Immigrant “carwasheros,” who often earn below minimum wage with no benefits, scored an historic victory this week by unionizing two Los Angeles car washes, Vermont Car Wash and Nava’s Car Wash. They were the first in the city limits to unionize. The workers are now members of the United Steelworkers, with the move likely gaining them significantly improved wages, protections and benefits while also scoring a symbolic and tactical win for organized labor as a whole.

Last summer, three car washes in Santa Monica recognized unions and then in October Bonus Car Wash in Santa Monica became the first in the country to sign a union contract, as Akito Yoshikane and Michelle Chen reported for Working In These Times.

The California car wash campaign begun in 2008 has been a major focus of the national labor movement, with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka joining L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in person to cheer the achievement on Tuesday. The Carwash Organizing Campaign, affiliated with the United Steelworkers, has rallied much community support and called for boycotts of local car washes, formerly including Vermont, and also including ones with the names Celebrity, Hollywood, Five Star and Magic Wand.

In January, California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris announced a settlement for more than $1 million among eight northern and southern California car wash owners that “underpaid workers, denied rest and meal breaks, and created false records of time worked,” according to a press release. The office had filed a lawsuit against the car washes in 2010. In December 2010, workers from Marina Car Wash who lost their jobs right before Christmas performed a play about their plight at a celebrity-heavy restaurant whose owners have family ties to the car wash owners.

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The $25.6 billion settlement on home foreclosures reached between five mega-banks—Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo—and 49 states, along with the federal government, is not an It's a Wonderful Life triumph of “organized people over organized money.”

But neither is it just another one-sided swindle perpetrated by the “the banksters,” as the 1930's “Hellhound of Wall Street” prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora called them. That's the story suggested by respected progressive Wall Street observers Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone and Pam Martens of Counterpunch.

Instead, the deal puts the foreclosure-fraud struggle on a new level, demanding continued struggle in the spirit and through strategies exemplified by the Occupy movement. It's a partial setback for the banks, forcing them to cough up a sizable (but still inadequate) chunk of money while shamefully shielding them legally on some key issues. But at the same time, it creates a federal task force, headed by the aggressive New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and  more clear-cut options for victimized families and housing advocates to pursue.

Let's begin with an overview of the foreclosure-fraud crisis as neatly summarized by Zach Carter:

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NEW YORK—Jazz is both America's classical art form and the classic music of struggle. You can hear that duality, and see it, every night on the dimly lit bandstands of New York City. But for the musicians, the toughest part often comes after the gig, when they realize the cash they took home isn’t enough to make rent. Or maybe 30 years down the line, at the age when other workers retire, but they have to keep playing shows to keep eating.

But now the unrest over inequity on Wall Street is starting to resonate in the heady air of Manhattan jazz clubs. The Justice for Jazz Artists campaign, run by the New York musicians’ union Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, is rallying for decent wages and pensions for artists, along with a greater voice in how their music is heard and sold.

Many jazz artists, both bandleaders and side musicians, hustle from gig to gig, often at the mercy of club owners who have little or no obligation to provide basic benefits like medical or unemployment insurance. With New York's exorbitant cost of living, a single bout of illness or rent hike could tip musicians and their families into poverty.

Hoping to make it easier for the city’s hardest-working musicians to make a real living, Justice for Jazz Artists (a coalition of musicians and activists with Local 802) has worked to pressure some of the city's major clubs, like the Village Vanguard and the Iridium, to provide musicians with access to pensions later in life. 

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The Komen controversy showed the brilliance of 'secondary boycotts'—and the injustice of punishing unions for using the same tactics

When news broke that the Susan G. Komen Foundation would cease funding Planned Parenthood, the backlash was fast, furious, and gratifying.  Within days, Komen apologized and promised that Planned Parenthood could receive future funds. But some commentators were angry at Komen for all the wrong reasons: for “politicizing” women’s health, for failing to distinguish vanilla health services from the abortion “controversy,” or for dragging an avowedly apolitical organization into the muck of politics.

Contrary to those critics’ claims, women’s health is political, as the past weeks’ contraception conflicts have reminded us.  As Amy Schiller wrote in The Nation, one of the virtues of the Komen controversy was the way it brought those politics—and Komen’s contradictions—to the surface. As Barbara Ehrenreich has written, Komen’s role in America’s breast cancer discourse has gotten worse as the culture around it has gotten better: When breast cancer was shrouded by silence, open, unapologetic conversation was a feminist feat. Now Komen hurts that conversation, contributing to a culture of cute and optimistic cancer that silences many women while letting corporations brand themselves conscientious on the cheap.

All of this is political. Progressives should be defending women’s right to choose, rather than Komen’s right not to.  And anger at the Right's attempted Komen coup should focus on the ends it sought—the denial of women’s autonomy—not the means it employed: attacking an opponent by squeezing its funders. Applied toward just ends, that tactic—what in labor law is called a secondary boycott—is a virtuous one. But while anti-choice activists have the right to use it without restriction, unions don’t.

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Thousands have been laid-off, while other UFCW members face wage cuts, contract givebacks

A trip through the federal bankruptcy court has been an agonizing experience for some 40,000 union workers at the A&P grocery chain, but a plan for financial renewal is holding out hope that the worst is finally over.

Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain is inching toward approval of a reorganization plan for the historic food retailer—known officially as the The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.—after 14 months of store closings, mass firings, tense court proceedings and tortured labor negotiations. Scheduled for final action at the end of February, the renewal plan aims to revive the company’s fortunes under new ownership. But union members took a beating in the process.

Taking the worst of the legal beating were the members of United Food & Commercial Workers union. Spread out across six mid-Atlantic states, about a dozen different UFCW locals represent check-out clerks, butchers, bakers, and other store workers at A&P and subsidiary chains Pathmark, Waldbaum’s, Super Fresh and others. At least 5,000 UFCW members have lost their jobs—some estimates place the total closer to 8,000—and many more have endured wage cuts and other financial shocks.

“We had to make some adjustments, there’s no question about that,” UFCW National Communications Director Jill Cashen said. It was a bad situation, she said, and local union leaders deserve credit for a “strong collective effort through a very challenging bankruptcy process.”

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“John,” 67, has been a librarian since 1973, much of that time spent in Chicago’s currently embattled library system. Working in a branch in a low-income neighborhood, John—who asked his real name not be used since he’s not authorized to speak to reporters—sees firsthand the important role the city’s libraries play and how library workers and residents have been affected by more than recent 100 layoffs and cuts in service hours.

As I wrote previously, the libraries have become one of several high-profile battlegrounds between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and public-sector unions, including AFSCME Council 31, which represents library workers. Although past retirement age, John keeps working in part because he loves the job and the interaction with local residents. He especially enjoys working with youth—“they keep me feeling younger than my actual years,” he says. But he’s frustrated that the city’s administration doesn’t seem to respect the importance of libraries today, or the needs and well-being of library workers and patrons. I recently talked with him about the issues:

How have the layoffs and cuts affected librarians who are still working?

Almost all the library staff at all levels feel somewhat demoralized. There’s seeming indifference, and a lack of appreciation of the important role libraries have in the city and their communities.

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Election excitement today could lead to workers' anger tomorrow

MILWAUKEE—President Obama's appearance last Wednesday at the Master Lock plant here—during which he repeatedly highlighted the company's decision to bring back about 100 jobs from Mexico and China and called for the restoration of America's manufacturing sector—uncorked a lot of hope among local workers.

A crowd of about 1,000 Master Lock workers (the plant employs 412 members of UAW Local 469) and guests roared in approval as the president described the fundamental changes needed in the American economy. He thundered:

Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy that's weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits. We need an economy that is built to last, that is built on American manufacturing, and American know-how, and American-made energy, and skills for American workers, and the renewal of American values of hard work and fair play and shared responsibility.

But if Obama does win a second term, it will be fascinating to see how working-class Americans respond when the president's soaring rhetoric, which is rekindling dreams of a manufacturing renaissance, collide with the cold reality of Obama's timid progam.

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WASHINGTON, D.C.—The AFL-CIO continues to mull over endorsing President Obama for re-election. But a recent deal that congressional Democrats made to increase pension contributions by federal employees might cause the labor federation to think again about officially falling into line behind the president.

Seeking to find a way to pay for an extension of unemployment pay benefits and a continuation of the payroll tax cut holiday, House Republicans proposed extending a pay freeze on federal employees that President Obama imposed on workers last year. Democrats rejected extending the pay freeze or increasing pension contributions on federal employees.

But it appears that on Thursday, a deal was cut between Democrats and Republicans wherein newly hired and rehired federal employees would have to pay 3.1 percent of each of their paychecks to the federal retirement system—a 2.3 increase over the .8 percent pension contribution that federal employees currently pay. Unlike the federal pay freeze, which would be a temporary measure, the increased federal pension contribution for newly hired and rehired federal employees would be a permanent increase.  

Sen. Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.) said the president's 2013 budget proposal to force current federal employees to pay 1.2 percent more toward retirement over a period of three years made it “challenging” to resist pension changes. “He made it more challenging for us to be able to keep the federal contribution from workers out of the package…,” Cardin told the Washington Post.

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BERKELEY, CALIF.—More than 200 workers fired after a Department of Homeland Security's I-9 audit at Pacific Steel Casting plant in Berkeley, Calif., marched Friday to protest the “silent raids” they say are devastating to their families and livelihood. A statement from the Committee of Fired Workers From Pacific Steel Casting, which is organizing the march, read: “We will march with our heads held high, undocumented and unashamed.”

In These Times reported in December about the federal government's audit of Pacific Steel and subsequent firing of 200 workers, which was implemented in successive waves between October and January.

In a federal workplace audit, the government checks the validity of Social Security numbers and demands the firing of any worker who is undocumented and cannot provide a  valid number. Tens of thousands of audits, done through no-match letters, I-9 audits and the “E-Verify” program, have led to massive firings across the nation.

Many of the fired Pacific Steel workers had been at the company for years, including Adrian Pacheco, who worked at the plant for seven years. The father of five including a 4-month-old, told In These Times that since his release, he’s been working “here and there. It’s hard. We are accustomed to a work routine and then it’s snatched away. It’s sad … we were working not robbing.”

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CHICAGO—Warehouse workers in the Chicago metropolitan area and in the Inland Empire region of southern California—two of the nation's largest logistical hubs—filed a letter of complaint and a petition Thursday with Wal-Mart. Both group are demanding that the retail colossus take responsibility for the behavior of contractors who frequently violate state and federal laws as they provide workers for Wal-Mart warehouses.

Wal-Mart tries to avoid any responsibility for workers in much of its fabled logistics system by relying on a complex and easily changed arrangement of principal and secondary contractors. Earlier this month, Chicago-area workers in Warehouse Workers for Justice (WWJ) sued Schneider Logistics, operator of many Wal-Mart warehouses, and one of its labor subcontractors for violation of federal laws in its abrupt firing of workers, many of whom had complained of not receiving pay they were owed.

At the same time, California-based Warehouse Workers United (WWU) won an injunction instructing Schneider not to proceed with planned dismissals of 100 workers on Feb. 24. On Thursday, about 100 demonstrators from labor, community and small business organizations chanted “wage theft is a crime/pay your workers or do the time” while picketing a downtown Chicago Wal-Mart Expresss.

Meanwhile, a delegation including warehouse workers presented the local store manager a letter demanding that Wal-Mart abide by its own statement of “Standards for Suppliers.”  They asked Wal-Mart to launch a formal ethics investigation of sub-contractor Eclipse Advantage and to establish a Responsible Contractor Policy, the goal of WWU as well in its petition to the company.

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Yesterday was a red letter day for labor journalism, as Politico inadvertently revealed a fundamental truth in one of the most embarrassing screw-ups in recent news. Covering President Obama’s visit to a unionized Masterlock plant in Milwaukee, Politico's Donovan Slack reported:

WH flies labor flag in Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE — It's very clear what side President Obama is on here in Wisconsin.

Behind the stage where he will speak today are two flags: an American one, as usual, and right alongside it — and [sic] a flag for the local union, Wisconsin 1848.

The problem was, there is no union called “Wisconsin.” However, the state of Wisconsin was founded in 1848 and Wisconites proudly represent this fact on the state flag, which the reporter bizarrely mistook for a union flag of “Wisconsin Local 1848.”

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The term “banana republic” has become a cliche to describe economic imperialism throughout history, but the legacy of colonialism persists in Latin America today. The tradition of predatory capitalism echoed in the recent death of Miguel Angel González Ramírez, a member of the Izabal banana workers’ union SITRABI in Guatemala.

According to the International Trade Union Confederation, the unionist was “shot several times whilst carrying his young child in his arms.” This seems to be another casualty in a labor battle between labor and corporateers who would rather see workers shed blood than be paid fair wages.

The ITUC has demanded an official investigation, noting that in the past year several unionists have been killed or targeted with threats. Last October, SITRABI member Pablino Yaque Cervantes was shot by an unidentified attacker, according to U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (US LEAP).

Manuela Chávez of the ITUC's Department of Human and Trade Union Rights told In these Times, “Freedom of association and the right to organize and bargain collectively have been endangered by a very high anti-union repression for years,” adding that the threats to unionists are aggravated by government inaction.

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In a break from conservatives' typical interest in devolving power to local governments, Florida State Republicans are pushing a bill that would forbid local municipalities from enforcing wage and hour laws. This is because in November 2010, South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice and a number of other groups successfully advocated for the Miami-Dade County Wage Theft Ordinance, considered by many to be a model wage theft law for the rest of the country.  

Since then, more than $1 million in stolen wages have been recovered for nearly 500 workers, and there is another $1.5 million in pending claims that workers are waiting to receive. However, they may never see that money, because last month Republicans in the Florida's legislature introduced a bill with the support of the Florida Retail Federation.

“Here in Miami Dade County, we have the only wage theft ordinance in the state. We had passed it because we don't have a State Department of Labor and wage theft is such a huge problem,” says Jeanette Smith of South Florida Interfaith Worker Justice. “Technically, we have a minimum wage law in Florida, but nobody to enforce it. Suing in the court for most workers isn’t a viable option so we need local governments to enforce the law.”

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The lede on a story by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) attacking import limits and other government protections for the U.S. sugar industry was an attention-grabber: “That Valentine’s Day hand on your back pocket billfold is not your sweetheart’s, it’s the sugar lobby’s.”

There are plenty of reasons for less-than-sweet feelings about the sugar industry, from the big sugar cane producers that have decimated large swaths of the Everglades to American Crystal Sugar Company, the sugar beet producer which has locked out 1,300 workers at its North Dakota plant this winter. On February 22, those workers are joining other locked out workers for a 1,000-mile-plus “Journey for Justice” from Fargo, N.D. to the site of a tire factory that's locked out workers in Findlay, Ohio. (In These Times staff writer Mike Elk will be along for the ride.)

But the AEI doesn't usually ally itself with labor or environmental causes, so I was surprised to see the conservative, pro-business think tank attacking the powerful sugar industry with a recent study saying import limits and other federal protections for sugar beet and sugar cane farmers are costing jobs and hurting consumers. AEI’s position does fit with its larger politics, once one considers that artificially high domestic sugar prices increase costs significantly (or so they say) for other parts of the food industry. AEI authors Michael Wohlgenant and Vincent H. Smith explain in their article:

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Federal unemployment benefits—and the jobless families relying upon them for survival—have long been the subject of all-out attacks by Republicans, typified by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) remark, “The safety net should not become a hammock.”

The war of words has been backed up by a landslide of legislative proposals to make the lives of the jobless harder—for example, a proposed February 29 cut-off of extended unemployment benefits that would hit about 2 million jobless workers and their families.

Republicans threatened the cut-off unless Democrats in Congress buckled and accepted a set of onerous new conditions—detailed below—for receiving unemployment benefits.
However, as of Tuesday night a House-Senate conference committee reached a tenative deal under which Democrats and Republicans agreed to extend unemployment benefits to 75 weeks, maintain the payroll tax reduction (worth about $40 a week to a typical worker) and create higher Medicare payments to doctors being underpaid by the system.

Republicans have long attempted to isolate the unemployment-benefits extension so that they could inject a set of new rules stigmatizing the jobless while reducing their eligibility for extended federal benefits. This comes at a time when numerous states have cut their share of unemployment insurance to reduce budget shortfalls.

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AFSCME showdown certain and SEIU challengers rumored, as union conventions approach

This summer could offer some of the biggest union leadership shake-ups in the recent history of the labor movement. The incumbent leadership teams of two of the nation’s largest and most politically active unions—the Service Employees International union (SEIU) and the public employees union (AFSCME)—could see challenges at their conventions in May and June, respectively.

Both unions are expected to spend $100 million each to re-elect Obama as well as be crucial players in the effort to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The electoral jockeying of candidates for leadership positions in these two unions may have an effect on how SEIU and AFSCME, which each have more than 1 million members, pursue these two big political challenges as well as shape how the unions interact with the Democratic Party.

Danny Donohue, president of  265,000-member strong CSEA Local 1000 representing New York public employees, has declared his intention to challenge current AFSCME Secretary Treasurer Lee Saunders, who is backed by retiring AFSCME President Gerry McEntee. When these two candidates met in the 2010 election for Secretary-Treasurer, Saunders narrowly won the election 652,660 votes to 649,356.

Donohue told In These Times that in the last election there were voting irregularities that negatively affected his candidacy. According to people interviewed supporting both Donohue and Saunders, however, AFSCME has formed committees around the country to hold open meetings on making sure the election procedures are fair. Regardles, the race will be quite heated.

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The debate around immigration in Washington brings the same smoke and mirrors each election cycle: anti-immigrant slogans about “securing the border” flashing alongside craftily worded policies to sustain the flow of cheap labor, legal or not. Politicians seem to want it both ways: keeping immigrants locked into a brutal underground workforce, while using mass deportation and constant abuse to exclude them from society.

One popular “compromise” policy on immigration, the “guestworker model,” perfectly weds the ideas of “free markets” and forced labor. For many years, special visa programs have allowed employers to hire temporary foreign labor at paltry wages with minimal oversight. It would be the ultimate captive labor force, except a few things get in the way—mainly that even these workers have some rights under the law, plus indentured servitude looks terribly out-of-date these days, even with Washington's stamp of approval.

In recent months, young workers channeled into Hershey factory jobs under the J-1 visa “student exchange” program have protested against cruel, coercive working conditions.  Advocates have also called attention to exploited workers under the H2-B program, which places tens of thousands of temporary workers in trades like hotel services and landscaping. For years, various investigations and lawsuits have exposed systematic abuses of seasonal farmworkers in the H2-A program, who toil in conditions often akin to slavery.

Posted by Michelle Chen  ·   ·  0 comments  ·  + share/save

Many don't earn minimum wage, and benefits are basically nonexistent

Just in time for the restaurant industry's biggest day of the year, Restaurant Opportunities Centers United delivered an anti-Valentine to the industry for its systematic mistreatment of women in the business, from fast service joints to fine dining establishments. The report—”Tipped Over the Edge: Gender Inequity in the Restaurant Industry“—shows the business has delivered no tangible love to its workers and a healthy dose of discrimination towards women in the restaurant workforce.

ROC, an organization with more than 9,000 restaurant worker members in 19 cities, started in New York City a decade ago. It serves as a worker rights center, a research-oriented advocate for better public policy, and an organizer and supporter of “high road” restaurants that demonstrate, as ROC director Saru Jaramayan says, that “you can pay good wages and have a thriving business and industry.”

But instead, most restaurants thrive—and the industry continues to grow and rack up record profits, even during these hard times—by paying workers poorly. ROC's report—supported by a dozen groups focused on women's rights—notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified seven jobs in the restaurant industry in its 2010 list of the ten lowest-paid occupations. Including tips, the average server made $8.81 an hour. But the average is misleading because of huge variations in the industry.

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Another 'breastaurant' gets hit with another sexual harassment lawsuit

When I heard last week that 19 women had sued the Chicago franchise of a national chain called Tilted Kilt, known for its “scantily-clad kilt girls,” I was not surprised.

I once visited the downtown faux-Irish pub and felt sorry for the young waitresses wearing ridiculous and uncomfortable-looking outfits, and the lone male customers who seemed to have nothing better to do than eat overpriced food and desperately seek attention from women who likely wouldn’t give them the time of day off the clock.

News of the lawsuit was gratifying, but reading the actual complaint was disturbing. The conditions alleged by the women at the restaurant do sound “outrageous” and “extreme” as the lawsuit says. But the most disconcerting revelation, for me, was the fact that the charges apparently deal almost excusively with the behavior of one manager described as a “predator.” The manager, Dennis Sotos, allegedly habitually grabbed women’s breasts and buttocks, propositioned them, loudly discussed pornography, dropped ice down their skirts and, in at least one case, used a straw to shoot water down a woman’s dress saying, “I’m trying to get your panties wet.”

If even a fraction of the allegations are true, Sotos and the franchise's two co-owners, Athan Sotos and Chris Tomaras, clearly deserve a sexual harassment lawsuit. But the narrow focus on one manager’s behavior leaves the impression that the general atmosphere at Tilted Kilt is otherwise legal and acceptable.

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