This story was originally published at Prism. Ryan Scanlan dreads any passage of Indiana’s House Bill 1093. The new bill would remove provisions that protected children between 14 and 17 years old who work year-round. For some students in the high school English teacher’s class at North Central High School in Indianapolis, some of those provisions safeguarded them from working more than nine hours…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In what union members called a “huge victory for workers,” an administrative judge with the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that coffee giant Starbucks violated federal labor law by terminating organized workers in several Pittsburgh locations, accusing the company of orchestrating a “purge” of employees leading the unionization effort. The ruling by Judge Robert A. Ringler found that the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Senate committee headed by Bernie Sanders of Vermont released a report late Sunday aimed at debunking Starbucks’ narrative that it supports workers’ rights and has not committed large-scale violations of U.S. labor law — claims that former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz will likely repeat when he testifies before the panel later this week. Since late 2021, when Buffalo workers voted to form the…
A group of 33 Democratic lawmakers on Friday implored the U.S. Labor Department “to take immediate action to rid Hyundai’s supply chain of child labor and hold those responsible to the fullest extent of the law” after a Reuters investigation revealed that dozens of kids as young as 12 years old — most of them Central American migrants — were working in Southeastern factories supplying the Korean…
Labor advocates renewed calls for boosting U.S. worker rights and protections on Thursday as federal data revealed that despite union membership rising by 273,000 from 2021 to 2022, a jump in nonunion jobs meant the unionization rate fell from 10.3% to a record low of 10.1%.
“In 1983, the first year where comparable union data are available, the union membership rate was 20.1% and there were 17.7 million union workers,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted in a statement announcing the new figures.
“These statistics highlight the need for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act.”
The number of workers who held a job covered by a union contract—including those who report no union affiliation—rose by 200,000 to 16 million last year, but the percentage of employees represented dropped from 11.6% to 11.3%, according to the BLS.
The bureau found that though 7.1 million public sector employees belonged to unions in 2022, similar to the 7.2 million private sector workers, the union membership rate was 33.1% for the public sector compared with just 6% for the private sector.
As The Washington Post reported:
The lackluster figures reflect how far unions have to go to see an upsurge in membership, especially in a year of booming job growth. More than 5 million jobs were created in 2022 across the economy, especially in industries where union membership is lower, such as leisure and hospitality, meaning union jobs did not outpace the growth of nonunion jobs. The economy also launched millions of new businesses, where jobs rarely start off unionized. And many of the high-profile victories at Starbucks, Apple, and REI, for example, added a relatively small number of union members. A 2022 Bloomberg analysis of labor data found that the average unionized Starbucks store added 27 workers to union rolls.
Despite the continued low union numbers, labor historians say there’s been a major shift underway, propelled by pandemic conditions, in how Americans view unions. More Americans said they approved of unions in 2022 than at any point since 1965—some 71% of those polled, according to Gallup.
Responding to the BLS release, the AFL-CIO, a federation of unions representing 12.5 million workers,
asserted, “These statistics highlight the need for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which will hold union-busting companies and organizations accountable and give workers the negotiating power they deserve.”
Specifically pointing to the record-low unionization rate last year, Nina Turner, a former Democratic congressional candidate and senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, said that “this is a move in the wrong direction.”
Noting the same statistic, Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce tweeted: “Unfortunately, this is not a surprise even though unions are extremely popular among workers. This is a direct result of employers using illegal union-busting tactics and Republicans turning their backs on working people.”
The panel’s Democrats also called on Congress to pass the PRO Act—a historic proposal to reform U.S. labor laws to better serve workers, spearheaded by the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).
\u201cThe entire increase in unionization in 2022 was among workers of color\u2014who saw an increase of 231,000, while white workers saw a decrease of 31,000.\u201d— Economic Policy Institute (@Economic Policy Institute) 1674153812
“Every worker deserves a union,” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), who was elected in November, said in a statement Thursday. “Unions built the middle class and they built America. It’s time to pass the PRO Act and drastically expand union membership across this country.”
A trio of Economic Policy Institute experts who analyzed recent data from both the BLS and the National Labor Relations Board pointed out Thursday that between October 2021 and last September, the NLRB saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, and “evidence suggests that in 2022 more than 60 million workers wanted to join a union, but couldn’t.”
“The fact that tens of millions of workers want to join a union and can’t is a glaring testament to how broken U.S. labor law is,” they wrote. “It is urgent that Congress pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. State legislatures must also take available measures to boost unionization and collective bargaining.”
\u201cThe Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act provide crucial reforms that would strengthen workers\u2019 rights to form a union and engage in collective bargaining. https://t.co/jRiXaa8y7G\u201d— Economic Policy Institute (@Economic Policy Institute) 1674153812
Despite union-busting efforts from powerful corporations, last year saw a wave of high-profile worker victories. Employees at Apple, Amazon, Chipotle, Google, Starbucks, Minor League Baseball, T-Mobile, Trader Joe’s, and beyond successfully organized.
“In 2022, we saw working people rising up despite often illegal opposition from companies that would rather pay union-busting firms millions than give workers a seat at the table,” AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler said Thursday. “The momentum of the moment we are in is clear.”
“Organizing victories are happening in every industry, public and private, and every sector of our economy all across the country,” she added. “The wave of organizing will continue to gather steam in 2023 and beyond despite broken labor laws that rig the system against workers.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Mount Pleasant, S.C. — Most of the 30 volunteers who work at the 130-bed, for-profit East Cooper Medical Center spend their days assisting surgical patients — the scope of their duties extending far beyond those of candy stripers, baby cuddlers, and gift shop clerks. In fact, one-third of the volunteers at the Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital are retired nurses who check people in for surgery or…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The budget for the National Labor Relations Board for fiscal year 2022 was $274 million, which might sound like a lot of money. But it is the same amount as the Board’s budget for Trump-era fiscal years 2021 and 2020, and that is a problem.
In fact, the NLRB has not had an increase in funding since 2014, the year that the Republicans took control of Congress during the Obama administration and reignited their decades-old campaign to deep-six workers’ rights to unionize.
No increase “means a cut to the agency’s funds, due to inflation and other factors,” explains Burt Pearlstone, president of the NLRBU, the union representing workers at the agency.
The Biden administration had sought a 10 percent funding increase for the NLRB this year. But Republicans dug in to oppose an increase, claiming the cost was too high. Privately many were simply doing the bidding of their corporate backers to further weaken an agency already in trouble. When the overall budget was finally passed in March, the administration had accepted flat funding.
A goal of the Trump administration, and the Republican Party generally, has been to decimate what they refer to as the “administrative state.” During the Trump years, agency heads were appointed to hollow out federal agencies from within. At the NLRB, Trump named Peter Robb, a management lawyer famous for breaking the strike of air traffic controllers under Reagan, as General Counsel.
Robb set out to weaken the agency by overturning pro-union case law and reducing agency staff, but many of his initiatives were stymied.
Case law at the Board changes slowly. Before a General Counsel can put into place changes that he or she seeks, the right case must be filed with the agency; the case must be tried before an Administrative Law Judge (ALJ) and then the Board in Washington, D.C.
Some of Robb’s initiatives were stopped by ALJs; for others, he did not find the appropriate case. Had Trump won a second term and Robb stayed in power, the story would be quite different.
Nonetheless, Robb was able to do significant damage to the agency. During his reign, jobs were left vacant across the country. There is always a certain amount of turnover, as staff move on to other jobs; those jobs were not backfilled during Robb’s tenure. In 2018 he offered buyouts, enticing additional staff to leave, and those jobs also were not backfilled.
The NLRB even failed to spend its budget in 2018 and 2019, prompting an investigation by the Board’s Inspector General. Underspending violates the laws establishing Congress’s spending authority (as does overspending).
As the NLRB Regions lost people, the workload increased significantly for those still working at the agency. In 2021, when President Biden took office, there already was a significant backlog of trials waiting to be scheduled. Those that were scheduled took longer and longer to get before an ALJ.
To his credit, Biden took the unprecedented action of firing Robb on his first day in office. Shortly after, he appointed Jennifer Abruzzo as the agency’s General Counsel.
Abruzzo had worked at the NLRB in various capacities, including as Assistant General Counsel, for 23 years. When Trump appointees took over the agency, she left and went to work for the Communications Workers (CWA).
Abruzzo knows the agency inside and out. She wants to enforce the original intent of the National Labor Relations Act: to level the playing field between workers and employers, and to protect the rights of working people collectively seeking to better their lives.
Almost immediately, Abruzzo issued memos alerting the agency of cases and practices she would like to see revisited and revised. She called for reinstating the Joy Silk standard (where the Board would require an employer to recognize the union once a majority of workers had signed union authorization cards), increasing penalties on law-breaking employers, declaring mandatory anti-union meetings unlawful, and other pro-worker initiatives. The labor movement took notice.
Biden also appointed two union-side labor lawyers to fill existing vacancies on the five-person Board: Gwynne Wilcox and David Prouty. The majority of Board members are now Democratic appointees. Both Wilcox and Prouty have fought in the trenches for years on behalf of workers and unions and understand how NLRB case law and procedures can be used to help workers or to hinder them.
The new appointments to the Board and the new General Counsel are exciting news — and not a moment too soon. Union organizing is way up. Workers across the country are taking on big corporations like Starbucks, Amazon, and Trader Joe’s, as well as seeking to unionize in unexpected places — comics, gaming, tech.
Filings at the NLRB for union elections from October 2021 to March 2022 were up 57 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. In response, employer lawbreaking is increasing. Unfair labor practice charges against employers are up 14 percent for the same period.
All the pieces are in place for positive developments at the NLRB, except for one thing — there are fewer people to do the work.
The Republican attack on the agency, accelerated under Robb, is being felt now. Between 2012 and 2022, the field staff at the agency was reduced by more than 40 percent.
Field staff are the lawyers and examiners who handle union elections, investigate cases, and prosecute unfair labor practices, as well as the administrative professionals who support this work. At the Brooklyn Region, which ran the elections in Staten Island at Amazon, the staff is down 40 percent since 2012.
Everything now takes longer. Delay favors the employer. Workers begin to feel that they can’t win and give up or move on.
That is Amazon’s goal in Staten Island. The company filed 25 objections to the election at the JFK8 warehouse. Along with claiming objectionable behavior by the Amazon Labor Union, Amazon alleges that the Brooklyn Region of the NLRB delayed the investigation of unfair labor practice charges, instead of dismissing them, creating the impression that Amazon violated the law affecting the vote.
Even though the Brooklyn Region received assistance from field staff at other Regions to help with the Staten Island vote, Amazon claims that the agency mishandled the election by providing insufficient staff for the election. Thus, Amazon is claiming that the underfunding of the agency is cause for overturning the vote.
Amazon’s claims of violations on the part of the Brooklyn Region also caused the hearing to be moved to the Region in Phoenix, Arizona, to avoid a conflict of interest. This, too, created delay. The hearing in Phoenix did not begin until June 13, months after the actual vote.
The objections hearing alone may take months, and then there will be many more months before the briefs are filed and a decision rendered. Other legal delaying tactics will follow.
Dragging things out is Amazon’s goal; understaffing aids that goal.
Even if the agency adds staff to resolve issues at Amazon (which it has done), fewer field staffers are available to handle the increased caseload involving workers and unions at other companies.
Workers at the Brooklyn Region feel overwhelmed by the workload. Many have begun talking about leaving. The Brooklyn chapter of the NLRBU has met with Abruzzo seeking relief.
“Brooklyn is not the only Region feeling overwhelmed by the workload,” says Pearlstone. He hears this from workers at NLRB Regions across the country. “The only solution is more money to hire more people.”
President Biden claims to be pro-worker and pro-union. He has supported the PRO Act, recommended greater worker rights in the federal government, issued a pro-worker message to employees at Amazon’s Alabama warehouse, and jubilantly told Amazon “Here we come!” after the first union win in Staten Island. And he has nominated a General Counsel and new Board members that care about enforcing the National Labor Relations Act.
But without sufficient funding for the NLRB, all of Biden’s statements could end up being little more than hollow promises.
Unions and labor activists need to demand that the Biden administration find additional resources for the NLRB now. Adequate funding for the agency has got to be a major issue for the labor movement — or else the wave of new organizing that has ignited our imaginations and revived an understanding of the importance of labor may wither away.
Workers at a massive General Motors plant in central Mexico will vote in a landmark election this week to decide which union will represent the plant’s 6,500 workers. A victory by the independent union there would be a big step toward breaking the stranglehold of the employer-friendly unions that have long dominated Mexico’s labor scene.
Employees at the factory in Silao, Guanajuato, voted last August to invalidate the contract bargained by a corrupt local of the Confederation of Mexican Labor (CTM), ending the CTM’s right to represent the workers there.
Four unions are now competing to represent them. Two have ties to the CTM; activists suspect a third union, about which little is known, was created to sow confusion. The fourth, SINTTIA (the National Auto Workers Union), is an independent union that grew out of the campaign to remove the previous corrupt union, and the campaign to reinstate a group of workers who were fired after refusing overtime in solidarity with striking U.S. GM workers in 2019.
Plant workers “basically spent most of 2019 searching for trade unions that could defend workers and fight for better wages and benefits,” said Alejandra Morales, secretary general of SINTTIA. “Unfortunately, we didn’t find one because they were all part of the CTM, and we wanted to free ourselves from the CTM.” (This and other quotes in this article have been translated from Spanish.)
Workers in Silao make the profitable Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra full-size pickup trucks and a variety of V8 engines and automatic transmissions. The United States, which accounts for 80 percent of Mexico’s vehicle exports, is the main destination for these trucks.
Mexico is the world’s fourth-largest vehicle exporter (behind Germany, Japan, and the U.S.); its auto industry employed 800,000 workers as of November. It produced 3 million cars in 2020, even with a dip in exports owing to pandemic-related plant closures.
Mexico’s labor law reform, passed in 2019, requires unions to hold secret-ballot votes to validate all existing collective bargaining agreements by May 1, 2023. The reform, along with provisions in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, the successor to NAFTA), is intended to allow workers to democratically choose their unions, a freedom long denied to Mexican workers.
Mexico’s Labor Secretary, Luisa Maria Alcalde, estimates that 80 to 85 percent of union contracts in Mexico are “protection contracts,” signed behind the backs of workers by employers like GM and corrupt Mexican officials—often before any workers are even hired. Most workers don’t know that they have a contract or a union, or that dues are being taken out of their paycheck. Even when they do, most have never seen their contract, let alone voted on it.
These sweetheart deals and the scarcity of genuine unions in most sectors have held the wages of Mexican workers down, to the benefit of multinationals like GM. Mexican workers now earn just one-tenth of what their U.S. counterparts do.
According to the Independent Mexico Labor Expert Board, an advisory committee created by Congress and chaired by Steelworkers international director Ben Davis, the result of all these sham contracts is that “millions of Mexican workers have worked extremely long hours (the longest among OECD countries) for very low wages (the lowest average wages among OECD countries), often in hazardous working conditions and with no effective means to vindicate their rights at work.”
There are, however, three independent, democratic unions in Mexico’s 22 auto assembly plants, and their contracts are significantly better than those of the other auto unions, paying up to twice as much.
Last spring, the U.S. filed a complaint under the USMCA after reports that the CTM had destroyed ballots when it was heading for defeat in an April contract ratification vote. The U.S. Trade Representative reached an agreement with the Mexican government to reschedule the vote, this time with more inspectors and observers to ensure the integrity of the election.
In the rescheduled vote, held in August, workers voted 3,214 to 2,623 to remove the employer-friendly “Miguel Trujillo Lopez” local of the CTM, creating the opportunity to establish a new union at the plant. (The “Miguel Trujillo Lopez” local is a national industrial union with numerous auto industry contracts, headed by the wealthy and powerful federal congressman Tereso Medina of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.)
After workers vote to remove their union, the terms and conditions of their existing contract remain in place until they approve a new one. A new union must collect signatures from at least 30 percent of the workforce to get recognition. More than one union can file, so long as each union submits signatures from 30 percent of workers within 10 days after the first filing (a worker can sign to support more than one union), in which case an election will be held. The union that receives the most votes wins. Any contract it negotiates must then be approved by a majority of workers.
The Silao election is the first to be held under these new rules. Four unions are on the ballot, but the real contest is between SINTTIA and a CTM affiliate known as “the Coalition,” with the other two unions there to divide the vote.
Héctor de la Cueva, coordinator of the Labor and Union Advisory Research Center (CILAS), which has been advising SINTTIA, compared the election to a wrestling match. “Imagine this is a lucha libre ring, and SINTTIA is going to fight against three villains,” he said. “The three other unions have entered the ring to create confusion and attempt to divide the vote of the workers, creating the illusion that one of these unions could be an alternative.”
Silao plant worker Israel Cervantes was one of the first to begin organizing against both the corrupt union and the company.
As the leader of a new organization called Generando Movimiento (Generating Movement, a wink at the name General Motors), he organized a show of solidarity with the U.S. workers who were on strike against GM in 2019 by refusing to work overtime to offset a production slowdown.
“We are willing to reinforce your struggle by not allowing [GM] to pressure us for greater productivity,” one GM Silao worker said in a message sent to United Auto Workers members in the U.S. and reported by Vice. “If our bosses are the same, then your complaints are ours.”
The company fired Cervantes and 18 other workers shortly afterwards, using various pretexts.
But Cervantes, who had worked at the plant for 13 years, would not be stopped. He has spent the last two and a half years fighting for reinstatement and taking part in the effort to remove the CTM. “We need a union controlled by workers to force GM to improve our jobs,” he told the Mexico Solidarity Project. “We’ve had dissatisfaction at our plant for a long time, but now we’ve turned anger into organization.”
In the run-up to the election, SINTTIA has been holding press conferences and talking to workers outside the plant about what an independent union could mean for them.
In the past, the union had very little presence on the shop floor. In SINTTIA, “workers themselves will elect their delegates and leadership,” Cervantes said. “That’s the argument we are making to people.”
Besides sharing information via WhatsApp and Facebook, they’ve held meetings at their union hall and in the neighboring cities of Silao, Irapuato, Salamanca, and Valles to inoculate auto workers against CTM’s fear-mongering.
The old union argues that it has the company’s backing. Since April of last year, “they would tell people that if they didn’t vote or didn’t join again, the company would leave,” said SINTTIA leader Morales. “The workers were told that if they didn’t legitimize their collective bargaining agreement, we were going to lose our benefits. We were going to be at the mercy of the company, which could then lower our wages.” None of this is true.
SINTTIA organizers mapped out the factory complex: the stamping plant, body shop, transmission plants, assembly lines, and painting division. They identified leaders in each of these areas and brought them together for meetings.
After extolling the merits of the independent union, they would tell fellow workers, “If you’re convinced of what we have just told you, of the purpose and objectives, now you must communicate it,” Morales said. “You’re an ambassador for SINTTIA. Pass it on to your fellow line workers.”’
But in next week’s vote, will enough workers hold strong against the CTM and the company’s attacks?
SINTTIA alleges that GM fired one union supporter Néstor Antonio Valadez on January 14, after 20 years on the job, accusing him of stealing an oxygen sensor. Valadez denies the allegation.
The purported theft occurred last November. “Why come out now with the accusation?” Valadez asked. He says his flyering and signature-gathering in support of the independent union were the true motivation for his termination.
“The CTM has been at GM for a long time and has kept wages low,” he said. “We need a change.” Among the demands that workers are pressing for, he said, is the basic right to bathroom access.
SINTTIA activists also allege that, while the company has barred SINTTIA from campaigning, it has allowed the CTM-linked unions free access to workers throughout the plant.
“The company prefers any of these three unions to win and not SINTTIA,” said de la Cueva. “These companies like General Motors continue to think that it’s better to negotiate with these mafias than with the authentic representatives of the workers.”
Another tool the CTM used was its control over loans to workers and scholarships for their children.
Wages at the plant are about $2 hourly. Workers often put their meager earnings into a yearly union savings plan to earn interest.
The CTM would hold these funds and use them to demand workers sign in support of the union. But it would also use the funds to make loans to workers at a rate of 50 percent, Cervantes said.
“If they wanted their scholarship, they had to join. If they wanted a loan, they had to join. Any procedure, help, or support that the [CTM] provided required them to join,” said Morales.
These loans were managed jointly by the union and GM—and should not have been impacted by the vote to remove the CTM. Instead of making that clear, GM allowed the CTM to spread misinformation, said de la Cueva of CILAS.
One of the independent union’s goals is to improve wages enough “so that a worker doesn’t have the need to take out loans,” Cervantes said, “because they’ll have a higher salary to cover basic living expenses.”
Inside the factory, workers are subjected to grueling and dangerous 12-hour shifts.
“There have been accidents, and the worker is always the one who is [held] at fault for not having done their work correctly,” said Morales, “or for doing work that they weren’t allowed to do—but were ordered to do.”
If workers question the poor treatment, she said, “they would put them in a small room with only two or three human resources people and harass them until they signed their voluntary resignation.”
As the pandemic raged across the world, workers were fired for demanding safety protocols. The old union sided with the company.
“During the pandemic, they never defended us,” said Morales. “In fact, there was even retaliation. In my team, two people died of Covid. When the second one passed away, we all raised our voices: ‘Do something. You’re my union.’”
One of the outspoken leaders demanding Covid tests and better sanitation within the company was fired. For Morales, the message was clear: “Stay silent, everyone, or this could happen to you.”
Thus far, votes to delegitimate contracts have been few and far between, a measure of the uphill battle that independent unions face in Mexico even after the 2019 labor law reform.
As of January 19, workers had voted to legitimate 2,616 contracts, according to a Mexican government database. Only 24 workplaces—less than 1 percent of those that have voted—have thrown out the existing union. The GM Silao plant is by far the biggest of these.
Others include several big auto parts factories in the border city of Matamoros, home to the big “20/32” wildcat strike wave three years ago that won 20 percent wage increases and 32,000 peso ($1,600) bonuses.
The no vote at GM Silao “didn’t come from out of nowhere,” said de la Cueva. He credits the organizing done by Generando Movimiento and other workers at the plant over the last three years. “This happened because there are organized workers. In many other companies the same thing isn’t happening, because the workers aren’t informed or organized.”
Nonetheless, a vote for SINTTIA at GM Silao could have ripple effects throughout Mexico, inspiring more workers to organize independent, democratic unions. (Another historic vote, the first-ever direct election for union leadership by the 90,000 workers at Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, will take place on Monday; a victory by a challenger there could have similar ramifications.)
“We can have better salary conditions, and more importantly, labor conditions, and good union representation,” said Morales. “That’s the starting point for other workers to be encouraged to raise their voices and not be subjected to the company.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Long-haul trucking went from being one of the best blue-collar jobs to one of the toughest in America. What does this transformation mean for the ongoing supply chain crisis?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
A group of five former rehab participants have filed a class-action lawsuit against The Salvation Army, alleging they were not paid for work they performed at the venerated charity.
The Salvation Army is one of the largest providers of drug and alcohol rehabilitation in the United States. Participants typically do not have to pay for a place in the residential program. But once there, the main mode of treatment is what The Salvation Army calls “work therapy” at the charity’s thrift stores, which generate more than $598 million in annual sales.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court, alleges that the charity violated California labor laws by not treating the workers as employees and failing to pay them minimum wage and overtime. According to the complaint, the participants worked more than 40 hours a week in “physically grueling and sometimes dangerous” jobs. Some picked up donations and worked in warehouses and stores, where they sorted, priced and displayed clothing, linens, shoes, accessories and housewares. Others performed maintenance jobs, repaired goods or operated heavy machinery. In exchange, they received gratuities of between $1 and $25 per week or “canteen cards” they could use to buy soda, chips or other snacks at The Salvation Army canteen.
The program provides room and board to the participants but requires them to sign up for and then relinquish their food stamps, according to the complaint. It also provides other services, such as spiritual counseling, Bible study and recreational outings.
But participants in the programs spent the vast majority of their time working. The charity admits only applicants who can work and routinely kicks participants out of the program if they get sick or injured and are no longer able to work, participants said. Most people do not complete the program, according to the complaint.
The Salvation Army did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the lawsuit. The organization has previously argued that rehab participants are not employees and are therefore not entitled to wages.
Jessica Riggin, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, alleges that the organization is violating labor law by not treating the workers as employees. Whether or not the program helps people is irrelevant, she said.
“There’s no nonprofit exemption to the labor code,” she said. “Even if they do good, that’s not a reason for them to not comply with the law like every other California employer.”
The suit, the attorneys said, was filed in response to an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, which found that The Salvation Army is among hundreds of rehab facilities across the country that put participants to work without pay. The federal Department of Labor previously found the charity in violation of labor law in 1990, but after The Salvation Army filed a lawsuit and lobbied federal lawmakers, the federal agency dropped the case. The Labor Department then added specific language to an internal handbook that effectively ended federal enforcement actions against The Salvation Army for wage violations.
The participants are seeking certification as a class and are demanding back wages for work performed by participants at 15 Salvation Army rehab facilities in California over the past four years.
Their attorneys filed the case under the Private Attorneys General Act, a California law that allows private attorneys representing employees to file lawsuits on behalf of the state to recover civil penalties for labor code violations.
This story was edited by Esther Kaplan and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Shoshana Walter can be reached at swalter@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @shoeshine.
Salvation Army faces lawsuit over labor violations is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Amazon’s victory over an against-the-odds unionization effort at its warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama is intensifying pressure on Senate Democrats to swiftly eliminate the 60-vote legislative filibuster and pass the PRO Act, a proposed revamp of employer-friendly U.S. labor law that would ban many of the tactics the tech behemoth used to crush the organizing drive.
Endorsed by President Joe Biden and passed by the House of Representatives last month, the Protecting the Right to Organize Act has yet to receive a vote in the upper chamber as several members of the Democratic caucus — including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Angus King (I-Maine), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) — have yet to back the legislation.
But even if every Senate Democrat were to sign on, the bill would still face long odds due to the chamber’s filibuster rule, which effectively requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. Five House Republicans voted for the PRO Act last month, but there is virtually no chance that at least 10 Senate Republicans would be willing to do the same given the party’s hostility to organized labor.
That leaves elimination of the filibuster — which can be done with a simple-majority vote — as the best way to ensure final approval of legislation that would go a long way toward reversing the damage inflicted by the decades-long assault on unions by corporations and their allies in government. To abolish the filibuster, Senate Democrats will need to win over Manchin and Sinema, both of whom have publicly voiced opposition to abolishing or weakening the rule.
“Unions put power into the hands of workers and are key to good wages, fair benefits, and an equal voice on the job,” tweeted Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). “It’s time to eliminate the filibuster, pass the PRO Act, and guarantee the right to organize.”
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a CPC member, added that Amazon CEO “Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world. He invested millions of dollars to keep these workers from unionizing. He thinks he’s untouchable.”
“The Senate needs to abolish the filibuster, pass the PRO Act, and we need to tax billionaires out of existence,” said Bush.
The renewed urgency behind the PRO Act comes after an initial tally found that 1,798 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer facility cast ballots against forming a union while just 738 voted in support, a likely decisive blow against an organizing push that drew national attention and the backing of prominent progressive lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), which attempted to organize the nearly 6,000 Bessemer workers, said Friday that it is formally filing unfair labor practice charges against Amazon, accusing the corporate giant of “lies, deception, and illegal activities.”
But while some of Amazon’s conduct may have been illegal — RWDSU has pointed specifically to the company’s work with the U.S. Postal Service to install a ballot drop box on warehouse property — organizers have noted that many of the company’s aggressive tactics were permissible under current U.S. labor law, underscoring the extent to which the deck is stacked against workers who want to form a union.
As Jacobin’s Alex Press wrote Friday:
After RWDSU filed for an NLRB election in November of 2020, Amazon held “captive audience meetings,” mandatory sessions where workers heard management tell them why they shouldn’t unionize. Managers lie in these meetings, and the ones in Bessemer are no exceptions. The company texted workers several times a day to urge them to vote no. They papered the facility’s bathroom stalls with anti-union flyers. They outfitted temp workers, ineligible for the union but especially vulnerable to management pressure, with ‘vote no’ swag, ensuring they’d serve as walking anti-union propaganda on the shop floor.
These are standard anti-union tactics, if amped up thanks to Amazon’s effectively infinite coffers. All of this is permitted under U.S. law. And even if the company broke the law during the union drive, that is to be expected—given how nonexistent the repercussions are for violating workers’ rights, around 40 percent of employers are charged with violating federal law during a union election.
Roxana Rivera, vice president of 32BJ SEIU, the largest union of property service workers in the U.S., said in a statement late Friday that “we have seen many companies employ the kind of union-busting tactics employed by Amazon in Bessemer.”
“From changing traffic lights to captive audience meetings, this corporate giant spent millions of dollars against workers, instead of on workers,” said Rivera. “Because companies use their outsized power to stop at nothing to prevent workers from coming together, Congress must act to make it easier for all workers to join unions by passing the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.”
“In most states, it is easier to buy an AR-15 than it is to join a union,” Rivera added. “The PRO Act would put a stop to many of the tactics Amazon used to suppress the union organizing efforts of its workforce. Workers will not be deterred and will continue to organize for a better future.”
Biden, who spoke out in support of Bessemer workers in late February, included the PRO Act in his roughly $2.3 trillion infrastructure proposal, but the labor measure is not likely to survive the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process — a restrictive procedural tool Democrats will likely use to pass an infrastructure package amid unified Republican opposition.
As Noah Lanard of Mother Jones put it Friday, the PRO Act “stands little chance of becoming law as long as the Senate filibuster remains in place.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The U.S. House of Representative passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act this week, with 42 House Democrats from Southern states as cosponsors.
The bill is one of the most ambitious attempts to strengthen the rights of workers and unions in decades. Its centerpiece is a provision that would override so-called “right-to-work” laws by allowing unions to collect dues from represented workers in states with such laws even if those workers have not joined the union.
“Unions benefit all workers, but especially women and workers of color,” Rep. Nikema Williams, a Georgia Democrat who cosponsored the bill, said in a statement after its passage through the House.
Right-to-work laws proliferated across the Midwest in the mid-2000s. But their roots are in the Jim Crow South, in the milieu of anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism wielded by rich white Southerners and their Northern allies to maintain an economic system built on racial division and cheap labor.
In 1944, Arkansas and Florida became the first two states in the country to enact right-to-work laws. As labor historian Michael Pierce wrote in 2017, the anti-union measures were meant to prevent what industrialists and planters in both the North and South saw as interracial organizing’s threat to the racial and economic order. The Christian American Association, a group founded by Texas oil industry lobbyist Vance Muse in 1936, worked to pass anti-strike laws and spearheaded right-to-work campaigns in Texas, Arkansas, Florida, and California.
The campaigns to get those laws passed by ballot initiative — in a time where many Black voters were blocked from the ballot — were explicitly racist in tone and substance. Pierce writes:
During the Arkansas campaign, the [Christian American Association] insisted that right-to-work was essential for the maintenance of the color line in labor relations. One piece of literature warned that if the amendment failed “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with black African apes . . . whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.” Similarly, the Arkansas Farm Bureau Federation justified its support of Right-to-Work by citing organized labor’s threat to Jim Crow. It accused the CIO of “trying to pit tenant against landlord and black against white.”
Most Southern states, with the exceptions of Kentucky and West Virginia, implemented their right-to-work laws during the mid-20th century. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress in 1947, gave these laws federal backing.
West Virginia passed a right-to-work law in 2016 and Kentucky in 2017. The measures have done what they were intended to do: No Southern state with the exception of West Virginia has a union membership rate over 10%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s most recent figures. South Carolina has the region’s lowest union membership rate at just 2.9%.
Right-to-work laws financially hamstring unions by preventing “union shops,” where all employees in a unionized workplace must pay union dues and/or join the union. The PRO Act would weaken these laws by letting unions collect dues even from employees who do not join, but who still benefit from the contract negotiations and collective bargaining done by the union.
“We have a generational opportunity to make America’s economy and democracy work for working people again,” North Carolina State AFL-CIO President MaryBe McMillan said in a statement. “The PRO Act does that by ending misleading and racist ‘right to work’ laws and creating meaningful consequences for employers that retaliate against workers for simply exercising their right to organize.”
The legislation includes a number of other provisions that would bolster workers’ rights to organize and could make union drives — like the ongoing one at an Amazon plant in Bessemer, Alabama — more feasible. These provisions include banning employer interference in union elections, such as what are known as “captive audience” meetings, a tactic used against organizers in Bessemer. Employers who violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) could face civil penalties, which they currently do not. Corporate directors and company officials could be held personally accountable for violating labor law. Union elections would be set by the National Labor Relations Board and employees and not be subject to the whims of employers. And workers could file a civil action against their employer if the employer violates the NLRA.
The Biden administration has come out swinging in support of the PRO Act, and in support of workers’ rights to organize. President Joe Biden released a video signaling his support for the union drive in Alabama, and the White House sent out a statement calling for the PRO Act’s passage.
“As America works to recover from the devastating challenges of deadly pandemic, an economic crisis, and reckoning on race that reveals deep disparities, we need to summon a new wave of worker power to create an economy that works for everyone,” Biden said in the statement. “We should all remember that the National Labor Relations Act didn’t just say that we shouldn’t hamstring unions or merely tolerate them. It said that we should encourage unions. The PRO Act would take critical steps to help restore this intent.”
The bill was first introduced in Congress last session, when the Senate was still led by Republicans. With Democrats narrowly controlling the Senate this year, it theoretically stands a better chance — but will likely be stymied by the filibuster, which requires a 60-vote supermajority to break. Just one senator from the South has signed on to sponsor the bill to date — Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Discussions are underway in the Senate about reforming the filibuster, which itself has a long history of being used to block civil rights legislation.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Tech companies in Silicon Valley are under the microscope for not living up to their idealistic pledges to save the world. On this week’s episode of Reveal, we investigate companies on the cutting edge that are struggling to solve some old-fashioned problems: Worker safety at Tesla, and diversity at Google and beyond.
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This post was originally published on Reveal.