Labor

Janus Is Here—But Don’t Ring The Death Knell For the Labor Movement

June 28, 2018 Moshe Z. Marvit, Inthesetimes.com Strategize! Class Struggle, Labor, New York (NY)

In a major decision that will impact labor for decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has just declared that all public-sector workers who are represented by a union have a Constitutional right to pay the union nothing for the representation. The Court overturned its landmark 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which permitted public-sector unions to charge fair-share fees that covered the costs of providing collective bargaining and contract administration to non-members that were represented by the union. Today, in Janus v. AFSCME, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment prohibits public employee unions from charging a mandatory fee for the costs of representation. Therefore, going forward, all public-sector employees will be under so-called “right to work,” the union-busting legal framework that denies unions the ability to charge workers dues.

LABOR SEIU Retires Its Safety And Health Program

June 26, 2018 Jordan Barab, Portside.org Educate! Health Care, Labor, SEIU

Unfortunately, SEIU is not alone. Last year, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) also dissolved its health and safety department when long-time director Darryl Alexander retired. A recent study by Harvard University professor Michael Zoorob showed that unionization saves lives. That’s the good news. But it doesn’t happen automatically when you sign the union card. The beneficial effect of unions on worker safety is the result of action by educated union members supported by union staff. Unfortunately, the Service Employees International Union, the nation’s largest labor union, doesn’t seem to have learned that lesson. As of July 1, the two-million member union will no longer have a health and safety program as it lays off its last health and safety staffer, Mark Catlin, who has been SEIU’s lone health and safety staffer for many months.

What’s Behind The Decline In Women Working?

June 13, 2018 By Matt Bruenig, Peoplespolicyproject.org Educate! Labor, New Economy, Women

Women’s labor force participation and employment peaked around 2000. Many have speculated since then about what caused this stall out and slight decline, with leading theories emphasizing the Great Recession and the lack of family benefits in the US like subsidized child care. There is no doubt some truth to these other theories, but there is another more straightforward cause of this decline: the changing racial demographics of the country. In May of 2000, white women made up 70.4 percent of all women between the ages of 25 and 54. By May of 2018, that number was down to 57.6 percent. Over that same period, Latina women went from 11.3 percent of the population to 18.9 percent. The residual “other” group also grew from 5.2 percent to 10 percent.

Grand Theft Paycheck

June 13, 2018 By Phil Mattera, Inequality.org Educate! Class Struggle, Labor, Wages, Workers Rights and Jobs

For the past two decades, Walmart has repeatedly been accused of compelling workers to perform certain tasks off the clock and has paid numerous fines for those practices. It is often suggested that the retailer is an anomaly, acting more like a fly-by-night sweatshop than a corporate giant. I recently completed a research project showing that, on the contrary, off-the-clock work, denial of overtime pay through misclassification and other forms of wage theft are pervasive in American big business. After digging through court records for much of the past year, I found more than 1,200 successful wage and hour lawsuits against hundreds of the country’s largest employers. These collective action suits have yielded some $8.8 billion in settlements and verdicts in the period since 2000.

The More Valuable Your Work Is To Society, The Less You’ll Be Paid For It

June 6, 2018 By David Graeber, Linkedin.com Educate! Exploitation, Labor, Workers

One of the most frequently heard complaints from supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement—particularly the ones working too much to spend much time in the camps, but who could only show up for marches or to express support on the Web—ran along the lines of: “I wanted to do something useful with my life; work that had a positive effect on other people or, at the very least, wasn’t hurting anyone. But the way this economy works, if you spend your working life caring for others, you’ll end up so underpaid and so deeply in debt you won’t be able to care for your own family.” There was a deep and abiding sense of rage at the injustice of such arrangements. I began to refer to it, mostly to myself, as the “revolt of the caring classes.”

Betraying Labor

June 5, 2018 Greg Godels, Mltoday.com Educate!, Strategize! Class Struggle, Electoral Politics, Labor, Revisionism

At a time when ex-FBI chief James Comey’s self-serving, self-righteous book becomes a bestseller, in a season when ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the enthusiastic apologist for genocide against Iraqi children, joins Comey on the bestseller list with a preposterous lecture on fascism, it may well be time to retreat to the library. I found some solace and much enlightenment from a dusty, cobweb infested paperback in a corner of a basement book self. I had read Organize! some years ago, maybe forty or more years ago. Published posthumously by the author’s daughter and a colleague, the book is a memoir of one of the US working class’s most valuable leaders– Wyndham Mortimer– at one of labor’s most important junctures.

Work Levels In The US And Nordic Countries

June 1, 2018 By Matt Bruenig, Peoplespolicyproject.org Educate! Labor, New Economy

US workers put in more hours than workers in all four Nordic countries and way more hours than workers in Denmark and Norway. Getting down to Danish and Norwegian levels of work would be like giving American workers 2.2 additional months of vacation each year. What is especially interesting about America’s high number of hours worked is that normally hours worked declines as hourly productivity goes up. This is true generally across countries and also true within the Nordic countries. But it is not really true of the US, which works far more hours than its hourly productivity would predict. The following graph shows the PPP-adjusted GDP per hour of the US and the Nordic countries.

Amazon Bows To The Unions: New Shifts And Higher Wages

May 25, 2018 By Antonio Sciotto, Global.ilmanifesto.it Organize! Amazon, Class Struggle, Labor, Unions

For the first time in Europe, the e-commerce multinational Amazon signed a contract with the unions regarding the organization of work shifts. This “historic” event—as FILCAMS CGIL, CISL and FISASCAT UILTUCS have called it—took place at the large shipment hub of Castel San Giovanni (Piacenza region), where, on Black Friday last year, employees were involved in a large-scale and unprecedented protest. The workers for the US giant, hired legally under the national contract for the logistics field, have complained they were being heavily tested by the tough shifts and the amount of tasks and the pace required by the e-commerce chain.

Teen Voices In The Fight To Raise The Minimum Wage In Massachusetts

May 24, 2018 By Jessicah Pierre, Inequality.org Organize! Class Struggle, Labor, Minimum Wage, Workers Rights and Jobs

Norma Meza is an 18-year-old student at Charlestown High School in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Growing up, she watched her mother battle health issues such as kidney failure, lupus, and ulcers. Despite working full-time, her mother struggled financially to keep the family afloat. Norma knew as early as 14 years old that she would have to get a job to help her mother pay the bills and put food on the table. Since then she’s worked a number of jobs to help contribute to her family’s income while gaining important work skills. “I’ve worked as an office assistant and learned in the process how to answer phone calls, assisting families who spoke Spanish,” said Norma. “After that I worked as a camp counselor for 2 years where I learned leadership, communication skills, and how to be a role model.”

Sarbanand: A “Dirty Dozen” Corporation Contesting Being Fined In District Court For Working A Farmworker To Death In Whatcom County

May 23, 2018 Edgar Franks, Foodjustice.org Resist! Class Struggle, Exploitation, Farmworkers, Labor

On Wednesday May 23rd at 9:00am Sarbanand Farms is scheduled to appear in the Whatcom County District Court to appeal a fine that was imposed on them by the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries after the death of a worker on August 6, 2017. This is happening in a courtroom that normally handles driving citations. This is the level of disrespect we are receiving for a farmworker’s death in Whatcom County. We believe the WA State Dept of Labor and Industries has given permission to agricultural corporations and the courts to normalize the deaths of farmworkers by exploitation. This past February, Sarbanand was fined over $150,000 for not allowing workers to take their rest breaks and lunches.

Supreme Court Rules Against Workers In Arbitration Case

May 22, 2018 Nitasha Tiku, Wired.com Educate! Class Struggle, Labor, Repression, State Violence, Supreme Court, Workers

ON MONDAY, THE Supreme Court slowed recent momentum to give workers—including many in the tech sector—the right to a day in court. The Supreme Court case centered around clauses in employment contracts that require employees to resolve disputes through arbitration, and preclude them from joining with others to file class-action lawsuits. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court ruled that those clauses are enforceable under federal law, which means companies can prohibit employees from banding together both privately or in court. Such binding-arbitration clauses are widely used at technology companies, and critics say they helped allow sexual harassment to flourish by hiding complaints. More recently, some firms have taken steps to limit the practice. Uber last week said it would eliminate arbitration agreements for employees, riders, and drivers with sexual misconduct claims.

Ethiopian Unions Pitch For Minimum Wage In Garment Sector

May 18, 2018 Umer Beigh, Thedawn-news.org Organize! Ethiopia, Exploitation, Garment Factories, Labor, Minimum Wage, Workers

Unions in Ethiopia are attempting to mobilize textile and garment workers, who are facing a massive wage crisis – most of the workers are forced to work under twenty Ethiopian Birr (ETB) per day, which is less than one dollar. The 600 or so ETB, which a large section of the country’s workers earns monthly, are hardly enough to meet their minimum needs. The condition of the workers has worsened since the political crisis of 2017, when hundreds of people were killed during protests that rocked the country, leading to a state of emergency for the past 10 months. Regional businesses and the transportation sector have been immensely affected during this period, further adding to the misery of these workers, who live on the margins of society.

Everyone Can Have Their Own Job Guarantee

May 11, 2018 By Matt Bruenig, Peoplespolicyproject.org Create! Labor, Workers Rights and Jobs

Before getting into his piece, it is helpful to again restate my main criticism of the job guarantee (JG) idea, the one I have been making for three years now (over and over and over and over). My main criticism of the idea is that the kinds of jobs that are appropriate for the program are not very good jobs and that advocates consistently claim that they will be able to do jobs that they can’t actually do. This criticism is aimed at the canonical JG proposal that says that the program’s intent is to set a fixed minimum wage and act as an employer of last resort (ELR) for the bottom of the labor market. Importantly for this post, the fixed minimum wage is key to the canonical JG’s design because it allegedly allows private employers to hold down the inflationary wage demands of their own workers by being able to hire out of the JG labor pool with ease.

Academic Alienation: Freeing Cognitive Labor From The Grip Of Capitalism

May 11, 2018 Maresi Starzmann, Roarmag.org Create! Academia, Capitalism, Class Struggle, Labor

Sitting in a coffee shop in a typical American college town, I overhear a conversation between two twenty-somethings. They lament, in educated and self-critical fashion, the failure of the academic system. Reflecting on their dedication and work ethic, they keep returning to the same question: What’s the point of four years of rigorous studying, of amassing student loans, of backbreaking night and weekend jobs, if there are almost zero job prospects out there? And, worse, what is their money going toward if not the kind of quality education they have been promised? With most classes no longer being taught by professors but by graduate students or adjunct teachers, they find the US educational system to be a scam. The experiences of these college students speak to a contradiction at the heart of the neoliberal economy.

Arizona Teachers Vote To Strike

April 21, 2018 Jerry White, Wsws.org Resist! Arizona, Class Struggle, Labor, Strikes, Teachers

Teachers in the southwestern US state of Arizona have overwhelmingly voted to strike to demand improved wages for educators and support staff, and restore more than $1 billion in school funding cuts over the last decade. At a press conference Thursday night, officials from the Arizona Education Association (AEA) announced that 78 percent of the 57,000 educators who cast ballots over the last three days voted for strike action. According to Noah Karvelis, an elementary school teacher and one of the leaders of the Arizona Educators United (AEU) Facebook group, teachers will continue to hold “walk-in” protests at their schools next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then walk out in a statewide strike next Thursday. The powerful strike vote takes place after statewide strikes in West Virginia and Oklahoma, a one-day strike in Jersey City, New Jersey, and sickouts and protests in Kentucky, Florida and many other states.

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