In These Times

Workers fired from Bissell's Chicago-area warehouse in November demanded the company's attention at an international trade show in Chicago on Sunday, March 15.   (Photo courtesy Kari Lydersen)

By Kari Lydersen

CHICAGO—Marketers for Bissell, the vacuum and cleaning products company, came to the International Home and Housewares Show at Chicago’s convention center last weekend to sell their latest products to Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl’s and other major retailers.

But while displaying their wares, company representatives got a clear message from workers fired last fall after filing discrimination and unfair labor practice charges. Fired workers were joined by about 100 supporters rallied by the UE union, which is advocating for the Bissell workers as part of its larger Warehouse Workers for Justice campaign.

As I previously covered on this blog, about 70 workers were fired in November from Bissell’s warehouse in suburban Will County—part of a massive distribution hub where 150,000 workers process retail goods coming from overseas for transport throughout the nation. Female Bissell workers were often paid $2.50 per hour less than men for the same jobs – which they say is especially ironic since women purchase the bulk of homecare products.

“It’s total discrimination,” said Cindy Marble. “I was fired simply in retaliation for standing up for myself.”

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On February 22, Assistant General Secretaries of the Unite union Len McCluskey and Paul Talbot announce that Unite members have voted in favor of taking industrial action against British Airways.   (Photo by OLI SCARFF/Getty Images)

By Lindsay Beyerstein

British Airways cabin crews say they will hold two weekend strikes totaling seven days later this month. Negotiations between the 12,000 crew members, represented by the British union Unite, and British Airways management broke down on Friday after management rejected the union's proposal of a 2.6% pay cut and other concessions.

The company issued a counter-proposal. Unite submitted the offer to the membership for consideration, but both sides continue to plan for a strike.

Like many airlines, British Airways is bleeding money. It is faring particularly badly right now because it depends so heavily on first- and business-class tickets to turn a profit. Cabin crews are frustrated because they are being asked to maintain luxury service while BA cuts crew sizes on long-haul flights.

As usual, when airline executives can't run their companies at a profit, workers are expected to make concessions.

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An Organizing for America volunteer works the phones leading up to the Massachusetts Senate election in January 2010. Martha Coakley lost the race to Republican Scott Brown.   (Photo courtesy Barack Obama's Flick photostream)

By Art Levine

With the president and most Democratic leaders expressing confidence in healthcare passage as soon as this week, it's still unclear if the House will have the needed votes to pass it. And if the votes aren't there, it could seriously undermine the chances for any element of the labor and progressive agenda from passing, whether it's a meaningful jobs bill or financial reform or even reviving the now-dormant Employee Free Choice Act to promote a level playing field for organizing.

And with only a handful of online sign-ups, at best, at Organizing for America events in some key swing districts to make phone calls for health reform, it's not clear what kind of clout progressve activists will have now. 

Some labor union leaders are also starting to voice their frustration, at a recent AFL-CIO Executive Council Meeting and public comments by Teamster President James Hoffa. Even so, the union movement and its allies are ramping up last-minute efforts to push healthcare reform across the goal line. But As Dick Meister of Truthout.org quoted Hoffa on the administration,

We obviously hoped that more would have been done. We're disappointed that jobs were not emphasized the first year. We're disappointed that the president got bogged down in the healthcare debate.

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(Photo courtesy March for California's Future.)

By Seth Sandronsky

Jennifer Laskin, 37, a school teacher who specializes in reading instruction at Renaissance Continuation High School in Watsonville in central California, is fed up with the state of her state. So she's marching with like-minded activists, including Emmanuel Ballesteros, 21, one of her former students, from Bakersfield to Sacramento.
 
“We’re marching to bring attention to the legislative budget issues we have in California, to bring attention to solutions to restore public and social services, to register people to vote and to collect signatures for the Majority Budget Act Initiative,” said Laskin, a member of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teacher, Local 1936, California Federation of Teachers. “We’re also talking and listening to people along the way to learn what is going on across this state. So far it’s been incredibly sad.”
 
The backdrop to the six-week march is the ongoing recession, which has rapidly decreased tax revenues in California, leading to sharp budget cutbacks throughout the state's education system, from kindergartens through universities. California has a 12.5 percent jobless rate, well above the 9.7 percent nationwide rate.

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By Roger Bybee

A few years ago, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) explained the supposed realities of globalization to workers: "We have to be honest with people, delivering a kind of cold wake-up call about the need for change in a fast-shifting economy."

Translation: It is no longer realistic to believe that corporations can afford to reward loyalty and hard work. The burden of change is on you. You are on your own.

This wake-up message was delivered this week to Fond du Lac, Wis. members of the International Association of Machinist Lodge 1947, who produce outboard motors at Mercury Marine. They learned that the Mercury Marine/Brunswick Corp. is granting bonuses to white-collar workers and executives in the wake of enormous pay cuts imposed on production workers last year.

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(Photo courtesy Flint Trading Inc.)

By Akito Yoshikane

Fourteen employees at a New York City customer service center for E-ZPass, the electronic toll system, were fired last week after trying to get their employer to acknowledge their recent unionization.

The firings were the latest by an employer that has so far demonstrated its unwillingness to deal with a unionized workforce. The conflict has been already been precluded by wage disputes and grievances filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

The trouble started last May, when the roughly 300 workers at the E-ZPass call center in Staten Island voted to unionize. Within hours of the vote, the company announced their pay was changing to piecemeal work based on the number of calls they take instead of an hourly wage.

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Hispanic farmworkers harvest strawberries at a farm in April 2006 in Carlsbad, Calif. The debate in Washington continues over whether to create a temporary guest-worker program for immigrants wishing to find work in the United States.   (Photo by Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)

By Michelle Chen

Something is astir in America's heartland. A grassroots coalition of independent farmers, consumer groups, and labor advocates is coming together to challenge the corporations at the top of the country's food chain and reclaim control over the food supply.

A series of public hearings on the agriculture oligopoly led by the Justice Department's antitrust division, has opened the door to a serious national dialogue on food policy reform. On Thursday, food and farm justice advocates gathered at a townhall meeting in Ankeny, Iowa amid chants of “bust up Big Ag” to drum up momentum for today's antitrust meeting, focused on the seed business and the biotech Goliath Monsanto.

In the midst of the healthcare and economic crises, food politics have intensified, with many communities demanding an end to perverse farm subsidies and more equitable nutritional programs. Aside from the more obvious impacts on small farmers and consumers, the food infrastructure's dysfunction is very much embedded in the workforce that sustains the country from the field to the table.

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A FedEx worker places packages onto a truck in Miami, Fla. Currently, employees of the company are barred from organizing.   (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Two Republican senators from Tennesse are doing a big favor for a big company from their home state by fighting unionization rights for drivers at the Memphis-based courier FedEx.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) has pledged to use "every right and privilege I have" to prevent FedEx drivers from organizing. The only reason FedEx can't organize now is because of a legal double stanard.

Other shipping companies like UPS are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, like the vast majority of employers in the United States. Whereas FedEx is subject to the Railway Labor Act, which denies them the basic organizing rights most employees take for granted.

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By Kari Lydersen

On Monday night, bus drivers for the Crimson Ride service at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa celebrated their first contract with an Ohio-based company, after a brief strike which I wrote about last week.

While the drivers’ strike got national attention thanks in part to Fight Back newspaper and the Network to Fight for Economic Justice, a school nutritionist in Alabama contacted me to point out how many workers in Alabama labor long hours in obscurity for far less than a living wage.

Peter Engstrom is passionate about contributing to the health and well-being of school kids in Huntsville, Ala. But even with a master's degree, he doesn’t earn enough as a cafeteria cook to support a family without working another job as a healthcare attendant. He is part of a living-wage campaign in Huntsville that hopes to follow in the footsteps of campaigns that have gained living-wage ordinances or other measures in other cities.

But as Engstrom describes in this Q & A with Working In These Times, Huntsville workers have a big challenge ahead of them.

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President Barack Obama listens to Vice President Joe Biden during a meeting in the Oval Office, Feb. 24, 2010.   (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

By Art Levine

Now that President Obama is finally embracing reconciliation and seeking at long last to fire up his base in support of health reform, it's worth asking whether Obama's quest for bipartisanship cost us too much in lost jobs and meaningful health legislation.

And where was all this fiery anti-insurance industry rhetoric from Obama last year when the right-wing dominated messaging? Long after it became clear that the president wasn't going to get any Republican support for his proposals outside of a stray vote or two—whether for his $786 billion economic stimulus bill or for healthcare reform—he and Democrats continued to water down the bills in the search for an elusive 60 votes.

But both the jobs and health bills that have emerged don't fully address the problems they purport to tackle, although there's an emerging view among most progressives that's it's important to pass some form of health reform. But support for current health care proposals remains relatively tepid among progressive activists, and there hasn't been so far a large-scale mobilization among liberals for the sort of big-ticket spending on massive jobs programs needed to start making up for the 11 million jobs lost in the recession. 

As George Packer explains in an important New Yorker article, this was "Obama's lost year"—and his emphasis on fair-minded and inclusive political approaches in D.C. over actually producing results that average people can see has hurt him and Democrats considerably.

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Sara Horowitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union.   (Photo courtesy EchoingGreen.org)

by Richard Greenwald

Many of us on this blog have been thinking a great deal about the future of labor in the U.S. We have explored the continued abuse of workers and have tried to find and highlight effective organizational strategies that have helped them.

The landscape is not a bright one. Unionization rates are at an all time low for the modern era. Labor law reform seems lost in the “hope” of the last presidential campaign. And unions seem more interested in fighting amongst themselves for scraps than in advancing the cause of workers. In this depressing fog, I have been watching with curiosity a new organization, the Freelancers Union (FU).

Like many, I wasn’t sure what to make of this organization. Not sure even about its name. But it has continued to grow; in the New York City area it has almost 100,000 members, making it one of the largest unions in the city. Its leader, Sara Horowitz, has become a go-to person on the new economy and workforce issues appearing on what seems like every TV and radio show and in countless newspapers.

At first, like many, I was amused. I mean, was this even a “union,” and was Horowitz really a labor leader? So I decided to sit down and talk with Horowitz about her organization, the growth of freelancing and the trend's larger economic ramifications.

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By Rand Wilson, AFL-CIO Communications Coordinator

Verizon's nationwide effort to sell off its land lines and focus on cellular service has hit a legal bump in Illinois—which is good for customers and telecom workers, because their quality of service and jobs are at risk should the debt-laden deal with Connecticut-based Frontier Communications be approved by regulators.

After hearing the case on the proposed Verizon-Frontier landline sale in Illinois, an administrative law judge (ALJ) with the state's Commerce Commission yesterday recommended rejecting the proposed Verizon-Frontier merger, which would affect more than a half million people throughout Illinois. "The proposed reorganization will diminish Frontier's ability to provide adequate, reliable, efficient, safe and least-cost public utility service," Judge Lisa M. Tapia wrote, mostly because it would leave Frontier with too much debt.

"The ALJ's reasoning is consistent with the positions that our union took and the arguments that we made about the enormous risks this deal poses for consumers and workers," said Jim Bates of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 51, which represents Verizon workers in the area around Springfield, Ill.

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