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Labor

The Working-Class Mini-Revolts Of The 21st Century

April 29, 2014 Jeremy Brecher, www.counterpunch.org , ,
Forty years ago I published a study of peak periods of American labor conflict – what I dubbed periods of “mass strike” — called Strike! As I have updated the book for the fortieth anniversary edition, I have had the opportunity to review the strikes and labor struggles of the last fifteen years in the context of 140 years of American labor history. The start of the twenty-first century has seen a continuing decline in union membership and strikes. But it has also seen the emergence of unpredicted mini-revolts. Activists in the Battle of Seattle took over downtown Seattle, put an end to the millennium round of the World Trade Organization, and redefined the question of globalization for millions of Americans. The 2006 immigrant-rights demonstrations, the largest ever in the world with nearly five million participants, brought millions of undocumented immigrants “out of the shadows” and made immigrant rights a pivot of American politics. In the Wisconsin Uprising, the hundreds of thousands of participants occupied the state capital for a week, closed the Madison schools, and rang the tocsin for struggles nationwide against austerity and for labor rights.

Rallies Across The Country To Save Post Office From Staples Privatization

April 25, 2014 Jodie Gummow, www.alternet.org , ,
“U.S. mail is not for sale!” This was the hard-hitting message of hundreds of local activists who joined forces across the country in a national day of action protesting a privatization deal between the U.S. Postal Services and Staples. The USPS pilot program establishing unsecured postal counters in more than 80 Staples stores in four geographic areas began late last year. In response, American Postal Workers Union (APWU) members and associates rallied outside Staples stores around the country demanding an end to the deal which they say is aimed at replacing good, living-wage postal jobs with low-wage, high-turnover jobs filled with untrained Staples employees. They say it may eventually lead to layoffs and the closing of post offices.

Incarcerated Workers Launch Nonviolent Strike Against New Jim Crow

April 23, 2014 Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, www.truth-out.org , ,
Hidden from public view by barbed-wire fences and windowless concrete walls, a movement is brewing in Alabama that could change America. This Monday, hundreds of men incarcerated in St. Clair and prisons across the state will stop work, adding economic muscle to their demands for wages for their labor, an end to overcrowding and inhumane conditions, an end to the “New Jim Crow” of mass incarceration of African-Americans, and the repurposing the prison system as a tool for genuine rehabilitation in a wounded world. The demands of the peaceful strike action are outlined in detail in the Education, Rehabilitation, and Re-Entry Preparedness Bill (FREEDOM Bill), which was presented to the state legislature by the Free Alabama Movement in January. Melvin Ray, spokesperson for the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) said, “When we look at our situations inside of the Alabama Department of Corrections, we have no choice but to engage in this nonviolent and peaceful protest for civil and human rights. We sleep with rats and roaches. We work for free and eat slop unfit for human consumption. We serve decades in prison solely to provide free labor and without any real prospect for parole, and without any recourse to the courts for justice or redress of grievances.

Community Solidarity Key To Burlington Bus Strike Win

April 23, 2014 Ellen David Friedman, www.labornotes.org , ,
An 18-day bus drivers’ strike in Burlington, Vermont, ended in a win April 3 when drivers ratified a new contract 53-6. Strikes are rare these days, and fewer still result in victories—so why was this one different? What generated public support for the strike, despite management’s aggressive plan to blame drivers for the loss of bus service for nearly three weeks? This strike succeeded through a powerful combination of workers organizing on the job and organized community solidarity, the roots of which go back to at least 2009. In the face of aggressive management and worsening working conditions, and dissatisfied with the response of their union, Teamsters Local 597, some drivers began to meet as the Sunday Morning Breakfast Club. They reached out to Teamsters for a Democratic Union in 2009 as they were getting ready for contract negotiations. According to driver Jim Fouts, “When I first came here the union was weak, because it was a business-as-usual union. Then some activists started saying, ‘This is wrong. We can vote on things. This is supposed to be a democracy.’ And really it was a bottom-up movement to change our union.”

Convergence: The Roots Of Earth Day Run Through Labor

April 22, 2014 Joe Uehlein, www.zcomm.org ,
The approach of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 provides us an opportunity to reflect on the “long, strange trip” shared by the environmental movement and the labor movement over four decades here on Spaceship Earth. A billion people participate in Earth Day events, making it the largest secular civic event in the world. But when it was founded in 1970, according to Earth Day’s first national coordinator Denis Hayes, “Without the UAW, the first Earth Day would have likely flopped!” Less than a week after he first announced the idea for Earth Day, Senator Gaylord Nelson presented his proposal to the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO. Walter Ruther, President of the UAW, enthusiastically donated $2000 to help kick the effort off – to be followed by much more. Hayes recalls: "The UAW was by far the largest contributor to the first Earth Day, and its support went beyond the merely financial. It printed and mailed all our materials at its expense — even those critical of pollution-belching cars.

This one time I played Pete Seeger’s banjo…

April 21, 2014 Evan Greer & Anne Feeney, www.labornotes.com , , , , ,
The first time I met Pete Seeger was at a People’s Music Network summer gathering about 10 years ago. I was a bright-eyed radical teenager who had just stolen all of my dad’s Phil Ochs CDs and was ready for revolution, but I was new to the folk scene and was probably the youngest person at the gathering by about 30 years. In terms of looks, I didn’t know Pete Seeger from Frank Sinatra.

Railroad Workers Unite In Chicago

April 21, 2014 Kari Lydersen, www.inthesetimes.com ,
Chicago is known as the place where the nation’s railroads meet. And last weekend, the city also became the meeting spot for about 40 of the country’s most progressive and activism-driven railroad union workers when it hosted the biennial conference of Railroad Workers United (RWU), an independent labor organization founded in 2008 that includes members of the major rail unions, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and other labor groups. Their gathering dovetailed with the Labor Notes conference, which brings together activist trade unionists from around the world every two years. Those converging in Chicago for the RWU conference included locomotive engineers, rail yard workers, people who build trains and employees of contractors that service locomotives. They represent a small wedge of activism and solidarity-building in an industry that, while crucial to the country’s economic well-being and one of the cleanest freight transport options, is also notorious for retaliation against workers who agitate for better conditions or speak out about injuries and safety hazards.

Oppose Another Step Toward Post Office Privatization

April 17, 2014 Dave Jamieson, www.huffingtonpost.com , ,
On a recent Saturday morning, 500 protesters poured out of a parade of school buses, signs and megaphones in hand, and tried their best to shame a single Staples store just outside Chicago. Among them was Mike Suchomel, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, who traveled all the way from New Jersey for a nearby labor conference. What has infuriated Suchomel and many of his fellow postal union members is a new arrangement struck between USPS and the office supply retailer. Under the premise of a pilot program, a limited number of Staples locations are now offering most of the same services provided at post offices, to be handled by Staples employees rather than postal workers. "It's just a big step toward privatization," said Suchomel, who hopped a bus to the protest from the Labor Notes conference, a biannual gathering of labor activists held in Chicago. "I think it's a terrible thing that the postmaster general would even think about this."

The Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Dishonesty Of Obama/AFL-CIO

April 17, 2014 Avi Chomsky, www.lawcha.org , ,
When Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, he told the AFL-CIO convention that he would oppose the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement promoted by then-president Bush “because the violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.” Labor advocates cheered. Once in office, though, Obama advocated for a Labor Action Plan to overcome what he saw as the obstacles to Congressional ratification of the Agreement. He and Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos signed the LAP on April 7, 2011, and Congress ratified the FTA a year later. Colombian opposition to the agreement was always deeper and broader than that in the United States. Violence against unionists became the main opposition slogan in the US, but it was always a slender issue to base a campaign on. The argument implied that the FTA was overall a good idea that would benefit Colombians, and was used to pressure the government to improve its labor policies so it could get the FTA as a reward.

Labor’s Problems With Health Law Deepening

April 9, 2014 Mark Dudzic, www.laborforsinglepayer.org ,
When activists from UNITEHERE—the union of hospitality industry workers—were recently lobbying in Washington DC in an effort to get relief from some of the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that are undermining the hard won healthcare coverage of the union's mostly low-wage membership, they were told by an aide to New Jersey Senator Menendez that, "Labor needs to regress to the mean." Of course, under the laws of mathematics, if you only reduce those factors that exceed a mean, the mean itself constantly adjusts downward. In that context, another term for "regress to the mean" is "race to the bottom". For many workers, the ACA is having that exact effect. UNITEHERE's recently released report Making Inequality Worse documents how Obamacare, supported by many unions as a means of leveling the playing field between union and non-union workers, is having the perverse and opposite effect of increasing inequality.

Graduate Students Arrested For Striking

April 8, 2014 Rebecca Burns, www.inthesetimes.com , ,
A system-wide strike by graduate assistants at the University of California commenced yesterday with what their union calls an ugly irony. The work stoppage, staged in protest of past alleged attempts by UC to intimidate graduate workers for labor organizing, was quickly met with what workers say was a further attempt at intimidation: The arrest of 20 students at UC Santa Cruz who were picketing early Wednesday morning. As Working In These Times has reported previously, graduate assistants are one of several groups of workers who have been locked in intensifying labor battles with the UC system, which has been hit hard by nearly $1 billion in budget cuts during the past five years. In November, graduate student workers struck in solidarity with campus service workers, a rare labor action that is prohibited by most union contracts and that was enabled only by the expiration of the UAW’s contract earlier that month.

Beyond The Minimum Wage

April 8, 2014 Amy Dean, www.inthesetimes.com , ,
Raising the minimum wage is an idea whose time has come. Long an important grassroots demand, campaigns to raise the wage are taking place throughout the country. Even the national Democratic Party has recognized it as it winning issue that its candidates should embrace. Yet, although a minimum wage boost is long overdue, an increase from $7.25 an hour to $10 an hour will not bring the working poor out of poverty. Nor will it restore the type of labor rights and collective organization that built the American middle class in the mid-20th century. This dilemma raises a critical question: How do we use the enthusiasm around this issue to promote a more robust and thoroughgoing vision of economic justice? Sarita Gupta is one progressive leader who is searching for an answer to this question. Gupta is executive director of Jobs With Justice, a national organization whose mission is to “win real change for workers by combining innovative communications strategies and solid research and policy advocacy with grassroots action and mobilization,” according to its website.

UPS Fires Hundreds Of Workers Who Defended Colleague

April 5, 2014 Kevin Short, www.huffingtonpost.com ,
UPS, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics companies, has decided to fire 250 workers who staged a 90-minute protest in February. The protest was organized after a long-time employee was fired over an hours dispute. Twenty of the workers were notified of their dismissal on Monday. The remaining 230 were told they would be fired as soon as replacements are trained. The workers, who are based in Queens, N.Y., walked off the job when Jairo Reyes, a 24-year company veteran and union activist, got in a dispute with the company over the number of hours senior staff could work, according to the New York Daily News. Reyes was fired on February 14 -- “that was my Valentine’s Day gift from UPS,” Reyes told the Queens Courier -- and the ensuing protest occurred February 26. A UPS spokesperson confirmed the firing to the Huffington Post, referring to the protest as "an unauthorized work stoppage."

Labor Movements: How To Fan The Sparks

April 2, 2014 Alexandra Bradbury & Jane Slaughter, www.labornotes.org , ,
We troublemakers keep hoping for the spark that will set a wildfire of workers in motion. The worse our situation gets—economically, politically, ecologically—the more we yearn for a vast movement to erupt and transform the landscape. It’s not impossible. Look at 1937, when workplace occupations spread everywhere, from auto factories to Woolworth’s. The 1930s wave of militancy forced Congress to aid union organizing with new laws and to enact Social Security and unemployment insurance. Industrial unions formed during that upsurge continue to this day. So why not here and now? In our lifetimes, we’ve seen sparks—but we haven’t seen them spread like that. In some ways we’re more connected than ever before, able to watch each other’s struggles in real time on our phones. Yet mostly, the sparks haven’t leapt from one workplace or one Capitol rotunda to another. The Occupy movement is the shining exception.

Four Postal Unions Unite To Save The Post Office

April 2, 2014 David Yao, www.labornotes.org ,
If you follow what’s going on with the post office, you’ve been reading for years about the various threats to postal services, our jobs, and our contract. Private companies want to gobble more and more of our work, the Postmaster General is more than happy to give it away, an anti-government faction in Congress opposes public services on principle, and the media cluelessly repeats misleading info about “huge postal losses.” With all these wolves circling at the gates, you’d think the postal unions would have banded together to fight as one. Sadly, for whatever reason, that has not been the case—until now. At this link is a proclamation of “A Postal Union Alliance,” signed by the presidents of the four major craft unions—the Mail Handlers, city Letter Carriers (NALC), Rural Letter Carriers, and American Postal Workers Union (APWU). In it, they commit to work together to defend against cuts in any service, oppose privatization and subcontracting, and “build an alliance with the American people in defense of the public postal service.”
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