to 12-hour days are the norm for drivers, Matt Maini, the new BA, will organize members to enforce their contractual right to work only 9.5.

Maini has two back surgeries and a hip replacement to show for his long days and 21 years at UPS.

“If you’d asked me 15 years ago, I'd say this would never happen,” he said. “But we decided we were going to dedicate our lives to making this a real union for the members.”

New Jersey voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly supported a $1 increase in the minimum wage, to $8.25 an hour, and amended the state constitution to lock in automatic increases tied to inflation.

With 64 percent of the vote in, 60 percent of voters were saying “yes” to the question, according to The Associated Press.  

Advocates of a higher wage praised the vote as a victory for low-wage workers, and said giving them extra spending power would stimulate the state economy. But opponents said the automatic raises, in particular, would dampen economic activity and job growth by increasing employers’ costs.

“New Jersey’s voters should be thanked tonight for understanding that the state’s low-wage workers need more than $7.25 an hour to survive in this high-cost state,” said Gordon MacInnes, president of the progressive group New Jersey Policy Perspective.

But John Holub, president of the New Jersey Retail Merchants Association, said that the automatic cost-of-living increases could be a problem if 1970s-style high inflation ever returns.

“We could have hyperinflation, and businesses will be hit with significant increases in wage costs when the economy is struggling,” Holub said. “But it’ll be in the constitution, and the Legislature wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.”

“We predict that raising the minimum wage automatically every year is going to result in losses for small businesses, so we’re really disappointed,” said Laurie Ehlbeck, director of the New Jersey office of the National Federation of Independent Business.

MacInnes said New Jersey is the 20th state to establish a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 and the 11th state to tie future increases automatically to rising costs of living.

As MacInnes suggested, the New Jersey battle reflected a larger movement — both nationally and around the world — to significantly increase the wages of the lowest-paid workers.

President Obama and congressional Democrats support a higher minimum wage, and California, Connecticut, New York and Rhode Island all raised their minimums this year. Minimum-wage campaigns are under way in Canada, Poland, Romania, Germany and India.

As middle-class jobs were lost during the recession, the number of Americans working in minimum-wage jobs more than doubled from 2007 and 2012. About 3.6 million workers, or 4.7 percent of the 75.3 million hourly workers in the country, made the minimum wage in 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Holub, of the merchants’ group, said his members already generally pay more than the minimum wage — typically at least $10 an hour. Retailers, he said, could have lived with a law mandating an increase of $1 spread over three years, as Governor Christie suggested after vetoing a bill earlier this year to raise the minimum wage. But he said: “The minimum wage has no business being in the state constitution.”

The state office of the National Federation of Independent Business, which has 7,000 members in New Jersey, said that research by its Washington office found that the wage increase would cost the state 31,000 jobs, more than wiping out any economic benefit from increased spending by low-income workers.

But Steven Pressman, an economics professor at Monmouth University, said a study of New Jersey’s 1992 minimum-wage hike found that there was no net negative impact on employment.

MacInnes said that automatic wage increases will ensure that low-income workers won’t lose ground because of inflation. According to his policy group, the wage increase would affect 11 percent of the state’s workforce: 241,000 who currently earn $7.25 to $8.25 an hour and 188,000 who earn $8.25 and $9.25 and would likely receive a pay bump.

New Jersey raised its minimum to $7.15 an hour in 2006; it rose again in July 2009 when the federal minimum wage was raised to $7.25. States are not allowed to set rates lower than the federal minimum.

Interviewed at a polling place in Lynd¬hurst, Elaine Benecki, 70, said she voted for the increase because she knows what it is to work for low pay. She worked at a bagel store for $7.50 an hour at the age of 68.

“I had to work. I needed the money,” Benecki said. “But the pay was so low! It barely helped me at all. So, yes, I voted for the minimum wage. No one should have to work that hard for so little money.”

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate took the final measure to restore the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to full strength with its approval of Richard F. Griffin Jr. as general counsel. Though Griffin's start date has yet to be determined, his instatement marks the last step in the board's resumption of its role as the principal agency of the federal government for settling labor-management disputes in the private sector. Given Griffin's long history as a union lawyer, his confirmation also signifies a rare victory for organized labor on Captol Hill.

The Senate action brings to a close a nearly two-year struggle between the White House and Senate Republicans over nominations to the labor board. The partisan bitterness—which is likely to continue—was reflected in Tuesday’s 55-44 vote, in which Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was the only Republican to back Griffin's appointment.

Griffin’s nomination will likely go down in NLRB history as one of the most unusual, not so much for his official actions but for the partisan rancor and legal maneuvering that accompanied his selection.

Griffin's contentious confirmation process was part of a deal struck in July to end a standoff between Republicans and Democrats over a number of disputed Obama nominations, including Secretary of the Department Labor and Environmental Protection Agency administrator. The deal saw the NLRB restored to its full capacity of five board members (three Democrats and two Republicans), with the delayed confirmation of Griffin as general counsel, who acts as a sort of chief prosecutor for the agency.

Along with fellow nominee Sharon Block, Griffin was originally named as a board member by President Obama in early 2012 in a “recess appointment” that did not require Senate confirmation. But Senate Republicans objected strongly that such appointments were unconstitutional and backed the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's court challenge of them. The Chamber’s challenge was successful: A federal district court ruled in January of this year that the appointments were illegal. The White House, however, continues to insist on the validity of the nominations, and the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to rule on the issue next year.

Throughout the process, much of the focus has been on Griffin as a supposed symbol of Obama’s pro-union sympathies. Formerly the top lawyer for the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), Griffin has been a lifelong advocate for the rights of union members. He had been involved in many aspects of the union’s affairs, including arguing cases at the NLRB. And while not especially prominent in Washington, D.C. labor circles, Griffin is seen by opponents as emblematic of "big labor"—so much so that Griffin’s continued presence on the NLRB itself became a political impossibility, remarks former chairman William B. Gould IV, who served on the board in the 1990s. As part of the political bargain between Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to break the overall impasse about nominations, McConnell and other Republicans insisted that both Griffin and Block resign their seats.

But in a little-noticed addendum alongside the wider-ranging negotiations, top Senate Republicans reportedly agreed to confirm Griffin as general counsel later in the year. “I think this is [a] real testament to Sen. Reid’s tactical skill to get Griffin approved [as general counsel]. Going back to the time when I served on the board in the 1990s, there was no way we could have ever gotten a labor union lawyer confirmed as general counsel. It just would have been politically impossible; it just couldn’t be discussed,” Gould says.

Gould adds the general counsel’s position is one of “great power and responsibility.” In his new role, Gould points out, Griffin has the power both to issue unfair labor practice complaints against employers or unions and to prevent such complaints from being made. "That’s a significant power, and as a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate, he can’t be fired by the NLRB chairman or even be ordered by the chairman to take specific actions," he continues. Further, the general counsel has major influence over the future direction of the NLRB by controlling the hiring of new staff, both at the D.C. headquarters and at the agency’s regional offices, Gould said.

Communications Workers of America CWA) President Larry Cohen welcomed the confirmation, saying, "Richard Griffin will be a strong advocate for workers' rights, and we look to him and this board to help restore” the agency as a place where workers' rights are given full legal protection.

Cohen was organized labor’s point person in the fight in the Senate concerning the other nominations. He continues in that role as a partner in The Democracy Initiative, a coalition of labor, environmental and progressive policy groups dedicated to reforming Senate rules so that presidential appointments can no longer be easily blocked by opponents in the Senate. The group has now turned its attention to several controversial appointments to federal judgeships.

Gould predicts, however, that the NLRB will continue to be a flash point in the political contest between Republicans and Democrats. “Unfortunately, it's likely that Republicans will continue to vilify Griffin and the board in general. They have gone too far down that road to turn back now.”

A diverse slate of local leaders pledging to take a firmer hand with management, increase transparency about contract details, collaborate with other postal unions and community groups, and mobilize members has just won national leadership of the American Postal Workers Union.

The Members First Team, headed by now President-Elect Mark Dimondstein, won seven of the nine seats it contested, the APWU announced last night.

The stakes couldn't be higher for postal workers, who are battling wave after wave of attacks—post offices and sorting plants closing, work privatizing, delivery standards eroding. The latest nasty bill pending in Congress would kill Saturday letter delivery, replace door-to-door with curbside and neighborhood "cluster box" service, and ban workers' time-honored no-layoff clause from future contracts.

"We're at a crossroads," said Dimondstein before the election. "At the core of this whole struggle is whether the post office is going to be decisively privatized and turned over to profit-making entities and low-paid, non-union jobs—or remain a public entity that serves all the people and maintains good-paying union jobs."

Along with Dimondstein, winning members of the slate were Debby Szeredy for executive vice president, Tony McKinnon for industrial relations director, John Marcotte for legislative/political director, Anna Smith for organization director, Kennith Beasley for Southern region coordinator, and Clint Burelson for clerk division director. Their three-year term begins November 12.

"We have not seen anybody at this point able to stop the postmaster general," said Szeredy, a local president in Mid-Hudson Valley, New York, who has organized other local leaders to oppose plant closures.

Plus, the union made dramatic concessions in 2010—including a three-tier system that funnels new hires into low-paid, perma-temp positions.

"It's a regressive contract that takes us back 30 or 40 years," said McKinnon, a local president in Fayetteville, North Carolina. "We have to try to stop the bleeding." The new team will bargain the 2015 contract.

Dimondstein was president of his Greensboro, North Carolina, local for 12 years and an APWU lead organizer for a decade. More recently he co-founded an area Jobs with Justice chapter and a local community-postal worker coalition.

THREE-TIER CONTRACT

APWU's members include nearly 200,000 maintenance workers, truck drivers, and clerks, whose jobs range from processing mail in plants to selling stamps in post offices. Three other unions represent the rest of the workforce, including letter carriers and mail handlers.

Unlike in many unions, APWU's rank and file directly elects national officers via mail ballots. Twenty-five percent of eligible members and retirees voted.

Temp workers, now called "postal support employees," were finally made union members in the last contract, but their jobs are still bad—low wages, weak benefits, little job security—and their ranks grew to about 16 percent of the APWU workforce. All new hires must now come in that way, at $12 to $15.85 per hour.

The federal hiring preference traditionally made USPS a place for veterans to find decent, unionized work. But the PSE track makes that option less desirable. Even in Fayetteville, home to Fort Bragg, a recent orientation of 120 included only four or five vets, McKinnon said.

The new middle tier lowered wages for career employees. A full-timer at Level 6 used to start at over $40,000 a year; that fell to $35,000, assuming a 40-hour week. And 30 hours can now be considered "nontraditional full time" (a way around caps on the numbers of part-timers)—so a "full-time" hire could start at just over $26,000.

Still, outgoing President Cliff Guffey said the contract "made progress" on the top issues: maintaining benefits and layoff protections, and winning modest raises for existing members. "It may not seem like much," he wrote on the incumbents' campaign website, but workers in other industries have less.

After APWU agreed to the three tiers, the Postal Service went after the other three other postal unions for the same concessions—but the Letter Carriers and Mail Handlers fought it to arbitration. In the end arbitrators imposed a version of two-tier, but both unions got better deals than APWU: new hires start lower than current letter carriers and mail handlers, but their top pay is the same.

"The union should never be selling short the coming generation," Dimondstein said. "We should always be looking to uplift and advance."

THE PEOPLE MOVE CONGRESS

For now, there aren't many new career positions to be had, anyway—as plants and post offices close (or "consolidate") and displaced members bump into available slots. The Members First Team argued national leaders haven't been doing enough to help locals fight.

"I think they've given up," Szeredy said. "We can't just sit back and say it's over."

Szeredy's plant is one of 55 on the chopping block this round. The cuts don't even make sense financially, she said: USPS is "spending money like water" on renovations to prepare for the shuffle. Trucking mail farther will create a domino effect of delays and pile up overtime costs.

She contacted union leaders at the other targeted plants, filed a complaint with the Postal Regulatory Commission, and brought her congressman to testify.

But despite Szeredy's efforts and other pockets of resistance around the country—a tent city in Berkeley, a plant sit-in in Salem, Oregon—the cuts are mostly steamrolling ahead.

Putting the brakes on will require congressional action, since USPS's supposed financial woes are Congress's fault. They're an accounting fiction, the result of a 2006 law requiring retiree health benefits to be funded 75 years ahead.

Fix-it bills languish in committee. APWU leaders' drumbeat message: lobby. Guffey touted the union's "unparalleled media campaign—complete with T.V. ads."

'CAUSE SOME TROUBLE'

Dimondstein wants to unite "retirees, seniors, even business organizations, civil rights organizations, veterans' groups, and so on, to build a movement to defend the post office—because we think Congress moves when the people move."

Such an alliance should defend not only good jobs, but also the democratic mission of the Postal Service, said Burelson, a local president in Olympia, Washington. It could demand that USPS reduce onerous postage rates for small and nonprofit mailers and offer secure, affordable email access to the public.

Despite calls from member activists, the four postal unions haven't staged national action together since 2011. Guffey has "openly abdicated the fight to save six-day delivery," seeing it as a letter carriers' issue, Dimondstein said. "The idea that we have different fights, it's the classic divide and conquer."

Slate members, all officers in state or local APWU chapters, traveled the country on their own dime to talk to members at plant gates.

Past President William Burrus, who retired in 2010, endorsed them. Burrus has been publicly critical of the contract his successor negotiated, especially the reduced wages for the next generation of career employees.

Retirees made up about 20 percent of eligible voters. Vital issues facing them, Dimondstein said, include a looming assault on the federal employee health plan and "defending six-day delivery—which all of us need as customers, and the older we get the more we need it."

"We always talk about what we want, but how are we going to get it?" Burelson said. "Historically you get it by causing trouble in some way."

An Indiana judge Sept. 5 ruled that the state's right-to-work law is unconstitutional, as it compels unions to provide services to workers who do not pay for those services (Sweeney v. Zoeller, Ind. Super. Ct., No. 45D01-1305-PL-52, order 9/5/13).

Attorney General Greg Zoeller (R) plans to appeal the ruling to the Indiana Supreme Court, a spokesman said.

Lake County Superior Court Judge John Sedia found that the 2012 law violates Article I, Section 21, of the Indiana Constitution, which forbids a “person's particular service” from being “demanded without just compensation.” He dismissed other counts in the lawsuit, brought by Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers.

“The services provided by a union in representing employees include negotiating and enforcing collective bargaining agreements,” which are paid for “by the payment of dues, and are not something required generally of all citizens,” Sedia wrote. “In fact, federal law ensures that nonmembers who obtain the benefits of union representation can be made to pay for them.” The right-to-work law, he added, makes it “a criminal offense for a union to receive just compensation for particular services federal law demands it provide to employees.”

“The Indiana Attorney General's Office will aggressively defend the authority of the people's elected representatives in the Legislature as we successfully defended this same statute from the same plaintiff who challenged it in federal court,” Bryan Corbin, a spokesman for Zoeller, said in a statement Sept. 10.

A federal judge in January dismissed a separate lawsuit brought by IUOE, saying the legislature was within its rights to make the policy judgment to pass the law.

Sedia dismissed the union's claims that the law deprives members of equal protection rights, that it infringes on free speech rights by diverting resources to representation of nonpaying individuals, and that it is an ex post facto law.

Ruling Called Victory for Middle Class

“This is a huge victory for the middle class,” James Sweeney, president and business manager of Local 150, said in a Sept. 8 statement. “These laws are nothing but thinly veiled tools to weaken unions, and this is a big win for workers who rely on unions to provide decent wages and benefits.”

“Considering who wanted ‘right-to-work’ enacted, it is no surprise that their top lawyer wants to go straight to the Supreme Court,” House Minority Leader Scott Pelath (D) said in a Sept. 10 statement. “The powers who bullied Indiana into this law are not going to give back the lunch money just because the playground supervisor said so.”

“Right to work has not worked,” Pelath said, adding that Indiana's unemployment rate remains high, wages lag those of other states, and the state has not become the “haven for job creation” promised when the law was signed. “We should use this ruling to dump the law for the second time in our state's history,” he said. “I have no faith in what our highest court will do here, but I will never stop reminding the people of Indiana what ‘right-to-work’ has done and who wanted it.”

Senate President Pro Tempore David Long said called the ruling “troubling on several fronts,” and said he is “confident” the state's law will be upheld by the Supreme Court.

For one thing, “the court appears to have based its ruling upon the argument that unions must represent all workers within a workplace even if some of those workers aren't union members,” Long said in a Sept. 10 statement. “However, federal law controls in this area, and clearly states that a union is not required to be the sole bargaining representative for a group of workers, and that the union can freely choose, and limit, who it represents.” He also noted that federal courts have upheld the law.

The ruling “shows there are good arguments against” right-to-work laws, David Orentlicher, a professor at Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney School of Law, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 10. It remains to be seen whether the challenge holds up in the state supreme court, which will have to decide whether a union can invoke the constitutional protection afforded a “person,” as well as whether Indiana's protection applies to the federal law that requires the union to provide services to nonunion employees, he said.

Indiana's right-to-work law prohibits parties to a collective bargaining agreement from requiring workers to become or remain union members or to pay union dues or fees. The law remains in effect while the case is being appealed.

August 30, 2013: Labor activists got an early start on Labor Day weekend this year—from fast food strikers to Teamsters standing up to contract givebacks.

Fast-food workers launched a one-day national strike to demand a living wage and the right for form unions. This as the largest Fast Food strike in U.S. history

We celebrated the 50th Anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom and union members and community organizations marched on Washington again demanding equality, jobs, voting rights, and more.

The Teamster rank-and-file is keeping the Labor Day spirit alive and well in our union—by standing up to corporate greed, benefit cuts and contract givebacks.

ABF Teamsters in the Central Region voted down their contract supplement for the second time.

UPS Teamsters are preparing for second contract votes in the Central Region, Southwest, Philadelphia and New Jersey and are organizing to stop healthcare cuts and win contract improvements.

UPS Freight Teamsters rejected their contract too and members are passing out stickers, leaflets, and petitions to keep building solidarity.

Retirees and active members are working with TDU to form a Teamster Pension Defense Committee to challenge legislative attacks on multi-employer pension funds.

Rank-and-file Teamsters and other working people are stepping up and standing together for a better future. That's something to celebrate this Labor Day.

Thousands of fast food workers walked off their jobs in 58 U.S. cities yesterday, an indictment of an economy that’s producing little more than McJobs. Some picket lines turned into temporary occupations, and several stores closed.

From a McDonald’s in Peoria, Illinois, to a Burger King in Durham, North Carolina, the one-day strikes hit businesses in dozens of new cities and towns. Organizers estimated a thousand restaurants were affected.

It was a significant escalation: previous fast food strikes had hit eight cities.

The strikes shut down some restaurants. In others only a few workers walked off the job, leaving managers scrambling to fill shifts. A Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Seattle was staffed entirely by managers and had to suspend deliveries, while a Burger King in Houston closed for lunch when most of the shift joined the picket line.

In Memphis, 50 workers and supporters picketed a McDonald’s as cars honked and pedestrians shouted their support. “McDonald’s makes $5 billion a year,” said Anthony Cathey, a striker from the store. “They treat us like slaves. We can't make ends meet.”

Another striker, Latoya Jones, said, “I’ve been here almost a year; $7.25 is not a living wage. I’m a single mom with three kids. I’m living paycheck to paycheck.”

In New York, workers picketing a midtown McDonald’s were joined by politicians and sympathetic clergy.

“They’re not letting workers that have been there awhile get enough hours,” striking Bronx worker Bianka Ramirez told the crowd of 300. If corporate managers had to work in her store, she said, “before long I guarantee they’d be asking for $15 and a union.”

Keeping Your Job

Laws on strikes have become so anemic that they provide workers hardly any protection. Only if strikes are primarily to protest a narrow range of “unfair labor practices” does the law protect workers from being “permanently replaced,” a euphemism for fired. (Wage theft doesn’t count as a ULP, and neither does discrimination or sexual harassment.)

The organizers of the strikes for “$15 and a union” have not spent much time emphasizing the ULP angle. An online “how to go on strike” kit includes a letter to the boss explaining that the one-day strike is “to demand a $15 an hour wage, for the right to join a union without intimidation, and to protest interference with our protected workplace rights…” But many signs don’t claim the strikes as ULP-related.

This direct approach has its advantages. For one, it doesn’t muddy the water with labor board jargon that could distract from the main point. Workers know they’re out for more money and a say on the job. And arguably, not much is lost—since the board, at best, takes years to reinstate workers illegally fired.

Instead, the fast food workers have relied on community supporters, including city council members or clergy, to walk them back into their jobs after striking. This approach has had a great deal of success so far in minimizing the risk of getting—or staying—fired. In St. Louis, for example, workers fired for striking were quickly reinstated after community delegations brought pressure.

The crowd briefly occupied the restaurant, then marched downtown to picket another. Strikers from across the city converged at an afternoon rally at Union Square where hundreds of fast food workers were addressed by more politicians and union leaders.

Not all large cities had large strikes. In Los Angeles, a crowd of 300 union members and supporters assembled outside a McDonald’s, but only a few were striking workers. They marched to a Subway and briefly occupied it; managers and employees hid in the back.

In Seattle, by contrast, workers struck around 30 locations, including Jimmy John’s, Subway, and Specialty’s Café and Bakery. A Qdoba Mexican Grill was entirely shut down when a crowd occupied the store. A Subway was unable to stay open because of a large crowd out front.

Striking Seattle workers started the morning fanning out to restaurants to try to convince more co-workers to walk out. They were often successful if they had already discussed the strike. Few to none walked out without earlier discussion, however.

Going Nowhere

Striking workers are winning the PR war. They shone a spotlight on McDonald’s much-ridiculed budgeting tool—the second line of which assumed the worker they were “helping” with their budget had a second job.

When confronted about its low wages, McDonald’s blames franchise owners. But when asked about the roughly 20 percent of stores it runs directly, company flacks acknowledge workers there also start at minimum wage.

Fast food companies have also claimed stores provide a ladder to managerial jobs or franchise ownership—but workers say promises of advancement are so much smoke.

John Valdez, who walked out of a McDonald’s in midtown Manhattan, said he has now worked for three McDonald’s locations over four years, and knows all the jobs. He worked his way up from $7.25 to $7.55 an hour—but when he changed stores, they bumped him back down to $7.25 again. “It’s not fair, that’s why everybody’s here today,” he said.

And there’s hardly any room at the top of the ladder. Only 2.2 percent of jobs in fast food are professional or managerial, said a recent report by the National Employment Law Project, “Going Nowhere Fast.” Front-line occupations like cooks, cashiers, and delivery drivers make up 89.1 percent of fast food jobs, with a median hourly pay of $8.94. Their supervisors make $13.06 per hour, but only comprise 8.7 percent of fast food jobs. And franchise owners have to prove assets of three quarters of a million dollars in most cases, the report said—so working your way up to ownership, on minimum wage, doesn’t sound realistic.

Burger King striker Tamara Green, in her 30s, said she’s close to finishing her college degree—but she knows, as good jobs are destroyed, a degree is not the ticket it once was. “I have college grads standing next to me and making a burger,” she told the New York crowd.

Union Backing

The Service Employees have been backing the effort, starting with 40 organizers in New York, the first city to hold fast food strikes, last July.

The union at first kept a low profile, but in recent weeks, as interest spread nationally, union officials started taking credit for the effort. There are signs SEIU is putting substantial resources, with as many as 10 full-time organizers each in several cities, and they recently announced they’re hiring researchers for the campaign.

In Memphis the union recruited fast food workers through a social media ad campaign, following up with a live organizer, which led to the first participation in fast food strikes there.

The city is iconic for the sanitation workers’ strike that drew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s support right before his assassination. Labor history was alive and being created anew on Thursday. Some Memphis workers held signs reading “I Am a Man.”

The strikers ended their march at the civil rights museum, at the site of the Lorraine Motel where King was killed. To get there, they marched up Beale Street, following the same route sanitation workers often marched in 1968.

Goals?

The short strikes don’t seem to be aimed at stopping production and costing the companies money, although they certainly have done that in some stores. Instead, the main targets are high-profile brands and low minimum wage laws.

They do seem to have revived a discussion of low wages and high corporate profits, reminiscent of the talk spurred by Occupy Wall Street.

The path forward is unclear. Squeezing more out of franchise owners makes little sense when McDonald’s, for example, rakes in much of its profit through fees and mandatory sales to franchisees.

A possible model comes from farmworker organizing. Both the Farm Labor Organizing Committee and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers have conducted multi-year campaigns to eventually win three-party agreements among farmworkers, growers, and produce buyers. CIW, in particular, has extracted money for tomato pickers directly from fast food companies like Yum Brands, which owns Taco Bell. They did it by public criticism and boycotts of the carefully-cultivated fast-food brand names, including McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Chipotle.

SEIU seems more focused on the political arena. In a planning meeting for the strike in Seattle, the only thing on the calendar after the strike was the city’s mayoral election.

In New York City, mayoral candidates Christine Quinn (endorsed by SEIU 32BJ) and Bill DeBlasio (endorsed by SEIU 1199) spoke at separate fast food rallies.

Quinn said she would introduce city council legislation to force fast food companies to provide workers with fixed schedules and notice of changes at least a week in advance. Workers say they are unable to go to school, arrange childcare, or plan their lives because they don’t have set shifts. “Every week my schedule changes,” said Valdez. He is often sent home early, he said, or called when staffing is short.

But Quinn’s record, blocking and then watering down New York City living wage legislation indicates that such election-time promises will dissipate quickly.

Nationally, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry seemed to focus on building momentum for a higher federal minimum wage. She told The New York Times that the demand “is moving people to understand that $15 is increasingly reasonable.” President Barack Obama has proposed a federal minimum that would gradually increase to $9 an hour, but Congress has not moved on it.

“$7.25 isn’t enough, I can promise you that,” said Shakira Campbell, a New York McDonald’s worker. “I need my money. Where is my money?”

With reporting from Steven Payne in Memphis, Josh Sturman in Seattle, and Slobodan Dimitrov in Los Angeles.

Workers at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles were probably surprised yesterday to see groups of truckers chasing trucks making deliveries and setting up temporary picket lines in front of them.

Port truck drivers went on a 24-hour strike early Monday evening to protest alleged union-busting by Green Fleet, one of the port's biggest trucking companies. The Green Fleet drivers say that the company harassed and intimidated workers who were trying to organize with the Teamsters, and hired a union-busting law firm to block unionization.

The strike is the latest salvo in an ongoing campaign to organize port truckers, who say that despite playing a key role in the global supply chain for some of the country's largest corporations, the trucks they drive amount to "sweatshops on wheels." Many drivers make poverty wages and complain of subhuman working conditions, like being denied access to bathrooms.

Organizers say 30 of the about 80 full-time workers at Green Fleet, who move merchandise for companies like Skechers and Huffy, walked out early Monday evening and successfully returned to work Tuesday. The strike follows last year's successful union drive for port truckers employed by Toll Group in Los Angeles and New Jersey, as well as a trucker strike in Seattle.

It's also the latest use of the strike as a short-term, offensive tactic against low-wage employers—a technique that seems to be spreading across the country.

Domino effect

Mario Hernandez has driven trucks at the Port of Los Angeles for 15 years and has worked for Green Fleet for four. He says he and his coworkers are paid not by the hour, but by the load, meaning they never receive overtime pay despite being forced to work overtime hours.

"I'm struggling. I can't even take my kids to the dentist," Hernandez says. Adding his family onto his just health insurance plan—not including dental—would have cost an additional $120 per week, "and I can't afford that."

Hernandez has a friend working for Toll, whose successful union drive led to a contract with employer-paid healthcare. "We do the same job;  we move the same kinds of containers that they do," he says. "Why shouldn't we have the same benefits?" Inspired by Toll workers' victory, Green Fleet workers began organizing in January.

Second-class drivers

Hernandez is a full-time Green Fleet employee, but the company also employees 35-40 independent contractors, according to the organizers, in Los Angeles, who as "owner-operators" of their trucks receive no benefits and are responsible for the cost of upkeep of their vehicles. The contractors form a kind of hyper-exploited second-class workforce throughout the trucking industry that owners use to keep wages low.

No independent contractors are on strike, as they cannot file unfair labor practice charges, but organizers did say some of them did not show up to work today. Independent contractors face even more abusive conditions than full-time employees. In a 2011 open letter from independent contractor port truckers in multiple cities, drivers described "keep[ing] empty bottles in our cabs" to urinate into, as some trucking companies do not provide basic facilities for contractors, and numerous costs for basic operation. "Everything comes out of our pockets or is deducted from our paychecks," the letter reads. "The truck or lease, fuel, insurance, registration, you name it."

Nick Weiner, campaign coordinator for the Change to Win federation (of which the Teamsters are a member) ports campaign, says port drivers "sit on the bottom of port economy." "Misclassification of full-time workers as independent contractors is at the heart of the business model of trucking companies," Weiner says. Such misclassification is a widespread practice across the American economy that allows companies to avoid paying benefits and escape some taxes.

"Misclassification is a scourge of this country," says Rabbi Jonathan Klein of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), a faith-based worker rights organization in Los Angeles. "It hurts working people's ability to have fair conditions on the job. In this case, it creates wage theft, and allows them to be abused."

Klein is one of 10 religious leaders accompanying workers back to work post-strike on Tuesday.

Ambulating to the win

Hernandez also says that after a group of workers delivered a petition to management demanding recognition of the union, Green Fleet management never responded; instead, they brought in a union busting law firm to intimidate union supporters.

"Why is [management] paying them so much money to avoid a union rather than sitting down with us to form our union?" Hernandez says.

Truckers walked off at 4:30 P.M. on Monday, and immediately began "ambulatory picketing." Since truckers travel throughout the workday, strikers follow "scab" trucks and picket them near their final destination.

According to organizers, one strikebreaking driver was attempting to make a delivery when he noticed strikers were following him. He stopped, put on his hazard lights, and jumped out of his cab to begin talking with the strikers about their decision to walk off the job. He returned to his cab and wrote the drivers a note in Spanish (pictured right), explaining he was too scared of getting fired to join, but supported the strike.

Workers were joined by religious leaders and local politicians, including the mayor of the city of Carson, Calif., where the Port of Los Angeles is located, and U.S. Rep.  Janice Hahn (D). One city council member, Mike Gipson, spent much of the night with the workers, from midnight to 4:00 A.M.

On Tuesday, workers returning to work accompanied by community members were initially turned away from the company's entrance. But after a half hour outside the gates, the company eventually agreed to the workers' return to work today—leading the union to declare victory.

A growing wave

The Los Angeles truckers are the latest low-wage, non-union workers to walk off the job, engaging not in a traditional strike after an impasse in bargaining but as an offensive measure, walking off over alleged unfair labor practices (ULPs) before becoming formal union members—what Labor Notes' Jenny Brown calls a "strike first strategy."

Fast food and retail workers continue to make headlines for multiple strikes since last fall, in an effort backed by the Service Employees (SEIU). Beginning in October, Wal-Mart workers organizing with OUR Walmart, affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), walked out several times. Warehouse workers in a Chicago suburb struck in September, staying out on the picket line for weeks and shutting down a key Wal-Mart distribution center for a day before winning most of their demands. Soon after, warehouse workers struck in Southern California.

Such strikes are quickly gaining traction across industries and various unions, particularly within Change to Win (though since backing the Wal-Mart workers' first strikes, the UFCW has returned to the AFL-CIO). As I wrote earlier this year for Dissent, even though these walkoffs do not always significantly hurt companies' profits—the key power of the strike, according to Joe Burns's recent book on the subject—they do serve to legitimate the act of striking to wring concessions out of employers at a time when strikes are at an all-time low. Tentatively, more unions and more workers seem comfortable with taking militant action on the job.

Victory breeds victory

The port truckers returned to work Tuesday afternoon, accompanied by community and religious leaders to protect them from retaliation, as many fast food and retail strikers have done in the past. Organizers say the 24-hour walkoff is just the beginning of the Green Fleet campaign, and that further battles with other nonunion port trucking companies are also likely.

Gonzalez says he is sure other drivers will support future strikes if this one brings gains, as he was galvanized when he saw the unionized Toll drivers win union recognition and a contract.

"Once they see us back at work, they'll lose their fear," he says.