Blog - From the Ground Up
 IEA Organizer, Dan Chambers talks about organizing a union. Without a union, the employer has the exclusive authority to hire, fire, set wages, hours, and benefits and to make other decisions related to your employment. Unorganized employees have very few rights or protections unless they have obtained collective bargaining recognition.
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Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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I have not been good about keeping my New Year's resolution to pen more posts, so I beg your forgiveness. Work, and a million of its related issues keep cropping up.
Here's some things you might have missed:
Pennsylvania's Senator Arlen Specter has switched parties (again), and since he was the deciding vote to kill the Employee Free Choice Act, some are saying it's alive again. Specter maintains he will continue not to support it, but perhaps some sort of compromise is in the works. If it's a day ending in 'y', then this story continues to have twists and turns.
Speaking of Employee Free Choice, now veterans' groups are getting in the act, throwing their support to build a movement for good paying jobs--many of which should go to our nation's veterans who are qualified for good jobs but cannot find any that will support them and their families.
Obama's first Budget is on its way to being passed, and all are signs are pointing to a likely victory on health care. Here's why: the budget adopts a procedure for forcing a vote on health by Mid-October that won't be subject to a filibuster in the Senate. It will be a straight up-or-down vote, and the Dems have the votes for some kind of health care reform.
Domestic workers in New York State are pushing for their own right to be considered real workers protected by labor law, overtime law and worker's compensation law. Makes sense to me. If it wasn't considered real work and was some other pursuit, then the kinds of families who can afford to hire domestic workers would make their kids do it.
That's it for now. Happy May Day.
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Friday, March 27, 2009
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In Iraq, teachers are fighting to keep their union free of government interference. The Iraqi government, which I might add, you and I are subsidizing to the tune of several billion dollars a year, is trying to force teacher union leaders to hand over membership records, and give up the keys to their offices.
Please take a second to tell them what teachers here in the USA have to say about this.
Thanks to multiple heads up I received from my staff colleagues here at the IEA for this story.
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Tuesday, March 17, 2009
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Not that it matters to the people who see themselves as the real shot-callers in this debate, but sizable majorities of Americans want to make it easier to form a union, not harder.
And it's not hard to figure out why. At a time when CEO bonuses are again in the news (and you're welcome, AIG executives! I'm still waiting for my thank-you note!), and when more and more Americans are falling behind, corporate America's lies about how unions are job-killers probably ring a little more hollow than they otherwise might. After all, jobs are being slain on a daily basis, at a time when less than 9 percent of Americans in the private sector belong to unions.
And Labor is connecting the dots for Americans too. They've put up a national campaign called Take Back the Economy that tells us all what we know deep down--we can't keep rewarding people like these AIG executives these kind of lavish salaries to the same people have contributed to the collapse of the economy. The gap between the rich and the poor has been expanding at an alarming rate, and while you can't say these individual AIG people are to blame for all of it, their compensation schemes are certainly part of the problem.
What do you think the office cleaners at AIG make? Do you think they get yearly performance bonuses for keeping executive offices nice and clean? Do you think they get their paychecks if the mess up and the executive washroom toilets don't get scrubbed? Kinda doubt it, myself. And, it would be nice if UAW contracts had the same sanctity as corporate payout schemes, but they probably never will. Because Executives do the really hard work of engineering credit default-swap markets, and UAW workers just make cars. NEA members just teach, transport, and work with students. SEIU members just clean buildings.
Obviously, my sarcasm demonstrates the same kind of anger most of you likely feel at this same prospect. How many non-tenured Illinois teachers could be held on in struggling districts for a week's worth of John Thain's pay?
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
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The Employee Free Choice Act wars have begun. Earlier this week, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa introduced the bill, which would allow workers to choose how they wish to unionize--either through a secret ballot election or when a majority of workers sign statements saying they want union representation. As part of its introduction, the Senate heard testimony from academics, religious leaders like Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and--gasp!--actual workers.
So it is, as they say, 'on' now.
That same day, a curious thing happened. Citigroup, who has received tens of billions of dollars in financial assistance from you and me through our tax dollars, downgraded Wal-Mart's stock from 'buy' to 'hold'. Why?
For fear this bill would pass, and workers might have the chance to organize without fear of being fired or having their jobs for exercising their rights. Apparently, the fear that Wal-Mart employees might, maybe, conceivably, be able to bargain for better wages and benefits is simply too much of a threat to the corporate behemoth's existence.
Not a very strong company, is it, if that's true. Think about that for a second. For years, Wal-Mart's critics have said that the company is as profitable as it is because of the low wages of its employees. I guess now, finally Wal-Mart is agreeing. They really are raking in billions off the backs of their workers. Apparently Wal-Mart is admitting that if the playing field were anything approaching level, then Wal-Mart would suddenly become dramatically less profitable.
Now, this kind of solidarity is really a thing to behold. If workers go on strike at company A, company B's workers cannot strike in support of company A's workers. This is illegal. What is completely legal is for Citigroup to try and frighten Senators into voting against this bill by manipulating stock prices. So workers can't display class solidarity, but corporations can.
Sounds fair. Oh, and members of Congress: that pressure you're feeling from the business community over this bill? Imagine that you were trying to do something they didn't want you to (like, oh, say, UNIONIZE!) and they had the ability not just to pressure, but fire you outright. That kind of pressure you're feeling? It's nothing compared to what America's janitors, nurses, construction workers, and others go through for exercising their rights to organize.
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
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So earlier this morning I posted about how Citigroup (who can thank you and me for tens of billions in taxpayer bailouts) downgraded Wal-Mart stock from 'buy' to 'hold' on the fear that the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) was introduced in the Senate earlier this week. For those who haven't obsessively tracked this like I have, the Employee Free Choice Act would allow workers to decide how they want to unionize--either through a secret ballot election, or through majority sign-up.
Apparently Citigroup wasn't done there. Today they hosted a conference call on EFCA with none other than the Chamber of Commerce, whose boss Tom Donohue stated that :
"On this deal... there's no compromise," said Donohue, whose group has poured huge sums into past Senate campaigns.
"There's no credit for amending the bill, the only credit anyone gets is for voting against cloture. Am I clear?"
Clearly this is a guy open to reasonable dialogue about this issue. So the conference call is held today to scare more journalists and business leaders on the issue and it's moderated by a woman named Deborah Weinswig. This is the same woman who on Tuesday downgraded Wal-Mart's stock. So clearly she's acting in a manner that's a little more invovled than a neutral analyst. Clearly, she (and presumably with Citigroup's blessing) is making stock market advice while trying to derail a piece of legislation that would impact millions of Americans. And you and I paid her and other Citigroup employees' salaries.
They could at least send us a thank-you note, you know? I just want state again that if members of Congress thinks what they're going through on this issue is pressure--I'd just ask them to put themselves in the shoes of workers actually trying to organize under modern rules. Whatever else it might be able to pull, Citigroup can't actually fire supporters of EFCA. They can threaten, they can run ads, but at the end of the day, they do not have the kind of life-and-death power over members of Congress the way they do with workers.
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Monday, March 09, 2009
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Here's a few things to get you started this week:
The New York Times gives its readers a view of one local's fight to rid itself of mob influence. The local is the Amalgamated Transit Union local 1181, which represents NYC school bus drivers and monitors.
United Students Against Sweatshops is calling on Florida Governor Charlie Crist (R) to use the full weight of his office to stop the near-slavery conditions of Florida farm fields. You can add your name to the list of those demanding justice for these workers, even though you may not be a student--I don't think USAS will mind.
Organized labor is throwing its support behind the President's budget package, which will further investments in sustainable and renewable energy, education, and health care.
Eight O'Clock Coffee is now union coffee, as its workers have representation with the Teamsters. Now if it were only fair trade too...
Bruce Raynor speaks on what the future holds for UNITE HERE. According to him, it's less UNITE HERE and more of UNITE over here, and HERE over there.
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Wednesday, March 04, 2009
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The horror of the Employee Free Choice Act, that is. This hilarious video, compiled by SEIU highlights the fear-mongering notes that corporate CEO's have been singing over this bill. It's replete with zombie footage and a scary movie voice-over announcer guy.
And of course, there's really nothing to be afraid of.
Now I'm as big a fan of the zombie movie genre as you'll find, but these lies about the Employee Free Choice Act are the worst kind of zombie lies--no matter often you strike them down, they just keep coming back. The Employee Free Choice Act will not get rid of the secret ballot--it will let workers choose if how they want to organize, period, end of story.
The video can be viewed here (sorry, I can't embed videos n this format, so you'll have to actually go to youtube).
Vice President Biden isn't scared--he's giving a full-throated defense of the bill at this week's AFL-CIO executive meeting in Miami.
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Tuesday, March 03, 2009
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The New York Times has a fascinating graphic up that shows how men and women's wages differ by occuption. I'm proud to say that one exception, one of the few areas where women are treated close to equal and make slightly more than men is in special education, which is of course, highly unionized. Postal clerks and social workers, who are also more commonly unionized than other workers are similarly equal in pay. Union salary schedules do a lot to diminish the ability of employers to discriminate and limit pay for any reason--gender, age, race, what have you. People with similar levels of experience and qualifications make similar amounts of money regardless these other factors, since it's only fair.
What was troubling was that on average women who teach in elementary and middle schools can expect to earn about 9% less than their male counterparts and women high school teachers can expect to earn about 10% less than their male counterparts. For women teaching in higher education, the gap jumps, it doubles in fact, to 20%. Clearly, in states where teachers have bargaining rights, more has to be done to address this gap.
And one thing is very clear by looking at this chart--the higher up the career ladder you go, the more likely that women face a steep gap in pay for what men earn for doing the same thing.
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