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Worker’s Rights

Fast-Food Workers Plan Wave Of Strikes For 2016 Primaries

January 15, 2016 Giovanna Vitale and Jack Temple, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
By Giovanna Vitale and Jack Temple for #FightFor15. Fast-food workers announced Friday that an unprecedented wave of strikes and actions calling for $15 and union rights will hit this primary season to hammer home to candidates that the nearly 64 million Americans paid less than $15 an hour are a voting bloc that cannot be ignored. Workers will also continue to collect signatures on their Fight for $15 Voter Agenda, a five-point platform that launched late last year and calls for $15 and union rights, affordable child care, quality long-term care, racial justice and immigration reform—issues identified by underpaid workers as key factors in whether they will go to the polls for a candidate.

Supreme Court Appears Ready To Bankrupt Public-Employee Unions

January 13, 2016 Dave Johnson, www.ourfuture.org , ,
By Dave Johnson for Campaign for America's Future - After a decades-long effort to place ideologically committed “movement” members in the judicial branch of government, funded by extremely wealthy individuals and their corporations, it looks like the resulting corporate/conservative wing of the Supreme Court is ready to make a ruling that would bankrupt public-employee unions. And clearly already-decimated private-sector unions will be the next target. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. In this case the Court is asked to overturn a unanimous 1977 case that said public-employee unions can charge nonmembers a fee to cover the cost of the services the unions are required by law to provide those nonmembers.

National Labor Board Takes McDonald’s To Court

January 11, 2016 Ned Resnikoff, www.america.aljazeera.com , , ,
By Ned Resnikoff for Aljazeera - Current and former McDonald’s workers who accuse the fast-food giant of illegal union-busting will get their day in court on Monday, when an administrative law judge is expected to begin hearing arguments in a major unfair labor practice suit. The Obama administration's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will represent the workers in a case that could have wide-ranging consequences for the McDonald’s franchising model.

Cafeteria Union Workers Demand Restaurant Employees Get Better Pay

October 31, 2015 Clark Mindock, www.ibtimes.com , , , , ,
By Clark Mindock of IBTimes - U.S. Senate aides brown-bagged their lunches this week in support of cafeteria workers on Capitol Hill hoping to unionize. The aides were aligning themselves with a broader push by federally contracted workers to unionize and demand higher wages in one of the most expensive cities in the country. Senate cafeteria workers associated with the movement have alleged that the company contracted to provide meals in the underbelly of the Capitol has illegally retaliated against their organizing efforts. The workers are employed by private employer Restaurant Associates, which is contracted to run a subsidized business that feeds senators and their staff.

Beware Of Companies Whose Names End In Yze

September 20, 2015 David F. Ruccio, www.anticap.wordpress.com , , ,
By David F. Ruccio in Anticap.wordpress.com. Finance is adopting sophisticated analytics to ensure business performance from high-dollar employees. Cambridge neuroscientist and former Goldman Sachs trader John Coates works with companies to figure out how monitoring biological signals can lead to trading success; his research focuses on measuring hormones that increase confidence and other desirable states as well as those that produce negative, stressful states. In a report for Bloomberg, Coates explained that he is working with “three or four hedge funds” to apply an “early-warning system” that would alert supervisors when traders are getting into the hormonal danger zone. He calls this process “human optimization.” People who do the most basic, underpaid work in our society are increasingly subject to physical monitoring, too.

Uber’s Attempts To Silence Drivers May Have Backfired

August 23, 2015 Clark Taylor, www.inthesetimes.com , , ,
By Clark Taylor in In These Times. Much has been made over how Uber, the car service that enables users to hail a car within minutes of pressing a few keys on their smartphones, is jumpstarting the “gig-economy.” Frequently lost amid the discussion over disrupting existing industries, however, is the fact that workers in this new economy often get the short-shrift. That fact was made extremely evident in a recent order against the company written by U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen in which he found that the terms Uber imposes upon its drivers as a condition of driving for the company, including a forced arbitration clause, are unconscionable and unenforceable under California law. In plain English, he ruled that the provisions were so unfair and one-sided in favor of Uber that they could not be enforced in a court of law.

Largest Ever Worker Mobilization In US On Tax Day

April 14, 2015 Fight For 15, www.popularresistance.org ,
On Tax Day, fast-food workers from Pittsburgh to Pasadena will walk off the job, while adjunct professors, home care, child care, airport, industrial laundry and Walmart workers will march and rally in what will be the most widespread mobilization ever by U.S. workers seeking higher pay. The two-and-a-half-year-old Fight for $15 will go to college, with protests expected by students from 200 campuses. Activists organizing around #BlackLivesMatter will join in as the ties between the racial and economic justice movements deepen. And the marches and rallies will stretch around the globe, with protests expected in more than 100 cities, in 35 countries, on six continents, from Sao Paolo to Tokyo. The first global strikes coordinated with U.S. workers are scheduled for Italy and New Zealand.

Striking Oil Workers Emerge Victorious

March 15, 2015 Kate Aronoff, www.wagingnonviolence.org ,
Yesterday afternoon, the United Steelworkers reached a tentative contract agreement with negotiators from Shell Oil Co., which has represented Chevron, ExxonMobil and other oil companies affected by the union’s now nearly six-week strike. Even as the strike continues in many workplaces, yesterday’s victory is the hard-won result of careful organizing and some promising collaboration. Beginning on February 1 — after a particularly contentious round of negotiations — an estimated 3,800 workers kicked off a strike action across nine refineries in Texas, California, Kentucky and Washington. As of Thursday’s truce, the strike had grown to include 7,000 workers across 15 refineries, petrochemical and cogeneration plants, including the nation’s largest refinery in Port Arthur, Texas. In total, the United Steelworkers, or USW, represents 30,000 members, and holds leverage over an impressive 64 percent of the United States’ refining capacity.

Support The Injured Colombian Workers

February 18, 2015 Paige Shell Spurling, www.afgj.org , ,
On February 16, 2015, 20 injured workers from the Colombian petroleum industry joined the injured Colombian General Motors workers in the tent encampment in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bogota that the GM workers have occupied for the last 3 ½ years. Many of their wives accompanied them, bringing the total number in the encampment up to around 30. Disabling injuries are increasingly a problem in Colombia, where protections have become more lax and healthcare has been privatized (leading occupational healthcare insurers to deny coverage by claiming that worker’s injuries are non-occupational). Companies such as General Motors, Halliburton (oil sector), Coca Cola, Drummond Coal and others, realizing that they were not going to be required to follow labor laws have increasingly exposed workers to conditions which resulted in disabling injury and then get rid of the problem by getting rid of the worker, a practice which is illegal on the books but in wide practice in Colombia.

FairPoint Worker Speaks Out For Universal Healthcare

December 21, 2014 Kris White, www.workerscenter.org , ,
My name is Kris White and I live in Grand Isle. I am a mother, a Fairpoint worker and a steward in my union, Communication Workers of America Local 1400, which along with our sister union, IBEW Local 2326, is striking against a shameful anti-human trend in this country that puts profits over people. The majority of FairPoint stock is owned by five Wall Street hedge funds. Angelo, Gordon & Co. is the single largest shareholding hedge fund with 20 percent of outstanding stock. These firms have no interest in maintaining and improving a quality communications company. They are in business to make massive profits. Fairpoint does not have to pay those investors by stripping the retired and active employees of the jobs and benefits we have invested our lives in earning. They are choosing to do so.Their goal was to get us to agree to changes that would increase their profits by $600 million per year or force a strike. We know this because they have been unwilling to negotiate. They came to the bargaining table with one proposal and have not entertained a single compromise.

Black Friday Strikes Escalate At Walmart Stores In DC

November 29, 2014 , , , ,
Three years ago it would have been unthinkable for a Walmart employee to walk off the job, especially on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year. They would have been administratively disciplined or worse, terminated. But that is what happened on November 28 at the H Street Walmart in Washington, DC when several workers did not report to work, saying they were fed up with low wages, irregular schedules, reduced hours, and economic hardship. unnamed (11) “I worked 40 hours a week but was classified as a part time employee even though I was working full time,” said Glova Scott, a Walmart employee at the H Street location. She said her classification prevented her from qualifying for company benefit programs. Early Friday morning, several hundred supporters from the advocacy group Our Walmart, the AFL-CIO, and other labor groups marched with strikers to the H Street Walmart in northwest Washington to tell managers they wanted better pay and regular hours

$15 Per Hour Is Not An Accident

November 9, 2014 Jack Temple, www.fightfor15.org ,
An estimated 609,000 low-wage workers won pay raises Tuesday night as voters in Arkansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Alaska overwhelmingly approved measures to raise the minimum wage. The New York Times editorial board wrote Wednesday that the 100 percent success rate for the initiatives makes clear that opponents of higher pay “could pay a price in the 2016 elections, when lower-wage workers and those who support them could turn out in higher numbers.” Oakland joined San Francisco in approving a substantial pay raise for low-wage workers, voting in favor of a measure to increase the city’s minimum wage to $12.25 per hour by next year. Voters in Illinois and counties throughout Wisconsin also approved advisory initiatives in support of raising the state minimum wage. More than 140,000 workers in San Francisco won a pay raise to $15 per hour Tuesday as voters approved a ballot measure to increase the city’s minimum wage. The victory in San Francisco is yet another sign of how fast-food workers have set the standard for a living wage across the country: as Businessweek noted, “That $15 figure isn’t an accident. It’s been a rallying cry of fast-food workers and other low-wage employees who’ve staged a series of high-profile strikes, beginning with a one-day walkout in New York two years ago this month.”

Groups Oppose World Bank’s Doing Business Rankings

October 28, 2014 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
Tomorrow, October 29 2014, the World Bank will release its 2015 Doing Business report and ranking of some 189 countries, including our nation. The report helps business push countries in a race to the bottom with laws that do not protest workers, the environment, consumers or control the abuses of transnational corporation. Popular Resistance sees these rankings as a great disservice to the world that empowers corporations and weakens governments and the people. Since 2002, through this annual publication, the World Bank has been benchmarking and ranking countries according to “the ease of doing business.” The Doing Business is based on the principles of privatization, deregulation, low taxation for corporations, and ‘free market’ fundamentalism. It rewards the lowering of social and environmental safeguards, therefore allowing the exploitation of natural resources and human capital by foreign corporations and local elites.

America’s Largest Worker Owned Co-Op Lifts People Out Of Poverty

August 16, 2014 Laura Flanders, www.yesmagazine.org , ,
Before Zaida Ramos joined Cooperative Home Care Associates, she was raising her daughter on public assistance, shuttling between dead-end office jobs, and not making ends meet. “I earned in a week what my family spent in a day,” she recalled. After 17 years as a home health aide at Cooperative Home Care Associates (CHCA), the largest worker-owned co-op in the United States, Ramos recently celebrated her daughter’s college graduation. She’s paying half of her son’s tuition at a Catholic school, and she’s a worker-owner in a business where she enjoys flexible hours, steady earnings, health and dental insurance, plus an annual share in the profits. She’s not rich, she says, “but I’m financially independent. I belong to a union, and I have a chance to make a difference.” Can worker-owned businesses lift families out of poverty? “They did mine,” Ramos said. Should other low-income New Yorkers get involved in co-ops? She says, “Go for it.” New York City is going—in a big way—for worker-owned cooperatives. Inspired by the model of CHCA and prodded by a new network of co-op members and enthusiasts, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Council allocated $1.2 million to support worker cooperatives in 2015’s budget. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, New York’s investment in co-ops is the largest by any U.S. city government to date.

Mercedes-Benz Violated Alabama Workers’ Organizing Rights, Judge Rules

August 1, 2014 Kathleen Burke, www.autonews.com , , ,
An administrative judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Mercedes-Benz U.S. International Inc. violated the organizing rights of workers at its Vance, Ala., plant by not allowing the distribution of union literature in common areas during off-work hours. A charge initially filed Sept. 3 alleged the automaker violated the National Labor Relations Act, citing a number of complaints of unfair labor practices. Judge Keltner Locke dismissed all other complaints in the charge, saying Mercedes took “prompt remedial action.” But Locke in the ruling issued last week found Mercedes violated the act when it told employees they could not disseminate union materials in the plant’s atriums and team centers, which he determined were mixed-use areas. The company also was found in violation for “maintaining a solicitation and distribution rule which employees reasonably could understand to prohibit all solicitation in work areas.” The ruling did not impose any penalties but said Mercedes must amend its solicitation and distribution rule to make it explicit that employees off the clock may solicit other employees also not on work time.
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