Happy Union Thanksgiving!
The Meal of the Year is here! This is family time, and in the labor movement we know all about the importance of family. The crazy fun of Black Friday follows, so don’t forget to buy union made when you can. And while some stores want to open on Thanksgiving Day this year, we say family, friends and those we care about are worth more than a few extra hours of shopping.
We’ve put together a Thanksgiving shopping list for a great union-made spread. And we realize it can sometimes be difficult to find union made for everything on your list, so another great way to go union is to patronize union grocery stores. So enjoy the day! And we’ve got one more recipe — for stout cake — that you’re going to want to add to the table this year in our Product Spotlight below.
A recent Los Angeles Times editorial succinctly spelled out the simple truth about a potentially major labor case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall, a hospitality union is seeking to overturn a lower court decision favoring a supposedly disgruntled worker whose case just happened to be taken up by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The case’s backstory is a somewhat complicated tale involving a Florida union local’s attempt to organize workers employed by the operator of a casino and race track. That operator, Mardis Gras Gaming, accepted a “neutrality agreement” with UNITE HERE, in order to give the union access to Mardis Gras’ workers without management objections. The arrangement also allowed for what’s called a card-check election, which is often used to simplify union elections at businesses.
But one Mardis Gras employee,
» Read more about: Supreme Court Considers an Important Labor Case »
Having failed to defeat the Affordable Care Act in Congress, to beat it back in the last election, to repeal it despite more than 80 votes in the House, to stop it in the federal courts, to get enough votes in the Supreme Court to overrule it and to gut it with outright extortion (closing the government and threatening to default on the nation’s debts unless it was repealed), Republicans are now down to their last ploy.
They are hell-bent on destroying the Affordable Care Act in Americans’ minds.
A document circulating among House Republicans (reported by the New York Times) instructs them to repeat the following themes and stories continuously: “Because of Obamacare, I Lost My Insurance.” “Obamacare Increases Health Care Costs.” “The Exchanges May Not Be Secure, Putting Personal Information at Risk.”
Every Republican in Washington has been programmed to use the word “disaster” whenever mentioning the Act,
» Read more about: Obamacare Smears Can’t Hide Three Major Truths »
So an Ohio Walmart started a food drive among its employees to help its lower income workers get a decent Thanksgiving. “Please Donate Food Items Here so Associates in Need Can Enjoy Thanksgiving Dinner,” reads a sign in the clerk’s break room. Someone snapped a photo on their cell phone, put it on-line and it went viral. The image underscores what Walmart itself knows: One million of its employees earn less than $25,000 dollars a year – impossible to live on in Ohio, much less Los Angeles, where an average apartment rents for $1,480 a month.
But did you know that L.A. County also leads the nation in “food insecurity”? That’s the current euphemism that means people are likely to go hungry. A national network of food banks estimated that 650,000 children in our county risk going without enough to eat. These are kids who live with parents or guardians who cannot afford a balanced meal or who skip dinner themselves to feed their children.
The twin harbors at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach handle 40 percent of the nation’s imported cargo and generate some of the best middle-class jobs in Southern California. And yet it would be a serious mistake to believe that all who work in the transportation of goods share in the bounty provided by port traffic.
Writing in today’s Los Angeles Times, Congresswoman Janice Hahn notes that “many of the truck drivers who serve the ports find themselves stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder because of the way their employers classify and exploit them.”
The drivers Hahn speaks of are mostly immigrant workers employed by companies who label them as “independent contracts” — a ploy that enables the companies to deduct their own trucking-related business expenses from their drivers’ wages. Hahn recalls speaking to drivers who have told her that, under this system,
» Read more about: Janice Hahn: Port Drivers Must Be Treated Fairly »
A recent Los Angeles Times editorial succinctly spelled out the simple truth about a potentially major labor case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. In Unite Here Local 355 v. Mulhall, a hospitality union is seeking to overturn a lower court decision favoring a supposedly disgruntled worker whose case just happened to be taken up by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
The case’s backstory is a somewhat complicated tale involving a Florida union local’s attempt to organize workers employed by the operator of a casino and race track. That operator, Mardis Gras Gaming, accepted a “neutrality agreement” with UNITE HERE, in order to give the union access to Mardis Gras’ workers without management objections. The arrangement also allowed for what’s called a card-check election, which is often used to simplify union elections at businesses.
But one Mardis Gras employee,
» Read more about: Supreme Court Considers an Important Labor Case »
This Thanksgiving, Walmart decided to show its workers that it’s concerned for their families. First, the retailer required that employees work not only on Black Friday, but also Thanksgiving night this year as, once more, it plans to start its Black Friday sale Thursday evening. Second, Walmart knew that because its workers make such low wages and are often on food stamps, the company decided to collect canned food for them.
Yes, the food box scandal that you’ve read in the news over the past few days is true. Walmart workers have been scraping together food donations for – themselves! Even The Colbert Report covered the disgrace. All of this comes on the heels of Walmart workers having to strike due to retaliation for speaking out against low pay ($8.81 an hour!), insufficient hours and unaffordable health care.
So,
» Read more about: How to Support Walmart Workers This Holiday Season »
Twenty-seven port truck drivers walked into the Rancho Dominguez offices of Total Transportation Services, Inc. (TTSI) Thursday and presented their employer with a petition. Their demand was simple: to be properly recognized as employees. TTSI is one of the largest port trucking companies in the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. TTSI’s business model – like the vast majority of port trucking companies in the country – relies on misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors.
When companies like TTSI misclassify their employees, they not only deprive the public of much-needed revenue by avoiding taxes, they also deprive workers of hard-earned wages by deducting business expenses like lease payments and fuel from drivers’ paychecks.
As TTSI driver Jose Rosales states, “Some weeks we aren’t even breaking even. How can I build a future for my family this way?”
Rosales and his fellow TTSI drivers who delivered yesterday’s petition are also seeking recourse through the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE),
» Read more about: TTSI’s Port Drivers Demand to Be Treated as Employees »
As Gary Cohn and Bill Raden point out in a recent Frying Pan News piece, it’s become the pastime of conservatives to skew debates over public employee pensions by singling out the comparatively high retirement benefits of “top-tier city and county executives,” while ignoring the typical pensions earned by the vast majority of government workers. This ploy is also used, naturally, in propaganda decrying the salaries of public sector employees while they are still actively working for states and cities.
The Center for Media and Democracy’s new project, Outsourcing America Exposed, has discovered that there is, in fact, a breed of “government worker” whose members receive sky-high, taxpayer-funded salaries. They are not teachers or librarians, however, but “CEOs whose corporations make billions by taking control of public services.”
Says CMD executive director Lisa Graves: “Taxpayers are being duped by corporate CEOs and Wall Street banks that are siphoning money out of our communities for huge salaries and bonus packages.”
Graves is referring to the gold-plated trough known as privatization,
» Read more about: How Public Taxes Became a CEO’s Personal Income »
As Gary Cohn and Bill Raden point out in a recent Frying Pan News piece, it’s become the pastime of conservatives to skew debates over public employee pensions by singling out the comparatively high retirement benefits of “top-tier city and county executives,” while ignoring the typical pensions earned by the vast majority of government workers. This ploy is also used, naturally, in propaganda decrying the salaries of public sector employees while they are still actively working for states and cities.
The Center for Media and Democracy’s new project, Outsourcing America Exposed, has discovered that there is, in fact, a breed of “government worker” whose members receive sky-high, taxpayer-funded salaries. They are not teachers or librarians, however, but “CEOs whose corporations make billions by taking control of public services.”
Says CMD executive director Lisa Graves: “Taxpayers are being duped by corporate CEOs and Wall Street banks that are siphoning money out of our communities for huge salaries and bonus packages.”
Graves is referring to the gold-plated trough known as privatization,
» Read more about: How Public Taxes Became a CEO’s Personal Income »
Walmart’s 1.3 million workers won a big victory Monday when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the retail giant had broken the law by firing and harassing employees who spoke out—and in some cases went on strike—to protest the company’s poverty pay and abusive labor practices.
The federal agency will prosecute Walmart’s illegal firings and disciplinary actions involving more than 117 workers, including those who went on strike last June as part of a growing movement of company employees. The ruling is likely to accelerate the burgeoning protest movement among Walmart employees, upset with low pay, stingy benefits, arbitrary work schedules and part-time jobs.
Over the past year, protests against the world’s largest private employer have escalated, led by OUR Walmart, a nationwide network of Walmart workers. Last fall, the group announced that it would hold rallies outside Walmart stores in dozens of cities on the day after Thanksgiving—the busiest shopping day of the year,
» Read more about: NLRB Sides With Walmart Workers in Major Ruling »
Yesterday, some 22,000 surgical and X-ray technicians, custodians, servers, cooks and other workers at nine University of California campuses and all of U.C.’s medical centers began a one-day unfair labor practice strike over what they say is intimidation and harassment of workers who took part in an earlier strike over patient safety in May.
AFSCME Local 3299 President Kathryn Lybarger said:
Our members have both the legal right and moral responsibility to stand up for the safety of the students and patients we serve. By attempting to silence workers, U.C. hasn’t just repeatedly broken the law—it has willfully endangered all who come to UC to learn, to heal and to build a better life for their families.
As it did in the May action, before today’s walkout began, Local 3299 took measures to ensure that patient care needs would be met, including keeping many key workers on the job and forming a Patient Protection Task Force to ensure that unforeseen emergency medical needs at U.C.
» Read more about: U.C. Health Care Employees Walk the Line »
In a remarkable act of courage and solidarity with the next generation, last week Boeing workers in Seattle soundly rejected corporate extortion, by voting down a contract which traded job guarantees for concessions that would severely erode the pay and benefits of younger workers. In doing so, the members of the Machinists are risking their jobs to save an America built on the middle class.
The dramatic fight of fast-food workers for a minimal living wage, risking their jobs every time they take a day off to demonstrate, is one end of a corporate economy based on low wages, no benefits and no unions. That corporate strategy, aimed at maximizing profits, is destroying America’s middle class, wrecking the engine that powered the U.S. economy.
On the other end of the middle class are workers like Boeing’s, who have fought together through their union for the good pay, pensions, health benefits and job security that characterized the increased prosperity and lowered income inequality of America in much of the second half of the 20th Century.
» Read more about: Machinists Say No to Cutting Next Generation’s Benefits »
It’s official: America has entered a retirement crisis. Or, as Forbes understatedly put it, “the greatest retirement crisis in the history of the world.”
And, while the causes are manifold — the demographic bulge of baby boomers leaving the fulltime workforce; greater worker longevity; the disastrous, 30-year shift from traditional defined benefit pensions to costly 401(k)-style plans — most experts agree that the national retirement implosion has gone critical, with an estimated 75 percent of Americans who are nearing retirement age having less than $27,000 in their retirement accounts.
Even John C. Bogle, the founder of the $2 trillion mutual fund and 401(k) behemoth Vanguard Group, recently admitted that the system of retirement plans that rely on 401(k)s is broken.
“[401(k)s were] designed as a thrift plan, and it doesn’t work as a retirement plan,” Bogle declared.
So it is with some irony that a Texas hedge fund billionaire/former Enron trader and a politically ambitious Northern California mayor have teamed up to cripple one of the few parts of the retirement story that still works — California’s public-sector pension system.
» Read more about: My Body Isn’t 40 Anymore: Three Faces of Retirement »
This afternoon about 100 port drivers will return to their jobs after staging a 36-hour walkout. The unfair labor practices strike, which was supported by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 848, was called to protest what drivers say is employer retaliation for trying to organize a union. The companies targeted in and around Carson were Green Fleet Systems, Pac 9 Transportation and American Logistics International. The drivers claim they’ve been intimidated and harassed for their organizing efforts – employer actions that are against U.S. labor law.
In addition to the retaliation allegations lodged with the National Labor Relations Board, wage-theft charges have been filed with the state against Pac 9 for misclassifying its employee drivers as “independent contractors” – a ploy that has allegedly allowed the company to deduct its business expenses from the drivers’ salaries.
The striking port drivers did not walk the line alone – Teamsters from the Toll Group,
» Read more about: Port Truckers Strike to End This Afternoon »
Walmart just reported shrinking sales for a third straight quarter. What’s going on? Explained William S. Simon, the CEO of Walmart, referring to the company’s customers, “their income is going down while food costs are not. Gas and energy prices, while they’re abating, I think they’re still eating up a big piece of the customer’s budget.”
Walmart’s CEO gets it. Most of Walmart’s customers are still in the Great Recession, grappling with stagnant or declining pay. So, naturally, Walmart’s sales are dropping.
But what Walmart’s CEO doesn’t get is that a large portion of Walmart’s customers are lower-wage workers who are working at places like … Walmart. And Walmart, not incidentally, refuses to raise its median wage (including its army of part-timers) of $8.80 an hour.
Walmart isn’t your average mom-and-pop operation. It’s the largest employer in America. As such, it’s the trendsetter for millions of other employers of low-wage workers.
Last week’s Twitter IPO triggered stories about “tech culture’s” impact on San Francisco and the broader society. It made me ask: is there really a culture of tech outside the workplace and, if so, what is it? More importantly, does labeling popular activities among young workers as “tech culture” create divisions among people who otherwise could be working together to solve social problems? Many (including myself) have identified the term with a libertarian political philosophy, hostility to unions and overwhelming white and Asian-American workers under-40 without kids. It is also identified with the rise of artisan coffees and foods, wine bars, upscale restaurants and the now legendary $4 toast that led the Courage Campaign to launch a petition to Mayor Lee regarding the city’s rising costs.
But associating “tech culture” with the politics of the tech elite, as occurred after Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg’s founded a pro-immigration reform group that ran opportunistic ads supporting the Keystone XL Pipeline and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
For generations, Americans have relied on public service workers to inspect the food we eat. In fact, one major concern of the recent government shutdown was that food inspectors would be furloughed, endangering or shutting down the food supply chain across the country.
American public institutions have a long track record of keeping our food disease-free. Yet as this service is increasingly outsourced to for-profit corporations, it is leading to repeated oversight failures that have caused illness and even death. And too often, the for-profit entities that are now responsible for keeping our food safe have conflicts of interest that encourage them to rubber-stamp inspections rather than ensure our food is safe.
The Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) has proposed a “Modernization of Poultry Inspection.” But “modernization” is just public relations babble for removing USDA inspectors from poultry lines and letting companies police themselves.
» Read more about: Removing USDA Poultry Inspectors: What Does the Fox Say? »
Twenty-seven port truck drivers walked into the Rancho Dominguez offices of Total Transportation Services, Inc. (TTSI) Thursday and presented their employer with a petition. Their demand was simple: to be properly recognized as employees. TTSI is one of the largest port trucking companies in the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. TTSI’s business model – like the vast majority of port trucking companies in the country – relies on misclassifying its drivers as independent contractors.
When companies like TTSI misclassify their employees, they not only deprive the public of much-needed revenue by avoiding taxes, they also deprive workers of hard-earned wages by deducting business expenses like lease payments and fuel from drivers’ paychecks.
As TTSI driver Jose Rosales states, “Some weeks we aren’t even breaking even. How can I build a future for my family this way?”
Rosales and his fellow TTSI drivers who delivered yesterday’s petition are also seeking recourse through the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE),
» Read more about: TTSI’s Port Drivers Demand to Be Treated as Employees »
On December 5, as part of its 20th anniversary celebration, the L.A. Alliance for a New Economy will honor OUR Walmart, an organization determined to transform conditions at the world’s largest retailer. Frying Pan News recently asked Walmart employee Martha Sellers, who has worked at the company’s Paramount store for 10 years, to reflect on her role in one of the most ambitious social justice efforts of our time.
Frying Pan News: If you could sit down for a one-on-one conversation with Walmart CEO Mike Duke, what would you say?
Martha Sellers: Explain to me why you cannot afford to pay us a living wage when it is proven you make mega bucks. Why?
You spend your money on all these things but your associates. Why?
You spend money on PR and opening more stores when the stores that are already open are not doing well.
» Read more about: Fear Is No Option: Walmart Associate Martha Sellers »