New AFL-CIO Campaign Highlights How ‘Work Connects Us All’
|
|
Viewers in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh are getting the first public look at a new AFL-CIO television spot, “Work Connects Us All: America’s Unions.”
The evocative ad features members of many unions, from virtually every industry, and is part of a broad campaign that aims to “fly above the tactics and controversies of the day” and connects with people around the values associated with work, according to AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler.
Rounding out the campaign’s features are social media and online ads, and a dynamic, interactive website, www.WorkConnectsUsAll.org.
The campaign emerges along with an expanding national awareness of the divide between the 99 percent and the economically privileged, and the recognition that the middle class is declining. Efforts in some states to take away rights of working people to come together in unions have given rise to a growing recognition of the bonds shared by working people.
Key lines from the TV spot, which is airing in English and Spanish, include:
And as work changes, we change with it. Work doesn’t separate; it’s what binds us together. I teach your kid, you fix my car, he builds my city, she keeps it safe…work connects us all.
Philip Levine: Reflecting the Poet’s Vision of Working in America
 |
When the nation’s Poet Laureate, Philip Levine, gives a reading of his work tomorrow here at the AFL-CIO, he will recite poems that weave a lyrical web of words around his visceral understanding of the world of work. Levine, whom the Library of Congress named Poet Laureate in May, and who has written of his experiences working in Detroit factories in the post-World War II years, finds his verses especially resonate with America’s workers—and that’s in part because his portrayals are so honest. (To attend the event, which begins at 1 p.m. Nov. 15, RSVP here.)
“I hated many of the jobs I had—they were hard, they were dirty, they were brutal, working lousy hours,” Levine recalls of the time he spent working at forges, on assembly lines and around slag heaps. Yet he also notes:
When I became a union worker, things were a hell of a lot better.
His experiences on the job without a union burned an anger in him so deep that for years he tossed every poem he wrote about that time. Quoting the poet William Wordsworth as saying Read the rest of this entry »
Report: Wage Theft Reaches Deep into the Low-Wage Economy
 |
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.
Danger: Falling Middle Class
 |
|
Jack Cafferty at CNN this week asked viewers one of his seemingly routine questions. But the responses to: “How has definition of ‘middle-class American’ changed?” reveal a cataclysmic shift in our nation’s economic identity.
Gary from El Centro, Calif., summed up the vast majority of the nearly 200 responses when he replied:
You should ask this question of the three or four people in the country still remaining in the middle class.
The comments reflect more than the run-of-the-mill griping about taxes or middle-aged discontent. They demonstrate a visceral understanding of the deep forces underlying the dramatic change that in recent decades has eroded the solid financial footing of America’s working families—America’s middle class.
In short, the American public knows what most lawmakers in Washington and policymakers around the country have yet to figure out: The nation is losing its middle-class backbone and bifurcating into a have/have not country.
Project Labor Agreements Benefit Communities, Contractors and Workers
 |
|
A new study finds that project labor agreements (PLAs) “make sense for public works projects” and debunks attacks by anti-union groups and contractors on such agreements, which set wages, benefits and working conditions on large multicontractor and multi-union public construction projects.
The study by the Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, “Project Labor Agreements in New York State: In the Public Interest,” details what PLAs do, how they have been used and the benefits they offer—benefits that extend to workforce and economic development.
PLAs have been demonstrated to be a very useful construction management tool for cost savings, for on-time, on-budget, and quality construction. PLAs make sense for public works projects because they promote a planned approach to labor relations, allow contractors to more accurately predict labor costs and schedule production timetables, reduce the risks of shoddy work and costly disruptions, and encourage greater efficiency and productivity.
