Workers Strike San Francisco’s Grand Hyatt Hotel
 |
| San Francisco hotel workers rallied in September for a fair contract. |
Hotel workers began a three-day strike this morning at the Grand Hyatt Union Square in San Francisco. The strike comes two weeks after members of UNITE HERE Local 2 voted by a 92 percent to 8 percent margin to authorize strikes at any of the 31 upscale hotels in San Francisco.
Local 2’s contracts with the luxury hotels expired in June. Since then, the union has been trying to negotiate new agreements. But despite earning record profits over the past five years, the hotels are using the recession as an excuse to demand changes in eligibility for the employees’ health care plan that would eliminate coverage or put it out of reach for many workers.
“This is a limited strike,” said Local 2 President Mike Casey.
It’s intended to send a clear signal to this corporation that they cannot use a temporary downturn to permanently drive down workers’ living standards.
While demanding workers take concessions, the Pritzker family, which owns the Grand Hyatt, is conducting an initial public stock offering today expected to raise close to $1 billion.
Says Aurolyn Rush, a 13-year telephone operator at the Grand Hyatt:
Hyatt’s cashing out almost a billion dollars for its owners, but at the same time they’re pushing to make health care unaffordable for me and my family? That is unforgivable, and we’re not going to stand for it.
Shuler to IBEW: Let’s Fight for Jobs
At this week’s Electrical Workers (IBEW) conference, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said we must focus on creating jobs and building a strong, sustainable and fair economy for the future.
Shuler, who rose to leadership as an IBEW organizer, congratulated the union’s members on their efforts in mobilizing and contacting members of Congress on behalf of health care reform and other key issues.
We still have a long way to go before we can truly have economic recovery, Shuler said, noting that as she travels around the country, the word she hears most often is “jobs.” The AFL-CIO worked hard for the economic recovery package passed by Congress, but the union movement still has much to do to address the massive unemployment and underemployment around the nation, she said. The AFL-CIO is pushing for more stimulus dollars to invest in energy, transportation, communications and school construction—for investment in green jobs and for more aid to state and local governments that have been slammed by biggest budget hits in decades. Most critically, Shuler said, if the union movement doesn’t push to make this happen, no one will.
Shuler said extending unemployment benefits was an urgent priority that will prevent further damage to our economy. With 26 million people looking for work, or discouraged entirely from the job market, and long-term unemployment at its highest level in more than 25 years, it’s critical to give some relief, she said.
Green jobs and a new energy economy have the potential to revitalize the country, Shuler said, but only if those jobs are good jobs, with fair wages and benefits. We can protect the environment and build a more prosperous future, she said, by getting a headstart on new technologies and increasing energy efficiency.
Shuler also laid out her vision for the policies we need to build a stronger economy—including health care reform, the Employee Free Choice Act and financial reform.
Baseball Stars Knock It Out of the Park for Employee Free Choice
 |
|
Just in time for the World Series, 12 members of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) have added their names to the broad coalition in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.
The players have signed a statement and appeared in print ads in Washington, D.C., papers yesterday. World Series participants Jimmy Rollins, Shane Victorino and Mark Teixeira took part. They were joined by Heath Bell, Dave Bush, LaTroy Hawkins, Torii Hunter, John Lannan, Andrew Miller, J.J. Putz, Justin Verlander and Adam Wainwright.
In a joint statement, these players say:
All Americans should have the same opportunity we’ve had—to be able to join a union without being fired and to negotiate with their employers without being penalized. Today, our country is facing some tough times. Health care costs are skyrocketing. Families are losing homes. Savings and retirement income are disappearing overnight.
Shuler in Oregon: The Sharks We Defeated Are Still Circling
At the Oregon AFL-CIO convention, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, who got her start organizing in Oregon, spoke yesterday to hundreds of delegates from across the state and encouraged them to start now on educating and mobilizing union members. Shuler told delegates:
Last year, you helped transform our country. And everything you did in 2008, we must do from now to 2010—and here’s why. The sharks you defeated last November are still circling out there. They’ve never given up. They’re just as vicious now, and they want to destroy everything you won. Don’t let them do it.
You have a big job next year: electing a governor who’s pro-working family, pro-union, pro-us; making sure we re-elect the representatives who stand up for what’s right; and beating back the two initiatives that our right-wing pals have dreamed up for 2010….So it’s not too early to get ready.
Rite Aid Workers Win Big Victory from NLRB
 |
||||
|
||||
Robert Masciola in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department writes about a victory in the three-year struggle by Rite Aid workers to join a union.
In March 2008, nearly 700 workers at Rite Aid’s distribution center in Lancaster, Calif., overcame a vicious two-year anti-union campaign to gain a voice on the job by voting for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 26.
The workers sought union representation to put an end to punishing production quotas and mandatory overtime piled on top of 10-hour shifts. They work in hot desert summers with no air conditioning in their work areas, with no job security.
As we enter the fall of 2009, workers are still fighting hard to win a first contract. But it has been hard given the employers’ conduct.
Traub: Workers Need Employee Free Choice Now More Than Ever
 |
|
Amy Traub, research director at the Drum Major Institute, has a great piece on the economic crisis and why we need the Employee Free Choice Act.
Traub says the nation’s economic crisis is making workers feel powerless on the job—more willing to accept poor treatment, long hours and most crippling for the economy, cuts in wages and benefits.
What they need, she says, is the freedom to form a union and bargain so they no longer end up bearing all the pain from the economic crisis. Traub writes:
“Productivity is soaring as fewer workers get more work done. But working people are not seeing many of the benefits. And that’s bad news for the economy as a whole. Consumers aren’t likely to resume spending when wages are down, especially without the ability they once had to borrow against high home values. It’s a recipe for a vicious economic cycle.
“The way out should include additional public stimulus, but it must also involve shifting more power to employees—enough to push back and stop making America’s working families the single easiest target for every negative economic development.”
Shuler in Pennsylvania: We Must Inspire Next Generation
 |
Speaking at last night’s annual dinner of the Southeastern Area Labor Federation of Pennsylvanian, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told the state’s union members we must get energized and active so that we can address the needs of a generation of young workers left behind by an economy that isn’t working:
We need to reach out to millions of unorganized workers who just don’t see us as the answer to their problems. To tell you the truth, they don’t see us at all. Above all, that means young workers in their 20s and 30s….They don’t have a connection to the union movement….No wonder young workers don’t realize what we have to offer them.
Shuler, who has been traveling nearly non-stop since becoming the youngest person ever elected as a top AFL-CIO officer last month, cited the AFL-CIO report “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” which found that workers under age 35 have been hit especially hard by the economic crisis. The economic hardship damages their earning power now and well into the future.
Settlement of 20-Year-Old Anti-Union Hiring Cases Shows Need for Employee Choice
In a case that clearly illustrates the need for real labor law reform, four construction unions have reached a settlement with Fluor Daniel over the company’s practice of discriminating against union organizers who apply for work. It took nearly 20 years for the cases to be resolved and some of the original workers in the cases have died.
Fluor, one of the nation’s largest engineering and construction companies, will pay $12 million in back pay and interest to 167 union members who were denied jobs. Each member will receive between $8,000 and $217,000.
The settlement ends several cases before the National Labor Relations Board, brought by three of the unions—Boilermakers, Electrical Workers and Plumbers and Pipe Fitters. The United Brotherhood of Carpenters is also a party to the litigation. Some of the cases date back to the early 1990s.
Big Corporate Dollars Fund Shoddy Studies
With the insurance industry releasing a “study” today that uses dubious numbers to fight health care reform, it’s useful to remember that the tactic of relying on fake numbers is nothing new to corporate lobbies.
Case in point: a study by Anne Layne-Farrar, paid for by business interests that use it as a cudgel against the Employee Free Choice Act. Layne-Farrar’s study contended that passing the Employee Free Choice Act would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of thousands of jobs—a figure without factual grounding but useful to those interested in preventing workers from forming a union and bargaining for a better life.
At In These Times, Art Levine takes a close look at Layne-Farrar and other scholars whose work do not reflect reality, but instead pushes the anti-worker agenda of groups—like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—who paid for the study. These groups are fighting to protect the status quo for CEOs, not jobs for workers.
Trumka to UMWA: Keep Fighting
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka traveled to West Virginia yesterday to celebrate a new term for Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts and Secretary-Treasurer Daniel Kane and to recognize the contributions of the union where he got his start.
Trumka talked about the crippling effects of the economic crisis and the need for a strong, energetic union movement to turn it around not just for individual workers and their families, but for the whole country.
Reaching back through the long history of the UMWA and the union movement, Trumka said the power of workers, uniting together, helped pull the country out of the 1930s Depression. With unemployment at a 26-year high and housing and health care increasingly hard for families to afford, we need that spirit now, Trumka said:
There’s only one way working people have ever won in the past; and only one way we ever will win in the future. And, sisters and brothers, it’s not by begging for it. It’s not by pleading for it. And it’s not even by praying for it. It’s by standing up and fighting for it.
