The Grassroots Collaborative issued a report last week looking at mainstream print media coverage of the Living Wage Ordinance that was passed by the City Council and subsequently vetoed in 2006. The research was done in conjunction with the Community Media Workshop and media researchers.
3. Balance was lacking in presentation of problems and solutions, or framing.
Essentially, the Collaborative argues that the policy ramification of the Living Wage Ordinance was reduced to the typical power-politics analysis of "unions versus business", ignoring the deeper issues of the effect of low-wage jobs in poor and minority communities, and disregarding the opinions of supporters of the Living Wage Ordinance where they did not fit into the pre-defined (by Mayoral forces) narrative.
The most troubling fact revealed by the study was that while 75% of those quoted in the articles surveyed were businesspeople or politicians, only 6% were community residents.
The SK Hand Tool strike is over, as Teamsters members voted Tuesday to end the job action and accept a contract -- with health care but lower wages -- from the company.
"They voted to both end the strike and sign the contract, and the contract included [a health care provision and] a return-to-work agreement," a spokeswoman for Teamsters Local 743 said Wednesday. The company is "going to call all the people back to work today and fire all the . . . scabs."
Some updates on union contract negotiations around town:
[CTA Tattler]: CTA bus drivers union weighs strike to protest layoffs
The union president, Darrell Jefferson, goes on to insist the CTA's budget deficit is actually $500 million, not the $300 million cited by the CTA. But the union will continue to resist any givebacks, including furlough days.
[Chicago Tribune]: Hotel workers authorize strike at downtown Starwood hotels
Chicago hotel workers voted Wednesday evening to authorize a strike at five downtown Starwood hotels.
A union spokesman said if contract negotiations drag on, similar votes could occur at downtown Hyatt and Hilton hotels. Union contracts covering 6,000 workers at 31 hotels in downtown Chicago expired Aug. 31, and the union has said a settlement is far from sight.
With a federal mediator in place at the end of the table, the Union and Management traded barbs as the contract stalemate continues. AFSCME continues to demand that management provide us with an updated wages proposal, which the county will not as the tax issue continues to drag on before the county board.
The existence of food deserts in Chicago is very real, and has a very nasty effect. The lack of any availability of affordable, healthy food in poor communities is probably directly related to the dangerously high rates of obesity among the poor, and the correlative high rates of heart disease and diabetes among the poor.
But the option of Big Blue is not the only option to solve this problem. There are more constructive solutions, ones that don't involve decimating the ability for small businesses and entrepreneurs to thrive, or exist; and ones that don't undercut the working conditions of the thousands of grocery and retail workers who have hard-fought benefits through their unions at unionized groceries.
The father of the American common school system, Horace Mann, once referred to the public school as "the greatest discovery ever made by man". I tend to agree, though the scientific method is up there, too: giving every child the same education and critical thinking skills is necessary to building the cognitive girding that a true meritocracy requires.
A public school system is also invaluable to democracy because they are in a sense immobile, essentially local, and connect families, workers, and youth in one place. It's easy to see why the public school system is a favorite target of reactionaries on the right: done right, it undermines the status quo by its very existence.
Despite the right's constant harping on the evil teachers' unions, there's no debate as to their positive impact on education historically. America's schools improved by every conceivable measure as unionization of the profession grew. In fact, teaching only became a profession because of teachers' unions. It's easy to forget now, but the schools were a patronage dumping ground in all but the toniest of schools for generations.
Despite the hysteria whipped up among parents and the free market fundamentalists, teachers don't go into the profession because they hate children and teaching. Teaching is an immensely stressful profession--consistently ranked among the most stressful. Teachers have to face roomfuls of children and adolescents in the most emotionally trying times of their lives, and they must manage to both educate them and keep them in line. The caricature of the teacher who puts on a movie and puts her head down to sleep is just that, and is the result of years of propaganda and little else.
Don't get me wrong; teachers' unions need reform. There needs to be a reasonable method for removing bad teachers; there needs to be room for innovation in curricula. And they need democracy.
Almost one year ago -- on December 5, 2008 -- 250 workers who had just been laid off from their jobs at the Republic Windows and Doors factory on Chicago's Goose Island secured their place in labor history. The workers refused to leave the factory until they received what was theirs: 60 days of federally mandated severance pay and compensation for accrued vacation time. While workers were told that Bank of America had cut off the factory's line of credit, the bank had received $25 billion in federal bailout money before the Republic closed.
Furthermore, for more than a month, workers had noticed management quietly emptying the factory in the middle of the night -- a corporate scheme that ended with Republic CEO Richard Gillman being held on $10 million bond and accused of stealing factory equipment and attempting to set up a new operation in Iowa.
Mechanics sat down with Lydersen, a staff writer for the Midwest bureau of The Washington Post and a frequent contributor to several other publications, including the Chicago Reader (where she recently had twogreat cover stories) and In These Times. Over drinks at Argo Tea, she discussed her book, the factory takeover and its lasting impact.
This is another example of the trouble the labor movement has. The private sector has carved out a legal regime that makes it easy and painless to bust unions and squash workers' rights to organize in the workplace. Because we don't allow our government to violate a worker's right to organize, it is much easier to organize in the public sector. As a result, we end up with high unionization rates in the public sector and low union density in the private sector. Since public employees get paid by all of us, it is easy to stir up resentment against public sector workers--why should they have it so good? Why should they get defined benefit pensions?
Rather than try to pull everybody up to the decent living standards that public sector workers get, conservatives advocate for dragging everybody else down to the lower living standards. Private sector jobs not covered by collective bargaining agreements, the argument goes, have their value determined "rationally" by the market, whereas union contracts "artificially" inflate wages and benefits. This is of course absurd; collective bargaining agreements are entered into voluntarily, just like any contract, and if using your size and bargaining strength to improve the deal you get is "artificial" then a certain big blue discount super retailer from Bentonville, Arkansas should be the archenemy of conservatives and libertarians everywhere.
Don't be surprised if CTA employees' refusal to give up what they've earned over years--decades--of work ends up being blamed for the fare hikes or service cuts. These workers are very convenient scapegoats. Easier to beat up on people earning the median income than force the powerful to pay their fair share, or make tough decisions.
Representative Alan Grayson Owns Republicans on Health Care
Representative Alan Grayson (D) - FL said that Repubs "want you to die quickly if you get sick" and called government's inaction on health care a "Holocaust". Republicans, of course, want to slap him on the wrist for his comments, by using the same mechanism used on ol' boy Ragin' Joe' Wilson.
Just as most 9-to-5ers were getting ready to call it a day on Thursday, members of the labor union Unite Here, Local 1, stormed North Rush Street and East Chicago Avenue, right outside of the Park Hyatt. Mechanics snapped these photos before 200 protestors were arrested as they sat across Chicago Avenue.
Union workers and supporters were protesting the Hyatt Corp.'s proposed cuts to workers' wages and health-insurance coverage. Workers have been without a contract since August 31, and the Hyatt Corp. is trying to make employees work 120 hours a month in order to qualify for health-insurance coverage, according to Unite Here, as reported by the Sun-Times' Sandra Guy.
Governor Quinn and the local leadership of AFSCME Council 31, which represents the largest proportion of state workers, have been unable to reach a deal that would avert over a thousand layoffs. The Governor was asking for concessions that the union said amounted to a 15% pay cut. This is a combination of cuts: deletion of promised raises, reduction of health care benefits and pension contributions, and unpaid furlough days. Quinn has announced that he will have to move forward with over a thousand layoffs as a result of the refusal of AFSCME locals to accept the cuts. Quinn sees the roaring budget deficits we all see. The assumption is that spending needs to be cut to reduce and eliminate this deficit; but it doesn't necessarily follow that cutting programs will have that effect. Cf., Adam Doster's "Civic Fed Rule."
And of course there is the fact that many state programs actually "save" the state, or the people, money from the services they provide. Either by addressing a problem that effects productivity (road congestion, child care for working class families, subsidies for health insurance that reduce sick days and unemployment), or by providing a service that indirectly raises revenue (subsidies for jobs programs; maintaining regulatory standards that protect consumer confidence). This isn't controversial; Illinois' conservatives would look at a list of state activities and approve of way more state activities than they disapproved of. Licensing, regulation of professions, capital projects that increase mobility, building institutions of higher learning, etc. We need correctional officers and child safety case workers; we need inspectors to check that our bridges aren't falling down, and to monitor water pollution levels. That's what a "state worker" is.
Knowing this, how about the fact that Illinois has the lowest state worker-to-resident ratio in the country? The problem is not the size of government, the problem is that politicians refuse to pay for the services Illinoisans demand. Cutting deeper into the bone won't make Illinois better; it'll make the quality of life worse. Even were our budget to be balanced, basic services will disappear. We know we're talking about basic services because Illinois has a tiny state government:
If Illinois state budget is "bloated," as many charge, these numbers would seem to indicate that the state's employees are not the cause of that bloat.
The Chi-Town Daily News' Adrian Uribarri reports on the expiration of the city-wide hotel contract between members of UNITE HERE's Local 1 and the city's downtown hotels. The negotiations have not gone well:
"The hotels are using the economy as an excuse to slow everything down," Strassel said. "We're willing to continue to negotiate, but at a certain point, we're going to hit a breaking point. Tomorrow's about putting the hotels on notice."
Strassel said the hotels are not only trying to cut medical benefits, but also overworking some employees as they lay off others.
De La Cruz, in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, was a small middle school, taking kids mainly from Whittier Elementary and sending them on to Juarez HS. Small--a few hundred students. To the Chicago Public Schools, under the auspices of the Renaissance 2010 program, that is a bad thing.
Because the school was small, the class sizes were, relatively speaking, small. But the teachers, being unionized, tenured, and with in many cases decades of experience teaching in that neighborhood, were expensive. That, according to Ren2010, is "under-utilization". Too few kids, too much school. Yet, of course, small school size is touted as among the benefits of charter schools--more personalized instruction and care from teachers.
De La Cruz, in a neighborhood with a high number of Spanish-speaking families, in a neighborhood periodically plagued with gang problems, is an award-winning school. It won the Spotlight Award from the state Board of Education. Not a decade ago. Not five years ago. In 2009.
So here was a public school where the kids were learning. The school was making progress. The school was small and the class sizes manageable. And it had to be closed.
Why? Why close a successful, small school in a working class neighborhood?
The residents, teachers, and students surely didn't understand. A heart-wrenching "hearing" last year in February featured parents and students astounded at the callousness of a Board of Education indifferent to local control, so sure were they in the magical wizardry of the "market" to fix education. Given what happened to De La Cruz, is Ren2010 about fixing public schools? Or destroying them?
The neighborhood, the Board argues, simply doesn't need a school.
The working men of SK Hand Tools, who make up a unit of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 743, went on strike today. From the Chi-Town Daily News:
In May, Teamsters Local 743 charged SK Hand Tool Corp. with an unfair labor practice, alleging that the company unilaterally took away health benefits for its workers. Friday, the case ratcheted up a notch: The union followed up its earlier complaint to the National Labor Relations Board with another that said SK administrators wouldn't provide information on financial or health-insurance matters for collective-bargaining purposes.
The labor family has its problems. Among those problems is one particular group of relations--the Hogan Family.
Chicago Union News has a great piece on the on-going saga of Teamsters Local 714, run for years by the Hogans on the city's south side. The Teamsters' International body has been pursuing the Hogans for years and the local has been slowly parceled out to its sisters locals over that time in an effort to maneuver the Hogans out of power.
Teamsters Local 714 -- long the domain of the powerful Hogan family, and a repeated target of anti-corruption investigators -- soon will cease to exist in its current form.
Between 3,000 and 4,000 private-sector workers represented by the Berwyn-based group are being "re-distributed" to 10 other Chicago-area Teamster units: locals 705, 710, 727, 731, 743, 777, 781, 786, 301 and 330, a labor official told ChicagoUnionNews.
The remaining public-sector employees -- about 7,000 jail guards, suburban cops and others -- will be part of a reconstituted (and possibly renumbered) Local 714 focusing solely on government workers.
The move -- recommended by Chicago's top Teamster, John Coli, and other members of the executive board, and authorized by the top Teamster in the country, James P. Hoffa -- is an outgrowth of last year's "trusteeship" of Local 714.
From an AFSCME news release on their meeting with the Governor today:
AFSCME Council 31 executive director Henry Bayer issued the following statement today after meeting with Governor Pat Quinn:
"This meeting was held at our union's request to urge the governor to rescind the state-employee layoffs he has threatened.
"I told the governor that layoffs will harm vital services that Illinois residents rely on. They will also hurt families and our economy by throwing thousands of men and women out of work.
"AFSCME continues to believe that the only solution to the state budget crisis is comprehensive tax reform that raises significant new revenue. Only with new revenue can Illinois invest in public services, create jobs and pay the state's bills.
"The administration must present to the body of local union presidents representing state employees any proposals that would require reopening our contract. That body will meet in Springfield in early September. Any decision regarding changes to the contract will ultimately be made by our members themselves."
In case you haven't heard, the Tribune Company plans to pay out almost $70 million in bonuses to top staff this year, despite the company's financial problems. The figure being tossed around is about 700 staffers, which amounts to almost $100,000 a person, if distributed evenly. Also noted is that 9 of the 10 top suits (excluding Sam Zell) will be paid out $3.1 million of the total sum.
The Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild rightly criticized the Tribune for calling the bonuses "performance" money. It's gotten to a point with our country where it isn't even news anymore when a business that is losing money like crazy - GM, Citibank, AIG - still rewards their executives with millions of dollars in cash and unthinkable luxury treatment. Their message is clear: this is class war, and we're winning.
And yet, what do we see from the working class? Steaming resentment? Mass strikes? Boycotts? Sadly, all we seem to see are Palin supporters, O'Reilly followers, and dittoheads. Seduced by birthers, teabaggers, and swift-boaters, many of us in this country seem to have forgotten our roots. We need to start waking up and realize that maybe Barack Obama's abandonment of single-payer health care (from the get-go), his cowardly treatment of Wall Street's robber-barons, and his lackluster support for the now-toothless Employee Free Choice Act is not called compromise - it's called losing the battle.
The labor movement can talk all it wants about EFCA, but the fact remains that millions of workers need to be organized, in industries that have never been heavily unionized and where high-turnover and class and race divisions make organizing extremely difficult. No real model exists for organizing, say, low-level white collar workers like telemarketers in a given market. Similarly, and more aggravatingly no model exists for organizing service staff in the food and retail industries, particularly as regional and national chains have come to dominate those industries.
Talk to somebody who has spent time organizing or thinking about new and necessary organizing models for the economy of today, and they'll start in on retail and restaurants. These are some of the most exploited workers in our economy and are generally treated miserably, with extremely low job security, zero benefits, and "wages" that essentially rely on patron generosity. It has been generally recognized that the only way to really organize this industry is to start with a geographic location and build industry wide identity first, rather than just try to organize "hot shops" one at a time, diffusing manpower and resources and making it extremely easy for employers to fire activists and blacklist them from other jobs. Only by taking on the industry across a given market could you ever hope to exert enough pressure to force them to recognize their workers' rights. In order to do any kind of market-wide effort, you need to first build identity and solidarity among workers in the industry.
About 30 people gathered outside Representative Deb Mell's office in the 40th District at 3657 N. Kedzie Ave. in Albany Park today, chanting and circling her office in an effort to get her to support House Bill 174. The event was one of about 40 "send offs" held across the state -- three of which were held in Chicago --organized by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union representing 1.6 million wokers, including caseworkers, nurses, corrections officers, child care providers, EMTs and sanitation workers, and the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, among other groups statewide. Organizers and marchers are pushing for state representatives to sign HB174, which AFSCME believes modernizes the state's tax structure by, along with other measures, raising the Individual Income Tax rate from 3 to 5 percent, and the Corporate Income Tax rate from 4.8 to 5 percent.
Mechanics followed the protestors -- most of whom work for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services -- outside of Mell's office from the time they started at 11:45 a.m. to the time they left about two hours later. Here are some highlights.
I spotted these workers picketing outside the Congress Plaza Hotel on a recent walk home. Mechanics has blogged on this issue extensively, and six years later, it's still a topic. This pic follows Ramsin's June post on the historic strike.
Those who follow the labor movement in Illinois probably know of the bad blood that was engendered between two of the state's largest public sector unions, SEIU and AFSCME, when former Governor Rod Blagojevich signed executive orders giving collective bargaining rights to home health care workers (2003) and child care workers (2005). In both cases the unions competed to organize the workers, resulting in intense and often times ugly confrontations. Journalist David Moberg covered the latter fight, which coincided with the big 2005 AFL-CIO split:
Out on the streets of Chicago, organizers from the two sides--boosted with staff from outside the state--became increasingly confrontational, and tires of AFSCME organizers were even slashed. SEIU, which had nearly 500 organizers of its own from around the country, brought in nearly 200 organizers for a weekend from several of its allies in the contest within the AFL-CIO--UNITE HERE, Teamsters, Laborers and United Food and Commercial Workers.
The Daily Heraldjust went up with a piece about the state government and why all the "cut spending" talk is likely just more nonsense that will gut government services for working and middle class families.
"You could shut down state government tomorrow and release 45,000 inmates, and say we're not going to provide any protection for abused kids, and we're going to turn our backs on the mentally ill and the developmentally disabled, we're going to close all the state parks, we're going to shut down all state services, and you would still have an $8 billion deficit," Lindall said. "Those who say that you should cut, it just doesn't square with the facts. There's no way to cut yourself out of this hole."
I'm all for seeking and destroying inefficiency, but public spending generates the services that make communities safe for business and families. Slashing it will have negative effects on our economy--first by further harming demand (layoffs) and then by degrading the infrastructure and services that keep people productive members of the economy.
Not all public services are created equal--but laying off working people is not the solution to a collapse in demand in the economy.
"I think they should lay off all the state troopers. I think they're a total waste of taxpayer money," Tobin said. "We have too many cops and state police have proven time and time again they're glorified Keystone Kops. We won't miss them one bit."
Tobin said lawmakers should also make state employees pay more into their pensions and pay more for retiree health care.
One of my very first posts on Gapers Block (awwww) was about the Congress Hotel workers going on strike ("The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (Local 1) is still on strike, dragging out a fight with the Congress Hotel (Congress and Michigan) that started in early June."). Gapers Block is celebrating our 6th year anniversary this year. That's right--the Congress Hotel strike has become the longest hotel strike in the history of the United States, with even the President making an appearance on the picket line (when he was a US Senator). Today is the anniversary picket.
Because I'm a worldly man, I have a subscription to the "number one Jewish newspaper" in the country, The Forward. They had a fascinating piece last week about how the Hotel strike has split the Jewish faith community in Chicago:
This fight, though, has taken on its fiercest and most unusual form within the city's Jewish community. The hotel is controlled by Albert Nasser, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist with residences in Geneva and New York. To run the day-to-day operations at the Congress, Nasser brought in Shlomo Nahmias, an Israeli-born businessman who has put up mezuzas on the hotel's doors and won public support from his Orthodox rabbi for the hotel's battle with its striking workers.
"You do not find in Chicago one hotel that has mezuzas on every door," Nahmias told the Forward proudly in a short interview in his office, just upstairs from the lobby.
Nahmias's foe -- the local branch of the hotel union Unite Here -- is itself led by a longtime Jewish labor leader who put a young Jewish organizer in charge of the strike when it first began. Since then, the workers -- most of them immigrants from Latin America -- have received growing support from Jewish communal organizations and rabbis around the city, who have criticized the conduct of the hotel's management. Just this spring, a high school student who had learned about the strike through his synagogue convinced his school to move the senior prom from the controversial hotel. The strike has become the clearest available case study in the conflicting ways in which Jews approach labor issues today. It is enough to leave some of the workers in the middle of it thoroughly confused.
Will you join the Congress Hotel workers on the picket today, and show your support for Chicago's service workers?
My favorite thing about right wing bloggers who are part of the anti-Employee Free Choice Act Talking Point Repetition Brigade is that they don't oppose EFCA for any sound reason--or any reason they could defend past stereotypes of "bullying" by union organizers that hasn't been a thing since On the Waterfront--they oppose it because they've been told that if enacted it will help the Democratic Party as it will "fill union coffers". So they don't oppose it because they're so worried about the working class and the (internationally recognized) human right to organize your workplace. They hate it because they hate the Democratic Party and want to make sure that Democrats won't be able to raise more money from a constituency group. The pretend fear of Italian-Mafia-stereotype organizers "bullying" millions of workers into joining unions (who bullied all those auto and mine workers into those sit down strikes again?) is completely ginned up and, frankly, offensive. Unions don't have the resources or power to "bully" any significant number of individuals into doing anything, much less force a nation of workers to join their unions.
This is not to mention that there is exactly zero evidence of systematic intimidation by union organizers (who tend to be young, post-college idealists and/or former rank-and-file "member organizers"), while there is a resplendent banquet full of meaty, fragrant evidence for initimidation by employers (who hold all the power in the employee-employer relationship).
That's pretty disgusting. And the Chamber of Commerce, which is going to end up spending well over the $100,000,000 they've committed to defeating EFCA, is being looked to by these bloggers, editorialists, and "activists" as their solemn leader in this fight on behalf of statutory non-supervisors in the workplace. Which is unbelievably stupid.
The Chamber of Commerce fights Family and Medical Leave. Fights the minimum wage. Fights OSHA standards that protect coal miners from being maimed and crushed. Argues for gutting the contract rights of guys like Sully the Magical Pilot, who rely on the protections of seniority and employer investment in training to become, you know, good at their jobs.
Do these right wingers actually believe the Chamber of Commerce cares about workers' rights? Maybe. More likely, they are just anti-union in general and are using an affected concern over "workers' rights" to continue the assault on this basic human right (which, if you think about it, is gross). They just wanna hurt the demmy'crats, cuz the demmy'crats are bad.
Personally, I would be all for unions never contributing another penny to national Democrats; but whether or not they do or don't, it doesn't change the fact that the employer-employee relationship is wildly imbalanced, and that American workers do not enjoy a reasonable right to organize their workplace. When Democrats try to defend workers' rights to organize, it's "payback" to their union buddies to "fill their coffers". But when conservatives deregulate every industry, appoint industry officials to oversee the departments that regulate those same industries, create gigantic tax loopholes and massive regressive tax cuts, it's not "payback" or "filling coffers", is it? No, it's celebrating the free market.
The big widely-known secret about the city's financial situation is that revenues are down and there are budget shortfalls, but the Mayor does have access to reserves built up through privatization over the last few years.
The Mayor has made efforts to balance the budget by cutting services--although this is couched as asking for givebacks from city workers--with disastrous results (e.g., the unplowed side streets). I think its important to always remind people that when you ask workers to take unpaid days off, or cut their pay, you are cutting the services that we often take for granted, and that make our city work efficiently, and better. The Reagan-era stereotype of the lazy public employee needs to die, because it's inaccurate. The reality is that your average public employee works in understaffed situations and is overworked. The reason your DMV lines are long is not because the DMV workers are moving in slow motion but because there aren't enough of them.
Here's AFSCME Council 31 Executive Director Henry Bayer talking about city workers' negotiations with the Mayor.
"What the decision demonstrates is that charter-management organizations are private," says Simon Hess, chief executive officer of Civitas. "That's part of the entrepreneurial spirit that has come to the public-school system."
Yup. That's the spirit. Run a "private" school, exempt from a variety of rules and regulation, while recieving 90% of your funds from taxpayers. As Kenzo noted, Civitas's claim to being a private entity essentially means it wants public money without any public accountability. I guess that fits the entrepreneurial model of say, a Donald Trump, which seems to be mostly taking risks with other peoples' money and making sure the rules are written so that even if you fail horribly, you'll still be rich and obnoxious. No risk for the "entrepreneur" and a public stuck with the deitrius of their failed experiments.
If this entrepreneurship, no wonder we create massive asset bubbles that burst and leave working people covered with gooey gum residue.
Amy Seidenbecker has worked for Illinoisans for three years. They are her employers via the Department of Human Services, specifically the Family Community Resource Center (FCRC) in Uptown. She's a Human Services Caseworker. Amy's job, in a nutshell, is to make sure people who need assistance--"We have integrated caseloads, which means all types of cases, and I like that; I have seniors, disabled people (mentally and physically), working poor, unemployed, underemployed, and homeless," she told me--are able to get assistance. This is what we mean by "government spending"; making sure that Amy is there to provide the services that keep working families' heads up above water, to keep them productive, hopefully healthy, and integrated into our economy.
As you can guess, Amy has not gotten rich as a DHS caseworker. Despite the caricatures of "public employees" getting fat on their collectively-bargained salary, as you can guess, Amy earns a living wage for the city of Chicago, where she also lives. She's a college graduate who went to work for the DHS for stability and "in order to do something directly helping people." Hers is a job that most reasonable people would agree needs to exist, to keep the social safety net that prevents catastrophe in good mend. She adds value to our community.
American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31 Executive Director Henry Bayer knocks one out of the park in an editorial going after the Civic Federation for their loopy contention that legislators can cut $4bn out of the state budget and should go after public employee pensions. Bayer makes the point that people in labor are constantly trying to communicate to the public: that it serves no one to keep attacking the comparatively minor benefits other working people get through unionization, that the goal should be raising the standard of living for all working people, not trying to snatch hard-earned benefits away.
Meanwhile, the Civic Federation types get golden parachutes and have eliminated defined benefit pensions for everybody but themselves. Defined benefit pensions are good enough for the Masters of the Universe, for geniuses who lose billions of dollars like Bank of America chief Ken Lewis, but not good enough for a state social worker who has spent thirty years helping tens of thousands of families be more productive members of our society (as an example). These union members are not getting rich on these pensions--they have to get up and go to work every single day, they worry about making ends meet, they live the life that most Americans live, but they've bargained for a little better compensation and benefit.
The news that a successful union organizing drive by the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, or A.C.T.S at Chicago International Charter School has led not to the school recognizign the union and negotiating a contract, but rather a fight over which body, the state IELRB or the federal NLRB is yet another reason why the laws governing the right of workers to free association are broken in the United States. Regardless of one's opinions over the utility and worth of unions, denying workers who voted for union representation the right to be recognized as a collective body is a violation of the labor rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, one of the few international human rights conventions the United States has signed.
What's depressing about this case is that it is not unique. In about one third of the successful union elections, no contract is signed within a year, usually do to management intransigence. Given the current toothless labor laws in the US and the weakness of the NLRB, there are few punishments for employers who, even in the face of a successful election, do all they can to prevent free speech and free association among their employees.
There are even more horror stories on the "front-end" of a union election process. The claim that the current system of workplace representation elections under the NLRB are "free and fair elections" held under "secret ballots" is comical. John McCain and Barack Obama (and to his credit, Richard Daley) never took me and my friends into "captive audience meetings" where they bashed the other side and demanded I vote a certain way or face consequences (which happens in 92% of union elections*). I never had to meet with my boss one-on-one to explain how I was voting either (78% of the time). And Daley never threatened to close down the city if I didn't vote for him (51% of employers facing union organizing drives threaten to close the plant).
Laws and regulations should protect the rights of employees to make informed, non-coerced decisions on how they best can excercise their rights to free association and improve their workplace conditions. As in the case of the International Charter School, all to often, current US labor law does little to prevent unethical employers from using every dirty trick to prevent the exercise of those rights.
*all numbers are from Steven Greenhouse's "The Big Squeeze"
Megan Mccardle is one of my least favorite bloggers, if by least favorite you mean it takes me hours after reading her to figure out exactly why I disagree with her. Mccardle is clearly not pro-labor (as she herself admits) and her coverage of restructuring and bankruptcy at Chrysler and GM clearly reflects her "liberatarian-ish" (her words) Booth school pedigree. What the government's role in the crisis of the automakers and who is to blame for their collapse is not a topic I'm 100% qualified to opine on, but what is interesting is what the frothy-mouthed language of those who would use the automakers' descent into receivership to bludgeon UAW and unions in general reveals about the politics of class in the US.
We're conditioned to think of class envy as a right-wing, anti-communist term, seeing it mostly in those of a lower station envying the accomplishments of their betters and turning to politics to take short-cuts to prosperity. The rhetoric around the "semi-skilled" workers of GM, Chrysler, and Ford making too much money reveals a class envy of another kind. It's the "I went to college, took a lot of math classes, and went to graduate school so I should make more than the assembly line worker who went to community college" kind of class envy. It's not fair that the beefy NASCAR fan from rural Ohio or African-American from Detroit (UAW is a heavily African-American union) can work 8 hours a day and earn a decent living while I work 16 hours a day calculating complicated capital flows. This kind of class envy is part and parcel of an economic philosophy that not only assumes that all wages are merely returns to human capital, but a specific kind of human capital, too. Learning firm-specific skills that allow (for example) blue collar autoworkers to become really, really good at putting together cars is less important than having some sort of general academic skill set that allows you to jump from job to job when you boss decides to downsize you to improve his company's stock price.
And so we of the creative, educated class are envious of those last vestiges of our parents and grandparent's generations, the ones who worked hard, built something tangible and not just played with words or numbers and got to come home at the end of a day and actually see their family. It's a shame so many of us have decided to take out our insecurity and envy on those workers.
Rep. Sara Feigenholtz: SEIU's Illinois State Council. I couldn't find any others, but that doesn't mean there aren't more. SEIU Illinois has enormous membership and claims about half the union members in the Fifth District. UPDATE: UNITE-HERE's Joint Board endorsed Rep. Feigenholtz today.
Tom Geoghegan: The National Nurses Organizing Committee (you'll note on their website they are not particularly friendly with SEIU). UPDATE: Geoghegan received the endorsement of Teamster Local 743 today, Wednesday.
Geoghegan has a long, storied history of working with nurses in organizing drives, something he wrote about brilliantly and compellingly in his book Which Side Are You On?
Union endorsements are very variable things. An endorsement by a big union could be wildly important or meaningless -- it really depends on just how hard local leadership feels they need to work in a particular race. The money is always nice, but if leadership can't mobilize its membership, the vaunted "boots on the ground" (die, cliche!) will never materialize.
Sorry, that's a little harsh, and not very reasonable, but I'll admit it was my first reaction when reading this Crain's Chicago piece about the likely "targets" of new union organizing drives if the Employee Free Choice Act (or EFCA) is passed and made law.
I understand that by opening a new restaurant, Glen Keefer would be creating jobs. But the way the free marketeers and their conservative enablers talk about "job creation" they make it seem like a charitable act. "I guess I'll create some jobs for the little people, rather than make gold coin angels on the marble floor of my portico."
But, of course, the reason people "create jobs" is because they generate profits for themselves with every job they create. They don't create jobs as some kind of favor; they ask people to come work for them in order to profit off those people's work. There's no getting around that; there's no way to "spin it" or "narrative it." That's a stone-cold, irrefutable fact. In the private sector, you create jobs to make a profit off the person's labor, not because you are a Dickensian aristocrat with a heart of gold.
Keefer goes on to quote directly from Cliched Management Union-Busting Arguments:
"We don't need a third party in between us and our employees who is extracting money from our employees for services that, frankly, they don't need," says Mr. Keefer, who says his workers get health care benefits and paid vacation time. "A third party could disrupt our working relationship and would raise costs for our employees and for us."
First of all, who cares what you need? This isn't about you. This is about the employees who are motivated enough by your mistreatment of them to undertake an organizing drive, an invariably painful and difficult (but highly rewarding) process.
Second, the union is not a "third party." The union is the employees themselves, who now, protected by a contract, can't be cuffed around, be forced to work off the clock, or cloy for the boss' favor to avoid being mistreated. Of course, this argument would be easier to make if some of the biggest unions in the country had more democratic control by rank-and-file membership. But there is more democracy in almost every union in this country than there is any workplace.
Finally, union contracts generally don't raise costs over the long term, and for many industries they actually stabilize or lower costs, due to lower burnout, lower turnover, and higher productivity (yes, union workers are more productive, whatever the zombie corpse of Reaganomics wants to tell you). It's never been about higher costs or third parties or whatever -- its about employers wanting always to be able to treat their employees arbitrarily. Without the constant threat of a loss of job, with the evaporation of systems of favoritism, employers lose their control over employees.
The Crain's story also mention Shirley Brown, a support staffer at suburban Westlake Hospital who has been working to organize a union at her hospital and across Resurrection Health Care for 6 years.
"Give us a choice and a voice....You should not be subjected to fear, harassment and intimidation because we want a voice," says Ms. Brown, 50, who's worked at Westlake for 13 years.
The Lilly Ledbetter Act is ridiculously long overdue. I remember Jesse Jackson fighting for equal pay in 1988. That there has been structural, institutional pay discrimination against a majority group in the population for the last, uh, forever, without public policy remedy is ludicrous.
"Ultimately, equal pay isn't just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families, it's a question of who we are -- and whether we're truly living up to our fundamental ideals," President Obama said. "Whether we'll do our part, as generations before us, to ensure those words put on paper some 200 years ago really mean something -- to breathe new life into them with a more enlightened understanding that is appropriate for our time.
NPR's Chip Mitchell looks at the potential impact of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would finally protect American workers' right to organize -- a right defined as protected by the United Nations, but which is practically lacking in this country.
Ask a union organizer named Dave Webster what he thinks of the Employee Free Choice Act, and he'll take you here to Chicago's South Side.
WEBSTER: Right now we're standing in front of the Comcast location in the historic Pullman district. We're at the East Gate, where the majority of the workers pull out in the morning after coming in to get their trucks and tools and stuff.
Webster works for Local 21 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Last year the union targeted the building's 200 technicians, warehouse workers and payment agents.
WEBSTER: We spent many hours here, handing out leaflets, talking to workers...
...and convincing many of them to sign cards saying they wanted the union to negotiate their wages, benefits and work conditions.
Comcast didn't recognize the union. That led the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election to see what the workers wanted. The balloting didn't happen for almost six weeks. Webster says the company took advantage of that lag.
WEBSTER: Comcast would plant supervisors to stand out here and watch which workers were taking the flyers, which workers were talking to organizers and basically scare them with their job so that they wouldn't talk to union organizers.
The union lost the election by 20 votes. Comcast declined to speak with WBEZ about the union's accusations.
The Chicago Federation of Labor and the Illinois AFL-CIO are hosting a rally in support of this basic human right.
Teachers are planning a sit-in picket at Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary at 955 W. Garfield (55th St.) beginning tonight tomorrow night (1/22) at 7:30p.m. 5pm to 7pm, when the school must be evacuated.
Holmes Elementary was slated to be a "turnaround" school, the Board of Education's method for liquidating public schools.
Come out and show your support for the parents, teachers, and students of Wendell Elementary.
A letter from the teachers, faculty, and LSC after the jump.
UPDATE: Sit-in details have been changed to a picket after a community meeting.
If we are to achieve a real equality, the U.S. will have to adopt a modified form of socialism.
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History is a great teacher. Now everyone knows that the labor movement did not diminish the strength of the nation but enlarged it. By raising the living standards of millions, labor miraculously created a market for industry and lifted the whole nation to undreamed of levels of production. Those who attack labor forget these simple truths, but history remembers them.
Chicago holds its title as the epicenter of America's worker movements. As layoffs have swept through America's working class, one group of workers decided to stand up -- or sit down -- at the point of production and refuse to be treated with anything but the respect that years of service and work deserve.
We heard stories at the factory of how some of the workers had essentially designed entire elements of the production process, how they had developed a machine shop inside to maintain equipment. Anyone who has worked a job knows just how essential institutional knowledge is to improved processes on the job. Workers have value.
About 9:30 p.m., the more than 200 workers present at the shuttered plant voted unanimously to accept a deal brokered after three days and nearly 20 hours of negotiations between their union, Republic management, its lender, and other parties.
In the end, about $1.75 million was brokered to accommodate the workers' demand for 60 days severance wages, vacation pay and a two-month extension of health insurance...."The occupation is over," said Armando Robles, president of the union local based at the plant. "We have achieved victory. We said we will not go until we got justice and we have it." Other Republic workers said they were thrilled that the sit-in had accomplished its goals and brought support from around the world.
When a CEO drives hard bargains, comes out of complex negotiations on top, and builds a reputation as a tough nut, he gets a book deal -- or a prime time reality show where he fires people for our amusement. When workers do the same exact thing for themselves, they're "spoiled"; they get reviled by the press, particularly the business media, as being parasites who drag businesses down. A union contract is a mutually consented-to agreement between free actors in an economy. So why not valorize the workers who win for workers?
For our generation, "Republic Windows" could become a watchword. The workers of Republic Windows and Doors have stood up for themselves in the only way available to them. Anybody who lives on wages can learn from their example.
The explosion of support for the workers has goaded politicians to act in support of the workers: in the last 24 hours, four of Illinois' constitutional officers, County Board members, and members of our Congressional delegation have all come out and inserted themselves in varying ways.
If any of this support was unwelcome I'd guess it was that of our beleaguered and fantastically unpopular Governor, who made a vague statement about the state "suspending" its "business" with the Bank of America.
The United Electrical Workers at Republic Windows and Doors were notified on Wednesday that as of Friday, they were jobless. No severance. No vacation pay-out, as per their union contract. Nothing. Why? Because the business is plunging toward dissolution, unable to get a line of credit, and Bank of America was instructing them not to honor their obligations -- no line of credit to honor obligations.
So when the workers went in on Friday to pick up their pay checks, 200 strong, they sat down and refused to leave. It's a worker occupation, like the Flint strike of 1936-7.
Today they held a vigil event outside the factory doors; labor representatives from every major union -- AFSCME, SEIU, UAW, the Teachers, IBEW, and more -- showed up to show support. Congressman Luis Gutierrez made a strong statement in support of the workers as well.
Update 1: Members of Local 1110 need your support. Make checks payable to the UE Local 1110 Solidarity Fund, and mail to: 37 S. Ashland, Chicago, IL 60607. Messages of support can be sent to organizer Leah Fried. For more information, call UE at 312-829-8300.
Donations of food and money are requested, as are solidarity actions targeting the Bank of America. The factory is in the Goose Island neighborhood, at 1333 N. Hickory (right near Division and Halsted).
Update 2: Here is video from the event; it's choppy (the first 27 sec in particular), and I was in the middle of the crowd so please excuse the shaking.
