Calif. Carwashes Agree to $1 Million Back Pay Settlement
Eight California carwashes agreed to a historic $1 million settlement with the state’s attorney general for routinely failing to pay minimum wage or overtime, creating false records of work hours and not paying money owed to employees who quit, according to Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Workers at these car washes were taken advantage of by unscrupulous employers who illegally denied them the pay and benefits they earned. I am pleased that the resolution of this case will allow workers to receive the pay they are owed.
At least $800,000 of the settlement will go to workers who were underpaid, according to court records. Other parts of the settlement will pay taxes and penalties. Click here for a copy of the settlement agreement.
Two of the washes in the agreement are Bonus Car Wash in Santa Monica and Marina Car Wash in Venice, where workers fought and won recognition with United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 last year. Says Local 75′s Dave Campbell:
We are glad that the Attorney General is taking seriously the issue of wage theft among car wash workers. Workers have been waiting to be made whole for past violations for years.
6,000 Bay Area Nurses on One-Day Strike
Concerned over the erosion of quality of care and cuts to patient protections, some 6,000 nurses have been on a one-day strike today at California’s second largest private hospital and at one of its most profitable corporate hospital chains.
The members of National Nurses United include 2,000 RNs at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center and Miller Children’s Hospital in Long Beach, and 4,000 RNs who work at nine Bay Area facilities that are part of the Sutter Health corporation.
Michele Ross and Elsa Matos-Leal, both RNs, summed up why they took today’s action:
Despite hundreds of hours of talks, this corporation persists with the
same hard line — pushing more than 150 proposals aimed at the heart of our patient advocacy and eroding safety standards that protect our patients.Sutter, not a mom-and-pop grocery store, hardly needs the sweeping concessions. It has amassed more than $3.7 billion in profits the past six years. It pays salaries of more than $1 million a year to 20 top executives, most of whom received pay increases of more than 100 percent from 2005 to 2009 according to Sutter’s own public IRS filings.
Long Beach RNs say they have gotten no assurances from hospital management for safe RN-to-patient staffing at all times and oppose the hospital’s refusal to implement safe patient lift policies to prevent accidents to patients and injuries to nurses, despite enactment of a state law requiring such policy. Read the rest of this entry »
Plan to Import Energy Would Cost 15,000 Jobs
Sempra Energy’s proposal to build a new transmission line to import electricity into the United States from green energy generators located in Mexico would cost as many as 15,000 U.S. jobs and nearly $300 million in lost local, state and federal tax revenue, according to a new report.
A huge 90 percent of the direct job losses would occur in Imperial County, Calif., which had the highest unemployment rate in the nation in April 2011 at 27.9 percent.
Bob Balgenorth, president of the California State Building and Construction Trades Council, said the report confirms what workers have known all along: Sempra’s plan is a job killer.
Women, Black Workers Hard Hit by Attacks on Public Employees
The improved jobs figures out last Friday obscured the ongoing decline in public-sector jobs. As the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics noted when releasing the March unemployment data:
Employment in local government continued to trend down over the month. Local government has lost 416,000 jobs since an employment peak in September 2008.
The loss of such jobs is important because the nation’s well-being depends not only on job numbers increasing, but on the creation of quality jobs—those that pay decent wages and enable people to attain or maintain a middle-class life. According to National Employment Law Project (NELP), the new jobs being created aren’t as good as the ones that have been lost. NELP found that jobs in lower wage industries, such as retail and food preparation, made up 23 percent of the jobs that were lost in the recent recession. Yet they made up 49 percent of the jobs the economy has gained in the past year. As the BBC Business puts it:
In other words, it appears that while people may finally be returning to work, they have to work for less pay.
20,000 March for the Middle Class in L.A.
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Nearly 20,000 working people marched through downtown Los Angeles Saturday, making it clear they will fight any attempt to launch a Wisconsin-like attack on workers in cash-strapped California. The march stretched for several blocks and included nurses, telephone technicians, electricians, truckers, screenwriters, actors, longshoremen, teachers and others. This is the largest action by Los Angeles workers in recent history.
The Wisconsin bill eliminates the freedom of state employees to bargain for a better life. Speaking at the Los Angeles rally, Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin, said even though the bill exempts firefighters, his union still opposes the law. He said the law is a direct attack on all unions and the entire middle class.
Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, told the crowd:
In Los Angeles, we’re not going to sit back and watch Republican governors and their right-wing corporate backers roll back the freedoms of working people in this country. We support Wisconsin and any other state where those freedoms are under attack.
At the rally, Mitchell gave a rousing speech connecting Wisconsin to LA.
This is about an attack on me. This is about an attack on you. This is an emergency we have in Wisconsin and across the U.S. This is about an attack on the middle class. We need to reclaim our moral outrage … because we are in the battle of a lifetime.
As Part of One Nation, Union Members Mobilize to Get Out the Vote
While tens of thousands of union members were marching for jobs and economic justice on 10-2-10 in One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, D.C., thousands of their brothers and sisters across the country were knocking on union family doors and volunteering to get out the vote for 11-2-10.
In Ohio, union families in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus and Dayton fanned out in neighborhoods spreading the word that Nov. 2 is about jobs and the candidates who will fight for jobs to rebuild the economy–candidates like Ted Strickland for governor, Lee Fisher for U.S. Senate and Betty Sutton for U.S. House.
Along with organizing a 28-bus convoy to One Nation, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO launched a Day of Door Knocking Action around the state where several hundred union volunteers spent part of their Saturday visiting union households to communicate with their co-workers, friends and neighbors about working family issues.
In California, union members distributed fliers outlining the Wall Street/corporate platform of Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.
Kentucky working families were out in force for U.S. Senate candidate Jack Conway who is running strong campaign against Tea Party-backed Republican Rand Paul and Paul’s platform to phase out and privatize Social Security and Medicare.
For more on Labor 2010, click here.
Thousands Rally in Los Angeles for Jobs, Candidates Who Will Create Jobs
More than 6,000 union members and allies rallied Friday in Los Angeles for a massive jobs action to tell California candidates for public office that the state needs leaders who can create and save jobs, not corporate-backed millionaires like gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman and Senate candidate Carly Fiorina.
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Trumka: ‘We’re Going to Rebuild America With Jobs’
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In the political showdown between Wall Street and Main Street, California is a key battleground. With the third highest jobless rate in the country and a towering budget deficit, California needs leaders who can create and save jobs, not just spout ”more of the same corporate bull,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told a crowd of thousands at a mass jobs rally in Los Angeles today.
“How are we going to rebuild America? With jobs! Who’s going to rebuild America? Working people with jobs!”
The choice for voters is clear in California, said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation. The Republican candidates for governor and U.S. senator, respectively, Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, are mirror images of each other.
Both are failed CEOs. Both slashed thousands of jobs to make themselves richer. And both have a dangerous agenda that will douse any hope for economic recovery. They want to slash jobs. Eliminate pensions. Scale back overtime pay and meal breaks for workers. They’re part of the greed is good crowd. I think it’s pretty clear that’s the wrong direction.
PG&E Engineers Get the Word Out At Work About Whitman’s Wall Street Agenda
(This is an excerpted cross-post from the California Labor Federation.)
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Most of the scientists and engineers at PG&E know that their jobs are increasingly vulnerable to outsourcing—but they don’t all know about Meg Whitman’s long and devastating track record when it comes to sending US jobs overseas.
To make sure their colleagues know the truth about Meg Whitman’s penchant for offshoring, a small but dedicated group of PG&E engineers and scientists (who are members of IFPTE-ESC Local 20) stuck around after work on Monday evening, and approached each of their co-workers one-on-one as they exited the office building in downtown Oakland to offer them information and educational materials on Meg Whitman’s history of outsourcing jobs as a corporate executive, as well as Jerry Brown’s strong track record when it comes to creating millions of good jobs in California. Read the rest of this entry »
New York Lawmakers Pass Domestic Worker Rights Bill
New York is on the verge of becoming the first state to require overtime pay and one day off a week for domestic workers after the state Senate on Tuesday passed landmark legislation extending those rights to more than 200,000 housekeepers, nannies and other domestic workers in the state.
The state Assembly passed a similar bill last year and lawmakers must reconcile the differences in the bills. The new law would take effect Jan.1.
State Sen. Diane Savino, a Staten Island Democrat, told the Associated Press:
New York has long been a leader in protecting the rights of workers. We enacted child labor laws long before the federal government did and were the first to pass labor protections for those toiling in sweatshops.
