Worker’s Rights

Beware Of Companies Whose Names End In Yze

September 20, 2015 David F. Ruccio, www.anticap.wordpress.com Educate! Corporatism, Surveillance, Technology, Worker's Rights

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 Educate! Civil Rights, New Economy, Wages, Worker's Rights

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 Resist! Minimum Wage, Worker's Rights

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 Resist! Oil and Gas, Worker's Rights

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 Resist! Colombia, worker safety, Worker's Rights

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 Organize! Healthcare, Strikes, Worker's Rights

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 Resist! Living Wage, Minimum Wage, Walmart, Worker Rights and Jobs, Worker's Rights

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 Organize! Minimum Wage, Worker's Rights

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 Educate! Corporatism, Environment, Taxes, Worker's Rights, World Bank

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 Create! Cooperatives, Poverty, Worker's Rights

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 Organize! Labor, Law, Unions, Worker's Rights

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.

The Bad Boss Tax

July 27, 2014 Sarah Jaffe, www.inthesetimes.com Organize! Taxes, Worker Rights and Jobs, Worker's Rights

Can you name the worst job you’ve ever had? For Cliff Martin, that’s not an easy question. All three of his current jobs—delivering newspapers, delivering magazines and working as a janitor—are strong contenders. Taken together, they pay so poorly that the 20-year-old Northfield, Minnesota, native relies on MNsure, the state Medicaid plan, for healthcare and lives at home with his father to save money. But what if Martin’s bosses had to fork over a fee to the state for paying him so badly? That money, in turn, could be used to help support Martin and his fellow low-wage workers in a variety of ways, from direct subsidies for food and housing to social programs such as Medicaid or public transportation. Take Action Minnesota, a network that promotes economic and racial justice in the state, wants to make that fee a reality. It’s developing the framework for a bill that it hopes will be introduced in 2015 by state legislators who have worked with the network in the past. As conceived, the “bad business fee” legislation would require companies to disclose how many of their employees are receiving public assistance from the state or federal government. Companies would then pay a fine based on the de facto subsidies they receive by externalizing labor costs onto taxpayers.

Fast-food Workers Ready To Escalate Wage Demands

July 26, 2014 AP, www.AP.org Resist! Fast Food, Labor, Minimum Wage, Poverty, Worker's Rights

Fast-food workers say they're prepared to escalate their campaign for higher wages and union representation, starting with a national convention in suburban Chicago where more than 1,000 workers will discuss the future of the effort that has spread to dozens of cities in less than two years. About 1,300 workers are scheduled to attend sessions Friday and Saturday at an expo center in Villa Park, Ill., where they'll be asked to do "whatever it takes" to win $15-an-hour wages and a union, said Kendall Fells, organizing director of the national effort and a representative of the Service Employees International Union. The union has been providing financial and organizational support to the fast-food protests that began in late 2012 in New York City and have included daylong strikes and a protest outside this year's McDonald's shareholder meeting that resulted in more than 130 arrests. "We want to talk about building leadership, power and doing whatever it takes depending on what city they're in and what the moment calls for," said Fells, adding that the ramped-up actions will be "more high-profile" and could include everything from civil disobedience to intensified efforts to organize workers. "I personally think we need to get more workers involved and shut these businesses down until they listen to us," perhaps even by occupying the restaurants, said Cherri Delisline, a 27-year-old single mother from Charleston, S.C., who has worked at McDonald's for 10 years and makes $7.35 an hour.

Workers Speak Out Against Work Schedule Abuse And Retaliation

July 26, 2014 Emily Divito, www.ourfuture.org Educate! Labor, Minimum Wage, Women's Rights, Worker's Rights

When American women have no control over their own work schedules, they have no control over their own lives. Mary Coleman of Wisconsin knows this first-hand. She was working the night shift at a Milwaukee Popeye’s restaurant, a time slot notoriously unpopular for its exhausting hours. When she asked her manager for a transfer to the day shift, she was denied, lied to, and then penalized for even asking. Coleman’s manager told her that there were no more shifts available during daylight hours that she could have. But just weeks later, five new employees were hired to Popeye’s, all of whom were given day shifts. Simultaneously, Coleman’s hours were dramatically cut. She now only works two days a week. That is not nearly enough to live on. Coleman expressed her struggles at a Tuesday briefing in the Cannon House Office Building jointly hosted by the Center for Popular Democracy and the National Women’s Law Center. Coleman’s experience is like that of roughly 2.5 million other American women working in low-wage jobs who are at the mercy of their employers for consistent work, and so, for consistent pay.

Bookstore Fires Employees For Union Vote, Then Rehires Them

July 5, 2014 Inquisitr, www.inquisitr.com Resist! Labor, Unions, Worker's Rights

The owners of a bookstore in New York City’s Upper West Side announced Thursday that they have re-hired four employees, days after they were controversially fired following their votes in a union election. According to a post on Book Culture’s website, store owners Chris Doeblin and Annie Hedrick stated that they “have re-hired all four store managers who were terminated last week,” adding that “there is no longer a labor dispute.” The announcement marks the end of a turbulent week for the bookstore, which operates two locations near Columbia University. The employees’ terminations followed a vote by workers at Book Culture to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. Only two of the bookstore’s employees voted not to unionize, but the day after the vote, several of them were abruptly let go, as The Huffington Post reported. A company-wide email from Doeblin confirmed that the employees were fired because of their union votes: “It was indicated to me … that two people in our management group voted in the union and effectively undermined the interests of the store. The store always being in opposition to the Union. Unfortunately there is no other recourse but to remove these people from our employ effective immediately.”

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