Voices At Work

A new report by Kaiser Family Foundation has found employers shifting health care costs to workers at an accelerated rate. The report says workers paid 30 percent of the premiums for family coverage and 19 percent for single coverage. That’s the highest rate in 12 years. Worker contributions increased this year by 13.7 and employer contributions fell by .9 percent.

Workers at a Mott’s plant in Williamson New York who have been on strike since May voted down the newest set of contract proposals on Thursday. The plant is owned by the Dr. Pepper/Snapple Group which has been seeking to lower wages at the plant. The company, which has been turning a profit, says it needs to slash wages in order to stay competitive with other plants in the region. A 401(k) proposal that was voted down would have amounted to an average loss of $3,600 for each worker represented by the RWDSU.

Flight attendants tomorrow will protest the firing of a flight attendant by Compass Airline after she revealed her low wages qualify her for food stamps. Doug Cunningham reports.

By Doug Cunningham

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Workers at Jimmy Johns sub shops in Minneapolis walked off the job on Thursday at nine locations to announce the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World Jimmy Johns Workers Union. The workers are demanding better wages – many workers are currently paid near minimum wage – sick days, consistent scheduling, and increased protections regarding safety on the job and sexual harassment. This isn’t the first chain that the IWW has targeted in recent years, Starbucks locations in Minneapolis and New York City have been organized by the Starbucks branch of the more than a century old union.

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“Eighty years after her death, Mother Jones’ howl for safe mines and responsible corporations still echoes,” writes LA Weekly’s Amy Nicholson in a review of  the play, “The Most Dangerous Woman in America: Machine Guns, Coal Dust, Mother Jones and the Making of the American Dream.”

Written by David Christie and performed by Actors’ Equity (AEA) member Therese Diekhans, the one-woman drama won the Best Solo Show award at the Hollywood Fringe festival in June.

It’s now set for two more performances in Everett, Wash., (just a 26-mile shot from Seattle, straight up I-5) next weekend, Sept. 11 and 12. The performances are half-price for union members and free for union members on strike (location info here).

Writing in the LA Theater Review, Kat Primeau says Diekhans’ charming, studied performance:

playfully brings to life 15 characters, from children mill workers to John D. Rockefeller, as the audience learns the true cost of Big Business cost-cutting in early 20th century mining towns. Mother Jones’ rallying speeches on apathy and revolution are particularly poignant amidst contemporary woes.

Visit Diekhans’ website here.

     

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) this week published three reports showing the extent to which America’s workers are losing ground this Labor Day: People are dropping out of the workforce because there are no jobs and those workers who have jobs are earning less.

First, there are not nearly enough new jobs. Nearly 15 million workers are unemployed, nearly a quarter of whom have been seeking work for more than a year. Even though unemployment rose slightly to 9.6 percent last month, it’s 0.5 percent less than it was last October. But that’s not because the economy has been generating that many jobs. EPI economist Heidi Shierholz found that the percentage of people who were actually employed held steady even as the population increased. Translation: The improvement in the unemployment rate has been almost entirely due to people dropping out of (or not entering) the labor force because of the lack of jobs. Check out Shierholz’s report, “Employment Growth Continues Subpar Performance,” here. 

And those who are working are making less. Wages for the typical worker have collapsed. In “Recession Hits Workers’ Paychecks,” Shierholz and EPI President Lawrence Mishel show that workers who have managed to keep their jobs or find new ones during the economic downturn have suffered from stagnant or no wage growth.

Wages are growing half as fast as they were immediately prior to the recession. That’s true in almost all occupations. The numbers were worse for men than women. In fact, the median income for an average working household fell between 2000 and 2007 by more than $2,000. This report, which you can find here, is the first in a series of reports leading up to the launch of EPI’s much anticipated “State of Working America” volume and revamped website in January 2011.

Finally, EPI has released a handy new tool that gives a clear statistical picture of the recession in one place. Labor Day by the Numbers is a chart that lists pertinent facts about the economy in a quick, compact form with links to previous EPI reports.

For example, the section dealing with the unemployment rate shows the number of people who are jobless, the portion who have been unemployed for six months or a year, the number who are underemployed and other key facts. You can check out the chart here.

USW President Leo Gerard is a regular contriubtor to UnionReview.com. Below is his article on Labor Day.

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The land of the free is not so free if you are poor, a person of color or an immigrant, says a new report. As a result, the U.S. government must aggressively work to eliminate discrimination and disparities throughout society and in the workplace and to ensure that international human rights standards are enforced inside its borders.

The report, compiled by the U.S. Human Rights Network, a coalition of human rights, academic and civil society groups, is part of the United Nations’ Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of human rights around the world. This is the first time the U.S. government has participated in the review, which occurs every four years. As part of the review, the U.S. government will have to defend its human rights record before a U.N. panel in November 2010.

The report on human rights conditions in the United States highlights the nation’s significant shortcomings in complying with international human rights standards and makes recommendations on how the United States can better meet those standards.

For example, the report points out that the U.S. labor laws fail to protect low-wage workers such as domestic workers, agricultural workers and independent contractors, who most often are people of color, immigrants or women. According to the report, the nation’s laws also limit freedom of association of workers by excluding large groups from the right to form a union. It calls for expanding and strengthening the right to collective bargaining, either by passing the Employee Free Choice Act or other legislation.

More than 200 nongovernmental organizations and hundreds of advocates across the country have endorsed the report, which took nearly a year to research and produce. The AFL-CIO and affiliated unions participated in several field hearings on human rights across the country that gathered information for the report.

The report addresses a wide range of issues, including education, equality and non-discrimination, capital punishment, treatment of people with disabilities, poverty and access to health care.

Anti-workers have denounced the report. But University of Pennsylvania Law School associate professor Sarah Paoletti, senior coordinator for the Human Rights Network’s UPR Project, says:

Refusing to acknowledge that the U.S. can make any improvements in its human rights policies and practices misses a critical opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate the need for governments to hold themselves accountable to their constituents at home. Enhancing human rights at home will only strengthen the nation’s standing and influence abroad, and we should embrace the challenge.

To read the U.S. Human Rights Network report, click here.  For more information on the UPR process, click here.

All of the rights and protections that workers have achieved were won because people just like you sacrificed to make progress and to achieve fairness.

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    Workers at wind turbine maker Trinity Structural Towers voted to join IBEW.        

Telecom workers, green industry wind power employees, sanitation workers—and, in a precedent setting win, website writers/producers—have recently joined AFL-CIO unions.

In Puerto Rico, 171 call center workers at AT&T Mobility won union representation with Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 3010 through majority sign-up. Under an agreement between AT&T and CWA, the company will remain neutral and will recognize the union once a majority of employees sign up. Meanwhile, in Ocean County, N.J., five employees of the Borough of Island Heights won representation by CWA Local 1088 also through majority sign-up.

A group of more than 130 workers at Trinity Structural Towers—Iowa’s leading manufacturer of wind towers—voted to join Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 347 in Des Moines.

IBEW organizer Brian Heins reports that Trinity mounted a two-monthlong anti-union campaign that included hiring two union-busting firms. “It was nonstop.…They used everything in the book.” The IBEW website has a detailed look at the workers’ victory here.

In Portland, Ore., 13 workers in the sanitation department at the Safeway Bakery voted to join the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) Local 114. Incredibly, even though the rest of the bakery department had long been unionized, Safeway not only used anti-union lawyers but flew in top executives to try and beat the drive by the bakers’ dozen to join the union. It didn’t work.

In a first for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), Web news writer/producers at Chicago CBS station WBBM voted unanimously to be represented by the WGAE. These are the first news writer/producers working exclusively on Web content to join the WGAE, the union that has long represented CBS News employees writing for TV and radio.

The unit, four writers/producers, are just the beginning, WBBM Web writer Michael Ramsey says:

We are proud to be the first web news writers and web producers to join the Guild, but I’m sure we won’t be the last. Web writers and producers may work in a different medium than the writers the Guild traditionally represents, but our needs are essentially the same.

As WGAE Executive Director Lowell Peterson says:

The news industry is shifting to digital platforms and their decision to join us helps ensure that writing and producing news continues to be a good job into the 21st century.

     

With their six-figure salaries and government-paid health care, members of Congress may not feel the pinch of a 9.6 percent unemployment rate. But millions of Americans are in pain, and on Sept. 15, they will shout loud and clear that we are in an emergency and Congress must act immediately to create good jobs. 

 Sept. 15 is the day workers, students and community and religious groups in dozens of cities across the country will revive one of the key demands of the 1963 “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” by calling for full and fair employment and demanding the government declare a national “jobs emergency.”

“It’s time for corporate apologists in the Senate, who are blocking a recovery for the rest of us, to recognize what workers already know: we are in a jobs emergency that requires a bold, emergency response,” says Sarita Gupta, executive director of Jobs with Justice, the main organizer of the protests.

With record long-term unemployment and communities losing vital public services, it is time to put full and fair employment and a massive federal works program—core demands from the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom that Glenn Beck wants us to forget—back on the national agenda. 

Protestors will demand that Congress pass the Local Jobs for America Act, which would save or create 1 million jobs, extend emergency Temporary Assistance to Needy Families subsidized jobs program, extend emergency unemployment compensation and pass a financial speculation tax that would rein in the more destabilizing aspects of Wall Street and generate $200 to $500 billion annually.

Says Gupta:

If Congress focuses on reducing the federal budget deficit rather than fixing the jobs deficit, millions of workers and communities will suffer. When Wall Street was in crisis, Congress found hundreds of billions of dollars to bail them out. We need to respond to the jobs crisis with the same urgency.

The Wall Street Journal reported that taxpayer bailed-out Wall Street banks are making “bumper earnings” while non-financial U.S. corporations are sitting on more than $8 trillion in cash reserves. A mere 20 percent of those holdings could employ 5 million Americans at $70,000 a year for five years.

 ”Our community has been devastated by the jobs emergency and these conservatives are actually bragging about blocking a federal job creation program while they help Wall Street and greedy corporations make record profits,” says Elce Redmond of Chicago Jobs with Justice and the South Austin Coalition.

Our country needs full and fair employment. Anybody that wants to work should be able to find a job, and not just any job but a job with justice.

For a list of cities planning actions and to learn more, visit www.jwj.org/jobs  or check out the Facebook page here.

Nearly 600 hospital workers in Kansas City, Mo voted this week to join SEIU. This victory is particularly sweet for me because I did a lot of work on this one. If you are interested in hearing aobut the work I do as an Online Organizer with the union, drop me a line at Richard@unionreview.com.

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Wisconsin working families aren’t waiting until Labor Day to mobilize for the fall elections.  They are already knocking on doors, leafleting worksites and more to get out the vote.

Rep. Steve Kagen (D- Wis.) won’t know until the Sept. 14 Republican primary who will be his general election opponent. But in the meantime, unions and their members are mobilizing to re-elect the Green Bay physician.

Denny Lauer (see top photo) of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 2-1279 took part in a recent labor walk where he talked with other union member families about Kagen, who has voted for job-creation legislation to put people back to work. Says Kagen:

It’s Main Street, not Wall Street or Big Business, that will provide jobs that will complete our economic recovery.

Earlier this week, a group of military veterans from the AFL-CIO Union Veterans Council met with Tom Barrett, Democratic candidate for governor. Barrett has the backing of Wisconsin’s unions. The group discussed vital issues, including jobs, the economy and veterans’ health care.

Unlike either of the leading candidates in the Sept. 14 Republican primary who have endorsed jobs cuts and furloughs, Barrett has proposed a detailed jobs plan that is estimated to create as many as 180,000 Wisconsin jobs in his first term.

Find out more about Labor 2010’s action in Wisconsin here.