Carwash Campaign Highlights Success of Community-Labor Teamwork
One of the best ways for unions to reach out to new groups of workers is by joining with community-based worker centers across the country—and the campaign to gain better working conditions for carwash workers in Los Angeles recently has done just that, according to several union leaders involved in the campaign.
AFL-CIO General Counsel Jon Hiatt, speaking at a brown bag discussion yesterday at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., said worker centers and unions have a lot in common. They both fight for enforcement of wage and hour laws, oppose misclassification of workers and they fight for immigrant rights. Hiatt says:
We have the experience, the expertise. Worker centers have a strong community base. Bringing the two movements together is good for workers. A few years ago, I couldn’t imagine local or national unions would be working so closely with worker centers.
Message to Solis: Get Tough with Labor Law Violators
Yesterday, Los Angeles City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo filed a 176-count criminal case against two Los Angeles carwash owners for allegedly abusing and intimidating workers, and for failing to pay the minimum wage. Delgadillo said the work conditions “bordered on indentured servitude.”
With Hilda Solis poised to become the next secretary of labor, Art Levine, writing on Huffington Post, asks if Solis will be equally as tough on companies that violate labor laws. Writes Levine:
One of the challenges for Solis is whether she’ll be tough enough in cracking down on such rampant abuses with a Labor Department gutted by eight years of pro-business GOP hacks in charge. It’s not that likely, though, that the moderate Solis will pursue criminal cases against the top CEOs who have yet to face the prospect of jail time over wage theft.
Even so, as the AFL-CIO’s general counsel, Jon Hiatt, observes, “My dream is that the first act of the new Secretary of Labor would be to identify top executives of companies that routinely violate wages and hours laws—and take them out of their offices in handcuffs. The deterrent value would be enormous.”
