People Before Profit blog

Southern labor stirs in North Carolina, again

Sat, 29 Apr 2006 07:02:00 +0000

Red Springs, N.C. — North Carolina is one of the most industrialized states in the country. Yet it still has one of the lowest percentages of workers in unions, though not from lack of trying by labor.

In fact, North Carolina unions have a long and proud history of militancy and determination in the face of vicious corporate and government resistance. It’s a history of intense corporate use of racism, red-baiting and right-to-work laws. Still, workers today in North Carolina continue to fight the very same battles for basic democracy and civil rights that they fought 60 and 80 years ago.

Militant labor history highlights

In April 1929, close to 1,800 textile workers from the Loray Mill in Gastonia struck to protest the firing of five union organizers. Members of the left-led National Textile Workers Union, pursuing their right to organize, ran into what was, and sadly remains today, a particular North Carolina brand of repression. Strikers were driven out of their mill-owned homes. Thugs were deputized by the local police to harass, beat up and arrest strikers. In June the company/state violence culminated in an armed attack on a peaceful picket line made up mostly of women and children. Then the “deputies” and police officers charged into a tent city of evicted strikers, where shots were fired and the Gastonia police chief was shot. “Gastonia,” a symbol of capital’s fierce resistance to union organization, became a battle cry for labor around the country and the world.

In 1974, after a 14-year battle, the Textile Workers Union of America finally won an election to represent 3,000 workers at JP Stevens in Roanoke Rapids. The story was immortalized in the movie “Norma Rae,” loosely based on the real-life experiences of union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton. It took six more years before the Stevens workers finally got their first contract — only after the TWUA merged with the clothing workers into the larger Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union.

In 1999, after 25 long years of bitter struggle, members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) finally won a contract at Fieldcrest Cannon Mills for 5,000 workers in five mills in the Kannapolis area. Four years later the mills were closed.

That was then, this is now

Today, workers at the largest hog processing plant in the world, Smithfield Packing in Tar Heel, are fighting to organize. They have the full support of the United Food and Commercial Workers union. Previous efforts by the UFCW to organize the plant in 1994 and 1997 with traditional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections failed by small margins. In both cases Smithfield used all the traditional anti-union strategies, including racism, intimidation and out-and-out thuggery to defeat the workers.

Incredibly, Smithfield has its own police force in the sprawling 1-million-square-foot Tar Heel plant. North Carolina law not only allows it, but gives it the power to arrest and jail workers in holding cells on the plant’s property. Since its establishment, the Smithfield police have arrested more than 90 workers on the plant grounds. These private police are also allowed to carry concealed weapons. Recently, because of bad publicity, the company has backed off on making arrests.

The Smithfield police force used strong-arm tactics at the plant gates and during voting to defeat the union. This is in addition to “captive audience” meetings where workers are subjected to anti-union propaganda, a paid network of spies, and intense pressure on shop floor supervisors to frame and fire union supporters. Smithfield police chief Danny Priest was found guilty of illegally arresting and beating union activists after the 1997 union election, under North Carolina’s 1871 (anti) Ku Klux Klan Act. Today he is running for Sheriff of Bladen County where the Smithfield plant is located.

Racism is a critical Smithfield tool. Following long-standing racial patterns of segregation, Smithfield continues to divide the meatpacking workers into jobs and departments along racial lines. African Americans predominate on the “kill floor,” while the “cut lines” are generally Latinos, mostly Mexican immigrants. Whites and Native Americans are concentrated mostly in the shipping and receiving, maintenance, warehouse and line supervisory positions.

During the 1997 elections the company held segregated captive audience meetings. Latinos were called in and told that the union would be run by African Americans who would bring in the INS to deport Mexican and other immigrant workers. Latino workers were also told by the company that if they voted for the union they would be deported.

In the company’s meetings with African Americans, the workers were told that the Mexicans were out to take their jobs. The company said the Mexican workers hoped the African Americans would join the union and strike so the Mexicans could move into their jobs. Both Black and Latino workers report that the company often tries to incite racial strife.

Smithfield’s illegal union-busting tactics were so extreme that in 2000 a National Labor Relations Board judge found Smithfield guilty of multiple gross violations of labor law. In both 2000 and 2005, Human Rights Watch issued reports highlighting the many abuses of basic human and civil rights at Smithfield. The case against Smithfield union-busting is well documented.

Smithfield is a horrible place to work. The work is hard, damp, frenetic, full of blood and pain. The plant currently employs about 5,500 workers. Each year the turnover rate is 100 percent. That means each year over 5,000 workers are hired and over 5,000 workers quit or are fired.

Line speeds are incredibly and dangerously fast. Some workers process up to 2,000 hogs an hour. Workers work so close to each other, and work so fast with super-sharp knives, that they often accidentally cut each other or themselves.

Eastern North Carolina Workers Center

When you walk into the Eastern North Carolina Workers Center in Red Springs, you know that North Carolina’s working class continues the long march for justice. The center is co-sponsored by the UFCW and is located about 20 miles away from the Tar Heel plant.

Organizers are in and out — meeting, picking up flyers, reporting on contacts, planning and discussing strategy, arranging legal help, setting up ESL classes and scheduling speakers at community events. They are African American, Latino, white and Native American Indian. The air is vibrant and the discussion is bilingual. On the walls posters proclaim, “Justice at Smithfield,” and “Amnesty for Immigrant Workers.” Posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez smile down on all the activity.

I was immediately impressed with the open and friendly atmosphere of the Workers Center. Here I was, a stranger and a journalist, with no appointment. Given the many attacks on these workers and the extensive company use of spies and intimidation, this friendliness to a stranger is a sign of their confidence.

The Workers Center focuses on supporting the Smithfield workers. Eduardo Pena, the lead UFCW organizer at the center, said the main things they deal with are workers compensation, due to the very high number of work-related injuries, and immigration issues. He introduced me to worker/organizers who were glad to share their stories.

Lorena Ramos, who now works for the UFCW, told me about being detained in a company holding area. Lorena and her husband are well-known and strong supporters of the union. They were paraded through the plant in handcuffs and accused of arson. They were held for hours by the company without access to phone calls or lawyers. The charges were later thrown out for lack of evidence, but the company is appealing.

The workers began to tell me stories of walkouts and petition drives in the plant. Julio Vargas was fired with other workers for helping to lead a walkout of cleaners. The NLRB found the company guilty of numerous violations and ordered the workers reinstated with back pay. The company is appealing.

Workers at the Tar Heel plant come from a large radius around the plant. They are dug into the communities all around. They have enlisted support from churches, civil rights and immigrant rights organizations, unions and other community groups.

Civil rights unionism yesterday and today

The more I listened, the more I got excited about the similarity to a previous workers’ struggle in North Carolina. I just happened to be reading “Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South,” by Robert Korstad (University of North Carolina Press: 2003). An incredibly important book about Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America-CIO (FTA), it tells the story of tobacco workers organizing the giant RJ Reynolds Company in Winston-Salem in the 1940s.

RJ Reynolds, like Smithfield, ran an extremely segregated factory system and fostered racism and male supremacy to divide the workers. RJ Reynolds, too, had used intimidation, mass firings and racism to block previous traditional union organizing drives.

The Smithfield workers told me about a recent walkout on the “picnic cutting line” protesting a company policy change that limited workers to one knife a shift. Sharp knives are critical to the work. Dull knives slow the cutting and can hurt to use because of the extra pressure needed. Previously every worker was issued two knives at the beginning of the shift so they could switch when the first one got dull. The workers walked off the line and presented their demand to the human resources department. There they were stalled and told to put their grievance in writing. They did. When the company then tried to threaten them, the second shift joined in and the company backed down. Even without a recognized union the Smithfield workers are acting like they have one.

This was so much like the events in Winston-Salem that really got the union movement rolling there in the early 1940s. Union organizers were in Winston-Salem hoping to crack Reynolds. Their big break came when African American women in the tobacco leaf stemming department staged a sit-down and refused to work because of grievances. Reynolds tried to stall, and it led to the shutdown of most of the plant. Reynolds was also forced to back down in the face of this kind of solidarity.

What is striking is the similar approach to organizing. Today at Smithfield, like then at Reynolds, the workers on the shop floor lead the fight. In both cases it is civil rights unionism because the issues go far beyond a union contract, though that is important. The issues include dignity and respect and breaking down race and gender barriers to equality. Both now and then the unions came to stay for the long haul. Building coalitions, community relations and a movement around the union are central themes.

Both Eduardo Pena and Gene Bruskin, the director of the organizing campaign nationally, stressed that the UFCW is there to support the self-organization of the workers. “We decided that the traditional method of flooding a bunch of organizers into the area and doing house calls and leafleting for a few months won’t work here,” said Bruskin. “We needed a way that tells workers that they have to stand up and act on their own behalf and the union will back them up all the way.”

On the way out, I asked one of the fired workers if she wanted her job back in the plant. “Not without the union,” she said.

Scott Marshall (scott@rednet.org) chairs the Communist Party USA Labor Commission.

TAKE ACTION

Go to .

You’ll find lots of ways to support the Smithfield workers, including a Student Solidarity Toolkit, model solidarity resolutions, how to write a letter to the CEO demanding justice, leaflets and other resources. You can also sign up for action alerts from the UFCW.

Immigration raids escalate fight over rights

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 15:14:00 +0000

Supporters of immigrant rights are reacting with anger to last week’s large-scale immigration raids, and calling for all raids and deportations to be stopped and for legislation legalizing undocumented workers to be supported.

On April 19 the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security carried out immigration raids in at least 40 towns and cities in 26 states, arresting 1,187 mostly Mexican employees of IFCO Systems North America, Inc., which makes wooden pallets used in factories and warehouses. In addition, seven supervisory employees of IFCO were indicted on felony charges of knowingly employing, housing and transporting “illegal aliens,” and face stiff punishments.

Next day, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff gave a gloating press conference to announce that the raids were just the beginning of a new crackdown. Earlier, ICE announced the prosecution of the owners of a restaurant chain in the Baltimore area for similar things.

The ICE announcement said the campaign would include “intensified efforts to deport criminal aliens and alien fugitives, building strong worksite enforcement and compliance programs, and uprooting the criminal infrastructure that supports illegal immigration.”

“Criminal aliens” means individuals, including legal immigrants, who, under the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Effective Death Penalty Act, are mandated to be deported because of criminal convictions. Immigration police have showed up at people’s homes and jobs decades after the original incident to deport them, in spite of their having long ago served their sentences and having a spotless police record since. Nor does it matter that the person leaves behind a broken family with U.S.-born, U.S. citizen children.

“Alien fugitives” are mostly undocumented immigrants who were arrested and given a court date, but did not show.

The government is going to use the receipt of multiple Social Security “No-Match” letters as the basis for targeting immigration raids. These are letters that the Social Security Administration sends out by the millions when a Social Security number submitted by an employer for one of their employees does not match anything in the database.

This can happen because of mistakes, but it is assumed when many such letters hit the same company, it is because many undocumented workers are employed there. In the past, the letter has told the employer merely to call the worker’s attention to the discrepancy. Many employers have fired workers because of a No-Match letter, but it has often been possible to get their jobs back through legal, union or community action. But now, if the receipt of No-Match letters will trigger a raid and perhaps prosecution of the company or its managers, companies will hasten to fire many more such workers.

Homeland Security phrased its justification for cracking down in terms of the deplorable way immigrant workers are exploited by such employers, which is hypocritical because the workers do not “benefit” from being arrested, losing their jobs and being deported.

What will happen then is predictable from past experience with workplace crackdowns. Fired immigrants won’t “go back” to their country of origin, where there are no jobs or sometimes even homes waiting. Rather, they will be forced to accept working off the books in exchange for cash, or even food and lodging.

The reaction in the immigrant communities was quick, with protests in Chicago, New York, Houston and other places. The universal opinion was that the arrests were a response to the massive immigrants’ rights marches and demonstrations of the last two months, an attempt to intimidate the immigrants and their supporters. They also may be an attempt to appease the ultra-right xenophobes in the Republican Party. Another possibility is that the raids are intended to stampede employers into lobbying Congress to approve a guest worker program.

Immigrants’ rights activists denounce the raids for pre-empting efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that well might have legalized some of the very people who have now been arrested and face deportation. Accordingly, from state Sen. Gil Cedillo in California, Pueblo Sin Fronteras in Chicago, the National Interfaith Network on Worker Justice and many others, a demand is being raised that there be a moratorium on all deportations until Congress finishes a satisfactory immigration reform bill.

Roberto Lopez of Sin Fronteras said “The national raids separated families, destroyed lives and traumatized children across the country. It is undeniable that these raids were timed by this administration to intimidate and stop a movement which has won the support of over two-thirds of the American people. Why should millions of families suffer because the political agenda of the Republican Party has prevented a solution to the immigration crisis for which they are responsible?”

On April 25, the Chicago City Council will take up a resolution denouncing the raids and demanding that they be stopped.

Workers of the world uniting: Solidarity grows for Mexican workers

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 10:22:00 +0000

Hundreds of Mexican federal and state police stormed the Sicartsa steel plant in western Michoacan, April 20, to remove striking steelworkers who had occupied the plant since April 2. The police opened fire on workers with teargas and bullets. When the smoke cleared, the police had killed two workers, one of them a representative of the National Union of Mine and Metallurgical Workers of the Republic of Mexico. About 40 workers were hospitalized, along with some two dozen police officers.

As night fell, 1,000 women marched through the streets to the mill protesting the attack. Police held the steelworks for two hours. Steelworkers and local residents, some still in their pajamas, fired up backhoes and, in a shower of rocks and stones, evicted the police and took control of the plant.

In solidarity, steelworkers walked out of a nearby mill as well as the Viga Trefilados plant 3 miles away on Cayacal Island. Some workers reported they were shot at from a police helicopter as they marched to the Sicartsa plant.

In the U.S., United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard denounced the government attack, saying in a statement that the “murderous actions” of Mexican President Vicente Fox’s administration “have marked it as one of the most heinous in all Latin America.” The USW has formed a strategic alliance with the 250,000-member Mexican union.

Sicartsa is owned by Villacero SA, a Mexican multinational steel and mining corporation with facilities in several countries including the U.S. It is Mexico’s largest producer of steel bar, rod and wire. Mexico is Latin America’s second-biggest steel producer, after Brazil.

The strike and occupation at the Sicartsa complex is part of a strike wave that swept the country protesting the government’s response following a Feb. 20 coal mine explosion which took the lives of 65 miners. The metalworkers union, which represented miners at the doomed Pasta de Concha mine, assailed the company and government decision to entomb the 65 miners when rescue efforts failed. “We did not want to abandon our comrades, dead or alive,” union miner Alvaro Cortez told reporters.

The only action the government took was to remove the president of the metalworkers union and name their own man.

The mine is owned by Grupo Mexico, which also owns Asarco copper mining operations in Arizona and Texas.

Miners struck Grupo Mexico 14 times “not only for salary increases but because of its constant refusal to review security and health measures,” the union said in a statement.

On March 24, 4,000 miners and steelworkers, furious at the attack on the union and in defense of their own working conditions, struck not only Grupo Mexico, but also Villacero and the mega-steel corporation Mittal as well. Mittal owns the former Bethlehem and LTV mills in the U.S.

Anger spilled across the border to the U.S. and Canada. The United Steelworkers sent health and safety technical support to the Mexican metalworkers. USW members picketed Mexican consulates from Philadelphia to Minneapolis to Toronto in solidarity with Mexican workers. It was the USW’s first such solidarity action in the U.S.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson deplored the latest police violence and demanded that the metalworkers’ leadership be restored. She also called for action on the critical issue of mine safety.

Michoacan public safety director Gabriel Mendoza Jimenez and state police chief Jaime Liera were caught in a public lie. They told the press, April 21, that their officers were not armed and only the federal police carried loaded guns. But Felipe Manuel Maya Bucio, a metalworkers union official, released a video showing Liera clearly issuing the order to fire. Both police officials resigned.

The deadly police violence sent a tremor through the Mexican government. The leader of Fox’s political party, PAN, and the lawyer for Villacero seemed to be singing out of the same hymnal. PAN leader Francisco Morelos Borja said the government had to act because the sit-in and strike at the Sicartsa mill were illegal. Alejandro Gonzalez, the corporation lawyer, accused workers of “terrorism”. But the president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission, Jose Luis Soberanes Fernandez, who has 11 investigators at the mill, said Fox should assume “serious responsibility for the killings.” Mexico’s national elections are in July.

While the families of steelworkers bury their dead, Villacero is worried about profits. The corporation estimates that the strike is costing it $3 million a day.

As of April 22, steelworkers and community residents continued to hold the mill and had set up a picket line circling the complex.

Teachers, electricians and telephone workers across Mexico were poised to hold a three-hour work stoppage April 28 in solidarity with the metalworkers.

General strike continues strong in Nepal

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 07:12:00 +0000

Tens of thousands of peaceful protesters against the autocratic rule of King Gyanendra continued to fill the streets of Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, and cities and towns throughout the country this week despite brutal government repressive measures, including a daytime curfew and orders to shoot on sight. Attacks by government forces have killed several demonstrators and injured hundreds of others. Thousands of protesters have been arrested.

In one report April 11, the online news service E-Kantipur said police “launched an unrestrained attack” on protesters in Kathmandu, firing tear gas shells and rubber bullets into a crowd that included women and children. “Protesters were severely beaten as large numbers of armed police personnel baton-charged the agitators in the surrounding streets,” the news service said. The director of a nearby hospital reported that 90 percent of demonstrators treated there had suffered head injuries.

A general strike demanding restoration of parliamentary democracy was launched April 6 by the Seven Party Alliance (SPA), comprised of the seven major parliamentary parties including the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), the trade unions, women’s groups and other people’s organizations. It has now spread even to remote villages in the Himalayan mountains.

The GEFONT trade union federation reported that workers and their unions had closed down the country’s factories, while government, telecommunications and bank workers challenged the king’s Essential Services Act by joining the general strike. GEFONT said lawyers, artists, teachers, doctors, businesspeople and disabled people had joined the protests.

On April 15, thousands of women, students and local residents participated in a peaceful rally in Kirtipur, initiated by women’s organizations linked to the SPA.

Meanwhile, villagers in Butwal decided not to send vegetables, milk and other foods to urban areas, saying city dwellers weren’t protesting vigorously enough against the monarchy. Reuters reported April 18 that food and fuel was running short in Kathmandu and that popular anger against Gyanendra was mounting. It quoted an unnamed diplomat: “We could see him toppled if he doesn’t do something in the next few weeks or days. I am very afraid we are moving into a revolutionary situation.”

The SPA has been waging a struggle to return to democratic government since Gyanendra dismissed the constitutionally elected government in October 2002 and took over absolute power in February 2005. In recent months the alliance has negotiated an agreement with Maoist rebels who had conducted a decade-long armed struggle.

Last week senior UN human rights commissioner Louise Arbour said she was “shocked by the excessive use of force by security forces in Nepal, as well as the arbitrary use of detention.”

Even before the current protest began, the head of the CPN(UML), Madhav Kumar Nepal, had been under house arrest since January. On March 23 police ransacked his home, arrested him and sentenced him to three months’ detention.

GEFONT said over 30 trade union leaders had been arrested since the general strike started. In an April 12 statement, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unionists protested the jailing of “a long list of trade unionists” and other activists, and called on the Nepalese government to release them and to end the use of violence against peaceful demonstrations.

On April 14 Democracy Now featured an interview with E-Kantipur’s editor, Nepali journalist Akhliesh Tripathi, who described the severe beating he and colleagues received at the hands of Kathmandu police as they sought to cover a protest earlier in the general strike.

On April 12, the U.S. ambassador, John Moriarty, told SPA leaders, “We support the parties’ peaceful movement for democracy.” But speaking on Democracy Now, Ashok Gurung, head of the New School University’s India China Institute, said the Bush administration has provided the Nepali Army with financial support and weapons. In an April 12 statement, the SPA called for intensification of the movement to restore democracy. It urged medical providers to treat injured protesters and called on security forces not to suppress the people’s movement, saying a new democratic government would compensate hospitals and doctors, and would be prepared to “take strong action” against leaders of security forces attacking the protests.

Delphis bankruptcy abuse challenged

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 06:56:00 +0000

While Delphi CEO Steve Miller has proposed in bankruptcy court to cancel labor agreements, slash the company’s hourly workforce by approximately 75 percent and phase in a wage cut from $27 an hour down to $16.50, it has sung a different song to its executives. As a reward for leading the auto parts manufacturer into bankruptcy, Delphi has asked the court for permission to give a group of executives hundreds of millions in salary and stock options.

In response to this, on April 6 Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced a bankruptcy reform bill designed to eliminate abuse of the bankruptcy process, which has occurred not only at Delphi but also during other recent corporate bankruptcies.

The Fairness and Accountability in Reorganizations Act of 2006 (S 2556, HR 5113) would close some of the loopholes that have allowed executives at Delphi to reward themselves while slashing wages and benefits for working families. Management should not be allowed to enrich themselves on the backs of workers and retirees, said the United Auto Workers in a statement supporting the bills. The legislation faces an uphill fight in the GOP-run Congress, whose new bankruptcy law, approved last year, allowed Delphi execs to seek bonuses and extra pay.

This bill would require bankruptcy judges to take into consideration a company’s foreign operations, as well as its domestic ones, in ruling on motions to reject collective-bargaining agreements and retiree health benefits. This is important as Delphi has been increasing its overseas operations and now has 180,000 employees outside the U.S.

“Companies should not be allowed to shift resources and production to overseas operations, at the same time they are pleading poverty in an attempt to slash wages, benefits and jobs in the United States,” said a joint statement from Conyers and Bayh.

Yet another initiative is coming from Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.). They are circulating sign-on letters that call on Delphi to provide workers, retirees and their communities with current and necessary financial information to show whether the company’s proposed wage and benefit cuts and facility closings are truly necessary and whether the proposed changes are being implemented in a gradual, humane manner that gives workers, retirees and communities the longest possible time to adjust.

The UAW is urging its members and the public to contact senators and representatives to press them to co-sponsor the Bayh-Conyers bankruptcy reform bill and to sign on to the Kennedy-Miller letter.

N.Y. judge slams transit union

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 05:43:00 +0000

NEW YORK — On April 10 Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Theodore Jones sentenced Roger Toussaint, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, to 10 days in jail for leading his union on a pre-Christmas three-day strike. Seven days later, Jones slammed the union again, fining it $2.5 million and crippling its ability to collect dues.

In a related development, 71 percent of Local 100 members voted to accept the contract the membership rejected in January by seven votes. Union leaders say the reason for the earlier rejection was confusion sown by the media and Gov. George Pataki. The union’s leadership is calling on the Metropolitan Transit Authority to ratify the contract instead of going into binding arbitration.

“When we went on strike,” Toussaint told the judge at his trial, “we did so knowing that the law forbids us to strike, but we were engaged in civil disobedience and we did it because we felt we had to.”

The union argued it had been backed into a corner by illegal MTA demands to change its membership’s pension structure.

“It is the Authority that is the chief lawbreaker,” Toussaint said. He added that while the state’s Taylor Law bars strikes and technically prohibits employers from doing certain things, employers face no sanctions for misconduct. “The MTA can pursue an unlawful bargaining proposal ... and face no consequences for that.” This has caused thousands of city employees to work without contracts for years, he said.

Toussaint argued that the strike was defensive and for the good of all New York workers. “We were fighting back against the MTA’s efforts to impose an entirely new pension on future transit workers and to begin that process for all municipal employees in the city of New York,” he said.

More ominous for the union are the $2.5 million fine and the loss of dues check-off, the automatic deduction of union dues from workers’ paychecks. Union officials estimate that only a small percentage of dues would be able to be collected manually from members, spread over the city’s sprawling transit system. The financial burden could cripple the union.

However, community and labor leaders are determined to put up a fight. Standing with Toussaint in court were several city councilors, Brooklyn Congressman Major Owens, State Assembly members and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

When Toussaint’s sentence was announced on April 10 at the NYC rally for immigrant rights, he was cheered as a hero by the thousands of people gathered. A number of elected officials and union leaders noted that, had the trial and the immigration demonstration not been on the same day, they would have been at Toussaint’s trial.

The city and state labor movements immediately announced an April 24 rally to coincide with Toussaint’s imprisonment. The NYC Central Labor Council argued in a statement that the penalties affect all workers, and urged maximum turnout.

The case has brought the Taylor Law, which drastically limits the rights of public workers, into focus. The law violates basic labor rights as defined in the UN International Labor Organization’s Declaration on the Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.

“First and foremost, if you’re a worker, you have to have the right or opportunity to use some leverage,” said Chris Owens, a community activist and candidate for Congress in the 11th District. He added that the penalties imposed are “unfair and outrageous.”

“Toussaint stood up, and the TWU stood up and did something that a lot of other unions should be doing more of,” Owens said. “They should have the support. If they did, the elected officials would be changing the laws, and the judges would be a little bit more in fear of the repercussions. Now it’s like open season on organized labor.”

Supporters of the union urge that letters protesting the rulings against the union be sent to the Hon. Theodore T. Jones, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of Kings, 360 Adams St., Brooklyn NY 11201-3712.

Virginia students sit in, 17 arrested in solidarity with campus workers for living wage

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 04:59:00 +0000

Seventeen University of Virginia students were arrested on the Charlottesville campus April 15 because they staged a four-day sit-in at the university president’s office. The students demanded the administration accept its “moral responsibility” and commit to paying a living wage to university workers.

Seth Croft, 21, a third-year English literature major, was arrested. “We tried everything we could to work with the administration,” he said in a telephone interview. “We realized that we needed to escalate in order to get them to hear our voices.”

Croft said his parents understood his decision to sit in and his mother, inspired by the action, joined the protest during his arrest. Croft added that the students and the living wage campaign were inspired by the example of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the nonviolent sit-ins and protests for racial integration that took place at the university 40 years ago.

Students have set up a tent city on the lawn next to Madison Hall, where the president’s office is located, in support of the sit-in. At one point they formed a human chain around the building, singing and chanting.

Since the arrests, rallies and vigils involving students, university workers, labor leaders, professors and community leaders have been taking place non-stop.

Living wage fights for university custodial, cafeteria and other workers have taken place across the country, including at Harvard, the University of Texas and Stanford. Last year at Georgetown University, a student-led hunger strike lasting nine days led school officials to agree to raise hourly wages to $14 from $11.33.

Although last month the University of Virginia raised its entry-level wage from $8.88 an hour to $9.37, the increase only applies to workers who are directly employed by the university. Most campus workers, such as food workers, landscapers and custodians, a majority of them women and people of color, are contract workers. They are hired by outside companies and paid as little as $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage in Virginia. That is not enough to raise a family on, workers and students say.

Carmen Comsti, 21, a senior in American studies and anthropology, was also arrested. “My family is a working-class family and I know how it is to struggle,” she told the World. “We want to make sure that everyone understands that it’s not only the legal or economic arguments that must be clear, but that this is, most importantly, a moral and ethical issue as well.”

The students, along with labor and community supporters, are demanding that entry-level workers at the university be paid at least $10.72 an hour.

The campaign for a living wage at the University of Virginia has been going on since 1998.

Todd Rosenbaum, 22, a senior in political philosophy and American studies, is an organizer with the campaign. “Nobody should be working 40 hours a week and not afford to feed their families,” he said. “Because the administration has ignored us in the past, the sit-in was designed to bring us into discourse with them. The administration has made it very hard for the workers to speak out.”

Ben Van Dyne, 23, another student organizer, said, “This is a beginning of a new stage. There are people of conscience who will stand up and say enough is enough.”

Jan Cornell, president of the campus Staff Union, said, “This is only the beginning. This is not over. We are going to go on, and on and on until [university president John] Casteen pays the workers $10.72 an hour.”

Staff Union, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, has represented the workers employed at the university since 2002, but has yet to be recognized by the administration. Cornell called the university president a “coward.”

Sue Herndon, an organizer with Staff Union, said the union has been working with the living wage campaign from the beginning. “Virginia is a right-to-work state,” where employees can’t have a closed shop, in which employers agree to hire only union members at union-scale wages. Herndon went on to thank the students for their actions. “Thank you, you’re incredible, absolutely inspiring, phenomenal.”

And to the workers she added, “Be strong and join us, together we can make a difference. With the kids we can be invincible. The people united will never be defeated.”

Thousands march for immigrant rights in San Antonio

Thu, 20 Apr 2006 07:00:00 +0000

SAN ANTONIO — San Antonio School District students walked out of classes April 10 along with students from Alamo District to protest the immoral Sensenbrenner bill, HR 4437, which would criminalize many immigrants as “illegals” and anyone who would try to help them. The students chanted, “No immigrant is illegal.”

Students, teachers and union members, including members of the Machinists Union, were joined by priests, nuns and thousands of other residents in a march from El Mercado to Hemisphere Park. They were part of a national explosion of political protest against HR 4437 and similar anti-immigrant bills under consideration in the U.S. Senate. Flags of the United States, Mexico, Texas, and the U.S. Marines were carried by many Mexican immigrants who have risked their lives for the country. No one asked if they were “illegal” then.

Students said that walking out was an education. It showed unity and respect for their grandparents and parents and those who have died in the desert. “Bush does not like us because we are brown,” one student said. “We (Mexico) are the closest Third World country,” said another.

A common theme of the signs was “Justice with dignity.” Other slogans included, “We are not criminals, we are not illegals, we are international workers,” “We pay taxes too,” “When it becomes a crime to help the poor, I will be first in jail,” and “Stop the wall of death!”

Victory! France scraps anti-labor law

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 07:05:00 +0000

French President Jacques Chirac bowed April 10 to the pressure of millions of students and workers marching across France and withdrew a hated law granting employers the right to fire a young worker at will for up to two years after he or she is hired.

“This is a big victory for the labor movement, for students and youth. This anti-labor law is dead,” said professor Jean Solbes in a telephone interview from his home near Montpellier in southern France. “This is the first time since 1968 we have seen such a big movement of university and high school students. And for the first time in many years, we had a united front of the entire labor movement to defeat it.”

The law limiting the labor rights of youth under age 26 was rammed through with no debate last month by Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who claimed it would reduce France’s chronic double-digit unemployment. But the law ignited street protests of up to 3 million youth and their worker allies. Hundreds of university campuses, high schools, factories, offices and other workplaces were idled by nationwide strikes.

Villepin poured fuel on the protest with his arrogant refusal to meet and discuss the draconian law, claiming it was essential to modernize France and make it competitive in “globalized markets.” Finally, after weeks of rising fury, Chirac was forced to withdraw the law, known as the First Jobs Contract (CPE).

The majority right-wing government initially pushed the CPE through without any debate, Solbes charged. “Villepin has never been elected in his life. He is an agent of the big bourgeoisie. He is very arrogant. The plan was to destroy all labor rights in France.”

Solbes, who participated in the movement and who serves on the higher education committee of France’s largest union federation, the CGT, said the marches, rallies and strikes were “filled with joy and solidarity.” The youth now are less doctrinaire than in 1968 when a similar uprising of students and workers swept France, he said.

“This time we were focused on defeating deregulation and privatization, all the neoliberal policies that strip workers of their rights,” Solbes said. “We are saying: We are human beings. We won’t be treated as objects. Our future is ours, not the property of the big bosses of the transnational corporations.”

Solbes added, “You have to take into account that this struggle came just a few months after French voters overwhelmingly rejected the European constitution. The people saw it as a blueprint for privatization and deregulation. They voted ‘no’ on the constitution, even though the conservatives and the social democrats endorsed it.”

An honorable exception was the French Communist Party (FCP), which campaigned vigorously for the EU constitution’s defeat. The FCP joined with energy and enthusiasm in the fight to defeat this anti-labor law as well. “Now the labor movement, the student and youth movement must maintain their critical independence and keep the pressure on to transform a labor victory into a political victory.”

Although Villepin has denied he harbors presidential ambitions, both he and his rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, have been considered possible successors to Chirac. But polls indicate that Villepin’s approval ratings have plummeted to 25 percent, a drop of 16 points in just the past month. Chirac’s ratings have also fallen to 25 percent.

Sarkozy is hoping to capitalize on their woes. But students in Paris carried a banner that read, “Villepin, we got you … Sarkozy, you’re next!” They also vowed to remain vigilant in their defense of labor rights, with some demanding that a similar law that applies to enterprises with fewer than 20 workers, the CNE, also be scrapped.

Writing in the FCP daily, L’Humanite, Jean Lojkine debunked the corporate media for interpreting the student-worker uprising as a case of “insiders,” older workers who enjoy job security and benefits, against “outsiders,” marginalized younger workers.

“More than two-thirds of the French population are now against the ‘First Job Contract’ law, far more than the ‘excluded’ and the ‘youth,’” he wrote. “The real reason for this widespread mobilization is the rejection of the whole concept of elimination of job security, making people’s lives insecure, from the unskilled to management-level employees. The whole labor force today faces the threat of torn-up collective bargaining agreements, of loss of workers’ rights and loss of social securities.”

Nor is this struggle unique to France, Lojkine continued. “This is happening throughout Europe. The new scheme is often held up in the mass media as the ‘New El Dorado.’ Any talk of the ‘generation conflict’ is therefore only a trap, a firewall masking the rising class struggle. … The ties uniting these groups are much stronger than they were in 1968, partly because of the increased maturity of the student organizations and the linkages … they are making with the demands of labor organizations representing workers.”

He concluded, “All eyes are now on France, less isolated than it has ever been. Didn’t Marx say that France was the nation in which class struggle would ultimately be victorious?”

Injuries lead nurses to quit. Union launches drive for state regs

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 05:38:00 +0000

Saying huge numbers of on-the-job injuries from lifting and turning patients causes ever-increasing legions of nurses to quit, American Federation of Teachers’ nurses division launched a drive for state legislation mandating that hospitals install devices to help cut the injury toll — since the institutions won’t install them voluntarily.

AFT Healthcare, the union’s 70,000-nurse division, brought in several of the devices during its legislative conference in Washington to demonstrate how they could help nurses avoid injury.

Back-saving devices

The devices were as simple as an inflatable life raft-like multilayered body cushion. A patient on the floor could have a Velcro-underlined sheet slipped underneath his or her body. With the lining facing down, the nurse slides the patient onto the body cushion. It’s then inflated, raising the patient, sheet and all, to the level of a bed. One nurse, without bending or lifting, could then slide the patient onto the bed.

That’s not what hospitals do now, though, says Health Care Division Director Candace Owley. They force nurses — and often just one nurse — to bend down, lift the patient and transfer him or her to the bed.

The result is injured nurses and techs, a Peter Hart survey for the division shows. And the injured workers are more likely to quit, worsening the nation’s health care worker shortage.

X-ray techs hurt too

The survey of 509 hospital nurses and 404 hospital radiology lab techs, who also must move and shift patients, showed 56 percent of the nurses and 64 percent of the techs had job-related chronic pain or injuries.

X-ray tech Vinnie Fedor of Bayonne, N.J., described the cramped X-ray room where he had to clamber on a table, crouch down to grasp a sheet under a patient on a gurney and lift the patient to the X-ray table. When he climbed down, his foot caught on the sheet “and I flew off, hit my head on a garbage can,” ricocheted back against the X-ray table and wound up with a fractured pelvis and needing knee surgery.

Pain is an issue

Pain has joined understaffing as the biggest on-the-job problem for nurses, with 39 percent listing that as their main issue, compared to 38 percent for understaffing.

On-the-job stress, injuries and pain have led 47 percent of nurses and 30 percent of the techs to consider quitting, the survey adds. More than four-fifths of both groups want state standards to force hospitals to provide patient-moving equipment and training.

AFT is not counting on the federal government to battle the rising injury toll. AFT affiliates will lobby the states, instead. That’s because, Fedor noted, the very first law the GOP-run Congress passed in 2001, at GOP President George W. Bush’s behest, repealed federal ergonomics rules — regulations designed to cut the numbers of the very injuries that hit Fedor.

— Press Associates Inc.

Labor law reform in France

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 05:27:00 +0000

More than a million people in France have taken to the streets against their conservative government’s attempts to change the country’s labor law.

According to the conventional wisdom here in the United States, “Old Europe” is in need of serious economic reform. But will the reforms currently on the European political agenda actually help most Europeans?

One of the recommended reforms is more “labor market flexibility.” This is an economist’s way of saying it should be easier to fire employees, and there should be less generous public pensions and unemployment compensation, and lower payroll taxes. Lower wages and benefits attached to employment, as well as a reduced influence of unions also fall into this category.

The French government has proposed to allow employers to fire employees under 26 years of age without having to show cause. To Americans this may seem strange, since employers under U.S. law are generally permitted to fire anyone without having to give a reason. But this is not the case in most other high-income countries and even in many developing countries.

The government claims that employers will hire more people if it is easier to get rid of them, and that therefore unemployment (especially among younger workers) will be reduced. But the available economic research provides little or no evidence for this argument.

For example, there is no relationship between the amount of employment protection in different countries and their unemployment rate. This is true generally for measures often portrayed as having a negative impact on employment: for example, unemployment compensation, national collective bargaining or the percentage of union members. While it is true that France’s unemployment rate is relatively high (9.2 percent), there are a number of countries with high levels of labor market protections and low levels of unemployment: Austria (5.2 percent), Denmark (4.4 percent), Ireland (4.3 percent), the Netherlands (4.6 percent) and Norway (4.5 percent).

This makes sense if we think about it in economic terms. First, it is not as though employers can’t fire people in France or elsewhere in Europe — they just have to show cause. They may prefer the American system, but if there are profitable opportunities for expansion, they will hire more workers. A country’s level of employment (and unemployment) generally has much more to do with the overall demand for the goods and services that its businesses produce, rather than the rules or benefits that affect individual employers.

Why then is Europe’s unemployment currently higher (8.4 percent for the high-income countries of Europe) than that of the United States (4.8 percent)? One possibility is that the European Central Bank (ECB) has kept interest rates higher than it should have in recent years. As the U.S. economy slowed in 2001, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates aggressively (to 1 percent in 2003) and kept them low for three years into our current economic expansion. The ECB was slower to cut interest rates and has been raising them this year, despite relatively sluggish growth and inflation of only 2.3 percent.

The idea that labor protections are the cause of European unemployment is part of an overall myth that Europeans would benefit from a more American-style economy. The U.S. economy is said to be more competitive, yet we are running a record trade deficit of more than 6 percent of GDP, and the European Union is running a trade surplus. The U.S. economy is supposedly more dynamic, but French productivity is actually higher than ours. Their public pensions, free tuition at universities, longer vacations (4-5 weeks as compared with 2 weeks here), state-sponsored day care and other benefits are said to be unaffordable in a “global economy.” But since these were affordable in years past, there is no economic logic that would make them less so today, with productivity having grown — no matter what happens in India or China.

French students and workers seem to have a better understanding of these economic issues than their political leaders. Hopefully, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

This column distributed by Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services was published in the Sacramento Bee and other newspapers. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

Sago survivor home, mine safety battle continues

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 05:24:00 +0000

PITTSBURGH — Randall McCloy, 26, thin and weak, sat inside his Simpson, W.Va., home with his wife and two children for the first time in two months. McCloy survived the worst West Virginia mining disaster in 40 years. His recovery from carbon monoxide poisoning following the Jan. 2 explosion at International Coal Group’s Sago Mine will take months.

In the halls of Congress, beneath the dome of West Virginia’s Capitol and in the small communities of the Mountain State, there’s a sharp struggle to protect the lives of the men and women whose labor keeps the lights on and the profits flowing into the bank accounts of massive coal corporations.

“Miracle” is the word most used to describe McCloy’s recovery, but many workers believe that the 11 men trapped with McCloy 250 feet underground for over 40 hours shared their fleeting oxygen with him. McCloy was one of two young miners in the doomed 13-man crew. One miner died in the initial explosion and the 11 others died later.

McCloy told The Associated Press that he is not going back to the mines. With his co-workers on his mind, he said, “It’s a delicate situation and it should be handled delicately. It’s not something you definitely want to dive right into. I am going to choose to be careful about what I say and how I word things for the families’ sake. I just feel I should show them great respect.”

Even before McCloy was able to return home, ICG re-opened the Sago Mine, March 15, amid simmering controversy between the state of West Virginia and surviving Sago families on the one hand and the coal corporations and Bush administration on the other. The Sago Mine is nonunion. As Woody Aylestock, 85, retired miner who lives in sight of the Sago Mine put it, “The coal company owns it all.”

For two months, the West Virginia Legislature, the state’s U.S. senators and representatives and the United Mine Workers union have been waging a battle to implement sweeping legislative action to prevent another Sago. ICG had been cited for 208 safety violations in the year preceeding the explosion, but fined only $24,000. Pressure from Congress forced the Mine Safety and Health Administration to increase the penalty for 43 of those violations to $105,840. To date, ICG has not paid a nickel and reserves the right to appeal.

That is all that has changed since Jan. 2. In testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, United Mine Workers President Cecil Roberts said, “MSHA’s top policy makers have not been doing their job protecting and enhancing miners’ health and safety. This may be because so many of them were mine management executives before coming to MSHA. At MSHA they spend too much time trying to appease their friends and too little time looking out for miners’ interest.”

Roberts was flanked by families of miners killed on the job in West Virginia and Alabama.

The 1969 Federal Mine Health and Safety Act, enacted following the 1968 Farmington disaster which took the lives of 78 miners, provides for union representation of miners and their families to be present during a safety investigation, whether they are members of the union or not. ICG has openly defied this provision of federal law, but Sago families have stuck with the UMW.

On May 2 the state of West Virginia and MSHA will hold a public hearing in Buckhannon to get answers to questions about the lack of action by the coal companies to protect miners, and to determine the cause of the Sago Mine explosion.