People Before Profit blog

Labor Dept. to coal mine owners: Pay black lung victims' claims, then appeal

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 16:07:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) - Overturning a long policy that left hundreds of thousands of coal miners, disabled from black lung disease, usually without a penny of benefits before they died, the Labor Department is ordering coal companies who contest claims by the miners or their families to pay first and appeal afterwards.

The new rule may help solve a longstanding problem that black lung victims face: Not getting any money because companies delay paying and hire doctors who give the firms the medical verdicts they want.

"Parties who fail to share any medical data they develop about the miner are subject to sanctions. Additionally, the final rule reinforces coal mine companies' obligations to pay benefits under existing orders while" they challenge the orders.

"The rule allows coal companies one year from the last payment of benefits to seek reconsideration...Although they are legally obligated to pay benefits while challenging these awards, coal companies commonly refuse to do so. The final rule requires the operator to pay before they can challenge the award through the act's modification procedures," DOL said.

The rule, finalized April 25 by DOL's Office of Workers Compensation Programs, also gives disabled miners greater access to their own health information. "No worker should have to sacrifice their health to provide for their family, including the thousands of men and women who work in coal mines across the country to meet the nation's energy needs. These hardworking Americans deserve to know the full scope of their medical condition, and the new rule ensures they have full access to information about their health, by requiring all parties to exchange any medical information that they develop in connection with a claim."

Photo: United Mine Workers of America.

GOP bill overturns Labor Dept. restriction on financial advisers; Obama promises veto

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 16:07:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) - By a 234-183 party-line vote - with every Republican for it and every Democrat against it - the GOP-run House passed legislation on April 28 to overturn the Labor Department's new rule that orders financial advisers to workers and citizens to put clients' interests first, not their own.

But the measure, HJRes88, is headed for the graveyard. Even if the GOP-run Senate agrees to it, President Barack Obama's Office of Management and Budget says in no uncertain terms that he will veto it.

The DOL rule orders financial advisers for workers' 401(k) accounts, or to anyone for anything else, to put their clients' interests ahead of their own gains. Republicans, led by the fiercely ideological majority on the Education and the Workforce Committee, claimed DOL's rule would force the advisers to stop serving workers and small businesses on investments.

The OMB called the GOP's claim poppycock, in so many words.

"The outdated regulations in place before this rulemaking did not ensure financial advisers act in their clients' best interest when giving retirement investment advice. Instead, some firms have incentivized advisers to steer clients into products that have higher fees and lower returns - costing American families an estimated $17 billion a year," OMB's statement said.

"The rule will ensure workers and retirees receive retirement advice in their best interest, better enabling them to protect and grow their savings. The final rule reflects extensive feedback from industry, advocates, and members of Congress, and has been streamlined to reduce the compliance burden and ensure continued access to advice, while maintaining an enforceable best-interest standard that protects consumers. It is essential that these critical protections go into effect.

"If the president were presented with HJRes88, he would veto the bill," the statement concludes.

Graph: U.S. Department of Labor.

California janitors ready to strike

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 11:49:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES-Labor leaders gathered April 28 to announce their support should California's unionized janitors decide to go out on strike on May 2.

Thousands of area janitors, represented by Service Employees International Union/United Service Workers West (SEIU-USWW), have indicated they are ready to strike and are expected to rally in the streets of Los Angeles as contract negotiations enter their final hours before an April 30 deadline.

"From the start, this fight back in Century City over 25 years ago when they were brutally beaten, to the strike in 2000 when they fought to close the gap between rich and the poor, now we find ourselves in 2016, again fighting for the dignity and justice they very much deserve," stated David Huerta, president of SEIU-USWW.

Janitors will protest what they say are the unlawful practices committed during their fight for better working conditions, demand on-the-job protections from sexual assault of immigrant women janitors, and call for wages that allow local families to meet their basic needs.

Last Saturday, over 20,000 janitors statewide authorized their bargaining committee to call for a strike against unfair labor practices by janitorial companies such as ABM, ABLE, DMS, and others who contract with some of the state's most high-priced real estate owners and businesses in the tech industry.

Among the attendees at the press conference are David Huerta, President, SEIU USWW; Rusty Hicks Executive Secretary-Treasurer, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor; Javier Bonales, Vice President, Teamsters 396; Paul Edwards, UFCW local 770; Xochitl Cobarrubias, United Steelworkers Union 675 and many of the janitors who are ready to strike against unfair labor practices.

Video: Rossana Cambron | People's World

Photo: "We fight in our contract campaign to build on better wages and working conditions, to support the new minimum wage proposal and call for continued action to protect immigrant workers! We need stop the harassment, sexual assault, and the exploitation of immigrant women janitors! YA BASTA!" SEIU United Service Workers West, Facebook.

AFL-CIO: Workplace deaths, injuries on the rise

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 14:05:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) - On-the-job deaths and injuries increased slightly in 2014, the last full year for which data is available, the AFL-CIO reported. And a worker died on the job almost every other hour, 365 days a year.

In its 25th annual Death On The Job report, issued to mark Workers Memorial Day on April 28, the federation, using U.S. data, reported 3.4 deaths per 100,000 workers that year, up from 3.3 deaths per 100,000 the year before.

In absolute numbers, deaths also rose, to 4,821 dead in 2014 - 13 per day -- from 4,585 the year before. That doesn't count the estimated 50,000 former workers who died last year from job-related illnesses, such as silicosis and black lung disease.

The 224-page report breaks down the deaths, injuries and illnesses on the job by state, industry and occupation. But even the federation points out the data is incomplete, as worker deaths, and especially injuries, are vastly underreported.

And, as in past years, the report notes that fines the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or state OSHAs can impose on dangerous employers are too small to deter law-breakers. And the agencies are understaffed, with fewer than 2,000 state and federal OSHA inspectors, combined, for the country's eight million workplaces.

"Working people should not have to risk their lives to make a living and support their families," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "Yet every day, millions are forced to work with little to no safety protections while big businesses and corporations profit off our lives."

Key findings in the report include:

The most-fatal states to work in were Wyoming (13.1 deaths per 100,000 workers), North Dakota (9.8), Alaska (7.8), South Dakota (7.2) and Mississippi (7.1). The least-fatal states were Massachusetts (1.7), California (2.0) and New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island (2.1). Though the report did not say so, 10 of the 11 worst states for worker deaths on the job - all but Alaska -- were so-called "right to work" states, where unions are weaker and workers have less protection from bosses.

Federal OSHA is so understaffed that it had 5.4 inspectors per million workers in 2014, a lower rate than the first year, 1974, its workforce size was even measured. And its budget is so small that it's $3.71 "to protect the safety and health of each American worker," the fed said.

State OSHAs aren't much better. Their inspectors get to worksites an average of once every 97 years, the report calculates. For the feds, it's an average of once every 145 years.

Farming, fishing, logging, oil wells and refining and construction were again among the most-fatal occupations. Oil set a record for on-the-job deaths last year (144). And 899 (9.8 deaths per 100,000) construction workers died on the job last year, most of them from falls. That's 19 percent of all job deaths nationwide, and up slightly from the year before.

Almost eight million state and local government workers lacked OSHA coverage in 2014. By law, federal OSHA doesn't cover state and local workers and almost half the states (24) don't either. The largest groups of un-covered state and local workers were in Texas (1.59 million), Florida (892,713), Ohio (629,572) and Pennsylvania (587,500).

Government workers in Illinois, California, Oregon, Michigan, Minnesota, New York and 20 other states had state OSHA coverage, but 363,761 in Missouri and 218,456 in Kansas did not. And death rates overall for state workers (4.1per 100,000) and local workers (5.4) were higher than in private firms (3.2 per 100,000 workers).

Older workers are more likely to die on the job (10.7 deaths per 100,000 workers). The 1,691 deaths of workers aged 55 or older set a record.

Women were two-and-a-half times as likely to be murdered on the job last year as men. A total of 804 workers were murdered, including 367 women. That's 19 percent of all female job deaths, compared to 8 percent of male job deaths.

Contract workers were at particular risk. Since the federal government started counting those deaths on the job, they've risen from 542 in 2011 to 802 in 2014. More than half of them (416) were in construction, and most of those construction workers fell to death (290).

In hopeful developments, enforcement has increased under the Democratic Obama administration and job safety and health violation fines have risen, though median and average OSHA fines are still low. But last November, Congress raised them again, significantly.

The 2015 two-year budget agreement included a law increasing all federal civil fines and adjusting them for inflation. And, for the first time, it brought OSHA under the law. "Under the new law, OSHA is authorized to raise maximum penalties by approximately 80 percent, the amount of inflation since the last time OSHA penalties were raised in 1990," the report notes.

"With these adjustments, the maximum penalty for a serious violation will increase from $7,000 to approximately $12,500 and the maximum penalty for a willful or repeat violation will increase from $70,000 to $125,000. The new penalty amounts must be implemented by regulation by July 1. State OSHA plans will be required to adjust their maximum penalties to conform to the new federal amounts," Death on the Job reports.

"More than 532,000 workers now can say their lives have been saved since the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, which promised workers in this country the right to a safe job," the AFL-CIO report concludes. "Since the first Death on the Job report in 1992, there have been improvements in workplace protections, but at the same time some conditions have gotten worse. Too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death. There is much more work to be done."

Photo: AFL-CIO

Railroad whistleblowers face retaliation, urge OSHA prosecutions, heftier fines

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:36:00 +0000

TACOMA, Wash. (PAI) - Six years ago, Curtis Rookaird, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) conductor, blew the whistle about unsafe airbrakes on BNSF tank cars in Blaine, Washington that were headed from Canada to Seattle.

His supervisor told him to skip airbrake safety tests. He refused. The results? Rookaird, for putting safety first, was fired. And after a multi-year struggle, he and his family lost their house, his wife has told the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

"My husband is a conscientious worker, and he should have been promoted, not fired," Kelly Rookaird told OSHA's committee that oversees treatment of whistleblower complaints. And BNSF, she said, should have faced much more than just a $250,000 fine.

The catch is that Curtis and Kelly Rookaird are not alone - and BNSF isn't the only railroad, or only company for that matter, that punishes whistleblowers with retaliation, putting them into economic straits and stress while inciting fear into other workers, too.

All that led Kelly Rookaird and two railroad colleagues, both BLE members, to D.C.

Data gathered by federal and private sources show 65 percent of workers surveyed witnessed company wrongdoing of various varieties, and that firms retaliated against 22 percent of all workers who stood up. Another 44 percent of workers decided not to report wrongdoing, for fear of retribution. Under federal law, such retaliation and retribution is illegal.

"A company cannot retaliate by taking 'adverse action' against workers who report injuries, safety concerns or other protected activity," OSHA, which oversees 22 whistleblower protection statutes, says on its website. But they do.

The sorry record of corporate treatment of whistleblowers brought Kelly Rookaird, retired BNSF engineer Jeff Kurtz and longtime BNSF switchman, brakeman, and engineer Michael Elliott on April 26 to tell personal stories about how U.S. companies treat workers who put safety first. Over the last eight years, two railroads, BNSF and Union Pacific, led all U.S. firms in whistleblower complaints, federal data show.

Kurtz, Elliott, and Curtis Rookaird are Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers-Teamsters members and also members of Railway Workers United, a rank-and-file organization which has led a long fight for improved safety standards on the nation's freight railroads.

RWU first came to prominence by exposing the lack of safety around railroads' long campaigns for 1-person freight train crews, after the sole crewmember - the engineer - left his oil freight in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, two years ago, only to see its brakes fail and the train roar into town, derail, catch fire, explode, destroy downtown Lac-Mégantic and kill 47 people.

But another part of safety is protecting workers who blow the whistle on company malpractice. That protection is one of OSHA's primary jobs, and it's hamstrung in doing it, the three told the agency's committee.

OSHA's role needs strengthening, because "even as a union officer, I'm not that well-protected," adds Kurtz, a 41-year veteran from Fort Madison, Iowa, and former Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers Local 391 official and Iowa BLE legislative director. Union prominence, as Washington state BLE legislative director, didn't protect Elliott from retaliation, either.

One problem OSHA has, they said, is low penalties: A maximum fine of $250,000 against errant firms, and no jail time for company managers who break job safety rules and laws, or order workers to do so. The company manager who arranged a fight that BNSF used as a pretext to arrest and then fire Elliott has since been promoted, for example.

"There needs to be damages, and criminal action against criminal behavior," by company officials, Kelly Rookaird testified. Instead, all three said afterwards, there's nothing. Elliott suggested starting company fines at $5 million. "They understand that kind of take," he said of corporate America.

Another is staffing. All three said OSHA investigators of whistleblower persecutions have too many cases to handle, and must also take care of routine paperwork themselves. OSHA is spending $17.5 million this year on 135 staffers nationwide to probe whistleblower complaints. President Obama wants to add $4.1 million and 22 staffers to that for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. Despite short-staffing, whistleblower complaints and settlements went up almost 7 percent from 2014 to 2015, rising to more than 3,100 in each category.

And a third is lack of power to force firms to divulge information. Unlike courts, OSHA cannot subpoena company records to find out what really went on after a whistleblower filed a complaint. OSHA investigators "must have subpoena power and they must be able to interview all the parties involved" - including workers - "without those parties having fear of retaliation," Kelly Rookaird told the agency's panel.

When Elliott, an engineer from Tacoma, took his complaint about track defects in 130 miles of BNSF right-of-way between Seattle and Tacoma to the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) years ago, the agency was so far behind in addressing railroad problems that it never got to it. So Elliott yanked it from FRA and went to OSHA.

BNSF retaliated by ordering a supervisor to stage a confrontation with Elliott, then using that conflict as an excuse to fire and arrest Elliott. Elliott sued, and eventually won $1.25 million in federal court - after a trial which, thanks to the subpoenas, disclosed far more wrongdoing at the railroad. But Elliott hasn't gotten a cent yet, because BNSF has appealed the verdict.

And that brought up one more problem the testifying whistleblowers told the panel about: A corporate culture that, as Kelly Rookaird put it afterwards, "puts velocity" -moving freight quickly and profitably - "over safety."

Kurtz and Elliott added some firms settle with OSHA, promising to improve, and then break those pledges. That's what BNSF did in 2012. "But it's worse there now," Kurtz testified.

Retaliation's impact can go farther than losing your job, Kurtz said. It affects your family and your future, and can even threaten lives.

After the hearing, Kurtz recalled an incident seven years ago, in July 2009, when conductor Josh Osborne and engineer Andy Reed of the small Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad were killed in an accident when "someone forgot to turn the switch on the main line" and they were crushed between two trains.

A woman BNSF conductor was called in to be an impartial investigator, Kurtz said. The whole scenario was so upsetting that she was on a suicide watch for days and could not return to work. BNSF's reaction? "If you're going to refuse service, you're terminated," Kurtz reported.

Committee members were sympathetic to the complaints from the three railroaders and from others, but they had to point out that sometimes their hands are tied: Congress approves OSHA's budget and sets limits on its personnel. Until last December, lawmakers increased OSHA's fines only once since the Occupational Safety and Health Act passed in 1970.

Dr. David Michaels, the OSHA administrator who testified later in the afternoon, has repeatedly made those same points to lawmakers, while seeking more funds and staff. So has the AFL-CIO. But Congress, especially under the GOP, has turned a deaf ear.

Photo: conbio.info

Immigrant bus drivers allege racial discrimination, labor law violations

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:29:00 +0000

MINNEAPOLIS - Somali and Oromo bus drivers have filed charges against two Twin Cities bus companies, claiming management discriminated against them on racial grounds and then illegally fired them.

The workers held a news conference on April 22 to announce the charges filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board against Monarch Bus Services and the Minneapolis and Suburban Bus Company.

"As citizens, we have the right to voice our concerns and complain to any company that is violating the laws of the United States of America," said Mahmud Kanyare, the leader of the group of about 15 drivers who call themselves the United Community of Drivers.

The workers say the companies discriminated against them by assigning them buses that were in disrepair and lacked heat, while white drivers were given better buses. They said the firms arbitrarily reduced their hours and failed to pay them for some of the time worked.

"This appears to be a clear case of discrimination based upon ethnicity," said Ellen Longfellow, a civil rights attorney with the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission records show many prominent companies have had to settle, or have pending cases, involving ethnic discrimination, such as discrimination against Muslims and Sikhs.

Violators include Walmart, National Tire & Battery, Swift & Co. meatpackers, American Airlines, and United Parcel Service. UPS' case about failing to hire, failing to promote, and segregating Muslims because of their appearance is pending in federal courts in New York. And in the Walmart case, supervisors told the worker, a Gambian, that "Muslims are terrorists and blow things up."

One EEOC charge of discrimination against Muslims, involving Abercrombie & Fitch, went all the way to the Supreme Court. There, last year, the justices sided with EEOC and the worker. They ruled the clothier discriminated against a female Muslim job applicant because she wore a headscarf (hijab) to her job interview. The firm claimed it violated A&F's "look."

In Minnesota, the bus drivers were frustrated in their attempts to present their complaints to ownership. They walked off the job in January and were then fired, they said. Although all are now working other jobs, they said they would like to return to bus driving and improve conditions at their former workplace.

Mohamed Ali, a bus driver for more than two years, said workers would like their concerns addressed so no one is treated "like a second-class citizen."

Several charges are in the process of being filed with the EEOC, Longfellow said. They allege discrimination based on ethnicity.

In addition, the group alleges the firings were illegal under the National Labor Relations Act, which protects workers when they take action as a group - whether or not a labor union represents them. The workers are awaiting a ruling from the regional office of the NLRB, which has already conducted interviews, Longfellow said. If the NRLB upholds their case as an illegal lockout, they could be returned to their jobs.

Following the news conference, Monarch Bus Service and Minneapolis & Suburban Bus Company issued a statement calling the drivers' claims "completely unfounded." It noted, in part that "Our two companies employ more than 175 employees of Somali heritage at all levels of the company, and we are actively hiring more. We enjoy a good relationship with those employees and the Somali community as a whole." It claimed the drivers stopped working "by their own choice" and were not locked out.

The drivers' news conference was held at the Minneapolis office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. CAIR has been active in assisting workers facing job discrimination and other problems.

Photo: Workday Minnesota

Temp workers increasingly at risk of dying on the job

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 13:03:00 +0000

Around Halloween in 2012, Jamie Hoyt reported for work, hired by Labor Ready, to a Verizon plant in Pearl River, N.J. The sunny, optimistic 58-year-old - as his sister describes him -- never came home.

Verizon engaged temp services company Labor Ready, which hired Hoyt. It turned him and responsibility for his job over to a subcontractor who in turn turned him and other workers over to the driver of an 18-wheel tractor trailer.

The workers' task was to load 2,500 pounds of computer equipment - servers - from the loading dock at the Pearl River plant onto the tractor-trailer for transportation elsewhere. But the truck was too big for the Pearl River loading dock, so its driver hired a smaller truck to transfer pallets of servers from there to the big truck, using the rear flaps of both vehicles.

What happened next to her brother the temp, says Mary Jo Hoyt, a registered nurse, was a preventable death. With no protection, no safeguards, no training and no support for the two trucks' rear flaps, the third pallet of servers slipped. It fell right on top of her brother.

Mary Jo Hoyt said she got a call from Pearl River that Jamie was taken to a nearby emergency room. When she called there, she heard, "The situation is very grave and the family should come immediately." "As a nurse, I knew what those words meant," she said.

Meanwhile, Verizon profited, by hiring Labor Ready, which hired Jamie, and which hired the other firm, that hired the driver. Her brother died.

Though he died four years ago, Jamie Hoyt is an example of a class of workers increasingly at risk of death on the job: Temps. And a new report from the National Council on Occupational Safety and Health says most of those deaths, like his, were preventable.

Hoyt detailed her brother's death in a telephone press conference to reveal the report, issued in time for Workers Memorial Day, April 28. Federal job safety, health and death statistics showed 802 temporary workers died on the job in 2014, up from 542 in 2011, the first year temps' deaths were separately reported. The 2014 data is the latest available, and the 802 temps were one of every six workers who died on the job that year.

"Contract workers are most frequently assigned to the most hazardous jobs," says Jessica Martinez, acting executive director of the National Council on Occupational Safety and Health. "And in too many cases, employers are not meeting their legal obligations to provide safe working conditions" or training workers in safety practices, she adds.

Besides spotlighting the hazards to temps, the council's report, Preventable Deaths, notes that many job-related deaths occur long after the worker has left the job. "Cancer claims more lives than any other occupational disease in most countries," it says. "The disease can be prevented, writes safety engineer Jukka Takala, president of the International Commission on Occupational Health, 'by reducing or eliminating the exposures leading to the disease.'"

Photo: Jan Carson/Flickr (CC)

Indiana Carrier plant workers take their case directly to UTC shareholders

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 15:05:00 +0000

On February 10th, United Technologies (UTC) announced its "business decision" to shutter the Carrier plant in Indianapolis and move production to Monterrey, Mexico. The move would eliminate at least 1,400 jobs in Indianapolis. A video of the heartless announcement was posted on YouTube and has received more than 3.7 million views, drawing national attention to UTC offshoring plans.

On Monday, members of the United Steelworkers Local 1999 who work at the facility scheduled for closure traveled to the UTC shareholder meeting in Florida. The USW members delivered a petition signed by 4,500 people, asking the company to reconsider moving their jobs to Mexico, and called on UTC to keep good, family-sustaining jobs in Indianapolis.

"Abandoning the Indianapolis plant will have a devastating effect on not only 1,400 workers, but also our families and our community," said USW Local 1999 Unit President Donnie Knox. "UTC's decision to move our jobs to Mexico and the video of a manager's callous delivery of that devastating news to workers in Indianapolis have made Carrier and UTC into poster children for corporate greed."

United Technologies' greed is not unusual. It is exactly what many of the other American companies have done over the last thirty years. Corporations sell out American workers, who labored to build the company from the ground up, only to watch their jobs shipped overseas so the stockholders can make a quick buck.

In October, United Technologies, Carrier's parent company, used a stock buyback program to temporarily inflate the share price. They announced plans to buy back $12 billion worth of the corporation's own stock - boosting the price per share up by almost 5%. UTC plans to spend another $3 billion later this year, to buyback even more shares. This is great news for the wealthy executives and Wall Street hedge fund managers who hold the majority of UTC stock (even though it's one of the reasons for a recent downgrade in UTC's bond rating).

What about the people who work for UTC? Instead of reinvesting in the company, expanding current operations or increasing the wages of the hard working men and women who built the company, UTC decided to use all those billions to buy back their own stock. Just imagine what that $12 billion could have meant for the 195,000 workers employed by UTC.

As if spending $12 billion to buy back their own stock was not bad enough, let us not forget that UTC also paid out dividends to stockholders. In 2015, UTC paid a quarterly dividend of around $0.66 per share. This means that over the year UTC paid out $2.50 to all 843 million shareholders, totaling $2.1 billion dollars in dividend payouts.

That's more than $14 billion total paid to stockholders in buybacks and dividends. The amount of money would it take to keep these 1,400 workers in Indianapolis would be just a drop in the bucket, compared to what is being shelled out to stockholders. The greedy executives do not seem to care about the workers, their families, or the city they will destroy when they close this factory.

Knox, and his fellow Steelworkers, delivered a petition with more than 4,500 signatures from Carrier employees and their supporters from Indianapolis and around the country, calling on the company to reconsider its heartless decision to abandon American workers.

Carrier's decision to move these jobs to Mexico is what is wrong with too many American corporations. They no longer care about building a lasting company that employs as many Americans as they can, they only care about how they can boost their stock prices to further line their own pockets.

The members of Local 1999 are going to continue to fight until Carrier reverses their decision to send these jobs to Mexico.

On Friday, April 29, members of USW Local 1999 will take the fight to save their jobs to the streets with a march and rally at the Indiana State Capitol. The rally will be headlined by USW International Vice President Fred Redmond, U.S. Senator Joe Donnelly and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

This article is reprinted with permission from NH Labor News.

Photo: USW, courtesy of NH Labor News

Union leaders grapple with problem of workers backing right wingers

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 11:17:00 +0000

BOSTON - Like many Graphic Communications Conference / Teamsters (GCC/IBT) leaders, the president of Local 3-N in Boston, Stephen Sullivan, has heard his members speak favorably of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as a champion of the working class -- a straight shooter who aims to bring greatness and jobs back to America.

But Sullivan urges caution. Trump, and other Republican presidential contenders, also have argued against the minimum wage, vilified the Affordable Care Act -- widely known as "Obamacare" -- and show persistent disregard for labor interests and minority rights, he warns.

"He's long on rhetoric but short on details," Sullivan said of Trump. "I tell people, 'Don't look at what he says. Look at what he does.'"

For labor leaders who find members leaning increasingly toward conservative, anti-labor candidates, there is an urgent need to counter right-wing arguments before November.

In the case of Trump, longtime Graphic Communications Conference/IBT leader John Agenbroad said the billionaire businessman has shrewdly portrayed himself as an "outsider" who has never held public office and doesn't seek funding from wealthy backers. To voters who feel betrayed by establishment politics, Trump can seem irresistible, Agenbroad said.

Often ignored are Trump's crude campaign trail remarks, lack of coherent policy statements and what often appears to be little knowledge of vital domestic and foreign policy issues. Also overlooked: His recent backing for right-to-work laws. "I like right to work," Trump said in South Carolina, adding the anti-union legislation is "better for the people."

"He's a loose cannon," Agenbroad said of Trump.

Agenbroad, former executive officer and secretary-treasurer of GCC/IBT District Council 3 and president of Local 508-M in Cincinnati who now works as a political consultant, said if Trump wins the GOP nomination he is likely to lead his party to defeat in November. But in an unusual election year, predictions often have proved risky.

Union leaders admit they are wary. "Don't ever be over-confident," said Graphic Communications Conference/IBT President George Tedeschi. "Anything can happen."

Writing in The Atlantic magazine, journalist Richard Brownstein observed that Trump is "amplifying the voices of constituencies that have usually been outshouted in fights for their party's nomination," Brownstein said.

Worried union leaders acknowledge that many members feel "outshouted" by powerful voices in American politics and are showing anger by backing extreme candidates.

Trump may be the most obvious beneficiary of the trend, labor officials say, but GOP hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also represents extreme right-wing positions and is a Tea Party favorite. Even Ohio Gov. John Kasich, cast as a moderate in the GOP race, has a strong conservative streak.

In recent years, many union members voted for candidates like Kasich and right-wing GOP Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who stripped public unions of most collective bargaining rights. It is a development that causes concern at the highest union levels.

As Teamsters President James Hoffa often has observed, the irony of union people voting for conservatives is obvious.

"We've made them into Republicans," Hoffa has said.

Tedeschi also laments the rightward drift evident in union ranks.

"Sometimes people become comfortable and lose focus," Tedeschi said. "They get won over by empty talk and distracted by hot button social issues that have little to do with real-life worries like wages and plant safety. And they forget who have been long-time friends of unions and who wants to tear down our movement. Voting for any Republican candidate this year is a huge mistake. When it comes to labor, one is worse than the other."

Mark Cooper, a member of GCC/IBT Local 727-S in Des Moines, Iowa, and president of the South Central Iowa Federation of Labor said, for instance, that he knows union members who oppose Hillary Clinton so strongly that they might vote for a Republican alternative, including Trump. Clinton, a former First Lady, U.S. senator and Secretary of State, is leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It is a case in point, Cooper said. Clinton has been criticized for her stand on some international trade agreements but, in general, stands strongly with union workers.

On the other hand, Cooper recalled meeting a worker at one of Trump's hotels who said he made $9 per hour working at non-union Trump property and $18 hour working for another property that was unionized.

It is essential that union leaders point out disparities of this sort as the election season continues, Cooper said.

Union people must vote for candidates who will oppose the Republican anti-union agenda that includes pushing a federal right-to-work law, gutting the National Labor Relations Board and seating a far-right justice on the Supreme Court to replace the late Antonin Scalia, labor leaders say.

"You need to have those conversations with your members," Cooper said. "We do have Republicans in our ranks."

Zachary Dowdy is a Newsday reporter and editorial unit vice president of GCC/IBT Local 406-C, Long Island.This article comes to the PW via PAI.

Photo: Crowd at a Donald Trump rally. Union leaders admit that they face an uphill battle convincing many woirkers that Donald Trump pushes policies that are not in their interest.. | Jim Cole/AP

Hillary Clinton’s pro-worker pledges excite building trades audience

Thu, 21 Apr 2016 10:47:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton finally showed that she can turn a crowd on.

The former Secretary of State, the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, repeatedly brought 3,000 unionists to their feet with strong pro-worker pledges - and a few jabs at the two leading Republican hopefuls - on April 19.

Clinton took time out from that day's New York primary, which she won by a 57 percent-43 percent margin over challenging Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., to jet to D.C. to address the 2016 Legislative-Political Conference of North America's Building Trades. That's the renamed AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department.

And her passion for workers' causes, from project labor agreements to being their advocate in the White House, excited the audience.

Admittedly, Clinton addressed unionists already disposed to back her. NABT, and ten of its 13 member unions, previously endorsed her candidacy, and thousands of unionized construction workers have been pounding the pavements for her this election season. Those waving signs in the cavernous hotel hall included the slogan "Hardhats for Hillary."

Still, Clinton is known for her policy-filled, fact-filled and rather dispassionate speechmaking. Her Building Trades speech was still policy and fact-filled, but it was anything but dispassionate. The cheering came for Clinton statements such as:

"If I become your president, I will be your champion in the White House - and you will have a seat at the table."

"I will not let anyone undermine collective bargaining rights. I will not let anyone undermine prevailing wage standards. I will not let anyone undermine project labor agreements." Those three statements were interrupted by cheers after each.

"I'll fight for a tax credit to expand your successful model" of apprenticeship training, which she said reaches African-Americans, Latinos, women and the disabled and brings them, via the building trades, into well-paying middle-class jobs.

"There are 1.2 million jobs" pending or available in construction, especially as current workers retire. "I want them to be filled by apprentices trained by the building trades and to become members of building trades unions.

"If you do your part, you and your family should be able to get ahead and stay ahead."

"We need an economy that grows for everybody, not just those at the top."

"Some country could be the energy superpower of the 21^st century. It could be China. It could be Germany. I want it to be us."

Clinton backed her sweeping statements with specific proposals. Clinton explained that every high school graduate needs post-high school education, in 4-year colleges, community colleges or as apprentices. So she advocated one tax credit for apprenticeship training, another for restoring U.S. manufacturing, and two infrastructure plans.

Her manufacturing plan centered around the tax credit, and much of the money would go for new clean energy development, she said.

"American workers don't quit and I won't quit on them," Clinton pledged.

As for infrastructure, Clinton repeated her proposal for a 5-year $275 billion plan to rebuild U.S. bridges, roads and mass transit, now funded by the federal gas tax. She added a public-private partnership, funding a $250 billion national infrastructure development bank, for "projects of regional or national significance." Building trades unions have campaigned for such a bank for years, as have congressional Democrats. The GOP ignores the bank plan.

And Clinton was particularly passionate, and got a storm of applause, when she described the infrastructure disaster, and political moves - by Republicans - that poisoned the drinking water in Flint, Mich., with lead. That harmed kids, especially minority kids. Earlier, the whole crowd gave a standing ovation to Plumbers Local 370 members who are replacing faucets and installing filters, as well as bringing bottled water, to the stricken city, for free.

All Clinton's infrastructure lines got vigorous approval, as building trades members help erect those structures, pave the roads and build new subways, tunnels, power lines, bridges and airports. She noted U.S. infrastructure - from eroding pipes to a creaky electrical grid to elderly airports to crumbling highways and bridges - needs not just repair, but replacement.

Clinton also used infrastructure for one jab at the GOP in general and presidential contenders Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whom she called out by name.

"We're hearing a different tune from some in the GOP," she said of their infrastructure plans. "Ted Cruz has supported a plan to cut infrastructure spending by 80 percent. Does anyone here believe we should do that?" The crowd responded, "No!"

And Clinton targeted Trump and Cruz not just on infrastructure, but on their readiness for the White House, their foreign policies and their anti-worker schemes. Trump, she noted, supports lower wages for workers. Then she turned to protecting the U.S.

"When Donald Trump talks approvingly about torture or about having South Korea and Japan have nuclear weapons, it's scary. When Ted Cruz talks about surveying Muslims, it's scary," she said of some of the foreign policy statements by the two Republicans.

"Loose cannons tend to misfire," Clinton summed up.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks at the 2016 Legislative Conference of North America's Building Trades Unions in Washington, Tuesday, April 19, 2016. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

MU graduate workers say “union” in a landslide

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 14:25:00 +0000

Graduate student workers at the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) have voted 84 percent in favor of having the Coalition of Graduate Workers (CGW), an affiliate of the Missouri National Education Association, represent them as their sole union. This victory represents the latest step in their power struggle with their employers in the MU administration over wages, benefits and other rights.

The conflict was first ignited in response to the university' less than 24-hour notice to graduate workers of plans to cut their health care coverage last Fall. In the face of a backlash from graduate students and supporters, including a walkout and rally, the MU administration quickly backpedaled on their plans to stop covering grad workers' health insurance, at least temporarily.

This initial clash highlighted both the precariousness of graduate workers' rights as employees and the power of their collective action-and spurred their effort to unionize.

Before this vote the CGW had already won some important victories. As Josephine Smiley, a teaching assistant in the MU School of Journalism, recalled, "Our union has already advocated on our behalf with regards to our healthcare situation and our wages, which are promised to go up this July-at least that's the last promise I heard."

For Smiley, these victories mean "a lot for me because I need to pay rent, I need to buy food." Still, recognizing the superiority of contracts to promises, Smiley voted in favor of being represented by the CGW, which, according to its website (cgwmissouri.org), originally formed "with the goal of securing a collectively-bargained contract that would prevent future crises."

"Crises" in this case refers to the aforementioned short-lived health insurance cuts.

The overwhelming pro-union vote notwithstanding, there has been a special reluctance by graduate workers in the MU School of Journalism to weigh in on or participate in unionization efforts. This stems in part from an interpretation of journalistic ethics popular at MU that holds that workers in that field must maintain neutrality, even on questions of their own rights on the job.

Regarding this chilling effect, School of Journalism graduate worker and voter Amanda Mainguy said, "I don't think that the bias, or the argument for impartiality... I think it's valid, but I don't think it's applicable."

As to why that argument does not apply with regards to the union vote, Mainguy clarified that, "I don't think it really matters because I think every person has a right to earn a living wage for their families." While noting that the journalistic ethics of this situation are complicated, she insisted that, "I don't think that--regardless of what you're affiliated with or who you're affiliated with within the journalism school--that you should be treated that way and not be recognized for your contribution to the university."

Adding to the anti-union climate, in the run-up to the union vote, MU Interim Chancellor Hank Foley made his opposition to unionization clear. In an email sent out by Foley April 8^th, he noted, "In recent conversations, we indicated there was some question regarding the legality of unionization among graduate students," therefore, "any vote to unionize at this time cannot be considered binding or recognized by the university."

The email then goes on to promise that if MU graduate workers-whom Foley scrupulously avoids referring to as "workers"-vote in favor of unionization, "University leadership will begin an educational campaign to ensure that all graduate students impacted by this decision will be knowledgeable about what this means at the University of Missouri." Later, in an interview with the Columbia Tribune published April 16^th, Foley labeled the union vote as a "mock election" and the graduate workers as "these kids."

When asked about Interim Chancellor Foley's recent remarks, Josephine Smiley said, "I'm pissed about that. We're not children. ... I feel like it's a way to put us down and sort of downplay the importance of what we're doing." She added that "other grad workers across the nation are organizing right now, so this isn't just a Mizzou issue."

While the vote result is a substantial victory for CGW, this is just the latest step in their campaign for justice for MU graduate workers. Given the resistance they've been facing from the upper administration, they still have an uphill battle ahead of them. However, as they have shown since the threatened healthcare cuts August 2015, MU graduate workers, particularly those active in CGW, are more than ready to add union organizing to their workloads.

Photo: Graduate student votes in the union election. | Jack Bertolt/PW

Think about immigration like a nurse

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 14:14:00 +0000

Presentation given at the House of Delegates Meeting of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals on April 18, 2016.

Congratulations on your victories at Delaware County Memorial, Hahnemann University and St. Christopher Hospital for Children, and at Einstein Medical Center. Almost 3000 nurses and hospital workers have joined the union in just a few months.

I was a union organizer for over 20 years, including a brief time with CNA in California. I know how important and how hard-fought these victories are. How you can change the lives of nurses, and give people real power where they work, and where they live. When nurses win a contract and a strong union our whole community benefits.

Safe staffing levels mean patients get better care. Power at work means we can advocate more effectively for the things we need in our communities. Single payer healthcare, with healthcare treated as a right, not a privilege. Better schools with teachers who are respected. Safety in our streets, including safety from the police who are supposed to protect us, but who often are the biggest threat we have to worry about for our children. Equality, where we all have rights, and discrimination is treated as a crime, whether it's because of our race or our sexual identity, or the country where we were born and the language we speak.

And I know from my own experience, and I'm sure it's true for you too, that the biggest thing we have on our side when we organize and begin to confront the people we work for is our unity. If we unite everyone where we work and where we live, and we stay together, there's no limit to the changes we can make.

I'm not talking about ignoring the way's we're different. We are different colors, and not color blind. We fight discrimination, but are proud of who we are. Some of us have skin like coffee, others like rich chocolate, and others like strawberry shortcake. (I'm stealing a line from a song by a good friend who sang it on many picket lines, John Fromer.) In our workplace, and I know this is especially true in healthcare, we speak a lot of languages. English and Spanish, of course. But now we hear and speak Tagalog, Vietnamese, Somali, Swahili, Croatian and many others.

Can we unite?

That reflects the fact that we have many people from different countries in our workforce. So we face a very serious question as a result. Can we unite across these differences? In our unions and our neighborhoods we can go one of two ways. We can unite together, as one organization for everyone. Or we can divide into us and them.

Our media and political discourse are telling us we can't. We must decide. Everything follows from how we answer this question. PASNAP organizing victories at those three hospitals say we can. Where I live in California, most healthcare workers are women and people of color, and immigrants are a big part of the workforce. And most union victories in my state rest on the shoulders of these courageous women and men, who defy discrimination and the threats to their jobs to organize.

So if we really believe we must unite, we must also grow to understand each other. And one of the most difficult pieces follows right after our first question. If we are going to unite, those of us who were born here, and those who have come from someplace else, we have to understand why people are coming here, and what choices people face.

Unless our ancestors were the native people who lived here when people arrived from across the Atlantic, we are all the children, grandchildren and descendants of immigrants, living on the land that was the home of those original inhabitants. So I want you to look into your own history, and think about how your family came to be here.

There are driving reasons why everyone has come. Many people came because survival was impossible in the places they lived for generations. They were forced by poverty, by wars, by persecution. The plantation owners of the south needed labor, and their raiding parties kidnapped African people by the thousands, and loaded them onto slave ships for the terrible middle passage, after which they were sold into bondage for generations. We just learned in the paper today that Georgetown University, that great institution, was built with the money from the sale of 238 slaves.

Most often, when people got here they were treated like dirt. The first "illegals" were the slaves, who were considered three-fifths of a human being, and that only so that slave states could get more representatives in Congress. Those coming from China were held prisoner on an island in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, for years. They passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to keep the Chinese out, and make being Chinese illegal too.

So there's nothing new about racism or the way people are treated today. A mother and child from Central America held in a detention center, a prison, in Texas today is no different from a Chinese father held on Angel Island almost 200 years ago. Immigration agents knocking on doors in the middle of the night looking for people without papers has an awful similarity to the slave catcher.

Consequences of making immigration status a crime

As a union we have to think carefully about the consequences of making immigration status a crime punishable by getting fired, getting deported, and even being thrown into prison. And this is not imagination. These things happen. Tens of thousands of immigrants get fired every year in what are called silent raids. When workers at the huge Smithfield pork plant in North Carolina tried to organize, not only were hundreds fired, but dozens were imprisoned because they'd made up a Social Security number to get a job. But they won, because Black workers and Mexican immigrants found they had a lot in common, most important, the need for a union to change the terrible conditions there.

That unity, that's our most important strength when we organize, is threatened by the way people are criminalized. If the nurse in your ward lives in fear that if they check her documents she'll lose her job or worse, don't you think she'll have to think a long time before signing that union card? It's a testament to the courage of many people that despite not having papers, they join and stand shoulder to shoulder with their sisters who were born here, or who were able to get papers when they came here. But let's not give our employers an extra weapon to use against us. We need everyone to have rights at work, and to live without fear of getting picked up.

Photo: David Bacon

The us and them mentality says that if the government builds a high enough wall, or devises even more extreme punishment for people who come here without papers, that people will stop coming. But I ask you, if you had to choose between seeing your family hungry or losing their land or your kids with no hope of getting beyond the sixth grade, would a wall stop you?

The consequences of turning people without papers into criminals have their biggest impact on us - our unions and our organizations fighting for social justice. So equality and rights are really a no-brainer, if we want to have power for working people. They are the road to unity.

Fleeing violence and poverty

But we also have to understand more about people who come. It's not enough to just write it off to poverty and violence, as though these things were just products of the way people are in other countries. Because much of the poverty and violence they experience is produced by what our country, and other rich ones like ours, do in the rest of the world.

When the U.S. negotiated NAFTA, it opened the door for Wal-Mart to become the largest store chain in Mexico. We know what Wal-Mart did to us, so what makes us think it would be any different there? NAFTA drove down the wages in Mexico, so that moving a factory from Pennsylvania becomes more profitable. Now a woman has to work on the line in Juarez for half a day just to buy a gallon of milk. In fact, they're striking over those wages in four giant factories in Juarez right now, which make the iPhones in our jeans. So let's help them. They need money and food, but they also need us to kill the next trade deal, TPP, that will drive more people into poverty, and force them to make the same choice about coming here. Let's make sure Hillary knows that we remember that in the twenty years of NAFTA the number of Mexican migrants here went from 4.5 to 12 million.

That violence that the mother and child fled in Honduras - where did it come from? When the Hondurans elected a President who tried to raise the minimum wage - their version of fight for 15 - the wealthy and military of Honduras kidnapped him and sent him into exile. That was good news for OshKosh and Levi's and the other garment companies who run the low wage sweatshops there, the ones that fire workers and bust unions when they try to raise those wages. These are the factories that make the jeans we wear here, but no one can afford to buy in Honduras, least of all the workers who make them.

And our government told the rest of Latin America that it should recognize the dictatorship that followed as legitimate. If Manuel Zelaya had stayed president, there would have been a much better future for that woman and her child. Instead, our tax dollars pay for guns for that dictatorship, who use them to protect drug dealers as they admitted in the NY Times on Saturday, and for killing union activists, which our media doesn't want to talk about. And then our taxes pay for the prison in Texas where she's held because she had no papers, and left home anyway in order to survive.

We have to get smart about what employers want, and what we want that's different. When hospitals or growers or construction companies here see the desperation of people to come here to work and send money home, or fleeing violence, they get dollar signs in their eyes. In some ways they want people to come. But only as workers who they can pay low wages, who they can threaten. So they set up recruitment programs, promising jobs and an income that seems high to someone used to working in a hospital for $20 a day instead of $20 an hour.

What they don't say is that these guest worker programs require people to work in order to stay. If you cross your boss, or don't want to work overtime for straight time pay, or even no pay at all, and you get fired or laid off, you have to leave. That's quite a hammer. You have to borrow a lot of money to get a visa like this, so if you have to go back home without paying off the loans you lose your home or farm, and so do the friends that helped you. I talked to workers in a shipyard in Mississippi who paid $18,000 apiece in India to get that visa. When they were fired for organizing, one of them committed suicide rather than have to go home to face his family.

Employers claim they can't find enough workers, but what they really want are workers at wages they want to pay. They think they will divide us, and get us to look at people like those welders from India as our enemy. Instead, we're going to help those workers organize too. But let's also put an end to those programs. In 2007, when Bernie voted against the immigration reform bill, he called guest workers programs "close to slavery," and he was right. He wasn't voting against legalization or immigration - he was voting against the guest worker programs employers stuck into all those reform bills. There's nothing wrong with people wanting to come here. But people should be able to come with rights, and right number one being the right to organize.

Use organized power to demand a change

Winning the union here for nurses in Pennsylvania is important because it gives us power and the chance to educate ourselves. We can explain to the other nurses in our hospitals the reasons for migration, and listen to the voices of those coming here from somewhere else, explaining why they decided to leave home. And then we can use our organized power to demand a change.

We can demand a trade policy that puts the wages and jobs of people in Mexico or Honduras or the Philippines first, and the profits of big companies last. We can demand an end to the military aid and wars that prop up dictatorships and cause thousands to flee as refugees. We can demand an end to the policy of treating immigration status as a crime, and instead ensure that all of us have rights and legal status. We can end the impossible process most people face when they apply for a visa to come here to reunite their families. The waiting time in Mexico City or Manila today is over 20 years to get a family visa. We can demand equality and respect and treatment with dignity for all of us, regardless of where we come from, what color we are, or whether we're men or women. We can win single payer healthcare, without a shameful rule that says a family can't get it if they don't have papers.

In politics in this country all this usually gets treated like some kind of dream or wish list. Nice idea, but impossible. At least this year and last year we're not letting ourselves get pushed around and told that the things we need can't happen. And for the first time in a long time, we have a real election campaign where we're demanding the things we really need.

But the real reason why we know this isn't just some pipe dream is that we have new unions at these three hospitals here. That was supposed to be impossible too.

So when they tell us in the New York Times or the Philadelphia Enquirer, or on TV and the radio, that it can't be done, that it's not possible, our answer is the same one farm workers shout in California. Even our President adopted this answer when he ran for office and became the first Black president in our history. That's what Bernie's campaign is really saying. Yes we can. Yes we can. Si se puede.

Photo: Nurse. | David Bacon

NLRB keeps up the pressure on Menard's

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 11:52:00 +0000

In a bizarre collision of opposite constellations, a 2013 tweet from Donald Trump and a recent decision from the National Labor Relations Board have stirred national media attention to how the home improvement chain Menards violates labor laws in its demands on workers.

The Trump tweet [12:58 PM - 28 May 2013, John Menard of Menards home improvement stores in Midwest treats employees horribly -- should they form a union?] criticizing John Menard had been supplied the media by Seth Goldstein, the New York based business representative for OPEIU, who candidly told me he included the tweet along with the NLRB decision to emphasize how Trump's opinions "blow with the wind" depending on what serves his own interests. The tweet came when Trump was not an announced candidate. "I thought the media would see how fickle his views are, especially when he was holding presidential rallies in Eau Claire," where Menards is headquartered, Goldstein said.

The NLRB through it regional director and researcher has now issued a call for national posting on the web and at every Menards store (some 280 throughout the Midwest, from the Dakotas to Ohio) that the company has tried to sidestep basic labor law and worker rights. It ordered John Menard, the leading private owner, to change the company's employee handbooks in several portions and attacks the broadness of the private arbitration agreements that employees have been forced to sign. The final order for posting, after discussion with both parties, may come down by end of April.

Specifically the order challenges Menards method of using arbitration policy to bar its 44,000 workers from engaging in joint activities such as class action suits, Goldstein explained. "Why I am taking this on from New York City, where Menards doesn't have a store, is because this is the sort of responsibility that unions should be engaged in," he said.

Goldstein resurrected this 2013 tweet by Trump: "John Menard of Menards home improvement stores in Midwest treats employees horribly-should they form a union?" Twitter was apparently even then his favored communication vehicle and it may have been motivated in part by his wife. Melania Trump attempted to sue Menards over not carrying her skin care products. That was the year that John Menard's personal and sexual proclivities erupted into national court reporting.

The ever-expanding charges against Menards - and its colorful owner who reportedly dropped $1.5 million in the effort to protect Gov. Scott Walker from recall and has been a major backer of Club for Growth and Koch funded campaigns - started last December when Goldstein read about Menard's tactics and anti-union animus and decided it was high time to take the billionaire's chain on.

The initial motor was a Progressive magazine story revealing that Menards made its managers agree that 60 percent of their pay would be docked if they let a union form under their jurisdiction. But Menards has now skated on that one with the NLRB once it agreed to eliminate that provision and go back, telling "every managerial employee subject to that provision" that it was eliminated, according to the NLRB.

But by then, Goldstein had gathered more information and kept expanding his complaints, working with lawyers representing workers who felt injured by Menards practices and adding a range of problems he uncovered in the employee handbook and the arbitration agreements every employee was forced to sign.

This caused the NLRB to investigate in depth and pronounce through its Region 18 director that most of Goldstein's complaints had merit and Menards will have to submit through national postings, changes in its handbook and revision of arbitration language to restore rights to protected activities that workers could engage in. Once shuttered, the doors to collective bargaining by workers at Menards are being opened.

Wisconsin's primary made no secret the depth of the "stop Trump" movement in the kind of rust-belt state he was expected to dominate. Those anti-Trump forces include John Menard. Goldstein said he thought it would be amusing to point out how billionaires can take on other billionaires "and Trump is not regarded as a financial savior by many in the business community."

Goldstein believes his revival of the Trump tweet would stir attention as well as discussion of the NLRB ruling from both the Sanders and Clinton camps and media outlets throughout the Midwest - another piece of ammunition to show how changeable Trump is in platform and statements.

Sure enough, since then, the media has finally linked the NLRB ruling to Menards decision in Ohio and Kansas to halt building new stores while still getting property tax abatement in those cities, as outlined in business journals.

In several cases, the NLRB already ruled that arbitration agreements can chill or punish exercise of constitutionally protected concerted activities of workers. Now legal experts say that the Menards decision actually enlarges and deepens the NLRB's reach into the language and attitude of business operators, since it demands reissued handbooks and could penalize companies that prevent unions from organizing.

Merit was found in five out of eight complaints, while some of the others were considered moot because of the company's own actions. The NLRB regional director also ordered national postings of Menards' violations of federal labor laws on Menards web portal and within each of its stores. The ruling ordered Menards to rescind language affecting employees ability to talk about working conditions and seeks elimination of references in the handbook to "gossip," "questionable attitudes" and a one-sided definition of confidentiality.

The case may be yards away from resolution. Menards' lawyers refused to say anything beyond "no comment." But a professor who is expert at arbitration agreements agrees that this NLRB ruling cuts deeply into the company's treatment of its workforce and doubts the company will go quietly into the night. "They will fight this, I assume, until they run out of options," noted Paul Secunda, Marquette University's professor of law and director, Labor and Employment Law Program.

If Menards ignores the ruling, as now seems likely, the NLRB can issue a formal complaint, moving the issue to an administrative judge. And if either side wants to fight after that, enter the federal court system.

Photo: Menards store. Public Domain.

Janitors and farm workers: Two strikes remembered

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 10:04:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES - I don't tear up very often. Tears probably were drummed out of me as a child. But standing there on the sidewalk a few weeks ago, I found myself with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. Before me almost a thousand janitors wearing deep purple Service Employee International Union T-shirts lined up to march from a Beverly Hills park to the high-rise offices of Century City.

The day celebrated the time, 25 years ago, when the people who clean buildings walked off their jobs. In a campaign called Justice for Janitors, they had marched nonviolently between those tall buildings, only to find themselves facing a phalanx of Los Angeles Police Department officers, batons swinging. Dozens were hurt, but the TV footage made citywide news, and a tide turned.

Suddenly the unseen low-wage workers made the front page. Instead of being ignored, they found themselves lauded as heroes, and after continuous demonstrations over a 20-day strike, they had a union contract. They got a raise, had a health plan for their families and gained protections on the job from harassment and wage theft. Most importantly, they gained a voice in how their work was done.

A quarter of a century later, the men and women in purple T-shirts who now gathered in the street to march would be protected and guided by police officers from Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. They filled three lanes, two blocks long, packed together. Their march followed a brief rally at the park, where clergy prayed and Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers (UFW) and Congresswoman Maxine Waters spoke, and where Rusty Hicks, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, announced that the California state legislature had just passed a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022.

The day and the timing felt auspicious. It was March 31st, Cesar Chavez's birthday, a day noted by people across California and around the world for the groundbreaking work he did to bring recognition to people who labor in the fields pruning grape vines, weeding rows of vegetables, picking and packing fruit.

I remembered my own small role in that effort decades ago, when we leafleted supermarket parking lots in Los Angeles, asking people to boycott grapes or certain brands of wine and produce. I also remembered marching with farm workers in Los Angeles and in the fields. Urged by the National Farm Worker Ministry, clergy and congregations brought food to support striking workers who otherwise would not have much to eat. My first act of civil disobedience took place in a dry irrigation ditch that separated a public road from a vineyard in the Coachella Valley.

Last September the UFW marked the 50th anniversary of the grape boycott. Hundreds of people gathered at Forty Acres outside Delano - the original base for the union and now a national historic site. Dolores Huerta and other leaders of the union reminded us of the personal courage required of strikers in those early struggles. Arturo Rodriguez, the current president of the UFW, described the price farm workers and their families paid to take that stand. "Ninety percent of the people who went out on strike," he said, "lost their homes or their cars or both." People lost everything, except each other.

And that's what made the difference. An obscure organizing effort for justice in the rural fields of California, where others had tried and failed, sparked a movement that impacted the consciousness of a people. Marginalized and pushed into neighborhoods cut off from the mainstream of Los Angeles and other cities across the Southwest, these workers infused new pride into a culture that soon called itself Chicano and La Raza. People stood up again, stood tall again.

And so 25 years ago, the mostly Latino janitors stood up for justice among the skyscrapers that signify wealth and power. And they won. And here I was standing on the curb watching all these people ready to march again, ready to stand up for themselves again. My eyes knew, but slowly my mind recognized that I was watching the sweep of history embodied in these people, in this struggle.

Justice starts in many small ways we can never quite anticipate. Historic shifts happen while hardly anyone notices. Participating, even a little bit, brings meaning to my life. Walking with others who have so much more at stake, who take great risks of life and livelihood, gives me hope. Standing on a curb in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, looking on as a group of working people prepared for yet another march, my heart moved and my eyes filled with tears. I was watching how justice gets made.

Rev. Jim Conn is the founding minister of the Church in Ocean Park and served on the Santa Monica City Council and as that city's mayor. He helped found Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, Los Angeles, and was its second chair, and was a founder of Santa Monica's renter's rights campaign.

Reprinted, including photo, by permission of the author and Capital & Main.

Labor movement vows to challenge bigotry, bridge racial divisions

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 12:57:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - With the country facing serious questions of racial justice - and bigoted political rhetoric intended to divide people - the labor movement hopes to foster dialogue and solidarity, leaders of the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions say.

Speaking and answering questions on April 14 at the annual conference of the United Association for Labor Education, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka condemned anti-immigrant statements by Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump and expressed support for Black Lives Matter and other groups challenging the status quo.

He also put racial justice at the top of the national union agenda.

"Race and justice aren't a side project of the AFL-CIO. They are at the core - the very core - of who we are as a labor movement now and in the future. Because it will define us," Trumka stated.

And he told one questioner the labor movement is the best vehicle for the national discussion on race "because we can sit down as brothers and sisters and we do not castigate people." Having the discussion, Trumka added, "is liberating" for unionists, black and white.

Trumka was followed in the forum in D.C. by members of the federation's Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice, who cited ways unions are taking on racism within their own organizations and in the broader society. Their presentation was one of the first since the commission began hearings around the country a year ago.

"I gotta be honest," said Trumka. "Race is subject that makes a lot of people - black and white people - uncomfortable and sometimes resentful."

But, he said, "We can't just face the easy stuff and ignore the hard things."

Specifically, the AFL-CIO is challenging its member unions "to expand and deepen this conversation about race," he said. Three years ago, the federation welcomed several organizations of low-wage workers to its national convention and adopted strong statements calling for congressional passage of comprehensive immigration reform and an end to a system of mass incarceration that unfairly targets low-income people of color.

More recently, the federation sent organizers to Ferguson, Mo., and other sites of killings of African-Americans by law enforcement. And it actively supports Black Lives Matter.

"Anyone who says Black Lives Matter is against anyone is simply wrong," Trumka told the labor education conference at Gallaudet University. "Black Lives Matter is for all of us, every last one of us."

Starting last fall, the commission held public meetings in six cities - Cleveland, Oakland, Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis and Birmingham - involving more than 600 union leaders and members, as well as community representatives.

"We've had real and candid conversations with working people. We've listened and we've learned from each other," Trumka said.

But the hearings were only the start. The effort to address racism will be a long-term process, he told the group, responding to questions later on.

"We are going to work on the laws, but we're also going to work internally in the labor movement to make sure we are eliminating all the institutional obstacles we can for people of color and for women..." Trumka said.

And in the months before this year's presidential election, the federation is posting Internet ads and meeting with union members who are Trump supporters, to challenge the candidate's racist and anti-worker statements, Trumka said.

The commission members - Bricklayers President James Boland, Teachers Secretary-Treasurer Lorretta Johnson, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre, Postal Worker Courtney Jenkins, who is on the fed's young workers council, and Steven Pitts of the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center -- called the hearings life-changing experiences. They said they're committed to following up the conversation with action.

"We all have to begin with ourselves and our own organizations," said Boland. "I'm from a union that is 80 percent white male and minorities are underrepresented."

The Bricklayers are taking a first step by analyzing the composition of their membership and acknowledging there is a problem, he said. Then the union must reach out to unrepresented workers and "redesign the workplace" to make it welcoming to women and people of color, he said.

The Teachers are holding discussions in hundreds of locals across the country, said Johnson, to grapple with the ways that educators can be part of the solution. She and the other panelists agreed that efforts among individual unions must be part of a large movement.

The AFL-CIO and its member unions must commit resources and staff and make the discussion "a central part of what they do," said Gebre. Otherwise, the effort amounts to nothing more than a public relations stunt, he added. And everyone needs to be part of the conversation, the panelists said. "It would be nicer if police unions found their way to the table," commented Boland. "I know there is a lot of fear there."

The payoff would be huge - because young people would see a labor movement that speaks to their concerns, said Jenkins, who African-American. "Finally, someone is going to support me and what I'm passionate about and what I care about."

Photo: Richard Trumka. Linh Do/Flickr (CC)

Low-paid workers stage another mass walkout

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 12:46:00 +0000

Low-paid workers - fast food workers, retail workers, adjunct professors, health care workers and others - from coast to coast staged yet another 1-day walkout on April 14, again demanding "$15 and a union."

The protests attracted hundreds of thousands of people in 320 cities, including unionists who back the low-paid workers. The protests - especially against McDonald's - spread to the Philippines and Brazil. Protesters again called attention to the fact that millions of U.S. workers are both underpaid and lack the best way to better themselves, union contracts.

The protests were so widespread that hospital workers at UPMC - the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center - became the newest participants. They won National Labor Relations Board rulings backing their right to organize, almost a year ago. But UPMC refuses to follow the law and recognize and bargain with the Service Employees, whom the workers voted for. So the hospital workers walked.

"I'm striking for their future," 10-year UPMC worker Nila Payton told ThinkProgress. UPMC has already announced it will raise its base pay to $15 an hour by 2021, but the single mother of two sons, ages 12 and 16, wants to see that hike come sooner. She also wants UPMC to address short-staffing and their right to unionize, too.

Fifteen dollars an hour "can make a difference, but that just barely scratches the surface," she said. "We can't afford health care, our benefits."

Adriana Alvarez, a Chicago McDonald's worker and single mom, told ThinkProgress the $15 wage must come to her in the Windy City. After two years without a raise, McDonald's raised pay by a dime nationwide. Alvarez now makes $10.50 hourly, still below a $13 minimum wage the Chicago City Council enacted for workers in firms with public contracts.

"I'm living paycheck to paycheck, just waiting on payday because my son needs this or he needs that," Alvarez said. One of her biggest expenses is day care. It used to cost $46 a month, but Illinois budget fights - and cuts by Right Wing GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner -- have almost tripled that cost, to $125 weekly.

Service Employees President Mary Kay Henry, whose union has funded and helped organize the Fight for 15 movement, hailed its recent wins -- $15 an hour minimum wage laws in New York and California - but also said low-wage workers would remember who stood with them politically, and who didn't. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind.-Vt., a Democratic presidential con-tender, backs the $15 minimum wage. Hillary Clinton backs $12.50. The GOP hopefuls don't.

"Both those who have won wage increases and those who haven't are going to bring their power to the ballot box this November to make sure candidates respond to their demand for $15 and union rights," said Henry.

"New York is where the Fight for $15 started, and New York is now the site of a monumental victory that now extends beyond fast-food cooks and cashiers who won their minimum wage of $15 an hour to millions more New Yorkers," she added.

New York's marchers, parading down Broadway, stopped by a Verizon store to show solidarity with union strikers. Verizon demands for millions of dollars in givebacks and unlimited rights to outsource jobs drove 39,000 workers, members of the Communications Workers and the Electrical Workers from Maine through Virginia, to strike on April 13 (see Verizon story).

The unionists led the marchers in a chant: "What do we fight? Corporate greed. What do we want? A union job."

The marches also highlighted that the nature of the working class has changed, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre and Jobs With Justice Director Sarita Gupta and other speakers told a session at Washington's National Press Club.

Rather than a white-male dominated workforce, the new low-wage workforce is predominantly female and minority, the panelists said. That status often brings accompanying disrespect, devaluation and downgrading of workers by the corporate class, they added.

"Working men and women are taking action, not just for wages, but for dignity," Gupta declared. "Working women tell endless horror stories of being unable to go to their own doctors' appointments because they will miss a shift and lose their jobs."

And the workers "are also being told 'You should be grateful you're getting this paycheck,' and that you should be proud to work for this company, which is abusing you,'" Gebre added. "I'm hoping we get to the point of saying, 'Enough is enough.'"

As a result, said another speaker, strong pro-worker advocate Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., while economic numbers show a recovery from the Great Recession, workers -- especially minority workers and women -- have not felt it in their paychecks and pocketbooks.

"The unemployment numbers have been dropping" during the recovery from the crash, she said. "But if you're working part-time at McDonald's because you can't find a full-time job, or your factory job was shipped overseas" and you got a lower-paying service job "you're part of that" unemployment decline. "And how good is that?"

But Gebre had one big warning at the D.C. session: That "a lot of people forget about the union part" of the Fight for 15. That's just as key, he stated, because "While our goal is to increase wages, if we really want working people to win, we've got to find a way to get them collective bargaining."

"How did we get here? How did we get to a situation where you treat workers like dirt? Well, for the last 30 years, Washington works great if you can hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers" to preserve and expand the clout and advantages of the 1 percent, Warren said.

Photo: Nursing home workers and their supporters join "Fight for $15" protesters calling for a union and pay of $15 an hour on the campus of Loyola University in Chicago, Thursday, April 14, 2016. | Teresa Crawford/AP

Verizon working families strike for better workplace

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 16:04:00 +0000

Working people at Verizon are on strike. After months of negotiations with the telecommunications giant, they've decided to take a stand to create a better workplace. They want to make sure the needs of working families are met, instead of standing by as a handful of individuals get richer and richer. They're fighting to stop the company from sending jobs overseas and to get Verizon to end its continued intimidation of working people at Verizon Wireless who are trying to create a better future for themselves and their families.

Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Christopher Shelton said, "We've been bargaining with Verizon now for almost a year. We have tried everything to get a path to a contract. A strike is a last resort, but Verizon has forced us there. Nobody wants to go on strike. It's a hardship for our members and their families. It's a hardship for customers who face delay in scheduling repairs and getting service. It's tough on communities. But Verizon has shown it has no regard for workers and our families, for customers, for communities. None."

Electrical Workers (IBEW) President Lonnie Stephenson said, "No one wants to go on strike, but Verizon-this immensely profitable company-is putting the squeeze on hardworking men and women who just want to come to work, do their jobs and be treated fairly."

CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor said, "We're standing up for working families and standing up to Verizon's corporate greed. If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom."

Ed Mooney, vice president of CWA District 2-13, added, "More and more, Americans are outraged by what some of the nation's wealthiest corporations have done to working people over the last 30 years, and Verizon is becoming the poster child for everything that people in this country are angry about. This very profitable company wants to push people down. And it wants to push communities down by not fully repairing the network and by not building out Fios."

In a statement, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka added, "The AFL-CIO stands in solidarity with the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers fighting for a fair contract. The 39,000 working people who went on strike this morning at Verizon deserve a fair contract that provides stability and acceptable working conditions."

Verizon made $39 billion in profits over the last three years but is unwilling to provide job security, better benefits and safe working conditions to the people who made it possible for their top five executives to make over $233 million in the last five years.

No one wants a strike. But Verizon's unwillingness to negotiate fair terms shows its disrespect for working people. Verizon wants to uproot workers, hurt communities and force retirees to pay extremely high health care costs. This strike is about doing what is right for everyday working people-not corporate interests. We call on Verizon to bargain in good faith and work with unions to create a fair and equal contract that stands up for working people rather than corporate greed.

This article was reposted from the AFL-CIO Now blog, as was the photo.

Verizon giveback demands force 39,000 on East Coast out on strike

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 15:32:00 +0000

Ten months of Verizon stonewalling and giveback demands, lasting through dozens of bargaining sessions, forced the 39,000 Communications Workers and Electrical Workers toiling for the telecom giant from Maine through Virginia to go out on strike at 6 a.m. this morning.

"Verizon made $39 billion in profits over the last three years -- and $1.8 billion a month in profits over the first three months of 2016 -- but the company is still insisting on givebacks that would devastate our jobs," the two unions said in a statement.

The unions said they are striking very reluctantly. Their bargainers, responding to Verizon complaints about rising health care costs, offered alternatives to save the firm hundreds of millions of dollars yearly. They were met by Verizon's "arrogant disrespect" in the talks.

Key issues that forced the workers to strike after weeks of talks and dozens of protests -- including one that Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders joined in early April in Philadelphia -- include an end to no-layoff protections for workers hired before 2003, a freeze on pensions after 30 years of service and elimination of profit-sharing with workers.

Verizon also demanded the unlimited right to shutter call centers and move those jobs to Mexico and the Philippines and wants techs to work as long as two months in a row away from their families. And it refused to discuss better wages, benefits and working conditions for at least 100 Verizon Wireless retail workers, who joined CWA two years ago.

"We're standing up for working families and standing up to Verizon's corporate greed," said CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor, whose area covers New England, New Jersey and New York. "If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom."

"Verizon is becoming the poster child for everything people in this country are angry about," added CWA District 2-13 Vice President Edward Mooney, who represents workers from Pennsylvania through Virginia. "This very profitable company wants to push people down. And it wants to push communities down by not fully repairing the (wire) network and by not building out FiOS [bundled Internet access, telephone, and television service that operates over a fiber-optic communications]."

Sanders spoke at a Verizon workers' Philadelphia rally where he told them they had the support of 20 U.S. senators. They wrote Verizon's CEO, Lowell McAdam, last month, urging him to bargain in good faith. "We want to be sure Verizon preserves good family-supporting jobs in our region," said the solons, led by Sens. Robert Casey, D-Pa., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. Nineteen Democrats and Sanders signed the letter.

And while the senators said they realize Verizon must make changes to account for declining landline use, they also said Verizon should "negotiate a new contract...to provide improvement in wages, healthcare, retirement security and work rules for the wireless retail workers and technicians" whose performance led to the high Verizon profits the unions cite.

"The company's greed is disgusting," the unions said in announcing the strike. "McAdam made $18 million last year. Verizon's top five executives made $233 million over the last five years. Last year alone, Verizon paid out $13.5 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to shareholders. But they claim they can't afford a fair contract.

"And it's not just workers who are getting screwed. Verizon has $35 billion to invest in the failing internet company, Yahoo, but refuses to maintain its copper network" for telephone landlines, "let alone build FiOS in underserved communities across the region.

"And even where it's legally committed to building FiOS out for every customer, Verizon refuses to hire enough workers to get the job done right or on time," the unions said. Several states, led by New York and Pennsylvania, are investigating Verizon's FiOS failures, CWA notes.

"It's time for Verizon to acknowledge that working families also have a right to do well in America. It's time for a contract that's fair to Verizon's working people and the customers we serve," the two unions concluded.

Photo: Communication Workers of America (CWA) website.

For these new Chicago teachers, April 1 strike was all about students

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 14:30:00 +0000

CHICAGO - It was their first strike. They stuck together on the picket line. They wore their union's color - red - and had "On Strike" signs hanging from their necks. A half-dozen first and second year teachers at Marsh Elementary got a taste of solidarity April 1, when some 27,000 Chicago Teachers Union members walked out to demand the state pass a budget and fund education.

Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner has refused to sign a budget bill until the Democratic-majority legislature bows to his so-called turn-around agenda. This is the tenth month that the state has been without a budget. Rauner's agenda includes measures that would severely weaken workers' rights and collective bargaining, ultimately driving down wages and hurting the economy. Democratic lawmakers passed a budget, which Rauner refused to sign, and Democrats, in turn, refuse to pass Rauner's extreme measures. There is plenty of blame to go around, but most business, education and union leaders, as well as the bulk of the media, place responsibility for the impasse and ensuing crisis squarely on billionaire Rauner's shoulders. Teachers and others say that closing corporate tax loopholes and making the wealthy pay their "fair share" in taxes would put Illinois on better fiscal footing. (The story continues after the slide show.)

"You gotta be in it for the students"

Physical Education teacher Hector Rico said he felt discouraged about having to strike for funding. "You think that teaching is a safe career. You want to be a teacher. It's got good benefits, a union, all that good stuff," he said. But he added that he was "frustrated how politics and money can influence our schools in a big way."

Rico, who is just starting his career, has had an eventful first year. On top of the battle for state funding, he and his fellow teachers are also in the midst of a long contract struggle. They have been working without a contract since June 2015, but the April 1 strike was called after Chicago Public Schools forced employees to take three unpaid furlough days because of the budget crisis. Despite it all, Rico still plans to be in the schools another nine years. "That's my goal - ten years," he said. "I feel that even though teaching is a good profession, you gotta be in it for the students first and foremost."

Amid the honking horns of passing cars, Nancy Pacheco, a third-grade bilingual teacher, said she had told her class before the strike that "it's not just a day off of school. Your teacher is trying to do what's best for you and trying to get better schools for you and that's why this is going on."

Pacheco is herself a Chicago public school alumna, having attended Jane Addams Elementary School and Lane Tech High School. Like Rico, this is her first year teaching and for her, the fight over resources is not "something you'd like to see happening. You just want to continue teaching."

Michael O'Brien is in his second year at Marsh and teaches fourth grade. He also expressed frustration with having to strike for basic needs. "We are fighting for things in our own contract as well and for our own profession. It's not fair that in different communities other schools have it better," he said.

He said he tells his students, "No one has that right to take your education away from you. And if anyone tries to infringe upon your education, I have to step in and fight that."

Juan Osorio, another first year teacher, provides music instruction to about 650 K-8 students each week. Yes, 650. Just learning their names must be a challenge, but Osorio says he knows about 75 percent of them, "100 percent when I have a class list."

Like the others, Osorio is excited about his new career and glows when talking about the importance of music education, which he sees as a major aid to the development of critical thinking. He was excited when he "had a really great breakthrough with one of the students." After listening to classical music, a genre that is not really "their style," Osorio said a student commented that he didn't like the music, but he understood why it was good music.

"So that was a big thing. They're understanding the quality of it, not that they have to enjoy it, but that it is good quality music."

Osorio's enthusiasm for the subject and the kids is apparent. For him, it's about the work, and he is worried just as much about the future of the music program as he is about his own paycheck. Music and art teachers are often the first positions cut when budgets are tight.

"If I have enough to survive, to pay rent, pay my student loans, I'm happy," he said, adding his student loan debt is $40,000. "But teaching is where I can do something that I want and can make an impact." He fears that all the "energy" he puts into the program might go "to waste."

An injury to one is an injury to all: save Chicago State University

These teachers are just a couple of years out of college. But their peers currently enrolled in Illinois public universities or receiving Monetary Aid Program (MAP) Grants may not even get an opportunity to graduate and become a teacher.

Chicago State University, a majority African American higher learning institution, may be the first casualty of the state's 10 month-long budget war. It has spent down its reserves covering unfunded state grants for its students and operating costs. CSU relies on state funding for 30 percent of its budget. It has declared a fiscal emergency and sent 900 layoff notices to its employees, cancelled spring break and moved up its graduation date. It is one of only a few public universities in the area that educate teachers, many of whom go on to become instructors in Chicago's public schools.

Now those schools face an existential threat. April 1 was a day of solidarity across the eco-system of education, public services and low-wage work. The CTU joined with other unions representing university faculty and staff, bus drivers, cleaning and security workers. In addition to the morning picket lines at the city's public schools, press conferences, rallies, and teach-ins took place throughout the day, culminating in a mass march downtown.

Putting students first comes full circle with public university professors. Cynthia Carr, an occupational therapy professor at Governors State, held a GSU University Professionals of Illinois sign that said, "Fund Our Future, Fund Higher Ed in Illinois." She was listening to CTU President Karen Lewis speak and patiently waiting to march.

"I'm here for all the state universities, not just Governors." She said that, like other universities, GSU has prioritized spending its money to cover MAP Grants and has decided not to increase tuition.

"That's why we're there. We're there for the students. Because ultimately, if we become the same tuition rate as a private school, then what are we saying? Education becomes privatized," she said. "There's just something a little strange about our colleges that are for the people not being there, not receiving the budget money in order to survive."

Blowing up colleges of education?

At a rally and New Orleans-style funeral for higher education at Northeastern Illinois University campus, Samantha Hernandez, a junior in English who plans to enter the college of education, echoed many of the sentiments the first and second year teachers had expressed: The desire to give back and inspire kids to navigate the difficult economic and social waters in which they grow up. But she worries about the future of her school.

"Northeastern to me is kind of like a second home. You're molded into one of the bricks that build the school," she said. "Northeastern is such a great school, it's very diverse and the professors care so much about the students."

U.S. News and World Report rates NEIU as one of the most racially and ethnically "diverse universities in the nation," and says "its students graduate with the least debt among regional Midwest universities." The federal government designated it a Hispanic-Serving Institution, the only four-year public university in the Midwest designated as such. Northeastern was founded in 1867 in Blue Island, Illinois, as the Normal School, Cook County's first teacher training institution.

The population at public universities like NEIU tends to be more racially and ethnically diverse, with many working class, low-income, immigrant, and - at a few public universities in Illinois - rural students. Some 150,000 low-income students statewide depend on MAP grants to cover part of their costs to go these public universities.

After all the smoke has cleared from the field of this budget battle, one wonders what will happen to all these new and aspiring, bright, energetic teachers? Will they look for another career path? Will there even still be public colleges of education? Or public universities?

Colleges of education (and teachers unions) have long been a target of the Republicans and right-wing ideologues. One Bush administration official famously said in 2002, "If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it would be to blow up colleges of education."

Hernandez said she is afraid of "what the government is doing" to destroy education. "But I'm going to continue to be a teacher because teachers are the people who create the pathways for others to go farther in life," she said. Inspired by one of her teachers, Hernandez will encourage her own students to speak up, and when they do, she will listen.

"I always thought that was so important because when you are young, you are always shushed...people think what you have to say doesn't matter. To have a teacher who tells you your voice matters is one of the greatest things anyone can have."

Slideshow: Scenes from April 1 strike includes photos of all interviewees. (Teresa Albano/PW)

Photo: First and second year teachers at Marsh Elementary stand with veteran teachers in the fight for funding and their students. (Teresa Albano/PW)

Lilly Ledbetter tells union women about ongoing struggle for equal pay

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:19:00 +0000

SILVER SPRING, Md. - Despite some gains in recent years - including legislation named for her that lets women and minorities sue for equal pay for equal work - women still face a tough road to equal pay, activist Lilly Ledbetter says.

"Some single mothers work two jobs and extra time on weekends and still can't pay their bills," the soft-spoken but determined grandmother from Birmingham, Ala., told several hundred union women gathered in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Md., for the Coalition of Labor Union Women's Election 2016: What's At Stake two-day conference.

That's because working women suffer widespread pay discrimination, and even though they can sue for back pay, thanks to the law named for her, they still face a long and hard slog to get it, Ledbetter said.

With Equal Pay Day scheduled for April 12 - the day marking when a working woman earns enough in one year plus extra months to equal what a working man earned the previous year alone-the unionists brainstormed on tactics to raise the issue of equal pay for equal work and other issues important to working women to the top of the 2016 campaign agenda.

Ledbetter, who rose to prominence as a campaigner for equal pay when the U.S. Supreme Court turned her pay discrimination case down - on a 5-4 vote in 2007 - agreed with that priority, with special reference to the High Court's role.

Ledbetter, a retired 19-year supervisor at the Goodyear Tire Company plant in Birmingham, Ala., first found she was being discriminated against in pay when someone else slipped her an anonymous note near the end of her tenure saying that male supervisors, even with less experience than she had, earned more.

The difference, she told the CLUW group, reached 40 percent, despite her superior ratings in managing 52-60 workers at Goodyear. Ledbetter sued, Goodyear resisted, and she took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the GOP-named five-man majority threw out lower court verdicts in her favor.

Justice Samuel Alito, Ledbetter told CLUW, wrote the decision against her. If Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had not retired, Ledbetter said, she would have won her case. And even before that, Congress - a Republican Congress, though Ledbetter did not say so - cut maximum awards in cases like hers to $300,000. The Alabama jury had awarded her $3.8 million.

The Ledbetter case turned the country upside down, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg challenged the country and Congress to overturn the ruling. Lawmakers did so in 2009. "The Ledbetter bill kept the courtroom doors open," after the court slammed them, she said.

That means the Supreme Court is extremely important to working women in this election, Ledbetter told CLUW.

The court has one vacancy, after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, intellectual leader of its GOP-named right wing. President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland, chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C., to succeed Scalia, but the Senate's ruling Republicans refuse even to hold a hearing on Garland, much less a vote.

"This is so critical to young people, who understand they don't have equal pay," Ledbetter explained. "And women and minorities have to understand that once it (equal pay) is gone, it's gone."

That's because even in cases where women and minorities prove that firms discriminated by sex - as Ledbetter did against Goodyear - race, gender or more, the harmed workers rarely get back pay. Working women thus lose hundreds of thousands of dollars each. They also lose Social Security credit for what would have been higher pay.

"It's not so much what happens to us, but how we react to it, and what do we do to change it," Ledbetter said of her fight, and the fights of other women for equal pay for equal work that she cited.

Union women must be in the forefront of the fight and unions are key to it, Ledbetter added. "You union people are very supportive and we can't get our unions taken away in this country," she declared.

The Goodyear plant where Ledbetter worked is unionized, with the Steelworkers, and she has said previously that if the contract had covered her - it did not, because she was a supervisor - the pay discrimination would not have occurred.

The role of the courts and the right wing's ideological push to pack them was one key issue CLUW delegates discussed on April 8. Others included the big picture of the election, with emphasis on what working women's issues will be important, attacks on women's health, so-called right to work legislation, key races and how CLUW members can make a difference.

CLUW President Connie Leak, an autoworker, struck those themes, and related them to the upcoming election. She didn't name candidates, but made it clear that one of the two major parties - the GOP - follows the lead of the Republican-named High Court justices.

"Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired?" Leak asked. "We have to do this because we know what we are facing. I don't have to call out no names because the names are the ones we don't want to be in charge" in the White House, she stated.

"So that means getting off your rusty-dustys. It's being about the fight."

Photo: Lilly Ledbetter. | AP