Q: Averaging just $17,000 a year, $4,000 below the poverty line, how on earth is a Wal-Mart employee able to have a truck and a mortgage?
January 31, 2009
January 29, 2009
Executive director of Progressive Christians Uniting, speaks out about The Employee Free Choice Act
“The Employee Free Choice Act will go a long way toward expanding workplace democracy. Progressive religious leaders, whatever their disagreements might be, must come together to support the restoring of dignity to those who labor honestly”
Wow, I can’t even edit this down, it’s perfect, directly from Religion Dispatches, By Peter Laarman (sorry for the full cut and paste)
Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act
If you know anything about politics, it is a
game changer. It is a total game changer for the next 40 to 50 years if the Democrats are able to get this legislation.
—Sen. John Ensign (R-Nevada)
We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.
—Lee Scott, former Wal-Mart CEOI once worked professionally in the labor
movement, and I often say that I have never felt the slightest discontinuity in moving from labor organizing and labor strategizing to ordained ministry. To me all of it has been the Lord’s work—and here is why.
All the people straining at the gnats in biblical
interpretation—namely, what God may or may not think about various forms of sexual expression—consistently miss the big theme within the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. That theme is deliverance from bondage and God’s call to build just community, to resist Egyptian ways of oppression and sweated labor. As many have pointed out, the Bible has far more to say about economic justice than any other
subject, to the point that right worship of God is directly equated with dealing justly with one’s fellow humans (witness the Isaiah 58 text used by Sharon Watkins, who preached at the national prayer service held on the day after Barack Obama’s inauguration). The biblical Sabbath and Jubilee keynotes—keynotes also struck by Jesus right at the start of his public ministry—contain within them God’s main message to us about maintaining just community. And what “proclaim liberty throughout the land” means, in practical terms, is abolish debt peonage and correct corrosive imbalances in wealth and social power.
Does this land of ours suffer from debt peonage and corrosive wealth imbalance? Is that even a question??
I was moved beyond measure to see the inauguration-related concert at the Lincoln Memorial open with Bruce Springsteen’s “Come On Up To The Rising” and end with Pete Seeger leading the multitude in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” Bringing Seeger up there wasn’t corny. It connected this moment to the last great economic crisis of 75 years ago. And I was glad that Pete made sure to include this little-known verse of Guthrie’s anthem:
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I’d seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?It’s not 1934, and we’re not at the point of mass hunger quite yet. But to pretend that working families haven’t been hit really hard—and with many more blows to come—is delusional.
The Employee Free Choice Act
For more than three decades US policy actively facilitated the corporate/conservative agenda of concentrating wealth at the top. We’ve seen where that got us. And there is no better engine than the power of workplace democracy and collective bargaining to put more money into the hands of regular people—and also to restore some of the dignity that creation theology says rightly belongs to those who labor honestly. That is why progressive religious leaders need to get behind the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which will come before the new Congress within the next few months.
EFCA would strengthen the labor movement, and I should acknowledge from the get-go that religious progressives historically have had mixed feelings about trade unions. Catholics and Jews have generally had much more favorable views of unionization than white Protestants, in part because of the vast number of Catholic immigrants to the United States who benefited significantly from their union membership but also because of the impact of Catholic and Jewish social teaching. White Protestants (my peeps) have too often tended to cling to a by-your-bootstraps ethic of individual achievement, joined to a suspicion that there is something slightly sinister and foreign about union leaders and about the union concept of class solidarity.
I grew up ten miles from the Kohler Company’s sprawling furnaces and factories in eastern Wisconsin during the seemingly endless and ultimately victorious struggle by the UAW to unionize those facilities. The Dutch Calvinists I grew up among—those who worked at Kohler—were mostly strikebreakers. It was a religious conviction among many that the owners should be able to operate their works without union interference.
But I am here to argue that at this moment in American life, all clear-thinking people of faith should be rallying around the union banner. If we’re going to draw analogies between Obama’s challenge and FDR’s challenge, we would do well to recall that what drove the New Deal and significantly remade American politics during the Roosevelt years was the tripling of US union membership that took place over the ten years following 1935—the year that workers first got real bargaining rights under the Wagner Act.
Led by the United Steelworkers, United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers, United Rubber Workers, and United Electrical Workers, the Depression-era labor movement raised wage standards and working conditions for a vast swath of the workforce, but it did much more than that. The CIO—Congress of Industrial Organizations—used its considerable political muscle to back the full range of New Deal reforms: close to home matters like workplace safety and wage/hour laws, obviously; but also banking reform, food and drug safety, Social Security expansion, interstate commerce regulation, the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps—a very long list of changes that built the social house we still live in, despite all the Republican efforts from 1980 onward to tear that house down.
And although this dimension is still little understood or appreciated, industrial unionism also nurtured the seeds of the nascent civil rights revolution. Let it be said that it was the Communist element within the CIO that took the most advanced positions on civil rights—an aspect of the movement that J. Edgar Hoover had a lot of fun with during his overly long career, but something I feel should be celebrated today as a badge of honor for the old American Communist Party, despite any other nefarious designs it entertained.
The revived US labor movement thereafter made a signal contribution to the fight against Hitler and Tojo by means of a grand compact struck with the government regarding war production. The government got labor peace (for the most part) and an incredible output of planes, ships, and tanks; the unions got to keep their representation rights along with a voice in production councils. Union density—the percentage of private-sector workers represented under collective bargaining agreements—continued its steady rise into the 1950s and 1960s, creating something new on the face of the earth: a working class capable of enjoying a middle-class living standard.
As late as 1973—also the peak year for real worker income in the United States—union density hovered at around 25% in the private sector. Today that number is just 7.4%. The bargaining power and the political clout of organized labor have been effectively eviscerated.
Why the drastic fall-off in union density? The standard explanations offered by corporate propagandists and neoliberal economists—technology, globalization, and outsourcing—tell part of the story but only part.
The story that doesn’t get told is a bit uglier; it is the story of brutal union suppression by employers who figured out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections.
By the Numbers
The cold, hard facts are these:
Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearly suggests that there’s something wrong with the current system for allowing workers to decide this question.
Just going by official National Labor Relations Board numbers (which surely underestimate the magnitude of violation), 27,000 workers had their workplace rights violated in 2006; many of these were fired outright for union activity.
44% of workers who do win union representation never get to a first contract because of employer stalling and other chicanery.
According to a Cornell University study, 92 percent of private-sector employers use closed-door “captive audience” meetings to snuff out union organizing efforts; 80% require line supervisors to assist in union-avoidance activities; 75% hire outside consultants (union-prevention specialists) who set up command centers within the company to wage all-out war on the union; 50% threaten to shut down operations to scare workers; and 25% illegally fire union supporters.
These aren’t just economic issues or labor abuses; they are human rights issues, and they were recognized as such in a Human Rights Watch report issued in 2000. In the years since that report came out, the odds against American workers trying to organize have only gotten worse.
The proposed Employee Free Choice Act will fix this fatal imbalance in straightforward ways. First, it will impose real penalties for labor law violations so that employers would no longer find it cheaper to take the penalty than to obey the law. Second, it will provide for impartial arbitration of first contract terms if no agreement has been reached within 120 days of union recognition, thus preventing the common employer practice of dragging out negotiations so that workers lose faith in the union—sometimes even decertifying it. Third, EFCA will simplify the recognition and certification process by enabling unions to gain legal recognition upon producing a majority of valid worker signatures on union authorization cards: i.e., the “card-check” method, against the more traditional practice of petitioning for an NLRB-supervised secret ballot election.
This, needless to say, is the provision that has the employers foaming at the mouth. They have already spent millions—and will spend millions more—on misleading print and TV ads asserting that if secret ballots were good enough to elect Obama, they should be good enough for union supporters as well. The slick kill-EFCA misinformation campaign is being coordinated by Mark McKinnon, the former media advisor to George W. Bush and John McCain.
The reality is that the card-check method is already widely used—accepted by employers as diverse as AT&T and Kaiser Permanente—and there is absolutely no evidence that it is any less democratic than voting by ballot: a method that often allows bosses to use every trick in their book to turn workers against the union. For employers to assert that it will be absurdly easy for unions to collect a majority of worker signatures, or that unions will browbeat workers into signing authorization cards, is not only a fantasy but is also fantastically hypocritical in view of the well-documented intimidation that employers themselves routinely bring to bear to defeat unionization drives.
A Game-Changer
But enough about the technical aspects; here is the bottom line: conservatives who call EFCA a “game changer” are absolutely right. Whether you think the game needs changing depends on whose side you are on, to quote the venerable labor anthem. Imagine what a doubling or tripling of union membership during the hoped-for eight years of Obama time could mean for progressive advancement in this new century!
Because make no mistake: the new labor movement is solidly progressive. It has been the biggest single force promoting universal, government-supported health care coverage, protecting Social Security from Wall Street privatizers, and advancing a green jobs/green energy future. But that’s not all. The racist, jingoist, homophobic, misogynistic movement of American labor’s worst years—the George Meany/Lane Kirkland years—is long dead and buried. Today’s labor leadership is solidly aligned behind LGBT equality, comprehensive immigration reform, and much more within the broad human rights and civil rights agendas. Labor’s near-death experience in recent years taught it to be much better at alliance-building than the movement of 40 years ago—much better at practicing an ethic of genuine reciprocation in relation to other social movements.
In other words, progressive clergy and lay folk have no excuse for hanging back from lending their full support to EFCA at this crucial hour.
For a long time we’ve been hearing that the religious right played the same role in maintaining nearly 30 years of Republican hegemony that the labor movement once played in maintaining Democratic hegemony. The religious right is now in some considerable disarray, though by no means disabled. What better time, and what better way, for religious progressives to help spur a big turn in our politics than to lend some help right now in restoring the central role of a progressive labor movement in advancing social justice?
Preachers, start your engines!
January 19, 2009
Wal-Mart, $640 million in back wages, would never have happened if the employees were represented by a union
<–Martin Luther King died in the midst of supporting workers in a struggle to form a union
Writer, producer and director for over 3 decades explains the need for the Employee Free Choice Act–>
Had the employees of Wal-Mart been represented by a labor union, the company wouldn’t be forced to pay $640 million in back wages to employees who were cheated out of that money. It never would have happened. Period.- David Macaray
I’ve noticed that Wal-Mart has been pushing it’s advertisements every 10 minutes or so here in New York, could it be the Black Friday death at the local Valley Stream store? Or could it be the fact that unbeknown to many, Wal-Mart got caught cheating it’s employees out of $640 million US dollars and quietly settled without much ado.
Good olde’ Wal-Mart, it wouldn’t want any bad publicity , but our friend David Macaray has posed this note, that the very employees that Wal-Mart brain washes into their team mentality would have never gotten ripped off if they were represented by a union, so heres a clip from a David Macaray article at CounterPunch called “The Economics of Cheating: Wal-Mart Caught Stealing” from 1/9-11/09:
But there’s one thing we can be absolutely certain of. Had the employees of Wal-Mart been represented by a labor union, the company wouldn’t be forced to pay $640 million in back wages to employees who were cheated out of that money. It never would have happened. Period.Things in the workplace fall through the cracks all the time; they get dismissed, put off, overlooked, rescheduled, piled up, mishandled, etc.. But in a union shop, no one—and that means no one—fails to get paid. You can ask union people to work harder, to work safer, to work quicker; you can ask them pretty much anything, and they’ll do it. Just don’t ask them to work for free.
Predictably, even though Wal-Mart clearly got caught with its hand in the cookie jar (the settlement was the result of 63 class-action lawsuits), the company has tried to put a happy face on it, claiming that the whole thing was rather “complicated,” and that the incidents in question occurred “a long time ago” and are in no way indicative what the company stands for today.
An employer trying to cut corners by cheating workers out of their pay isn’t really that “complicated” a concept to grasp. It’s pretty basic, actually. Moreover, it’s a form of what is commonly known as “theft.” And Wal-Mart did it knowingly and for the basest of reasons: they wanted to save money, and thought they could do it without getting caught. But they got caught. That’s why they’re paying $640 million.
Of course, the biggest shocker in all this is the fact that, despite Wal-Mart’s history of stinginess and deceit, the company’s employees are still independent. The world’s largest retailer, with over 1.4 million employees, remains immaculately non-union (at least in the U.S.). Given that labor unions, across-the-board, offer superior wages, benefits, and working conditions, that circumstance is absolutely astonishing. Over 4,000 stores in the U.S., and not one of them is unionized? That is mind-boggling.
David continues:
After all, look at the facts. If a company spends millions of dollars trying to keep the union out, and preaches to its employees that unions are bad—that they’re unnecessary, that they’re a hindrance, that a union wouldn’t help them—and then turns around and steals wages from the very people who are loyal to that company and who can barely make a living on the wages they’re already being paid, what does that tell us?Corporations cheat all the time. They cheat the competition by engaging in illegal or unethical business practices, they cheat the public through false advertising and poor quality, and they cheat Uncle Sam by not paying their fair share of taxes. The public has become inured to it
But when a corporation steals from its own people—especially ones as fiercely loyal as Wal-Mart employees—doesn’t that cross the line? Doesn’t that totally blow their minds? What’s it going to take for these Wal-Marters to realize they’re being exploited?
I really don’t understand it at all, are they that fucking stupid? It amazes me how many of these employees in big box/corporate structered chains consider themselves associates, team members or partners.
October 22, 2008
October 16, 2008
Wal-Mart closes only union department in North America
Unreal, finally a few workers became union in Wal-Mart, so they closed the section. Wal-Mart is a disgrace!
From PR Newswire:
Wal-Mart Watch Responds to Wal-Mart’s Closure of Unionized Tire and Lube Express in Gatineau, Canada
“Wal-Mart’s closure of the recently unionized Tire and Lube Express auto shop in Gatineau, Quebec shows how Wal-Mart is willing to do anything to keep its workers from receiving better wages, decent benefits or fairer
working conditions. The Gatineau workers have merely exercised their human rights under Canadian Law, something that is clearly unacceptable to Wal-Mart.“Later today, Wal-Mart Watch will launch a new web site which features the real stories of Wal-Mart employees who are suffering under Wal-Mart’s low-wage, low-benefit business model.
“The closure in Canada clearly shows that Wal-Mart has no desire to change.”
Fuck you Wal-Mart, you are a huge reason that the American people are having hard financial problems and you had led they way to giving our jobs oversea’s.
More headlines from Labourstart
- Quebec Wal-Mart to close unionized auto shop [The Star]
- Quebec Wal-Mart Closes Tire Centre After Labor Accord [Bloomberg]
- Quebec Wal-Mart shuts Gatineau union shop [The Gazette]
- Quebec Wal-Mart closes auto shop after union win [Reuters]
- Quebec Wal-Mart Canada shuts another location after workers unionize [UFCW]
- Quebec Wal-Mart closes unionized shop [The Globe and Mail]
- Quebec Wal-Mart closes shop where union contract imposed [CBC]
- Quebec Wal-Mart Watch Responds to Wal-Mart’s Closure of Unionized Tire and Lube Express in Gatineau [Wal-Mart Watch]
September 13, 2008
What’s Wal-Mart so afraid of? Four words- Employee Free Choice Act
Wanted to do a write up and show our readers the new pro-Employee Free Choice Act video released by Brave New Films, luckily enough, Robert Greenwald, the director/producer of “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price” and “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism”, has already done it for me.
From Alternet (9/12/08):
What’s Wal-Mart So Afraid of? Four words: Employee Free Choice ActWhat’s Wal-Mart so afraid of? They’re up to their old tricks, using scare tactics to intimidate employees against supporting pro-worker candidates. So what’s got them backed into a corner? Four words: Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
EFCA would effectively enable workers to unionize and secure contracts without fear of being fired or reprisals from union-busting companies like Wal-Mart. It’s a crucial bill for workers’ rights. It could single-handedly restore the middle class. And it’s the reason we’ve partnered with American Rights at Work to bring you our latest video.
Send this video to every person who cares about fairness and wants a middle class in America, and get them to sign the petition to ensure that EFCA passes. And while you’re at it, let your friends know about Meet the Bloggers because today at 1pm ET/10am PT, our special guests SEIU President Andy Stern and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney will be discussing the importance of EFCA with bloggers Baratunde Thurston (JackandJillPolitics.com) and Michael Whitney (American Rights at Work).
Check out the articles below on EFCA, get informed, and join us on the show’s live blog at 1pm ET/10 am PT, when we’ll stand up to Wal-Mart, and stand up for workers’ rights.
- The Law that Could Give Labor Some Brawn — Moira Herbst, Business Week
- Happy Labor Day. Drop Dead. — Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal
- In Fight Over Law Securing Workers’ Right to Organize, Corporations Bill Themselves as Underdogs — David Sirota, AlterNet
- Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win — Kris Maher, Wall Street Journal
- Inside the Mind of Union Busters — Art Levine, Today’s Workplace Blog
- Wal-Mart’s Desperate War Against Unionization — ZP Heller, Brave New Films
- Employee Free Choice Act Summary — American Rights at Work
And if you missed any episode of Meet the Bloggers, you can also watch them in the archives.
August 31, 2008
Canadian Wal-Mart workers win first contract, get $2.49 raise
I couldn’t think of a more fitting Labor day story:
The very first in the entire North American continent, Their pay has went up $2.50 an hour
From 8/22/08 at The PSL webpage:
Canadian Wal-Mart workers win contract
By: Stefanie FisherIn brief
On Aug. 15, a Canadian Wal-Mart located in Gatineau, Quebec, was forced to honor a three-year contract for employees working in its lube and tire department. It is the only Wal-Mart in North America to have a union contract in place.
The workers, organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Canada, will see an increase in their starting wages from $8.40 to $10.89 per hour. Although there are still 200 non-union workers at the same location, the workers have scored an important victory in the struggle to organize the world’s largest retailer.
This is not the first time the anti-union giant has been ordered to honor union contracts. In 2000, 11 meat cutters working at a Texas Wal-Mart won union recognition. Shortly thereafter Wal-Mart, Inc., eliminated the positions in 180 stores in six states, claiming lack of profits.
Wal-Mart recently reported profits of $3.45 billion—up 17 percent from $2.95 billion a year ago.
On this Labor Day 2008, please take a moment to think of the men and women who had fought so valiantly for the lifestyle that our labor can bring us today. Do not disrespect their fight, never cross a picket line and always be willing to help a fellow worker, regardless of affiliation, race, gender or creed, because if workers unite we can once again change the world. Never forget that our labor creates their wealth.
In solidarity,
Joe
August 30, 2008
Video: Wal-Mart-The high cost of low prices
Never viewed this before, so I got a YouTube account just to put it all together, for more info you can check out what people over at iMDB, the Internet Movie Data Base, have to say about it, it gets a rating of 6.9 out of a possible 10, by 1,822 viewers.
August 15, 2008
More blatant discrimination against construction workers comes to light, this time prevailing wage violations across America
Kinda, sorta follow up to “Blatant discrimination! Another disposable worker death in New York’s underground sweatshop construction industry” from Jan. 2007
ow do you under bid the union contractors?
By using a work force that does not understand the law of the land. This construction company forced it’s largely Cantonese workers to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, with no overtime pay, no breaks and massive safety violations, on jobs that were publicly funded. That’s right, if you live in Oakland, California, there’s a good chance that the school you send your kids to was built with the help of the criminal activity of a few at the top, who profited on the backs of their workers, while screwing the contracting firms who obey the laws, the public who didn’t get what they paid for and the workers who worked in pre-1900 conditions.
I thought the abuses of Chinese workers here in the United States sorta ended after the railroads were built, yes for those of you not well versed in 
history, from the “end of slavery” years of 1864 to 1867, on just one leg of the transcontinental railroad construction it is estimated that 1200-1300 Chinese workers died in that three year span. For more information on the atrocities against Chinese workers on the railroads there’s a book written by William F. Chew, who is the grandson of two of the railroad workers. His book is called “Nameless Builders of the Transcontinental Railroad“. Mr. Chew isn’t just a bump on a log, he’s a pretty smart fella, in his 45 year career as an aerospace engineer he created components that were critical for spacecraft travel.
So now back to our story, here in New York the homelands might be different but the story is the same, get workers new to the country and cheat the workers and the public out of their legally bound responsibility. Capitalism at it’s finest. Screw everyone to get ahead.
Just two weeks ago it came to light that a local scumbag General Contractor pocketed $550,000 of public money which was supposed to go to his employees, according to The New York Times article from July 31st. entitled “Officials of Building Firm Accused of Cheating Workers and City “:
The officials, Yuly Aronson, owner of the May Construction Company, and Anthony Branca, the company’s accountant, ran their scheme from April 2005 through November 2006 during work on two dozen city buildings and courthouses, according to Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo.They were charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with falsifying payroll filings to receive roughly $2 million from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services for employee wages and withholdings, of which Mr. Aronson, 46, and Mr. Branca, 50, ended up pocketing about $550,000 that was supposed to go toward the salaries of 84 workers, the attorney general said.
Here’s the how to screw your work force part:
May Construction lured many of its employees with an advertisement in the Polish-language newspaper Nowy Dziennik, according to the attorney general’s office. Most of the company’s workers were secured through those advertisements and were each paid the minimum of the prevailing wage, even though the jobs they were doing required they be paid higher wages, the attorney general’s office said.
The good news, if convicted, according to New York State’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo:
“Contractors on public works projects should be warned: Obey the law and pay the prevailing wage, or face the consequences,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.Mr. Aronson and Mr. Branca face several charges including grand larceny. If convicted, they could spend up to 15 years in prison.
So that’s the story of how Polish immigrants are getting screwed on prevailing wage violations here in New York, let’s get back to what transpired in Oakland, California, it took a Cantonese speaking organizer working with the International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers (IBEW Local 595) to bring the violations to light and that’s a good thing. Here’s some snips from the East Bay Business Times, from the August 12th. story entitled “Former employees sue Oakland contractor NBC General“:
NBC General Contractors Corp., an Oakland construction company that is working on several publicly funded projects in the city’s downtown, has been hit with a lawsuit filed by former employees seeking millions of dollars for prevailing-wage, overtime, meal break and safety violations.
Sounds like your average non-union construction company nowadays, sometimes it’s Chinese, sometimes it’s Guatemalan’s, Mexican’s, whoever they can screw and threaten the best. The less they are allowed to speak up, the less they know about US labor law, the more they can be screwed, but enough of my ranting, the story continues:
NBC General became the subject of the organization’s scrutiny because some contractors perceived its bids on projects were often lower than others and that prompted questions about whether its books truly reflected hours worked, said the partnership’s Alameda County compliance officer, Andreas Cluver. The union group wasn’t able to investigate efficiently, however, until it made contact with a Cantonese-speaking organizer who understood the language and culture of many of the NBC General workers.
That’s the way to do it fellas, IBEW did exactly what needs to be done, just because the workers did not speak English, did not mean they were stupid, they just needed someone to explain to them their rights. How bad were these workers treated, heres more:
The suit filed July 17 in Alameda Superior Court seeks to represent a group of what is probably about 150 workers who worked on NBC General projects for a period of four years, from July 2004 to the present, said plaintiff attorney Sharon Seidenstein. A judge would have to grant class-action status.“The company is working on prevailing-wage jobs and they are not paying the prevailing wage,” said Seidenstein. “They are also working them extremely long hours; for instance, during the summer the workers are alleged to be working 12-hour days, seven-day weeks, with no overtime.”
Also named in the complaint is J.H. Fitzmaurice Inc., the Emeryville-based firm that is the general contractor for the Fox Courts housing project.
It is unclear how much plaintiffs will recoup if they prevail, although Seidenstein said it could be “millions.”
Cluver stated that he had calculated about $6.6 million in underpayments to workers, based solely on his calculations and not taking into account any penalties a court might issue.
Monica Mui Ung, president and CEO of Oakland-based NBC General, and J.H. Fitzmaurice, did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment on Tuesday.
I just hope the owners of these companies in NY and CA see the inside of jail, they really deserve it. One can only wonder how badly they treat workers on non-prevailing wage jobs, but you can see that in my first article entitled “Blatant discrimination! Another disposable worker death in New York’s underground sweatshop construction industry“
Immigration: the wedge issue of the labor movement
This country is delving deeper into the 3rd. world as anyone is allowed to enter here illegally without penalty, and until recently one of the only times ICE, our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, has raided a work place it was in the middle of a union organizing drive. Here’s just a few facts to ponder.
In Iowa, ICE raided AgriProcessors, the countries largest Kosher meat packing plant and found almost 400 illegal alien workers, reports of weapons and get this, a Crystal Meth lab! There were over 60 underage workers at the plant, the youngest of which was 13 years old.
In California, a pregnant Mexican teenager died on a California vineyard, she wasn’t allowed to have water! 5 more immigrant farmworkers in California have died in the fields since.
In New York, undocumented immigrant construction workers were threatened with guns if they decided to join a union. On other sites workers are told to say that if hurt at work, they are to report the injury as happening on the soccer field. On a nearby house getting remodeled I asked the owner of a construction company why he only gave his Guatemalan workers doing siding one plank for each teir of the 32 foot high scaffold, he told me they were like monkeys, they would be OK. I could go on about New York, about how when Fresh Direct, the internet supermarket was raided by ICE right in the middle of a NLRB wait period for a unionization vote. But lets get to the legal issues that are encouraging more illegal immigration, the laws against working rights and the laws that are helping to fracture labor protections. Here’s two I reported on recently. Oh yeah, by the way they are both in Right to work states.
Kansas, a state in this United States, has passed a bill through it’s Senate that will exclude punishment for the employers of undocumented workers, but would fine a union who lets the worker into it’s ranks. You got that? They do not blame the employers and they want to stop anyone from helping the workers.
Utah, there is now a law which will exclude an injured worker from getting Workmans Compensation who has committed any crime, BUT the law does not hold the company responsible for hiring the illegal immigrant, nor will their premimum go up. Now theres a couple of great places to open up business.
To Be Continued, what I’ve been up to lately
I can continue with this but I really need some rest, you may have noticed I have been writing scarcely recently at Joe’s Union Review, there’s just so much to write about and so little time lately, I too have a full time job and I’m teaching an apprentice in my trade, it’s an honor and a privilege to help her in her career, I was a little concerned that I might not have been ready to train someone, but I’m doing my best, she is my union brother (talk about a weird line) and it’s important.
Something you may want to check out
Just in case you don’t read Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, you may have missed the news of the meeting they had with their workers that threatened that if Obama were to be elected President, that there would be almost nothing standing in the way of the Employee Free Choice Act getting passed, which would of course pave the way for those damned unions to corrupt the wonderful working environment that their workers currently enjoy by giving them a fighting chance to seek collective bargaining representation. Was it illegal what they did? Was Wal-Mart being a good employer and informing their workers about the candidates or did they threaten them as to how they should vote?
Here’s a little fact that slipped through the media unreported, Wal-Mart was recently sued by none other than the US Dept. Of Justice, why would you ask? They refused to rehire a returning veteran in their Florida store. That’s right, Wal-Mart, that great American franchise said a big F you to someone who went out and risked their life for them. They of course settled for $12,000 out of court.
Wal-Mart is most likely a big contributor to the organizations against The Employee Free Choice Act, but I’ll have more on that soon. As American Right’s At Work puts it:
What Wal-Mart is doing for November’s political elections is what it, and hundreds of other anti-union companies, do all the time when workers say they want a union: intimidating them to go against their own self-interests.The most ironic part of this news is that Wal-Mart’s political ally, the Chamber of Commerce, sees itself as “David” versus the supposed “Goliath” of unions in the fight for the Employee Free Choice Act.
“This is a David-and-Goliath confrontation, but we believe we’ll have enough stones in the sling to knock this out,” said Mr. Steven Law, chief legal officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.Maybe, if David first set up a front group to defame Goliath with a $30 million television advertising campaign before he loaded up his slingshot.
I’ll write some more on this soon, but for now,
Peace, have a great weekend
Joe
