Monday, Mar 10, 2014, 3:54 pm · By Kari Lydersen
Riding Herd Over Workers’ Rights?
Sheep herders in Colorado and other Western states are often guest workers from South America. Current labor laws offer them little protection, but a lawsuit filed by four workers could change that. (J. B. Foster / Flickr / Creative Commons)
Over the past decade, Reymundo Zacarias Mendoza, Sergio Velasquez Catalan, Francisco Javier Castro and Alfredo Conovilca Matamoros came to the U.S. from Peru and Chile to work herding sheep, goats and cattle in Washington, Wyoming and Colorado on H-2A temporary guest worker visas.
Now the four men are legal permanent residents of the U.S.—and they are suing the federal government over its requirements for H-2A guest worker visas for herders.
The men argue an exemption granted to the sector means that as permanent legal residents, they are unable to take herding jobs at fair wages with decent working conditions.
The case presents an interesting legal strategy. The exemption for herders has been in place in similar forms since the guest worker program started started about three decades ago. There is actually nothing preventing the men from applying for herding jobs and it is entirely possible they would be hired if they were willing to work for the wages and in the conditions offered.
Monday, Mar 10, 2014, 3:03 pm · By Bruce Vail
Teamsters Back School Bus Drivers in Fight Against ‘Rampant’ Wage Theft
Baltimore area bus drivers, shown here protesting wage theft last May, will collect $1.25 million from employer Durham School Services once their settlement is finalized in April. Photo via Teamsters Local 570
More than 350 Baltimore-area bus drivers are preparing to celebrate victory in a $1.25 million wage theft case against Durham School Services, an Illinois-based bus-contracting company with operations across much of the country.
The case, which covers the employees at Durham between March 2010 and September 2013, reflects a troubling national trend of companies cheating workers out of their earnings. “Wage theft is a huge problem, and it’s outrageous,” says Andrew Freeman, one of the attorneys at Brown Goldstein Levy, the Baltimore-based firm that filed the suit against Durham last year. In their suit, the plaintiffs accused the company of failing to pay employees for overtime work such as bus inspections, bus cleanings, fueling, and other related tasks.
The settlement of the U.S. District Court case should be finalized April 4, with distribution of the stolen wage money following immediately afterward, says Moe Jackson, a union organizer for International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 570. For almost two years, the local has been trying to organize the drivers and aides at Rosedale, Jackson says, where employees are also bristling over low pay, substandard benefits and overbearing management practices. The Teamsters initiated the wage theft case on behalf of the workers, officers say, as a step in the unionizing process.
Friday, Mar 7, 2014, 8:00 am · By Michelle Chen
California Farmworkers Often Forced To Live in Squalor, Says Report
California farmworkers already work long hours in harsh conditions; a new report by the California Rural Legal Assistance exposes the effectively unlivable housing conditions many of them return to every day. (USDAgov/Flickr/Creative Commons)
For California’s farmworkers, toiling all day in the brutal, sun-scorched fields is hard enough; the homes they return to each night are often in even worse conditions. Though the reforms won by previous generations have extended basic labor and safety protections to seasonal and immigrant farmworkers, many remain shut out of the right to decent accommodations.
According to a new report published by California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), the housing crisis in the agricultural workforce has worsened over the last generation. Despite the locavore fads and slow-food diets that have infused today’s farm-fresh produce with an air of glamour, as a workplace, the fields still echo the social marginalization and scandalous poverty that sparked the groundbreaking grape boycott of the late 1960s.
Don Villarejo, the longtime farmworker advocate who authored the report, tells In These Times that growers have “systematically” reduced investment in farmworker housing over the past 25 years in order to reduce overhead costs and to avoid the trouble of meeting state and federal regulations, which were established as part of a broader overhaul of agricultural labor, health and safety standards during the 1960s and 1980s. According to Villarejo, workers’ modern material circumstances are little improved from the old days of the Bracero system. That initiative—the precursor to our modern-day guestworker migrant program—became notorious for shunting laborers into spartan cabins, tents and other inhospitable dwellings on the farms themselves, beset with entrenched poverty and unhealthy, brutish conditions.
Thursday, Mar 6, 2014, 6:55 pm · By David Bacon
Giving Up on Congress, Immigrant Workers Stage Wave of Protests
On Feb. 27, 2014, workers at a recycling plant in San Leandro, Calif. go on strike to protest an Immigration Customs and Enforcement Agency (ICE) inspection of company personnel records, intended to identify undocumented workers for termination. (David Bacon)
For the last five months, community and labor activists, most of them young, have sat down in front of buses carrying people to detention centers for deportation. In Tucson, they obstructed and chained themselves to Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) buses. In San Francisco, a month after blocking a bus carrying deportees to detention, “Dreamer” Ju Hong—a young immigrant whose deportation was deferred in the White House's executive action two years ago—challenged President Obama during a local speech. “You have the power to stop deportation,” the protester told him.
In response to these actions and others like them, the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco have passed resolutions demanding a moratorium on deportations; San Francisco is imposing a halt in immigration-related firings as well.
And the pressure is only intensifying. Last week, unions and community organizations closed down an intersection in front of a Silicon Valley supermarket chain where hundreds were fired after an I-9 audit: an ICE inspection of company personnel records, intended to identify undocumented workers for termination. The next day, immigrant workers in one San Leandro, Calif. recycling facility walked out of work when their employer and ICE threatened their jobs in a similar audit.
Wednesday, Mar 5, 2014, 9:01 pm · By Melinda Tuhus
Together, New Haven Activists and Leaders Strike Back Against Wage Theft
Julio Olivar is one of two dozen Gourmet Heaven workers who say they were cheated out of their wages by owner Chung Cho. (Melinda Tuhus)
Last Wednesday in New Haven, Conn., labor activists and workers joined police and government leaders at a news conference announcing their shared commitment to stopping employers from stealing the earnings of their mostly low-wage workers.
Wage theft—paying employees less than the minimum wage or not paying overtime when required by law—is widespread throughout the country. A recent report by the National Employment Law Project found a quarter of low-wage workers interviewed in several cities had been paid less than the minimum wage in the previous week; three-quarters had worked more than 40 hours a week without being paid overtime.
Too often, employers found guilty of wage theft slip through the judicial system with little more than a slap on the wrist. But in New Haven, city officials are taking significant steps to pursue criminal charges against those who shortchange their workers.
Wednesday, Mar 5, 2014, 7:00 pm · By Matthew Blake
Will Bruce Rauner Be Scott Walker 2.0 for Illinois Unions?
Bruce Rauner, the leading Republican in Illinois's race for governor, believes public sector unions are responsible for the state's "long-term death spiral." (Chicago Tribune/Getty Images)
Over the last few years, Republican governors in the Midwest have frequently done battle with organized labor, particularly public employee unions. In 2011, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker sharply curbed the bargaining rights of public workers; the next year, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder enacted right-to-work laws.
Even in Illinois, with its supermajority Democratic state legislature, public employees have still had their fair share of feuds with Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn over austerity measures, most notably a recent cut to public worker pensions. But since World War Two, when workers started organizing in earnest, Illinois has not faced a governor ideologically opposed to public-sector unions.
If he’s elected this year, Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner could change that.
A venture capitalist from Chicago’s tony North Shore, Rauner has regularly argued that public employee unions bear the blame for Illinois’ financial and education problems. In a November 2012 Chicago Tribune editorial, Rauner opined that Illinois is “in a long-term death spiral” thanks to legalized “bribery” between elected officials and public sector unions. He has also badmouthed “union bosses” and often expounds on the benefits of union-free charter schools.
Wednesday, Mar 5, 2014, 3:23 pm · By Amien Essif
Exotic Dancers Sue Strip Club for Labor Law Violation
Exotic dancers at PT's Showclub in St. Louis are suing the strip club for violating the Fair Labor Standards Act by misclassifying them as independent contractors, rather than employees. To date, only one strip club in the U.S. has successfully unionized—the Lusty Lady, pictured here. (CrossfireCW / Flickr / Creative Commons)
Are exotic dancers independent contractors, free to determine how and when their work will be done, but guaranteed nothing by the Fair Labor Standards Act? Or are they employees, entitled to a minimum wage, overtime pay and other workers’ rights?
In the coming months, this question will likely be heard before the Illinois Southern District Court. On January 31, Brandy Apple and Amanda Sheer, two exotic dancers, filed a class-action lawsuit against the nightclub company VCG Holding Corporation. The latest of several lawsuits to accuse a strip club of misclassifying its workers, Apple et al v. VCG Holding Corp. alleges the dancers were treated as employees but misclassified as independent contractors during their time working for PT’s Showclub, a subsidiary of VCG, in the St. Louis area.
In the United States, employees—not independent contractors—are assured a minimum wage and other protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Apple and Sheer claim their misclassification resulted in thousands of dollars of lost wages and a violation of their rights as de facto employees. The dancers also say PT’s illegally required them to share their tips with managers and threatened them with retaliation when they asked to be reclassified.
Tuesday, Mar 4, 2014, 6:41 pm · By Michelle Chen
Sex Workers Have Labor Rights Just Like Any Other Employee, Confirms NZ Court
Since the decriminalization of prostitution in 2003, New Zealand sex workers have reported experiencing safer sex practices and better relations with the police. (Wikipedia/Creative Commons)
Last month, the New Zealand Human Rights Review Tribunal made a landmark ruling on the violation of a woman’s human rights in a Wellington brothel known as The Kensington Inn, run by one Aaron Montgomery. But the case didn’t involve the typical media tropes of a worker being “sold into slavery” or abused by a sadistic client. Rather, the employee filed a complaint against both Montgomery and Kensington’s owner, M &T Enterprises, after Montgomery allegedly harassed her.
In February, the Tribunal published a decision siding with the worker—thereby confirming that brothel employees have the legal right not to be harassed by their managers, just like they do in any other profession.
When it comes to debates about sex work, feminists often raise the concept that it's a “job like any other,” as journalist and former sex worker Melissa Gira Grant has explained. Yet the exchange of sex for pay remains a curiously radical notion for many around the world. While it’s certainly true that sex work is a real career born of both necessity and ambition for many, it also comes laden with social anxiety and culture-war taboo.
In New Zealand, however, the occupation's decriminalization over the last decade has helped push back the country’s Victorian-era morality laws to foreground human rights in the sex sector. And last month's Tribunal ruling further affirms sex work's legitimacy as a profession and the workers' agency as laborers.
Monday, Mar 3, 2014, 7:19 pm · By Yana Kunichoff
CPS Threatens Teachers Over Standardized Test Boycott
Sarah Chambers, a teacher at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy, will not be administering the Illinois Standard Achievement Test this year—nor will any of her colleagues at Saucedo. (Chicago Teachers Union)
Beginning Monday, teachers in schools all across Chicago are expected to sit their third- through eighth-graders down for two weeks of standardized testing. On students’ desks will be the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT), a state-level assessment that, thanks to the nationwide move to Common Core, won’t have any bearings on school ratings, grade advancement or instructor evaluations this year.
But teachers at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy and Drummond Thomas Montessori School, which joined the educator-led boycott of the ISAT last week, have declined to participate. Teachers from both schools say they are willing to risk disciplinary action so their students can get two weeks of teaching, not testing.
In response to their decision, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said in a letter this week that teachers who "advocate against the ISAT on work time"—referring, the Chicago Teachers Union believes, to an instructor boycott—risk disciplinary action. Although teachers say they have not encouraged any students to opt out of the test outright, Byrd-Bennett also wrote, "The State Certification Board may take action to revoke the certification of any employee who encourages a student to boycott the ISAT."
Monday, Mar 3, 2014, 6:36 pm · By Bruce Vail
Booming Business at Alabama Shipyard Fuels New Union Campaign
The Austal shipyard in Mobile, Alabama specializes in building littoral combat ships like the USS Independence. (Austal)
Rapid business growth may be the key to finally unionizing shipbuilding workers in Mobile, Ala., where an Australia-based defense contractor has successfully fought union organizing for more than a decade.
That’s the estimation of Ron Ault, President of the AFL-CIO’S Metal Trades Department (MTD), an umbrella group for unions representing boilermakers, machinists, pipefitters, and other skilled shipbuilding workers from around the country. “There is a boom in Gulf Coast shipyards now,” Ault says, and high demand for skilled workers may give unions a foothold. Gulf shipyards are recruiting workers from all parts of the country, including heavily unionized areas, and the presence of this whole new generation of workers is a real opportunity for labor organizing, according to Ault.
Six MTD unions have joined together to back such a union campaign at the Austal USA shipyard in Mobile, where lucrative Navy contracts have fueled a rapid expansion of the business, including massive new hiring. Campaign organizers are settling down in Mobile for a long-haul effort to revive union shipbuilding in the city, Ault says.
The Australian-owned Austal is a relatively new player among U.S. naval contractors, but has made a big splash since setting up its first U.S. operations some 15 years ago. A specialist in aluminum-hulled commercial ferries, Austal made its move into military work in 2006 when it scored a contract with the Navy to build the first version of an entirely new class of warships—the Littoral Combat Ship, or LCS. The ships are lighter and more versatile than many traditional Navy warships, and are designed for use in the widely scattered hot spots of the War on Terror, rather than as part of the giant aircraft carrier battle groups. Austal has also developed a military version of its aluminum fast ferries, which can deliver heavy equipment such as tanks to remote areas of the world. The Navy liked the first examples of these vessels and has ordered up to ten copies of each. These multi-billion dollar defense contracts are now expected to keep Austal’s Mobile shipyard humming with activity for the next five to ten years, and perhaps even longer.
