Unionists & Restaurant Opportunities Center help non-union workers organize against wage theft

Restaurant Opportunities Center & BIGRAFX

 

Union women make $212 a week more than non-union

Unions narrow pay gap with men, while non-union women fall farther behind

The typical full-time union member made $908 a week last year. That’s $192 more than the median wage a non-union worker got for working full-time, and up $22 from the previous year, the Labor Department reports.

But the union advantage is even more dramatic for women workers. A woman who works full-time as a union member typically makes $840 a week, compared to $628 for non-union women. What’s more, that union woman earns more than the typical non-union man gets paid -- $54 more each week.

The "wage gap" between men and women is narrower for unionists than for everyone else -- and it’s closing for union women. Meanwhile, women who don’t belong to unions are seeing their wages fall farther behind the wages of men. Union women now make 86% of what union men are paid -- but non-union women get paid just 79.9% of what non-union men earn, down from 80.3% the year before.

The bottom line: Unionists still far out-earn their non-union colleagues, and the gap is widening.

Machinists launch union for the unemployed

Online organizing, resources, help, discounts

"You lost your job. You're not alone. 31 million Americans face the same challenges. You want your job back. You want your life back. But you can't do it alone. Neither can anyone else. You all need each other. That's what UCubed is here to do: Help you and 31 million other Americans organize, work together and get back to work. Let UCubed help you connect. Form a cube, and multiply your political and economic power by 6. Then by 36. Eventually, by 31 million. Take Control."

That’s how the Machinists Union describes the new union it founded to help the unemployed organize –Ucubed. "Like old-fashioned barn raisings, activists can help each other polish resumes and network to identify job openings ," says Machinists President Thomas Buffenbarger. Ucubed’s website also features a "Machinists Mall" of sales and discounts that used to be open only to members.

Read more

M. Patricia Smith wins post as ‘workers’ lawyer’ for the nation

One of the last things the Senate did before the Democrats lost their 60-vote working majority was to okay M. Patricia Smith as "the workers’ lawyer," a.k.a. the federal Solicitor of Labor.

Ms. Smith had done a stellar job defending justice for workers as commissioner of the New York State Labor Department. And that’s just what's wrong with her, cried Republican Sen. Mke Enzi of Wyoming. Enzi actually claimed that the Wage and Hour Watch Smith set up to go after employers who violate wage and hour laws made her unfit for the post. That was just a front for unions, he fumed.

Read more

New web site helps women defend their health

What we need to take action & live longer

The Women's Health Task Force has launched a web site "to provide a place where women can find accurate and easy-to-understand preventive health information" so they can "take action to live longer and better quality lives."

The site is packed with useful tools for women's health -- from the perspective of women. Current features (for February) include:

• Advice on how to prevent heart disease -- the #1 Killer of U.S. men and women;
• "Questions to ask your doctor";
• The facts about how the second most common cancer in women – cervical cancer – is entirely preventable;
• The lowdown on new breast cancer guidelines – and the controversy around them;
• Links to valuable resources; and
• Headlines from A Daily Women’s Health Policy Report (new each day).

You’ll also find basic information about key health issue like obesity, depression and osteoporosis (weakening bones).

Read more

Postdoc researchers at three U.Mass. campuses choose UAW

Under Mass. law, they can organize through 'card check'

Union supporter Karissa Atticks wants paid maternity leave

Some 300 postdoctoral researchers working for the University of Massachusetts at campuses in Boston, Amherst and Dartmouth are unionizing. Now that a majority have signed union cards saying they want UMass Postdoctoral Researchers Organize/United Auto Workers (UMass PRO/UAW) to represent them, it triggers a process that will require the university to negotiate over wages, health insurance, job security and other workplace issues.

In Massachusetts, the Written Majority Authorization law gives public workers and some private-sector workers the right to unionize with a "card check." Once the state labor board confirms that a majority have signed union cards, the union will be recognized and UMass has to negotiate.

"We’ve taken this step so we can protect our rights on the job, and make sure postdocs working on different campuses and in different labs are treated fairly and receive comparable pay and benefits," explained Simona Maccarrone, a postdoctoral researcher from UMass Amherst.

Read more

Attack on Airport screeners’ right to organize

Anti-union vendetta in Congress claims another victim

Taken in part from PAI information

DeMint aimed to kill health care too

President Obama’s pick to head the Transportation Security Administration -- the agency that runs airport screening – was downed by an attack that has nothing to do with making travelers secure. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent and police detective, is a top security official with the Los Angeles airports authority. But those qualifications mean nothing to Republican Sen. James DeMint of South Carolina, who led the assault on Southers’ nomination.

Read more

2010 Union summer schools for women

Midwest summer school flyer

Building skills and solidarity:

• July 6-10, Portland, Oregon.
  The Western Regional Summer Institute for Union Women will take place at Reed college. For more information, contact Helen Moss.
• Last week of July, State College, Pennsylvania.
  The Northeast Regional Women's School will be held at Penn State University. For more information, contact Cheryl Reynolds, Julie Sadler or Amy Dietz.
• July 28-August 1, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
  The Midwest School for Women Workers will be hosted by the University of Minnesota Labor Education Service. The Coordinators will be Mary Bellman and Deborah Rosenstein.

Read more

'Female Power' still leaves women paying big price to have children

The Economist looks into gains for women workers worldwide

The Economist

"Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men," reported The Economist, a weekly magazine covering international business, in December. Yet mothers make a lot less, especially if they’re single.

Noting that women have moved en masse into the workplace world-wide, The Economist warns that "Women’s rising aspirations have not been fulfilled. They have been encouraged to climb onto the occupational ladder only to discover that the middle rungs are dominated by men and the upper rungs are out of reach." Why is that?

The number one reason mothers are paid less

While prejudice still hurts women, says The Economist, "the biggest reason why women remain frustrated is more profound: many women are forced to choose between motherhood and careers." While some traditionally "female" jobs such as teaching mix well with motherhood because of the hours and pay structure, most jobs don’t.

"The reason for the income gap may thus be the opposite of prejudice," concludes The Economist. "It is that women are judged by exactly the same standards as men."

"This Hobson's choice is imposing a high cost on both individuals and society," the magazine continues. "Many professional women reject motherhood entirely; in Switzerland 40% of them are childless. Others delay child-bearing for so long that they are forced into the arms of the booming fertility industry. Some choose not to work at all, representing a loss to collective investment in talent. But a choice must be made."

Read more

NLRB urges court to slap injunction on Covanta

To force company to pay annual raises & bonuses

When it comes to justice for Covanta workers in Rochester, Massachusetts who voted to unionize back in May, 2008, today’s NLRB isn’t taking "no" for an answer. In November, the NLRB went to court for an federal injunction for serious violations of labor law. The injunction would mean immediate pay raises for all 140 workers at the SEMASS waste-to-energy plant.

The procedure the NLRB resorted to -- Section 10(j) – has been used rarely and only for extreme cases where company actions cause real and immediate harm to workers. The NLRB acted after Covanta refused to pay raises and bonuses to workers because they voted union. The NLRB had earlier issued a complaint over a number of violations of federal labor law, including blatantly illegal work rules.

Progress is finally being made at the bargaining table, however, where Utility Workers Union Local 369 won an interim agreement with Covanta that preserves all existing benefits for workers until the parties reach a final collective bargaining agreement. That was a sharp turn-about from Covanta’s previous demands for steep cuts in benefits. Workers ratified the interim contract on November 1 with a whopping 93 percent approval vote.

Read more

 

A great way to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Clergy launch boycott for fired Bissell workers

On Jan. 18, around 100 people gathered with church leaders in Joliet, Illinois to support 70 warehouse workers who’d been fired en masse after they filed complaints and announced they were forming a union.

The clergy launched a boycott of Bissell Homecare Inc., which had employed the workers through a temp agency. On the boycott list are Bissell vacuum cleaners, mops, brooms, brushes, cleaning formulas and sweepers products. The Chicago-based Warehouse Workers for Justice, which helped organize the Joliet event, hope the boycott spreads from church to church and town to town.

Since Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot dead while supporting sanitation workers who went on strike in Memphis (after two had been crushed to death on the job), it’s no stretch to think he would have been proud of those church leaders who stood up for workers on his birthday this year.

Read more

Typical union member now works for the government

As jobs crisis & lax laws hurt members at private employers

For the first time in American history, more union members work for the government than for business and other private employers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced in January.

As the recession hammered hard at both manufacturing and construction, the number of union members fell by 771,000, wiping out the gains of the previous two years. That drop "largely reflected the overall drop in employment due to the recession," the BLS explained when it released the bad news. Auto workers were especially hard hit, as assembly lines ground to a halt and factories and showrooms bolted their doors shut.

These days, 7.9 million public workers are union members, outnumbering the 7.4 million members in the private sector. Organizing at companies in the private sector has been a tougher challenge, thanks to weak labor laws and trade laws let companies shift production to anywhere in the world -- even to factories with slave-like conditions.

Among the least unionized jobs are also some that can’t so easily be moved abroad, however. In farming, fishing and forestry only 2.8% of jobs are union and just 3.1 percent of sales work is union.

A larger share of those who still have their jobs are women, the Labor Department announced. In January women made up half -- 49.9 percent of the labor force, compared with 48.8% back when the recession hit in Dec. 2007.

Read more

New Times: New Guild

Grant recipient Rosen Lum kicks off series

Rebecca Rosen Lum

"Our industry hemorrhaged 86,400 jobs from November 2008 to November 2009" and "It takes courage and commitment to be a journalist these days," wrote Rebecca Rosen Lum, in the first installment of a 7-part series called "New Times: New Guild."

Written for the California Media Workers Guild/CWA ,Rosen Lum’s article explains how they’re launching the first Guild-sponsored freelance unit in North America, which "intends to set standards for quality and fair treatment in all platforms, eventually forging a movement to be reckoned with in the new media world.

"Mainstream media outfits like the San Francisco Chronicle and MediaNews Group increasingly rely on freelancers to cover their depleted staff," she writes. By working together, "Guild Freelancers will work with represented Guild bargaining units at those newspapers to ensure staffers and freelancers are solidly aligned, and one group cannot be pitted against the other."

Supporting Rosen Lum in launching this exciting project is a grant from the Berger-Marks Foundation. Here’s some of what’s already happening:

Read more

Uniform Justice campaign wins another vs. Cintas

Appeals court tells company to honor worker free speech

"Mi ofrenda," painted in honor of Eleazar Torres-Gomez who died in 2007 while working at a Cintas laundry in Tulsa, Oklahoma

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kayancheung/, Creative Commons Li

A 3-judge appeals court unanimously backed the right to "free speech" this December for the 17,000 people working for Cintas Corp, the nation's biggest uniform supplier. The court ruled that Cintas violated their rights when it cracked down on workers who wore union hats and stickers on their uniforms and tossed out pro-union fliers from the break room in Charlotte, N.C. The union they want to join is Unite Here.

The NLRB and the court told Cintas to wipe out from its files any references to disciplinary action for wearing pro-union material, to stop interfering with employee rights, and to post explanations of the NLRB decision at its Charlotte and Branford, Conn., facilities.

The union’s "Uniform Justice" drive is now nearly seven years old. Cintas, which supplies and launders uniforms for restaurant and hotel employees and other workers, posted sales of nearly $4 billion last year.

Cintas earlier tried to sue the union, along with the Teamsters and Change to Win coalition, as "racketeering" criminals for their support of workers. More on how the judge in that case blasted Cintas, as he threw out its complaint against the union and workers’ rights.

Hey LaDY!

Your tin snips are showing!

Beth Szillagyi was a 22 year-old student when she answered a want ad in Springfield, Illinois and walked into the Sheet Metal Workers union hall looking for a job as an apprentice. "My first hurdle," she now recalls, was "the typical cigar-smoking, raspy-voiced business agent. May he rest in peace, but he scared the bejesus out of me back then."

That was in 1979, when women in the trades were a mighty rare sight. Although the want ad encouraged women and minorities to apply, only four of the 200 applicants were women.

After she got the phone call -- "Dolly, you’ve got yourself a job" -- Szillagyi says she "was bound and determined that no one would stop me, even though I had heard that men at the hall were actually betting money that I wouldn’t survive the apprenticeship. Now I have a lot of old friends who would stick up for me should the need arise, but getting to that point was quite a challenge.

"I have had several mentors over the years, and they have meant so much to me… Without these fellas, the journey would have been much more difficult."

Read more

Where is Right to Work Foundation now?

Saks Fifth Avenue - not a class act

Fired cosmetics workers wanted to unionize

Less than two weeks after the retail workers' union filed a petition to represent workers in the cosmetics department of Saks’ flagship Fifth Ave. store in New York, the company abruptly fired all 115 of them. Was it a coincidence, as the store claimed? Not hardly, said Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union Local 1102, which filed labor charges on Jan. 5 for "gross labor law violations."

The fired workers aren’t allowed to get a "severance" package unless they sign a release saying they won’t make legal claims against Saks for anything related to their jobs. That would mean they couldn’t protest that their union right to organize was violated – which, says the union, is blatantly illegal. Some had worked the counters for 20 years.

The company gave the fired workers’ jobs to vendors like Lancome that pay workers less, yet Saks continues to dictate the work they do. The company claims that this is the norm, but while cosmetic companies do have people hawking their wares within Saks stores, the Wall Street Journal reports that "at other branches of the 53-store Saks Fifth Avenue chain, the cosmetic departments [still] are Saks-staffed."

"By maintaining control, but claiming not to be in charge, they think they can sidestep their legal responsibilities as an employer," Local 1102 President Frank Bail protested.

Read more

Oh no

Court okays lower pay for nurse practitioners

Four out of five of the nurse practitioners working for the Tennessee Valley Health System (part of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs) are women. They do the same work as physicians assistants, who are mostly (55%) men. Nurse practitioners need a master’s degree to get hired, but physicians assistants don’t. Yet nurse practitioners at the TVHS get paid less. Does that sound like discrimination?

Why, no, said the courts, after 35 nurse practitioners -- including 5 men – sued under the Equal Pay Act. Just 10 months after the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act restored the right of workers to sue over pay discrimination, an appeals court agreed with a lower court that this wasn’t pay discrimination at all.

Read more