Carwash Workers’ Message Hits Sunset Boulevard
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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.”
Asian Pacific Americans Tell Their Stories at First National Workers’ Rights Hearing
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Ricky Lau, an electrician with the Electrical Workers (IBEW) and a Chinese immigrant, worked for 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week for his former employer, a contracting company. He and his mostly immigrant co-workers, many of whom did not speak English, were ripped off, he says. While they worked 60 to 70 hours, their weekly time cards read 16 to 20 hours. They had no benefits and no health care coverage.
Fed up, he and three other co-workers left the company and joined IBEW. With the help of his union, Lau and the other workers have been able to assert themselves. Now the four workers are suing the company in a class-action suit for back wages.
Report: Face of Unions More Diverse
The face of the union movement has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. In 1983, more than half of all union workers were white men, few union workers had a college degree and nearly one-third were in manufacturing. Today, almost half are women, more than one-third have college degrees and only one in 10 work in manufacturing.
“The Changing Face of Labor, 1983-2008,” a new report released today by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), shows the union movement is more diverse than 25 years ago. The makeup of union members reflects similar shifts in the overall workforce. About half of union workers are in the public sector, while one of every 10 is in manufacturing; and the remaining four are in the private sector outside of manufacturing. Click here to read the report.
Says CEPR senior economist John Schmitt, one of the report’s authors:
The view that the typical union worker is a white male manufacturing worker may have been correct a quarter of a century ago, but it’s not an accurate description of those in today’s labor movement. The unionized workforce is changing with the country, The fastest growing groups in the overall economy are also the fastest growing groups in the labor movement.
FLOC: Mexico Doing Nothing to Solve Organizer’s Murder
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The murder two years ago of Rafael Santiago Cruz, an organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) in Monterrey, Mexico, is part of a corrupt system of supplying immigrant labor to harvest crops on America’s farms, says FLOC President Baldemar Velasquez. Over the past two days, Velasquez and members of his union have been in Washington, D.C., meeting with members of Congress and international human rights panels to push for justice in Cruz’s murder.
Yesterday, FLOC brought the case of Cruz’s murder before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the Organization of American States. After Cruz’s killing in 2007, the IACHR granted protective measures to Velasquez and FLOC staff located in Mexico.
The Mexican government has done little to solve the case. Of the four people who are known to have participated in the murder, all but one of Cruz’s killers remain at large, said Leonel Rivero Rodriquez, a Mexican human rights lawyer, at a briefing today at AFL-CIO headquarters.
Burmese Refugees Battle Oppression in U.S. Plant
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Aung Oo fled his native Burma with his family to escape the brutality, ethnic violence and repression of that country’s military dictatorship.
After being allowed to legally migrate to the United States under the refugee resettlement program, he faces another kind of oppression―working for an employer that pays him half what he should make and that forces him and his co-workers, both native and foreign, to work in unsafe conditions.
So on Sept. 8, Aung Oo and a U.S.-born employee, Tim Hand, went on strike against W&K Steel on behalf of all the other 35 workers in the plant, located in Rankin, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh. They are still on strike.
In a letter to W&K, they demanded that management correct such egregious safety violations as water running down into electrical panels, frayed extension cords with exposed wires in standing water, lack of ventilation, exposure to extreme cold weather and lack of safety training. They also demanded an end to discrimination and equal pay for equal work.
Report: Unbalanced Immigration Enforcement Hurts All Workers’ Rights
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When Josue Diaz, an immigrant worker and his co-workers protested the inhumane and illegal working conditions at a construction site in Texas, their employer called local police and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But the law enforcement officials didn’t enforce the workers’ rights or penalize the employer. They arrested the workers.
Diaz’s experience is not unusual. According to a new report released today, the federal government’s immigration enforcement in recent years—including a heavy reliance on raids and often inadequately trained enforcement agents—has severely undermined efforts to protect workers’ rights, which in turn harms both immigrant and native-born workers alike.
The comprehensive report, “ICED OUT: How Immigration Enforcement Has Interfered with Workers’ Rights,” was prepared by the AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work and the National Employment Law Project (NELP). Drawing on case studies like Diaz’s from across the country, the report examines a series of alarming incidents between 2005 and 2008.
Tomato Workers Score Huge Victory
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In a huge win for farm workers, one of the nation’s top food service and management companies reached an agreement with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to improve working conditions and give a raise directly to Florida’s tomato harvesters.
The pact between Compass Group North America and the CIW calls for the company to pay an additional 1.5 cents per pound for all the tomatoes it purchases each year, with 1 cent per pound passed directly from the supplier to the workers. The agreement boosts workers’ wages from 50 cents for a 32-pound bucket to 82 cents per bucket, a 64 percent increase.
This is the first agreement where the money goes directly to the workers. Previous agreements called for the money to go into an escrow account.
Jobs with Justice Week of Action: Demanding Real Economic Recovery
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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Wall Street bailout, and Jobs with Justice (JwJ) is launching a Week of Action to demand that the banks use our taxpayer dollars to finance the recovery and not their own corporate agenda.
During the Sept. 24-Oct. 1 week of action, working people will join with students, activists, community leaders and others across the country to highlight Big Banks’ misuse of tax dollars. So far, few of the billions in taxpayer money that went to Big Banks have reached Main Street. Instead, executives of banks that were bailed out with taxpayer dollars have lined their pockets with stock options that guarantee them huge windfalls for years. While they get richer, they have laid off more than 160,000 employees since Jan. 1, 2008.
To top it all off, Bank of America, which received $45 billion in taxpayer-funded bailout support, has spent more than $1.5 million lobbying on Capitol Hill against the reforms that would protect consumers from a future financial crisis, such as restrictions on executive compensation, home mortgage lending and credit card fees. The bank also is lobbying on a consumer rights bill, on student lending issues, on a bill that would’ve allowed bankruptcy judges to alter mortgages and on a proposed federal regulatory oversight agency.
Taking the Next Steps to Build Strength Through Diversity
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The diversity of the union movement is its strength. Building on the success of the historic Resolution 2 passed in 2005, the AFL-CIO Convention adopted a far-ranging policy to create more inclusive unions and a more diverse leadership.
The resolutions, “A Diverse and Democratic Labor Movement” and “Unions Should Give People with Disabilities a Voice and a Face,” call on unions to reach out at every level to build diversity.
The resolutions require every state federation and central local bodies to establish concrete goals for expanding diversity in their leadership. We also will increase our commitment to include lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers and workers with disabilities at all levels. And to secure the future of the union movement, we will actively recruit, train and include young workers in all activities and programs and provide opportunities for leadership.
AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer William Lucy said the union movement stands on the threshold of a crusade to rebuild the middle class. The progress made in including new workers in union leadership has chipped away at one more source of divisiveness in our movement. He praised the unions for successfully carrying out the mandate of Resolution 2 to make convention delegations more inclusive—43 percent of delegates are women or people of color.
Immigrant Rights Are Workers’ Rights
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As long as America’s mostly immigrant day laborer workforce is discriminated against and denied their rights on the job, no workers’ rights are safe, a key organizer told the AFL-CIO Convention.
Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), said day laborers have become the symbol of what critics say is wrong with the nation’s immigration system. In reality, he says, they are the symbols of a drastically changing economy. While the economy depends on their labor, it refuses to allow them to fully participate in the American Dream.
Day laborers work in an economy that accepts the fruits of their labor but does not accept their humanity.
