Labor Union Blog

Disneyland hotel workers  began a water-only fast Tuesday to protest what they describe as life-threatening safety issues on the job. The more than 2,000 bellmen, dishwashers, room attendants, and cooks, members of Unite Here! Local 11, have been working without a contract since February 2008. They say new work requirements at three resort hotels and the villas at the Grand Californian Hotel have led to serious health problems among workers, including heart attack, stroke and musculoskeletal injuries.

Disney management also is demanding to make drastic cuts in workers’ health insurance.

During the fast, eight Disneyland hotel workers, two Los Angeles International Airport food service employees–who also are members of the local–and one adult son of a Disneyland hotel worker will refrain from eating and consume only water. Fast participants will remain, 24-hours a day, in front of the Grand Californian Hotel, sleeping in tents on the sidewalk and surrounded by a large shrine to injured workers.

Part of the shrine will pay tribute to Grand Californian housekeeper Rosario Casas, who is out of work on disability after suffering a heart attack on the job in October.  Casas said her doctor said the heart attack was due to stress.

Narciso Guevara, a houseman at the Grand Californian Hotel, who plans to fast, said:

We’re fighting for our health. We need better, safer conditions on the job, healthcare we can afford, and even more importantly, we need the company to respect us.

Maria Navarro, a housekeeper at the Grand Californian, who was injured at work just three days after Disney remodeled the hotel, said she is fasting to bring attention to the injuries she and several of her co-workers have suffered.

Since the changes were implemented at the Grand Californian, things have gotten worse. There are many people in my department who are hurt, but work through the pain because they are afraid of losing their jobs. So much pressure creates an unsafe place. We must make it stop.

Throughout the fast, community and religious leaders, unions, musicians, students and residents will call on Disney to address the health and safety issues at the hotels to by participating in daily actions, rallies and concerts.

The fasting workers are blogging about the action at:http://www.disneyisunfaithful.org/work-shouldnt-hurt and more information also is available here.

Here are a few tidbits worth noting from around the nation’s economic scene.

Bob Herbert at the New York Times puts the sorry U.S. unemployment rate in clearer–and more painful–perspective today, pointing out how the workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with.

The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.

Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.

One hundred fourteen thousand Boeing workers could be seeing bonuses. The deal would apply to the company’s white collar workers and is part of an annual incentive plan. The plan kicks in based on yearly internal profit goals. 2009 will see seven days of extra pay and will apply to current Boeing workers and those who worked part of 2009. While workers who are represented by the Society of Professional Engineering Employees are included in the annual plan, workers in the company’s blue collar workforce represented by the International Association of Machinists are not.

Poor funding for Tennessee’s Illegal Alien Act has resulted in little follow through. Jesse Russell reports:

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By Doug Cunningham

The nation’s largest nurses union is blasting Anthem Blue Cross for raising its insurance premiums by 39 percent for individual policies in California. Eight hundred thousand people are affected, with premiums for some of them rising to nearly $1000 a month. National Nurses United says it’s disgraceful, abusive behavior in an industry that systematically price gouges while denying care. National Nurses United says the best way to end this health insurance abuse is by creating a Medicare for all universal single payer system that guarantees health care for all.

By Doug Cunningham

The San Francisco Labor Council is calling on the AFL-CIO and Change To Win to endorse and support an April 10 march in Washington for jobs. That’s the 75th anniversary of the depression-era Works Progess Administration, which created some 8.5 million jobs in the U.S. during the Great Depression of the 1930’s. In its resolution supporting the April 10 march the San Francisco Labor Council says we need the same bold, sweeping jobs program now for the more than 20 million un and under-employed Americans.

By Doug Cunningham

President Obama spent time Tuesday meeting with republican and Democratic congressional leaders in a bid to find common ground on jobs creation, health care reform and efforts to reduce the federal budget deficit. On a jobs bill Senate Republicans so far would say only that maybe a smalljobs package might be approved by the Senate.

With the nation’s capitol under two-plus feet of snow, Nebraska’s Sen. Ben Nelson (D) appears to have come down with a case of snow madness–a delirium that sometimes manifests itself in bizarre and illogical actions and speech.

Nelson announced yesterday that he would back a Republican-led filibuster against President Obama’s nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, Craig Becker. The vote is scheduled for later today. Call your senators today and tell them to stop obstructing President Obama’s nominees, starting with Craig Becker.

Nelson says he believes Becker, the Obama administration’s choice for the NLRB, “would pursue a personal agenda there, rather than that of the administration.”

As Michael Whitney on FireDogLake writes:

How does that make any sense, when it’s the Obama administration that nominated him twice?

John Drinkwater, organizing and mobilization coordinator for the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, sends us this report on how the state federation is helping build the future by tapping into the skills of today’s young workers.

Continuing its ongoing mission to develop young union leaders in the Commonwealth, the Massachusetts AFL-CIO’s Third Annual Futures Convention elected a new Futures representative to a serve on the Massachusetts AFL-CIO Executive Council and head the Futures Program for the coming year.

This year, delegates at the Feb. 5 and 6 convention voted among a group of three candidates nominated by their fellow delegates and chose Daniel Manning of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2325 as their new rep. Ben Sherman of Sheet Metal Workers Local 17 and Christopher Deane of Iron Workers Local 7 also ran for the Futures seat.

Manning will be the third young union member to hold the one-year term Futures seat, taking over for Allison-Doherty-LaCasse, a member of the Boston Teachers Union/AFT who served for the past year and led the Futures program through its successful second year. Jeremy McKeen, a member of the Lynn Teachers Union/AFT, served as the first Futures Representative in 2008.