‘Undercover Boss’: A Fairy Tale That Ignores Grim Reality
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As kids, we all loved the sugar-coated fairy tales of handsome and brave princes rescuing beautiful princesses from despotic kings.
The new CBS “reality” show “Undercover Boss” that debuted last night after the Super Bowl is a 21st century sugar-coated fairy tale. But this time, the brave prince is actually a CEO who goes undercover as a regular worker near the bottom of the food chain. There he finds how hard and dirty the job is; how stifling and draconian the company’s workplace rules are; and how crappy the pay is.
Then after walking so many miles in an employee’s work boots, the boss sees the light and promotes workers, raises pay, eases rules and promises a new found respect for all workers.
(If your boss isn’t going undercover anytime soon, be sure to check out American Rights at Work’s new website, Fix Our Jobs, where you can vent about how lousy—and even how great—your job is and learn how to make it better. Click here to watch the video.)
UMass Researchers Choose UAW
A majority of the 300 postdoctoral researchers working at three University of Massachusetts campuses in Boston, Amherst and Dartmouth have signed cards to join a union to negotiate better wages, health care and working conditions.
A delegation of the workers filed a petition yesterday asking the Massachusetts Division of Labor Relations (DLR) to certify their union, UMass Postdoctoral Researchers Organize/UAW (UMass PRO/UAW), as their representative for collective bargaining.
Says Simona Maccarrone, a postdoctoral researcher from UMass Amherst:
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. This will give us the same union rights as other workers and faculty at UMass.
Report: Union Membership Benefits Workers in Every State
Joining a union would be good for workers in every state in the nation because union members receive better pay and benefits than nonunion workers, according to a new report.
“The Unions of the States,” released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), studied union membership rates, size of the union workforce and wage and benefit advantages for union workers in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Click here to read the report.
The report found union membership rates vary widely, from more than 25 percent of workers in New York and Hawaii to fewer than 5 percent in North Carolina and South Carolina. California has the most union members, with 2.6 million, and Wyoming the least, with just about 20,000.
Workers Across Nation Choose a Voice with AFL-CIO Unions
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County workers, professional employees, bakery workers, airborne pilots and “ghost” pilots and sheriff’s deputies are among the latest workers to choose a voice at work with AFL-CIO unions.
In Utah, more than 400 Salt Lake County workers won a union voice with AFSCME Local 1004. The 408 county employees—skilled trades, maintenance and service workers—could vote for union representation only after AFSCME fought and won passage of a county collective bargaining ordinance last year.
John Farrer, a Highway Department worker, says:
This is definitely a positive thing for workers, and that’s why they voted it in. With all that’s happened, the wage cuts, benefits going down and insurance going up, we need a strong union voice to represent the interests of working families.
Foxwoods Casino Dealers Reach Historic Tentative Contract
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More than a year after contract negotiations began, some 2,500 casino dealers at Foxwoods Resort Casino and MGM Grand in Connecticut, members of UAW Local 2121, have a tentative settlement for a first contract. Foxwoods/MGM, owned by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, is the largest gaming complex in the country.
If ratified, the contract would provide an average 12 percent increase in wages over two years and establish a more equitable distribution of tips. The contract also creates what the union describes as “an industry model” for job safety, including programs to reduce repetitive stress injuries, a major extension of medical leave time for workers out with serious illnesses for more than six months and a unique 24-table “smoke-free pit” for workers and customers.
Middle Class Task Force Addresses Child Care, College Costs, Retirement Security
The White House Task Force on the Middle Class today announced several initiatives it says will help middle-class families afford soaring child care costs, care for their aging relatives, cope with the challenge of saving for retirement and pay for their children’s college tuition.
President Obama says the measures will help “ease the burdens on middle-class families who are struggling in this economy, and provide the help they need to get ahead.” The White House says Obama will discuss these and other vital middle-class issues, including job creation and health care in his State of the Union address Wednesday.
The Task Force chairman, Vice President Joe Biden, says the initiatives were developed after a series of meetings during the past year with working families around the country and at the White House.
Every day, middle-class families go to work and help make this country great. For a year, our Task Force has been hearing that they are struggling with soaring costs and squeezed family budgets. These common sense initiatives will help these families cope with these challenges.
Job Crisis Takes Toll on Union Membership
With the economy hemorrhaging jobs—more than 3.3 million jobs lost in 2009—the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show union membership in 2009 dropped slightly, from 12.4 percent of the workforce to 12.3 percent.
Nationwide, union membership dropped by 771,000, to 15.3 million in 2009, according to the BLS.
The recession eliminated jobs across the private sector, but was felt most deeply in manufacturing, transportation and construction—the nation’s economic backbone and heavily unionized sectors of the economy.
Thomas Perez: Fighting Discrimination a Top Priority
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More than 40 years after Martin Luther King’s death, the nation still has a long way to go to achieve his dream of equality and justice, says Thomas Perez.
In a Point of View guest column at the AFL-CIO site, Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, says if King were alive today, he would be fighting for economic justice:
He would continue his quest for economic justice for all Americans to be able to access the great wealth and promise of our nation….He would urge our nation’s leaders to move forward on health care reform, repeating his painfully accurate observation that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
He would join with you, and with your fellow workers nationwide, in calling for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act to ensure that workers can stand up for their rights in the workplace.
He would ask the question: If women outnumber men in the workplace, then why are women still fighting for pay equity in the workplace?
King’s Legacy: Fighting for Justice, Community
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While people of color have made tremendous progress in the past 50 years, there is still a long way to go before Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of justice and equality is realized. The union movement can play a big role at the front of the effort to create that new America, many participants said during the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration.
One of the hallmarks of a more just society is that people take care of each other. On Friday, the more than 400 participants in the King Day celebration, which began Jan. 14 in Greensboro, N.C., spent the day in a mass community service project sorting clothes, supplies and other goods for distribution to local homeless shelters, unemployed people and others in need.
Just Transition to Green Economy Would Create Jobs, Profits
A just transition to a green economy is the only path toward building the broad support needed to combat climate change and to creating and retaining quality jobs and decent work, AFL-CIO Policy Director Damon Silvers said.
Speaking yesterday at the U.N.’s Investor Climate Risk Conference in New York City, Silvers said investors, especially those who manage workers’ pension funds, must change their investment strategies and lead the way to a stronger, greener future.
Silvers delivered the speech on behalf of AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who was called to meet with President Obama on health care.
