Human Rights Day: Celebrate Our Struggles, Build for the Future
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In a dramatic way not seen in years, today’s celebration of International Human Rights Day arrives during enormous and popular ongoing struggles.
In the worldwide job crisis, workers must still have right to decent work and should not be forced to choose between unemployment and precarious work. See the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) message on International Human Rights Day.
Yesterday, people around the world joined a conversation with Navi Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, to talk about human rights—including the right to form or join unions in the workplace and to bargain for a better life.
You can watch a short video or listen to the conversation here.
This has been an extraordinary year for human rights around the world. Millions found their voices using the Internet and instant messaging to inform, inspire and mobilize supporters to seek basic human rights. Social media helped activists organize peaceful protest movements in cities across the globe—from Tunis to Madison, Wis.; from Cairo to Cleveland and New York to Madrid—at times in the face of violent repression.
At the core of the struggles around the globe is the right for all people to have a real voice on the job, and the right to a decent job.
Report: Wage Theft Reaches Deep into the Low-Wage Economy
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A new report shows how wage theft reaches deep into the low-wage economy.
“The Movement to End Wage Theft” illustrates the problem with the stories of workers employed by a grocery chain, a temp agency, a construction company and other incorporated businesses. These workers’ wages were stolen by their employers who failed to pay the minimum wage or overtime, or refused to abide by work-break and safety rules.
Findings from a 2009 study cited by the study’s author, Nik Theodore of the University of Illinois at Chicago, concluded that 26 percent of low-wage workers in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles were paid less than the legal minimum wage, and 76 percent of workers who worked overtime were not paid the legally required overtime rate.
Here’s one account from the report (available here in PDF format):
For six years Modesta has worked as a cashier in a retail store in Brooklyn, New York. When she started at the job she was paid $5 an hour. She worked 60 hours, 6 days a week, but received no overtime pay. Last year she was given a “raise” and now earns $6.60 an hour—still well below the state minimum wage. Most of her co-workers are paid even less, but she says her employer has been able to continue this practice because the workers are too scared to complain.
National Taxi Workers Alliance Gets AFL-CIO Charter at Future of Work Event
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The National Taxi Workers Alliance made history when its leader, Bhairavi Desai, accepted the organization’s charter as a member of the AFL-CIO during an event today on “The Future of Work.” Highlighting the changing shape of the union movement, the event opened with remarks by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis. Desai then took part in a panel discussion which included representatives of other labor organizations that represent workers who are either traditionally excluded from coverage by labor law, or for whom the changing shape of the economy means the protections they have on paper mean little.
Joining Desai were Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance; Justin Molito, director of organizing for the Writers Guild of America, East; and Bill Cruice, founding executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals, NNU. The panel was rounded out by economist David Weil, a professor at Boston University, who discussed how changing business models affected the exercise of employee rights. Before the program began, dozens of exuberant taxi workers, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ”Justice, Rights, Respect, Dignity” crowded around Solis, Trumka and Desai. Trumka said the taxi workers are:
an inspiring example of how working people are organizing even in the face of employment relations that have eroded all of our rights.
America’s Future: Domestic Workers Organizing Nationwide
Dave Johnson, a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, sends us this.
At this morning’s Take Back the American Dream conference plenary, Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), told the audience that the people who care for others are a national treasure, but the nation has yet to adequately value their work. Poo described the situation of one domestic worker who cared for a disabled child 18 hours a day, six days a week for less than $3 an hour—and who was fired without notice, leaving her homeless overnight.
Some 2.5 million domestic workers are vulnerable to such abuse, Poo said. America does not value care culturally, and such work has been explicitly excluded from labor law since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act was passed without covering farm workers or domestic workers. Poo described the incredible efforts by domestic workers to organize in New York, where
after six years of organizing in New York, they passed the nation’s first statewide domestic workers bill of rights, and now are taking this to other states.
Still Nickel and Dimed and (Not) Getting by in America
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Congratulations to author Barbara Ehrenreich for the 10th anniversary re-issuance of her classic study of the working poor, “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.” Ehrenreich didn’t just write a theoretical study, she based the book on her experiences working as a waitress, a Wal-Mart “associate,” a nursing home aide and a maid employed by a cleaning service. At the time the book came out, Ehrenreich wrote a piece for us based on her experiences. She concluded:
…even in an economy celebrating unequaled prosperity, a person can work hard, full-time or even more, and not make enough to live on.
That was in 2001. The U.S. unemployment rate at mid-year was 4.5 percent. There were 150,400 home foreclosures in the first quarter of that year, as reported in Aug. 17, 2001, by The New York Times, which noted that home sales were on track to make 2001 the second-best year ever.
Today, the 2001 economy seems like a dream. America’s jobless rate has hovered between 9.1 percent and 10.1 percent for more than a year, with foreclosures in July alone totaling 221,763—and that figure is a 44-month low.
Working at low-wage jobs during the dot.com boom when the economy was buzzing, Ehrenreich wrote that while employed as a waitress,
Video Shines Spotlight on Real-Life ‘Help’
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When the highly acclaimed movie “The Help” premiers today, 2.5 million domestic workers will be hard at work taking care of someone else’s children and cleaning their homes. Working people are hoping that this movie, which for the first time features African American domestic workers at the center of a major motion picture, will also shine a spotlight on those who usually remain invisible.
Fifty years after the stories told in the film, domestic workers remain an unprotected workforce, without access to basic rights that other workers take for granted. Still mostly women of color, far too few domestic workers receive overtime pay, meal and rest breaks, sick leave or vacation. And far too many of them work for less than minimum wage.
Caring Across Generations Campaign Kicks Off at First-Ever Care Congress
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Emmelle Israel, a fellow in the AFL-CIO Media Department, writes about the founding of the Caring Across Generations campaign.
More than 700 care workers, care recipients, community activists and union members came together yesterday in Washington, D.C., for the first-ever Care Congress. The energy in the room was electric as everyone celebrated the launch of the Caring Across Generations campaign, a national effort to reform the direct-care industry. Care workers from across the nation were joined by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Schuler and AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer Lee Saunders. Each spoke about the importance of direct care work for the nation as a whole and even in their own lives.
Care workers look after some of the most vulnerable populations in our country: the young, people with disabilities and the elderly. But they are also part of one of our nation’s most vulnerable workforces. Care workers and domestic workers in general lack legal protection under U.S. labor law, which leads to a lack of proper training, lack of benefits, wages, that place many below the poverty line and employer harassment. Add in the fact that care workers are largely immigrants and female, and their exploitation as an “invisible, undervalued and unappreciated” workforce becomes even more prevalent. However, the care workers who spoke out at the Care Congress were determined to not remain without a voice.
Solis told the story of meeting one such worker, a nanny named Allison Julien who once told her, “Domestic workers make all work possible.” Those who attended the Care Congress and those who are part of the Caring Across Generations campaign are coming together to make sure that the work care givers do gains the respect and protection that it deserves.
Now Countries Need to Ratify the New Global Domestic Workers Rule
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Across the world, working men and women celebrated the historic vote June 16 by the UN’s International Labor Organization creating a new global rule to protect domestic workers. Now the work begins to make sure countries implement the rule, known as a convention, and make protections for domestic workers a reality.
In a joint statement, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Worker Alliance (NDWA), said the convention “acknowledges that domestic work—work performed in or for private homes—is indeed work.”
Further, the people who perform this work—overwhelmingly women, migrants and people from historically marginalized communities—are indeed workers, and thus entitled to the same rights and protections that all other workers enjoy.
Milestone for World’s Domestic Workers
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Today, at the International Labor Organization’s 100th annual conference in Geneva Switzerland, the global community took a major collective step towards achieving economic and social justice for some of the world’s most vulnerable workers with the overwhelming adoption of the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention and accompanying recommendation.
More than 80 percent of the world’s governments, workers and employers voted in favor of the convention’s adoption, with 90 percent supporting the accompanying recommendation. In practice the convention and recommendation set out basic minimum rights and protections to which domestic workers within countries that ratify the convention are legally entitled. Symbolically, however, these instruments achieve much more.
Domestic Workers: ‘We Have Broken the Silence. We Have Yet to Break Our Chains’
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Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance /La Alianza Nacional de Trabajadoras del Hogar, sends her observations on the International Labor Organization’s (ILO‘s) meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, where a new global rule on domestic workers is set for a vote June 16.
I’m on my way home from a week of discussion and debate about the “Decent Work for Domestic Workers” convention at the ILO’s International Labor Conference in Geneva. This is the first international convention on domestic work. Getting here has been a long road, more than 10 years in the making. The final vote on the convention will take place on June 16.
This process was a powerful reminder of the importance of movements: movements of workers that demand change, movements of women that promote hopeful visions for new ways in which we can relate to each other, social movements that create progressive governments that can play powerful roles in international arenas. It was the growing movement of domestic workers around the world—and our capacity to capture the imagination of trade union movements and governments internationally—that got domestic work onto the agenda at the ILO in the first place.
