People Before Profit blog

Grocery workers mobilize for health care

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 05:55:00 +0000

HAYWARD, Calif. — Hundreds of northern California grocery workers roared their approval at a press conference here Dec. 8 as California Labor Federation head Art Pulaski pledged the federation’s support for the UFCW locals now in intense and difficult contract talks with Safeway and other grocery giants. Pulaski said the federation will join the workers’ “Boycott Pledge Card” campaign.

The press conference and the rally that preceded it came after two weeks of contentious talks in which Safeway, Albertsons and Krogers made clear they mean to slash workers’ health care. Since the contract affecting some 30,000 workers expired on Sept. 11, the two sides have agreed to extend it for short periods, the latest ending Jan. 15.

“The California Labor Federation is joining with community and interfaith leaders to step in to hold Safeway accountable for the massive health care cuts that they are seeking at the bargaining table,” Pulaski said. “We see no reason to let Safeway and the other large grocers shirk their responsibility and pass such enormous costs onto working families and the taxpayers.”

The Bay Area Coalition of eight UFCW locals announced plans for a Dec. 16 mass day of support in front of 54 area Safeway stores. Dozens of other unions, community and interfaith organizations are joining in the drive to add to the 75,000 pledges consumers have already signed, saying they will honor a boycott or strike if one is called.

“Time and again Safeway has rejected real solutions,” said Judy Goff, head of the Central Labor Council of Alameda County. “They rejected Prop. 72 (to require employers of 50 or more workers to provide health coverage) and stood with Wal-Mart. Now they want to take away health care.”

Goff said the labor movement and supporters have laid the groundwork for adopting stores in Alameda County and elsewhere in northern California if grocery workers have to strike.

While UFCW members are prepared to strike, if necessary, “we’re ready to spend the time needed to win a contract with a good standard of living for us and for those to come,” union spokesperson Ron Lind told the crowd.

“Why can’t we have the same kind of health care our brothers and sisters in Canada have? Let’s start with Safeway!” said Ethel Long-Scott, executive director of the Women’s Economic Agenda Project. Long-Scott called for putting universal, single-payer health care on the nation’s agenda.

The UFCW says the employers’ proposals would also slash retiree health coverage. “After 33 years, I’m eager to retire this spring,” said UFCW Local 870 executive board member Glenn Bright, who started work at Lucky’s (now Albertsons) at age 19. But if the employers’ proposals are implemented, he added, “everything I’ve worked for will go down the drain.”

“The general public doesn’t understand that we already have deductions and co-payments,” said Marla Donati, attending the rally and press conference with Local 870 sisters Diana Mendoza and Angela Willman. Only a quarter of the grocery workers have full time jobs, Donati said, but the cost of health care is the same regardless of hours worked. She also pointed out that “grocery workers haven’t had a pay raise in 10 years.”

The supermarkets claim the solidarity actions planned by the union and its allies have little effect. But at its annual investor conference last week, Safeway said the lingering effects of the southern California strike would cut 20 cents per share from its earnings. The grocery giant had already said it lost nearly $320 million because of the strike.

Festival of Lights & Rights boosts strikers

Fri, 17 Dec 2004 04:57:00 +0000

PORTLAND, Ore. — In the spirit of the holidays, 300 people joined a picket line outside the Parry Center for Children Dec. 10, protesting the starvation wages that forced the 85 child care workers on strike Nov. 29.

The “Festival of Lights and Rights” in solidarity with the members of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 503 was organized by the Oregon chapter of Jobs with Justice. The festival is an annual event held in support of workers’ right to organize. People carried candles and flashlights to ward off the chill darkness on Powell Boulevard and dozens of drivers honked in sympathy as they passed.

“The community support — both from the labor community and the community at large — has been tremendous,” said shop steward Colleen Erin Sullivan as she led the picket line. “At our first rally more than 500 people showed up and we expect a big turnout at a rally downtown this Friday. Our morale his stayed very high in no small part because of the solidarity.”

Sullivan said the starting wage at the center, a resident facility that serves emotionally troubled children and teens, is $8.86 per hour and is capped at $9.28 per hour, even though a college degree in psychology or sociology is a requirement for the job. In the last 18 months, turnover has reached 64 percent. “The turnover here is so high the quality of care and the safety of the children is compromised,” she said. “Obviously people come here because they care about kids. But they also need to be able to eat. The pay is so low that people are forced to move on.”

It can take months to win the confidence of children who have been victims of abuse, she said. A study by the Nursing Management Journal published in June 2000 showed a dramatic drop in the use of physical restraints as clients and their therapists got to know each other better. That bond is broken by rapid turnover.

The Trillium Corporation, which owns the Parry Center and three other child care centers in Oregon, claims to be a “nonprofit” but ended 2003 with an $868,694 surplus. The five managers awarded themselves salary increases ranging from 19.1 percent to 37.4 percent in 2002, a combined cost of $117,767 compared to the $63,000 it would have cost to give each of 120 wage workers a 45-cent-per-hour raise.

Sullivan said 90 percent of the operating revenue for the Parry Center come from taxpayer funds. The Multnomah County Council has accused Trillium of violating a county resolution on fair wages and worker rights. It and the Portland City Council have passed resolutions urging the firm to accept the strikers’ offer of settling the dispute through arbitration.

“They are under a lot of pressure,” Sullivan said. “As far as I am concerned, every Trillium worker, every worker, deserves to be paid a living wage and be represented by a union. But Trillium Corporation has rejected arbitration. They would prefer to break the union and sacrifice the children in the process. Now they are threatening to bring in permanent replacements.”

Sullivan graduated from Albion College in Michigan with a double major in psychology and sociology. She has been at the Parry Center for three and a half years, hoping that collective bargaining would win a livable wage for herself and her fellow workers.

“I am here because I think we can make a difference for these kids and change the face of children’s mental health care in Oregon,” she said.

Illinois college faculty strike wins gains

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 06:09:00 +0000

CHICAGO — Faculty members at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) reached agreement on a new contract Dec. 8 after a 20-day strike halted classes here for 12,000 students. The teachers were demanding a fair wage increase, a reduction in workload and an end to a two-tier wage system separating full-time tenured and part-time teachers. The agreement won pay increases, especially for the lowest paid faculty members.

This was the first faculty strike in 75 years in the state university system. Earlier this fall, teachers in the city college system struck for the first time in 25 years.

The 500 faculty members are represented by University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. The striking teachers and staff received strong support from students. The strike was solid despite administration threats to eliminate health insurance, punish students who respected the picket line, and deport immigrant faculty members who supported the strike.

By law the university administration was required to inform the Immigration and Naturalization Service that immigrant workers were on a legal strike. But now this information had to be given to the Department of Homeland Security. While some immigrant workers remained on the picket line, at least two went to Canada during the strike, fearing deportation.

“The administration is making us work less on things that make us a good institution,” Sarah Hoagland, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies, told the World. Hoagland, who teaches three courses each fall and spring semester, said she works long hours preparing for her classes and keeping up on the latest developments in her field, hours that are not reflected in a 40-hour workweek.

Additional hours advising students and student clubs are part of the faculty workload. But two years ago, the administration unilaterally declared that faculty would not get credit toward their work hours for this work.

NEIU faculty salaries have been at the bottom in the Illinois university system. As bad as salaries are for full-time faculty, the salary for new teachers is approximately half to two-thirds of that. Part-time “Unit B” faculty receive half the salary of a full professor but must teach more courses.

Funding for the state higher education system has been cut 16 percent over the last four years. As a result, full-time faculty slots have been cut and the number of part-timers at NEIU has ballooned to over 50 percent. While other state universities have managed to increase faculty salaries, NEIU chose to increase administrative costs. Tuition skyrocketed 70 percent in the same period.

One part-time professor, an immigrant, who continued to walk the picket line in the face of deportation threats, has a Ph.D. and has been teaching at NEIU for seven years. As part of the “Unit B” faculty, he teaches five courses a semester and receives $27,000 a year, what one union spokesperson termed a “slave wage.” He is forced to work 70 hours a week teaching at three universities including NEIU, commuting over 700 miles each week, to support his family. “I see my children only on Sundays,” he told the World.

“We are trying to protect the right of the faculty and staff to reasonable compensation and workloads so we can provide the quality of education students deserve,” said John Murphy, Local 4100 vice president. “We believe we are battling for the future of public higher education in Illinois.”

The author can be reached at jbachtell@rednet.org.

Labor at crossroads: Bring the discussion from union hall to union hall

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 05:44:00 +0000

NEW YORK — In an amazing bounce- back from the frustrating Nov. 2 electoral defeat, labor leaders, academics and rank-and- filers turned out en masse here to discuss and debate “Labor at the Crossroads: Competing Visions, Alternative Strategies, and the Future of the U.S. Labor Movement.” The 500 conferees were brought together Dec. 2-3 by the Queens College Labor Resource Center. They could all agree on one thing: in the face of the most vicious corporate assault in recent memory, this nation’s organized labor movement has to fortify itself with major structural and ideological upgrades in order to successfully fight to defend the working class.

Passionate expressions of strong opinions by labor leaders and activists were tempered with civility, perhaps based on recognition of the critical need for unity.

“We begin this debate in the open, in full public view,” said Brian McLaughlin, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, setting the tone. “Bring today’s discussion from union hall to union hall so our members can participate,” he urged. “We must look to our members for every challenge we face.” Then he dramatically ripped apart a Wal-Mart sign he had brought along for the purpose.

Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE HERE, the newly merged union of hotel, restaurant, clothing and textile workers, told the conferees he didn’t have all the answers, but he argued, through his union’s experience with industrial laundry workers, that it is necessary for each organization to take responsibility for a whole industry.

UNITE HERE, along with the Service Employees (SEIU), Laborers and Carpenters unions, earlier this year formed the New Unity Partnership. NUP has issued a controversial program for a radical restructuring of the AFL-CIO. It advocates consolidation of the federation’s roughly 60 unions into 20 large unions with defined industrial concentrations.

Five years ago, when UNITE made a decision to focus on industrial laundries, Raynor said, the union had only 10,000 laundry members with “low wages and lousy conditions.” The goals the union set were “wages people could live on, a defined-benefit pension plan, health care for the workers’ children,” and, he added ironically, “the communist notion of a few paid sick days.” The union has now achieved those goals for 97 percent of its represented workers, Raynor noted proudly, as a result of having organized 40,000 laundry workers, or 25 percent of the industry.

Gerry Hudson, SEIU’s executive vice-president, agreed with Raynor, adding, “For today’s unions, size matters in taking on globetrotting predatory corporations. It doesn’t work to have 60 different multisector unions.” SEIU has proposed designation of “lead” unions in each industry, with 50 percent of their resources going to organizing. Hudson also advocated developing unions in sectors where there presently are none and in non-union regions like the South. He also called for building global alliances of unions in the same industries around the world.

Taking a different tack, Larry Cohen, executive vice president of the Communication Workers, emphasized the role of shop stewards. CWA has 25,000 stewards. Cohen circulated his 10-point proposal for change, which focused on getting members into action. “If anyone thinks we’ll achieve collective bargaining rights based on restructuring rather than mobilization, they’re kidding themselves,” he said. Cohen, a founder of Jobs with Justice, challenged other unions to fulfill their commitments to mobilize and educate their memberships in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

From the floor, former ConEd senior electrical technician Jerry Waters highlighted the concerns of small unions like the 50,000-member Utility Workers, of which he is national vice president. The UWUA vigorously fought deregulation in 1996, he said, while other unions in the utility field were passive. “How do I fit in?” he asked, unwilling to let that fight fall by the wayside in a merger.

“I like the debate and the idea of debate,” Waters told the World during a break in the conference. Waters was thinking about how to get the discussion onto the shop floor. “Stewards are our first line of defense,” he said. “We have to get back to the workers and talk about it. It’s their organization.”

The author can be reached at rwood@pww.org.

Unionists chart antiwar drive

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 05:30:00 +0000

CHICAGO — How can union activists make sure the unfolding discussion in the AFL-CIO includes the issues of international solidarity and peace? How can we move the foreign policy debate forward in the labor movement? How can we support the growing sentiment in labor for bringing the troops, predominantly workers and the sons and daughters of workers, home from Iraq and out of harm’s way?

U.S. Labor Against the War (USLAW) discussed these questions and more at its Dec. 4 conference here. More than 150 trade union leaders and rank-and-file members wrestled with these urgent questions. An organization of more than 100 affiliated national, state, regional and local unions, other labor bodies and members of labor-affiliated groups, USLAW was founded in October 2003. USLAW activists joined with others in labor working to defeat George W. Bush in 2004, but planned this conference to continue the work on “fundamental issues of war and peace — Iraq in particular — and the diversion of expenditures from human needs to the military and its corporate backers,” which go beyond Election Day.

In the wake of Bush’s re-election, the mood at the conference was serious but upbeat.

Bill Fletcher, executive director of TransAfrica, keynoted the conference. Fletcher said the right wing used national security issues to re-elect an unpopular president and move forward its own plans for world empire. The AFL-CIO chose not to address these issues, he said.

But noting labor’s stake in peace, Fletcher asked, “Can our security be won at the expense of the rest of the planet?” He urged delegates to “think through how to bring the debate on imperialism into the labor movement.”

He said labor cannot continue to “bash trade agreements but ignore military aggression,” and labor should be expected to support a minimum program of international, working-class solidarity, including nonmilitary solutions to problems and a democratic foreign policy.

Nancy Lessin and Charley Richardson, longtime trade unionists and co-founders of Military Families Speak Out, received a warm reception as they told the delegates of the growing opposition to the Iraq war among parents and relatives of men and women in the armed forces — those already in Iraq and those being threatened with extended tours of duty, or “stop-loss” orders. Several GIs have filed suit against the “stop-loss” orders, claiming their contractual rights are being violated.

Delegates and observers spent most of the day in active discussion on strategy and tactics, and agreed to build support in labor for coming peace actions in March 2005. USLAW plans to continue building trade union solidarity with Iraqi unions, including raising money for material aid and sending a U.S. labor delegation to Iraq in 2005.

USLAW sits on the national steering committee of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the nation’s largest peace coalition, which has organized the major peace demonstrations starting with the Feb. 15, 2003, “The World Says No to War” action.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org.

S.F. hotel workers triumph over lockout

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 07:08:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — Some 4,300 hotel workers returned to work triumphantly at 14 of this city’s premier hotels last week, after area health providers’ decisions to extend workers’ medical coverage for December and January pulled the rug from under a weeks-long lockout imposed by the hotels’ management.

Negotiations for a new contract are continuing. The union reported progress on several peripheral issues, with the hotels withdrawing a demand for random drug testing and the union modifying a proposal on vacations.

On Nov. 20, Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that the workers’ union, UNITE HERE Local 2, and the Multi-Employer Group, representing hotel management, had reached agreement on a 60-day cooling-off period. When Newsom first called for the cooling-off period earlier in the fall, the union agreed immediately but the hotels summarily rejected the mayor’s appeal.

In the meantime, however, the state of California determined that the locked-out workers were eligible for unemployment insurance payments. After the employers refused the union’s request to use part of a shared emergency trust fund to pay for health coverage, health care providers including Kaiser Permanente, Chinese Community Health Plan and PacifiCare said they would extend coverage through the end of January.

The union’s call for a boycott was being heeded by a growing number of associations and corporations, who were canceling or moving scheduled meetings, and guests who did check into the hotels had to run the gauntlet of the workers’ lively picket lines.

After the hotels rejected his first call for a cooling-off period, Mayor Newsom, whose 2003 campaign received substantial donations from the hotels, declared he would “do everything in my power to see to it that the city and county of San Francisco does not do business with those hotels,” and briefly joined the workers’ picket lines.

“The lockout ended when the hotels realized that their tactics had turned against them,” Local 2 said in a communication to the workers. Besides the unemployment payments and the extended health coverage, the union credited solidarity with its picket lines in Hawaii and Monterey. “Our fight was spreading to cities all across America and beyond,” Local 2 said. “So the hotel bosses finally figured out that the only business decision that was not a complete disaster for them was to end the lockout.”

The lockout began as the hotels’ response to a two-week warning strike starting in late September, against four of the 14 hotels. Key issues remaining include the contract expiration date, health coverage co-payments, workloads and wages.

The authors can be reached at pww@pww.org.click here for Spanish text

Workers strike the Youngstown Vindicator

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 05:32:00 +0000

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Fed up with years of wage freezes and concessions in health care benefits, workers represented by Local 11 of The Newspaper Guild went on strike Nov. 16 against the The Vindicator, a daily newspaper published here and circulated in northeastern Ohio and parts of western Pennsylvania.

The 179-member local represents reporters, photographers, copy editors, circulation managers, delivery drivers and advertising salespeople.

The walkout was joined by the Teamsters union, which represents 25 mailers at the newspaper. Both unions voted overwhelmingly to strike over the issues of wages, health care, sick leave and job bidding rights. The early-morning walkout began 90 minutes after the expiration of a two-year contract, and no union members have crossed the picket lines.

The company immediately called in scab truck drivers from Tennessee and other southern states and hired a squad of goons, ominously dressed in black military wear and equipped with video cameras, to intimidate the unionists.

The union, in turn, went to work on a strike paper, publishing its first edition of The Valley Voice Nov. 19. The strike paper is a weekly, but the Guild plans to put it out twice a week if the strike continues.

Despite severe economic depression in this city — caused by the loss of its steel industry more than 20 years ago — a spirit of union solidarity remains strong. Pickets surrounding the newspaper’s downtown production facilities are greeted daily by continuous honking car horns, cheers, clenched fists and thumbs-up signs. There has been an outpouring of support from the local labor community and from unions in Cleveland, about 70 miles to the northwest.

The last time the union struck was 40 years ago. Workers hope that their work stoppage during this holiday season — normally the time when newspapers make their most money selling advertising — will force the company to sign a fair contract.

Sporadic bargaining sessions have continued during the strike, but the two sides last week were reportedly very far apart on money, with the company offering a mere 1-percent wage increase.

During contract talks two years ago, the company pressed union members to contribute to their health care plans, which up until then had been fully paid by the company. The union agreed, but only with the understanding that management and nonunion employees were contributing as well.

The union discovered this month that the company had lied. Only union members have been paying into health care over the last two years, giving management and nonunion employees a free ride. Striking sportswriter Pete Mollica told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he has lost $8,000 annually due to cutbacks in wages and benefits.

Anthony S. Markota, president of Local 11, told the Akron Beacon Journal, “Our members are very strong and we are going to stay out until we get a fair and equitable contract.”

For more information, visit the union’s web site at www.valleyvoiceonline.com.click here for Spanish text