Labor Union Blog

On the road with the Selma to Montgomery marchers, Andre Natta sends us this from Alabama.

Walking along the freshly paved stretch of U.S. Highway 80 on the road to Montgomery, Shomari Davis, business representative of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local Union 11 in Los Angeles, remarked:

It’s very interesting how 40 years later, we’re fighting for some of the same rights that were originally fought for—fighting for workers’ rights, fighting for the 99 percent, fighting for everybody to do their equal share, against corporate greed.
Yesterday, hundreds of marchers passed through land that is probably among the most scenic of the route. It was appropriate we made our way through farmland as yesterday’s focus was black farmers and health care. We learned about information sessions on the Black Farmers discrimination settlement (currently scheduled through May 11 throughout the southeastern United States).
We ended our day in front of the Viola Liuzzo monument, at mile marker 111 on the eastbound side of U.S. Highway 80. Her senseless death is seen as one of the major reasons the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed.

Liuzzo is buried just outside of Detroit, although the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Women erected a marker in 1991 on the spot where she was murdered along Highway 80. While participants gathered around the monument yesterday at the end of their journey, we learned from Mark Thompson, host of Sirius/XM Radio’s “Make it Plain” (by way of AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker), of the decision by a state judge in Wisconsin to issue a temporary injunction of the state’s voter ID law, meaning it would not be in effect for the upcoming April 3 presidential primaries.

It was a small victory, but one marchers believe could lead to larger ones as they continue on the road to Montgomery.

Funding to build and maintain the nation’s highways, roads, bridges and transit systems runs out March 31, but a long-term transportation bill is being bottled up by Republican lawmakers.

This week, the Laborers (LIUNA) launched a multimedia campaign to highlight the growing public safety crisis posed by America’s crumbling bridges, deteriorating roads and struggling transit systems.The campaign appeals to voters to call on the Republican leadership in Congress to support a long-term highway bill that protects investment in transportation systems.

LIUNA President Terry O’Sullivan says the average age of bridges in the United States is 45 years, “dangerously close to the designed lifespan of 50 years.”

With this campaign, we’re letting Congress know that while they’re busy playing politics, Americans are being forced to risk their safety every time they cross a deficient or obsolete bridge.

The campaign includes radio spots in Ohio and Kentucky, home states of House Speaker John Boehner (R) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), and mail to voters, including a tongue-in-cheek manual “How to Survive a Bridge Collapse.” It also includes a tour of “The Emergency Bridge Repair Team” aboard a flatbed truck loaded with a giant roll of duct tape that will travel through the two states.

For more information, to view campaign ad materials and listen to the ads, visit www.highwaybill.org.

Here’s one for the good guys. David Warrick, executive director of AFSCME Council 62, reports that a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative law judge just ruled that Louisville, Ky.’s Our lady of Peace psychiatric hospital must reinstate former employee Amanda Doyle, who was fired, says Warrick, for trying to form a union at the hospital. 

Doyle was fired in October while she and other workers were in the midst of an organizing campaign with AFSCME. Says Warrick:

It was clear to us from the beginning that this was a case of employer retaliation against an employee who was exercising her protected rights under the National Labor Relations Act. The ruling makes it clear that Our Lady of Peace must stop its take-no-prisoners anti-union campaign.

Along with reinstatement and back pay for Doyle, the judge ordered Our Lady of Peace to post and read out loud at a meeting with workers that they have the right to join a union and that the hospital will not fire, harass or discriminate against workers for supporting a union.

Warrick told the Fat Lip, the news blog of the Louisville weekly LEO:  

I hope this helps other people realize their rights to unionize. We can’t let these companies bully us anymore and we need to stand up for what we believe in and for our rights.

A big welcome to the new blog MoveAmerica, launched today by the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department (TTD).

As TTD President Ed Wytkind writes in the first blog post:

With Congress currently engaged in debate over surface transportation funding, which is on the verge of being extended for the ninth time, with all transportation investments on the chopping block in the House, and with a presidential contest featuring candidates who are spouting anti-union rhetoric, those that actually keep our economy moving in the passenger and freight transportation industry need to be clear on what’s at stake.

MoveAmerica is dedicated to those workers.

TTD is looking for comments and ideas, along with photos representing transportation workers, and encourages people to share at ttd@ttd.org.

Also, you can follow the Transportation Trades on Facebook and Twitter from TTD.org.

The TTD is one of six trade departments established in the AFL-CIO Constitution. The others are:

Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD)

Maritime Trades Department (MTD)

Metal Trades Department (Metal Trades)

Department for Professional Employees (DPE)

Union Label and Service Trades Department (UL&STD)

A proposed rule by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) would not only reduce the number of trained federal food safety inspectors on the lines in poultry processing plants and allow plant management to nearly double the speed of those lines, it would also turn many inspection duties over to plant employees.

Stan Painter, chairman of AFGE’s National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, says:

We have concerns and I think the consuming public would have concerns about the process of which their poultry—turkey and chicken products—would now be inspected by plant employees.

The rule, proposed by the department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, would increase the maximum line speed from the current 91 chickens per minute to 175 per minute. It also would reduce from three to two the number of federal food safety inspectors per line.

Under a Freedom of Information Act request, the group Food and Water Watch obtained more than 5,000 pages of documents on a pilot program operating under the proposed rule’s guidelines and found that: 

large numbers of defects are routinely being missed when inspection tasks are performed by company employees instead of USDA inspectors.

Food and Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter, says:

Based on the data coming out of the plants, where this privatized inspection scheme is already in place, it is unacceptable for USDA to try to expand this program to more plants.

She says that federal inspectors receive extensive training to protect public health in poultry facilities, “but there is no similar requirement for company employees to receive training before they assume these inspection responsibilities in the proposed privatized inspection system.”

AFGE’s Painter says federal food inspectors take pride in their work to protect public safety.

That little dime-sized seal that says inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we want that little seal to mean something. We don’t it to just be window dressing or give people a good feeling or false sense of security that their product in the future is as safe as it currently is today.

The comment period on the new rules is open until April 26, and you can click here to submit your comments.

For more from Painter on AFGE’s “Inside Government” program, click here, and click here for more from Food and Water Watch.

More confirmation that the extremely rich are getting richer and those without jobs are suffering even more.

In 2009 and 2010, the first year of the current “recovery,” the 1 percent captured 93 percent of U.S. income growth. Repeat: 93 percent of income growth went to the 1 percent.

Even the Wall Street Journal writes:

Forget two-speeds. It’s more like the 1 percent is in a fast lane and the rest are stalled in the parking lot.

Affirming the findings of the study, authored by Emmanuel Saez, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) President Lawrence Mishel adds that at the same time, those in the bottom 90 percent of the income scale have seen their wage share retreat to what it was in 2006—when it was the lowest in any year (dating back to 1937).

A big contributor to declining income is the nation’s historically high long-term unemployment, and a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) looks at how many of the millions of workers struggling with unemployment and under-employment are not being counted—yet are experiencing “significant and long-lasting loss of earnings, deterioration of skills, poverty and even higher rates of divorces and reduced physical and mental health.”

Under the standard measure of long-term unemployment, half of all unemployed African American men have been jobless for more than six months or longer, followed closely by roughly 49 percent of unemployed Asian men, African American women and Asian women, according to  “Long-Term Hardship in the Labor Market.”

However, the report’s alternative measure (which includes discouraged workers, workers marginally attached to the workforce and workers who are part-time for economic reasons) shows that African American men are much more likely than other workers to experience long-term hardship. About 9 percent of all black men in the labor force, compared with 7 percent of black women, 5 percent of Latinas and 4 percent of Latino men had been unemployed for six months or longer in 2011.

Says John Schmitt, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a co-author of the report:

The recovery, which officially started in the summer of 2009, has provided almost no relief to those experiencing long-term hardship in the labor market.

Housekeepers at Hyatt Hotels will shine a spotlight tomorrow on what they say are unsafe and demeaning working conditions when they rally outside several Hyatt properties, as part of International Women’s Day observances.

Antonia Cortez, a Hyatt housekeeper in San Francisco who has been cleaning rooms for Hyatt for 35 years, says Hyatt management keeps “adding weight to the beds and the job is getting harder and harder.”

I have chronic pain in my shoulders and elbows from performing the same difficult task over and over.This job has damaged my body, and I clean just 14 rooms a day. In some cities, Hyatt makes housekeepers clean 30 rooms in one day.

Along with safety issues, workers say they are often disrespected and humiliated in the workplace. Last October, Hyatt fired two sisters, with 30 years of combined experience, after one objected to the posting of demeaning pictures of housekeepers in bikinis on a company bulletin board. 

Click here for more information from the coalition Hyatt Hurts and here for details on tomorrow’s actions.

More than 1,000 participants in the five-day Selma to Montgomery, Ala., march are carrying on their journey today, focusing on the renewed threat to workers’ rights and voting rights around the nation. The crowd began its march at the Viola Liuzzo memorial, some 24 miles outside Selma. Liuzzo was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan, who was murdered by Ku Klux Klan members after the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches.

The march is more than a re-enactment of the historic Selma to Montgomery march carried out 47 years ago by civil rights activists who were attacked by armed officers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, says AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus and Coalition of Black Trade Unionists President Bill Lucy. Young people, especially, are joining the march because:

they see the blatant attempt to rollback all the gains they assumed were fixed—gains not to be tampered with. They now see voter suppression taking place in so many different places.

Photo ID laws have been introduced or passed in at least 15 states. The Rev. Jesse Jackson, also a march participant, says such laws:

discriminate against those who don’t have driver’s licenses—disproportionately poor, elderly and minorities. Nationally they could disenfranchise about 5 million voters. Several states are also pushing legislation to restrict voter registration and to limit early voting.

Lucy, who is taking part in the events throughout the week, along with AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, also points to the new Alabama anti-immigration law that requires police to determine citizenship status during traffic stops, essentially exposing Latino citizens and non-citizens to constant harassment.

We’re outraged that this law passed in Alabama that criminalize so many people in this state and has created a wave of fear. It’s a dreadful law. Something that borders on the South African pass laws of the 1980s.

South African pass laws were a central part of the Apartheid regime, segregating the population and severely limiting the movements of the non-white populace.

Alabama’s anti-immigration law, H.B. 56, is detrimental to the entire state. According to one study, it could cost the state up to $10.8 billion (or 6.2 percent of its gross domestic product), up to 140,000 jobs in the state, $264.5 million in state tax revenue and $93 million in local tax revenue.

As he prepared to take part in today’s events, Lucy surveyed the growing crowd of participants, recognizing people who were there for the original march in 1965 as well as many young people, all of whom “see a need to stand up an speak out against” the attacks on fundamental civil and workers’ rights.

There is a tremendous outpouring of commitment to these issues and recognition of importance of the march and of keeping those issues on the front burner.

Tonight, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will deliver a keynote address on immigrants’ rights and the role of labor in the civil rights movement at a “Unite To Fight” rally following the day’s 12-mile march.

The Mine Safety and Health Administration’s (MSHA’s) enforcement effort and practices at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine had a number of significant failures before the April 2010 explosion that killed 29 miners, according to MSHA’s own report on its actions released today.

MSHA’s George Fesak who led the internal review says:

While there was no evidence linking the actions of MSHA employees to this tragedy, we found instances where enforcement efforts at UBB were compromised because MSHA and District 4 [the MSHA district with jurisdiction over the mine] did not follow established agency policies and procedures.

The report finds that inspectors “failed to inspect key parts of the Upper Big Branch mine, did not properly step up enforcement actions, and missed major coal-dust violations” prior to explosion, writes The Charleston Gazette’s Ken Ward.

Mine Workers President (UMWA) Cecil Roberts says the report on MSHA’s actions at the nonunion mine “illustrates the many shortcomings of that agency with respect to enforcing the law at UBB.”

Required inspections were not completed. Logbooks where critical information was supposed to be recorded about the conditions of the mine were not examined. MSHA District 4 supervisory personnel did not follow up on what were clearly flagrant violations of the law. These and many other failures allowed Massey to continue to get away with violating the law and putting its employees in danger every single day. April 5, 2010, was one day too many. 

Roberts also says that the report indicates that “the inspectors who were tasked with working at UBB were new and inexperienced.”

Many had not even completed all their training. This is a nationwide issue at MSHA, the result of years of neglect and indifference by the Bush administration. But frankly, that’s still no excuse for what occurred at UBB.

“It is clear the entire system failed these 29 miners,” says Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who cites:

Congress’s failure to maintain adequate and experienced staffing at MSHA over the years, to the agency’s failures to fully enforce the Mine Act, to the inherent weaknesses in that law, to a company hell-bent on exploiting all of those weaknesses. 

After meeting with families of the Upper Big Branch victims today MSHA Administrator Joe Main told reporters:

I don’t think there’s question that MSHA could have done better. I don’t think there’s any question that we surely plan to do better.

One former Massey supervisor has been sentenced to a jail term and two have been convicted or have plead guilty.

New York City carwash workers are following their Los Angeles counterparts to battle rampant mistreatment, wage theft and unsafe working conditions. Today the coalition, WASH New York, released a report—“The Dirty Business of Cleaning NYC’s Cars”—that details the long hours, low pay and dangerous conditions the city’s more than 5,000 carwash workers at some 200 carwashes face every day.

The Wash New York campaign aims to improve working conditions and standards and bring workplace rights and a voice on the job to carwash workers, says Stuart Appelbaum, president of Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union/UFCW (RWDSU/UFCW).     

Carwash workers should be able to exercise the same rights as all other U.S. workers; including the fundamental right to join a union if they so choose. The dirtiest practices in the car wash industry will only become full of more filth and grime if they are ignored. It’s time to wash them away for good.

The campaign is a collaboration between RWDSU and the advocacy groups Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change.    

At a press conference today, carwash worker David de la Cruz Pérez told reporters:  

Washing cars, the boss makes us work long hours, from seven in the morning until 7 o’clock at night, for $5.50 an hour plus tips. They yell at us, they disrespect us, and they treat us as if we were not even human beings.

Said Vincent Alvarez, president of New York City Central Labor Council (NYCCLC):

As we learned from WASH’s investigative report, carwashes have little oversight, and health and safety regulations are often routinely ignored while wage and hour laws get broken. These workers deserve better, and they are bravely speaking out today for the recognition of their right to join a union.  

Click here for the full report and to learn more, visit www.washnewyork.org and connect with the campaign on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook for the latest news, updates and calls to action.

The Wash New York campaign is similar to the Southern California CLEAN Carwash Campaign where workers at several carwashes have won representation with the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675.