Search Results for 'carwash'
Organizing & Bargaining |
Nov 16 |
Carwash Workers’ Message Hits Sunset Boulevard
 |
|
Chloe Osmer of the Clean Carwash Campaign in Los Angeles reports on a new way the workers are delivering their message across the area.
Last week, the message that carwash workers are organizing for justice reached new heights—above L.A.’s famous Sunset Boulevard. The billboard, which reads “Wash Away Injustice: Boycott Vermont Hand Wash,” stands out starkly among the sea of corporate advertising signs that line the popular strip.
Vermont Hand Wash, owned by brothers Benny and Nisan Pirian, has been at the center of an organizing campaign and currently faces charges by the Los Angeles city attorney of criminal misconduct.
Two months ago, carwash workers and their supporters were shut down when they tried to send a public message about their struggle by renting a billboard near Vermont Hand Wash calling on consumers to boycott the carwash.
The boycott message was considered too radical by corporate advertising executives, so the CLEAN Carwash Campaign agreed to a billboard message that read, “Support Carwash Workers: Wash Away Injustice.”
Organizing & Bargaining |
Oct 26 |
L.A. Carwash Workers Celebrate Law Preventing Wage Theft, Spread the Word
 |
|
Chloe Osmer of the Clean Carwash Campaign in Los Angeles took part in a rally to celebrate a new law that protects workers from wage theft and later helped spread the word to carwash workers across the area.
Carwash workers and their community supporters celebrated passage of A.B. 236, a bill to renew the state’s Carwash Worker Law on Friday. Carwash workers, legal services, community organizations and unions announced the launch of an outreach campaign to raise awareness about the law to the roughly 10,000 workers in the Los Angeles-area carwash industry.
The Carwash Worker Law was one of only a handful of labor bills signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this legislative session. Manuel Zuniga, who worked at Florence Carwash in Los Angeles for more than three years, told the crowd:
Carwash workers helped pass this law, and now we want all workers in this industry to know it exists. We have found our voice and we are saying, “Ya basta” (”We’ve had enough”) to exploitation!
In the States, Legislation & Politics, Organizing & Bargaining |
Oct 14 |
California Carwash Workers Win Another Victory
 |
|
Carwash workers in California are fighting for justice and an end to the exploitation many workers suffer at the hands of abusive carwash owners. One of the workers’ major protections—the Carwash Worker Law—was set to expire this year. But the workers and unions supporting them mobilized for its renewal. Chloe Osmer, of the Clean Carwash Campaign sent us this update.
This week, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) signed into law AB 236, a bill to renew the state’s “Carwash Worker Law” and extend it to 2014. The California Labor Federation and the Community-Labor-Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) Carwash Campaign worked hard to win the bill’s passage.
Sponsored by Assembly member Sandre Swanson (D), the law requires all carwashes to register with the state, enabling the state to prevent employers who have violated labor laws in the past from continuing to do so. It also requires that carwash employers purchase a surety bond as wage insurance and contribute to the Carwash Worker Restitution Fund, both of which provide workers with a means to collect owed wages.
Organizing & Bargaining |
Sep 4 |
Report: Wage Theft, Labor Law Violations Widespread Across Country
 |
|
As we celebrate America’s workers this weekend, a new study shows how hard it is for low-wage workers to make a decent living because their employers engage in wage theft and break laws on pay.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with 4,387 workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City, a group of respected academics estimates that 68 percent of the workers surveyed are routinely denied proper overtime pay and often are paid less than minimum wage. The average low-wage worker lost more than $2,600 in annual income due to the violations, 15 percent of their yearly earnings.
The study, “Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers,” was released earlier this week. The three city surveys were conducted throughout 2008 in eight languages by researchers at the National Employment Law Project (NELP), the University of California-Los Angeles, University of Illinois-Chicago, Cornell University and Rutgers University.
Those surveyed are employed in various low-wage industries, including retail, restaurants and grocery stores, carwashes, building services and industrial laundries, home health care, child care, construction, warehousing, transportation and garment manufacturing.
Organizing & Bargaining |
Aug 26 |
Carwash Workers Win Big Victory in NLRB Settlement
 |
||||
|
||||
Carwash workers in Los Angeles won a major victory in their struggle for better working conditions and decent pay. Today, the workers reached a formal settlement in their National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint against Vermont Hand Wash, one of the area’s most notorious anti-worker car washes.
As a result of the settlement, Vermont’s owners must pay more than $50,000 in back pay to workers who were illegally fired for union activity.
The NLRB issued the complaint in late May alleging that Vermont’s management targeted and then fired three workers because they sought to form a union. According to the complaint, among other retaliatory acts, Vermont management cut the hours of union supporters or assigned them less desirable duties and unplugged the time clock when union supporters picketed the carwash, resulting in a loss of wages to workers on the job.
The complaint identifies one manager, Manuel Reyes, who, it says, threatened employees on multiple occasions with bullets, a machete and a combat knife. The NLRB also charged Reyes with similarly threatening two union organizers with a side-handle billy club in front of carwash employees.
Organizing & Bargaining |
Aug 19 |
Justice for Car Wash Workers Too Radical for L.A.
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
|
Looks like a billboard supporting workers’ rights is too controversial for the corporate hacks who seem to run Los Angeles.
The billboard, outside the Vermont Hand Wash in downtown L.A., carried this “radical” statement: “Wash Away Injustice! Support Carwash Workers.” Before it was unveiled, the Vermont Hand Wash, one of the most notorious anti-worker car washes in the city, pressured CBS Billboard to pull it down before a rally took place in support of car wash workers who are fighting to join a union to improve conditions in the industry. Nevermind that the language and design of the billboard had been approved in advance.
As the workers took down the sign, car wash workers and their supporters chanted, “Shame on you!” and “Don’t take it down!” The rally, with hundreds of workers in the Los Angeles area joining AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, members of Congress and local union, clergy and community leaders for the unveiling, carried on below the symbolically blank billboard.
Henry Huerta, director of the Community-Labor-Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) campaign, said:
We came here today to unveil a billboard with a message to Angelinos to “Support Carwash Workers” in their struggle against exploitation by the owners of this carwash. Unfortunately, the company that owns this billboard caved to pressure from the Pirian family. They have violated our First Amendment Rights to Free Speech and are complicit in this employer’s violation of workers’ rights to Free Association. SHAME ON CBS BILLBOARD! AND SHAME ON THE PIRIAN FAMILY!
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles City Attorney filed criminal charges against Benny and Nisan Pirian, the owners, and Manuel Reyes, manager of the Vermont Hand Wash, with 220 counts of criminal misconduct altogether—including conspiracy, witness intimidation, grand theft, brandishing a deadly weapon, failure to pay wages and failure to comply with wage orders of the state’s Industrial Welfare Commission regulating workplace conditions.
Organizing & Bargaining |
Jun 8 |
Reaching Out to New Generation of Labor Lawyers
 |
|
Some 26 law students spent two days in Washington, D.C., learning about opportunities to join the ranks of union lawyers in the ongoing battle for social and economic justice.
The students participated in the law clerk training and networking conference at AFL-CIO headquarters June 5-6. The conference was sponsored by the Minority Outreach Program of the Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC), a network of 1,900 union lawyers from around the country.
Artemio Guerra, a law student at Fordham University, says he learned everything he knows from the union movement. Guerra worked 11 years as a community organizer in Texas, and his parents were activists in the United Farm Workers. Guerra, who is clerking this summer at the law firm of Gladstein, Reif and Meginniss, says:
I can’t think of anything else to do in my life except help working people and their organizations be stronger. I’ve learned that when people come together for a cause, they can get things done.
Organizing & Bargaining |
Jun 4 |
California Labor Commissioner Files Suit to Close 9 Carwash Operations
The fight for justice, fair wages and safe working conditions for Southern California’s carwash workers—carwasheros—received a boost June 2 when the California Labor Commissioner filed a lawsuit to close nine carwashes operating illegally. The same day, the state Assembly passed a bill to continue the state law regulating carwashes the nine are charged with violating.
The CLEAN Carwash Campaign says two of the carwashes targeted in the lawsuit are
examples of the abusive practices in the industry that prompted passage of the Carwash Worker Law.
In the States, Organizing & Bargaining |
Jun 3 |
Labor Board Charges California Carwash Owner
 |
|
The owner and a manager of a Los Angeles carwash where workers were harassed, intimidated and fired by management more than year ago when they tried to form a union now face charges from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
In a complaint issued May 28, the NLRB charges that when workers at Vermont Hand Wash began organizing with the Carwash Workers Organizing Committee (CWOC), they were met with threats, unlawful interrogations and surveillance. CWOC joined with the United Steelworkers (USW) last March as part of the CLEAN Carwash Campaign.
CLEAN Carwash is leading a major citywide effort by unions, community and religious leaders and others seeking to eliminate abuses and uphold standards in the carwash industry. Click here to learn more about the campaign and how you can help the “carwasheros,” as the workers are known.
In the States, Legislation & Politics |
Apr 27 |
Workers Memorial Day 2009
 |
|
The very real threat of being killed or seriously hurt on the job hangs over every worker and workplace in the nation. In 2007—the year with the latest available figures—5,657 workers lost their lives on the job and more than 4 million other workers were hurt or made ill, according to the AFL-CIO’s 18th annual “Death on the Job” report.
“Death on the Job” reports that another 50,000 to 60,000 workers died due to occupational diseases. On an average day, 15 workers lose their lives as a result of workplace injuries and disease, and another 10,959 are injured. Yet little has been done in recent years, says the report, to improve job safety and protect workers.
For eight years, the Bush administration failed to take action to address major safety and health problems. Many OSHA and [Mine Safety and Health Administration] MSHA rules were withdrawn or blocked. The rules that were issued were largely in response to court challenges, congressional mandates or tragedies. New and emerging hazards were not actively addressed. Voluntary efforts were favored over strong enforcement.
