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Mexico’s President-Elect Prepares Labor Overhaul to Empower Workers (Wall St Journal)

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 05:11:00 +0000

Mexico’s President-Elect Prepares Labor Overhaul to Empower Workers

No more secret agreements between union bosses and employers, future labor minister says

Luisa María Alcalde, tapped to be Mexico’s next labor minister, says new laws will aim to ban the so-called protection agreements that labor lawyers say have long worked to suppress wages in the country. PHOTO: JOSE PAZOS/NOTIMEX/NEWSCOM/ZUMA PRESS

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Juan Montes

Sept. 11, 2018 6:17 p.m. ET

MEXICO CITY—Mexican President-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador is preparing legislation to overhaul the country’s collective-bargaining system to improve wages and help Mexico comply with labor-rights provisions of a recent trade agreement with the U.S., a top aide said Tuesday.

Mr. López Obrador aims to effectively ban so-called protection agreements, or collective contracts signed by union leaders and employers without worker consent, by requiring unions to show they have the backing of at least 30% of workers before signing a contract, said Luisa María Alcalde, who has been tapped to be labor minister when Mr. López Obrador takes office Dec. 1.

“Those contracts are rotten from the outset,” she said in an interview. “It is time for Mexican workers to decide by themselves who should represent them.”

Perhaps as important, Ms. Alcalde said existing protection agreements would also have to be legitimized in coming years by way of secret ballots among workers. Nine out of 10 collective-bargaining contracts signed in Mexico are agreed without the consent, and sometimes without the knowledge, of a company’s workers, experts estimate.

Mr. López Obrador, a leftist who won the July 1 presidential election by a landslide, campaigned on promises to improve the lot of workers in Mexico, where average monthly wages are around $315.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has also insisted that a revamped North American Free Trade Agreement include measures to increase Mexico’s low wages, which Mr. Trump sees as unfair competition.

Mexican government data show manufacturing workers in Mexico earn $2.30 per hour on average, while U.S. factory workers make about $21.50 an hour.

The preliminary trade agreement reached between the U.S. and Mexico in late August, which will serve as the basis for a new Nafta if Canada agrees on terms with the U.S., includes enforceable labor provisions.

One provision would allow the U.S. to impose trade sanctions if Mexico fails to enact labor reforms that ensure basic worker rights such as effective access to collective bargaining, according to two people with knowledge of the deal. Mexico also agreed to approve new labor legislation consistent with the trade deal.

“This is a game-changing reform. Protection contracts are a huge burden for the country, and [worker] representation will bring a better distribution of wealth,” said Álvaro Altamirano, a labor lawyer who has worked for Volkswagen andAudi in Mexico.

A dysfunctional collective-bargaining system in Mexico has kept wages depressed for decades, and labor conditions haven’t significantly improved for millions of workers, experts say.

Current laws don’t require labor unions to prove they represent workers before signing a collective-bargaining contract. The signatures of the employer and the union leader are enough if an agreement is duly registered before labor authorities.

The planned legislation would complement a constitutional amendment that was enacted in February 2017 but which hasn’t gone into effect because of pending secondary laws. Lawmakers say the legislation would be approved before the end of the year. Mr. López Obrador’s Morena party and its allies have a majority in both houses of Congress.

Ms. Alcalde, the 31-year-old daughter of a prominent leftist labor lawyer, has a masters of law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a Mexican law degree. Aside from unions needing to prove they represent at least 30% of workers to sign a contract under the new law, she said it would require majority approval if two or more unions fight over a contract. Union leaders will also have to be elected through secret ballots.

The proposed laws, if fully implemented, would raise Mexican wages, improve labor conditions and help increase companies’ productivity, Ms. Alcalde said. Some business leaders are concerned, however, that the new model may increase labor conflicts and discourage investment.

The legislation would create an independent body to make sure workers are effectively represented. Copies of contracts will be made available on the internet for the first time.

For years, many companies favored protection agreements because they keep wages low and profit margins high, while avoiding costly strikes. They also help protect companies against strike threats. Such threats, common in Mexico, have often served as a means of extortion by fake unions that don’t represent their workers, labor lawyers say.

Write to Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com

Unison Organising Webinar: A conversation between Roger McKenzie, Unison assistant general secretary, and Chris Tansley, NEC member and Chair of the Development and Organisation Committee

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Thu, 20 Sep 2018 04:19:00 +0000

Building the Links! Building a Movement! A Webinar discussion between Roger McKenzie of Unison and Andre Lewis of the Grenadian TUC

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 19:13:00 +0000

I recently had the honour of having a discussion with brother Andre Lewis from the Grenadian trade union movement. Here is the link to the webinar of that discussion.

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/rt/4260766278217945857

What Activists Committed to the Long-Haul Fight Can Learn from the Life of Organizer Fred Ross

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:04:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

In many respects, Ross’s life is the story of a significant segment of the progressive movement in California

Bill Fletcher, Jr.

In These Times

June 9, 2016

A young Fred Ross, right, with Woody Guthrie at the Arvin farm labor camp near Bakersfield, California, in 1939.

The biographies of icons frequently fall into one of two categories. On the one hand they may be laudatory, in some cases turning the subject into a saint. At the opposite end, they can tend towards tell-all pieces, in some cases aiming to tear down the subject. What makes America’s Social Arsonist: Fred Ross and Grassroots Organizing in the Twentieth Century, Gabriel Thompson’s new biography of the legendary community organizer, unusual is that it presents a very balanced account of the life and work of one of the foremost progressive organizers of the 20th century, while at the same time offering very useful insights into the art and craft of progressive organizing.

In many respects, Ross’s life is the story of a significant segment of the progressive movement in California. He came of age politically during the 1930s; witnessing the great agricultural worker struggles of that era which came in the aftermath of the mass deportation of Chicanos and Mexicans in 1930s which came to be associated with the term, “Los Repatriados,” found himself face-to-face with the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II and his slow but steady emergence as an organizer and theorist within the Community Service Organization (and later, the United Farm Workers).

Although Ross and legendary organizer Saul Alinsky were quite close, and Ross actually worked for Alinsky for a period of time, Ross departed from his mentor in two important respects. First, central to Alinsky’s approach to organizing was the notion of building an organization of organizations. Through the Industrial Areas Foundation, locally-based coalitions were put together, frequently rooted in the religious community. This aimed to guarantee some level of credibility for the organizing effort. But Ross disagreed: He believed in the need to create new community-based organizations that were unencumbered by older leaderships who he frequently believed to be too passive or otherwise obstructive.

The other difference is that Ross recognized the importance of the Chicano movement in California and was prepared to engage in struggles that some organizers, influenced by Alinsky, would have concluded were far too divisive. The Community Service Organization, which he helped to build, was rooted in the Chicano movement, though open to others. It fought against police brutality that was directed at Chicanos and attempted to build Chicano political power in Los Angeles.

Although Ross did not present himself as a person of the Left (probably in part due to the Cold War persecution of leftists), his inclinations were clearly toward the Left. He mostly refused to engage in the sort of redbaiting that was common from the 1940s to the 1960s, even among many progressives.

This fact gave me pause. I have been highly critical of Alinsky and those who have followed in his wake for their de-ideologizing of organizing: an approach that suggests that it is almost unimportant what one organizes around; it is the act of organizing itself that raises the political consciousness of those engaged, and raises it in a progressive direction. This de-ideologizing by many of Alinsky’s followers made its way into the ranks of organized labor, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s and played a counter-productive role in efforts at labor renewal.

The Ross described by Thompson appears to have been a somewhat different sort of character. On the one hand, there is no attention to ideology and leftist political education in the organizing that he conducted. In that sense, there is a consistency with Alinsky. At the same time, Ross’s approach, as demonstrated by the sorts of struggles in which he engaged, seems more akin to a sort of “evolutionary leftism,” that through various forms of progressive organizing, we will naturally achieve the kinds of transformations we need as a society—no larger ideology necessary.

Such an approach eschews the importance of movement-wide strategic objectives, rooted in a larger political vision. Nevertheless, this appears to be a difference between Ross and Alinsky that was overshadowed by their close friendship over the years.

The other aspect of Thompson’s treatment that I especially appreciated revolved around the question of family. Ross’s family life was largely tragic. It is not just that his two marriages ended in divorce. Rather, Ross’s approach towards his organizing life was to put organizing before everything else.

At one point in history such an approach would have been considered noble, if not heroic. Yet, in reading about his ignoring his two wives, and spending limited amounts of time with his children (with the notable exception of Fred Ross, Jr. who followed in his father’s footsteps as an organizer), what was striking was both Ross’ sexism and his blindness to the multi-dimensional side to living the life of an organizer.The sexism was especially ironic because Ross made reaching women a priority in his organizing.

In Ross’ era, it was frequently accepted that men could go off and save the world and the women should take care of the home front. We should be careful about judging a past period based on the norms of our current era. Yet one can conclude that, first, there were alternative courses even during that era, and, second, that the cost, not only to Ross’s two wives and children but to Ross himself, were severe.

In social movements there are intense pressures on organizers—paid and unpaid—to put everything else aside in the name of the cause. There are circumstances where that is necessary, if not unavoidable. I am reminded of a South African activist, Nimrod Sejake, who was exiled due to his anti-apartheid work, spending years in Ireland, the result being his missing out on years in the lives of his children. One cannot second guess such a decision, made under extreme conditions. Yet the decision came at great cost. His family was very divided over whether his sacrifice had been worth it, a very tragic legacy for a person who committed so much for a greater cause.

For Ross, however, the idea of the organizer prioritizing organizing above everything—including one’s family—rose to the level of principle. It was not only about what one might be forced to do under extraordinary circumstances, but what an organizer should be prepared to do at virtually any point. In Ross’s case, this included ignoring his wife during certain key moments when she was recovering from polio.

The failure to recognize the need for a balance which includes a family and a life committed to social justice inevitably led to dysfunctions in the way that Ross thought and operated. The movement became everything, and this meant, at certain key moments—as we would see when Ross worked with Cesar Chavez—a willingness to turn a blind eye to terrible, abusive practices carried out in the name of the movement. Ross failed to question the actions of someone who, even more than Ross, believed that he was putting the movement before everything else.

Thompson also offers an insightful and emotionally challenging look at the development of the United Farm Workers of America. Cesar Chavez, the legendary founding President of the union, was someone who Ross mentored. Over the years their relationship evolved, such that Ross came to not only admire Chavez, but to see him as the leader who could transform American society. This evolution took very tragic consequences when Chavez himself evolved into a leader filled with paranoia, anti-communism, and quite possibly, some level of anti-Semitism, as Randy Shaw recounts in Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW, and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century.

Ross witnessed firsthand the deterioration of the UFW, including the purges carried out against outstanding leaders and activists, such as the purging of two great leading figures in the UFW, Marshal Ganz and Eliseo Medina (the latter going on to become Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU), or the manipulation of a key vote at the UFW convention that led to the departure of many UFW activists, feeling betrayed. Yet he said nothing. Thompson proposes that Ross might have been one of the few people who could have successfully challenged Chavez as he descended into Tartarus, taking with him a union that in so many ways pointed in the direction necessary for broader U.S. labor renewal.

Thompson not only tells an excellent story, but he also, at key moments in the book, identifies certain lessons for organizers, drawing from the life and work of Ross. He does not editorialize as to whether he, in every case, agrees with Ross, but the lessons are clear. One example, noted above, was Ross’ awareness that women are generally the best organizers, and that if one wishes to get any substantial project off the ground, one must win over women. It was not clear, however, the extent to which Ross recognized that winning over women was not just about winning them in the initial organizing efforts, but ensuring that they have a full leadership role throughout the process of the construction and life of an organization.

Ross, additionally, promoted the notion of beginning with where people are, then moving them forward, a truism for organizing whether one subscribes to Alinsky or Mao Zedong. The book lists myriad of additional lessons that Ross drew from his own experiences and which he theorized, to varying degrees.

Ross did not believe in the concept of “burnout”. He believed that an organizer is either an organizer or they have given up and dropped out. In reading about this I was reminded of the famous story of the incident involving General George S. Patton—during World War II—where he hit a soldier who was suffering battle fatigue (an incident dramatized in George C. Scott’s remarkable portrayal of the general in Patton).

In both Ross and Patton’s case, there was a misreading of human beings. These were not simply examples of macho, whether applied to organizing or to war. It was a failure to understand how human beings cope with pressure and particularly over extended periods of time. Organizers do burnout. Some of them leave the movement entirely; others return full swing after a certain period; and others ‘renegotiate’ their relationship to the movement on different terms.

A good friend of mine stepped away from a leadership position in a major local union. I asked him why he did this. He replied: “Because of my family. I realized that if things kept going the way that they were going, I would not be part of the lives of my children as they grew up nor be a good partner for my wife.”

Ross might have described such an approach as what we used to call “half-stepping,” evidence of someone who wasn’t fully committed to the movement. I would look at it as more of an adjustment to the simple fact that involvement in the movement is a marathon. This is a long-distance race during which time one’s speed may vary or breathing may change. But one never loses sight of the final goal. Failing to appreciate the multi-dimensionality to the life of an organizer guarantees that instead of building and reinforcing organizers, we produce Blade Runner-type replicants or androids who may, at first glance, appear to be human, but have actually lost their souls.

In many respects, this is what appears to have happened to Ross. Yes, he was without question great and dedicated. But in failing to appreciate the marathon nature of our journey and the need for balance, he began losing pieces of the humanity for which he had actually been fighting for most of his life.

Gabriel Thompson has produced one of the most thought-provoking books on organizing and affecting social change that I have read in some time. In telling Fred Ross’ life story, Thompson has dared to push the envelope on matters that many progressives would rather ignore.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a columnist and editorial board member for BlackCommentator.com. He is also a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the co-founder of the Center for Labor Renewal. He is the author of The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Relations, 1934-1941 and co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice.

Portside is proud to feature content from In These Times, a publication dedicated to covering progressive politics, labor and activism. To get more news and provocative analysis from In These Times, sign up for a free weekly e-newsletter or subscribe to the magazine at a special low rate.

Growing Temp Industry Shuts Out Black Workers, Exploits Latinos

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 13 Jun 2016 08:02:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

The group’s pitch is this: Black workers are losing jobs, and Latinos are losing their rights. Only united can they hold temp agencies accountable.

Will Evans

Chicago Reporter

June 8, 2016

Leone Bicchieri is the executive director of Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, a labor group that is running a grassroots campaign to reform temp agency hiring practices.

Stacey Rupolo

The code word for black workers caught Rosa Ceja by surprise.

She was working for a temp agency in spring 2014, supervising workers at a big brick packaging plant northwest of Chicago. Crews of minimum-wage temp workers in hairnets boxed consumer products such as adult diapers and energy drinks in shifts around the clock.

She knew the company wanted only men for some jobs and only women for others. And she knew those codes: “heavies” for men, “lights” for women.

But when Ceja asked the recruiting office to send more heavies, she was told there were only “guapos” available. She was confused. “Guapo” means “good-looking” in Spanish. “I'm like, ‘Who cares if he's cute?’ ” Ceja remembers saying.

Guapo, her fellow recruiters told her, meant a black worker. Black people didn’t want to work hard or get their hands dirty, they explained, so they were called the pretty ones. Latinos, the “feos” or ugly ones, were what the company wanted.

Ceja said she checked with a packing company supervisor to make sure.

“She said, ‘If you ever bring me a black guy, they’re automatically walking out,’ ” Ceja said.

Ceja had stumbled into the noxious muck of systemic discrimination in the rapidly growing temp industry. Around the country, temp agencies have used code words, symbols and gestures to illegally hire workers by sex, race and age. Whether filling orders for only white workers or only Latino ones, the tactics often hit black workers the hardest.

As Ceja underwent a crash course in this hidden system, an advocacy group called the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative was devising a counteroffensive.

The group eventually developed legislation to make temp agencies keep track of the race and gender of all job applicants.

Illinois Senate Bill 47 would provide the proof, supporters said, that temp agencies were shutting out black workers in favor of Latinos they could more easily exploit. If it passed, it could mean a fair chance at a paycheck.

Although a modest reform, it was likely the first of its kind. It put Illinois at the forefront of tackling a national problem in an increasingly important part of the workforce.

This is the story of why SB 47 was born – and how it was killed.

♦ ♦ ♦

Inside Illinois’ silvery-domed Capitol building in May 2015, Democratic Rep. Ken Dunkin was trying to guide the bill through a Labor and Commerce Committee hearing. It already had cruised through the state Senate the month before.

But a powerful Latino lawmaker pushed back, and not gently. Staffing agencies were doing a great job employing his mostly Latino constituents, he said. The exchange got heated.

“You’re hurting people in my community,” said Rep. Luis Arroyo, also a Democrat and a power player on Chicago’s Northwest Side. “You’re hurting the people that I’m putting to work in my community.”

Dunkin tried to say the bill, which would amend the Day and Temporary Labor Services Act, wasn’t just about boosting the job prospects of black workers. But Arroyo cut him off. If it wasn’t just about black workers, Arroyo argued, why weren’t any Latinos complaining about the situation?

“I don't want folks to get this twisted,” Dunkin said.

“It’s twisted already,” Arroyo shot back.

Arroyo’s district is 61 percent Latino and 4 percent black. The Chicago district Dunkin held – and lost in the March primary – is just about the opposite, at 52 percent black and 4 percent Latino.

The debate echoed the tensions between black and Latino laborers competing for minimum-wage jobs on the streets of Chicago.

Whether it’s low-wage Hispanic workers or low-wage African American workers, each of them are trying to make a decent living, and they’re being pitted against each other -- Faye Williams, regional attorney for the Memphis office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

It’s a dynamic playing out in cities across the country, as some employers choose Latinos for jobs black workers once often had. The clash is particularly sharp in Illinois, with one of the highest rates of black unemployment, far surpassing Latino joblessness.

And that wasn’t the only problem.

Dan Shomon, a lobbyist for an alliance of temp agencies, said the proposed law would create a paperwork nightmare costing businesses millions of dollars. Shomon is also executive director of the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, which he said represents 25 agencies that provide 250,000 jobs a year.

“We oppose discrimination also,” said Shomon, a top aide to Barack Obama during his state and U.S. Senate careers until 2006. He didn’t mention that, just one week before, a board member of his association had signed an $800,000 settlement to resolve government findings of widespread discrimination at his company. Other association members also have been hit with bias claims.

Shomon said the bill’s requirement to track the race and gender of job applicants wasn’t necessary: The federal government already collects that data, he told legislators. He had that wrong, but nobody caught the error. He repeated it a few times.

After the SB 47 hearing, Shomon took Arroyo and another bill opponent to Saputo’s, an Italian restaurant popular with politicos, spending $45 on each of them, according to lobbyist expenditure records. Asked about this, Arroyo said free meals don’t buy votes in Springfield.

“I would be a heavy, heavy individual if that was the case,” he said.

Following another hearing on the bill a few days later, the lobbyist treated Arroyo to a $50 meal at Nick & Nino’s, a “penthouse steakhouse” with 30th-floor views of the Capitol dome. By then, the bill effectively was dead.

At the second hearing, Arroyo and another lawmaker had made Dunkin promise that he wouldn’t bring it up for a final vote unless the industry lobbyist approved it.

And with that, a lobbyist who spread inaccurate information, representing companies that have faced serious allegations of discrimination, squelched what could have been a trailblazing reform.

♦ ♦ ♦

SB 47 had grown out of a larger battle over hiring discrimination in the temp industry.

The Chicago Workers’ Collaborative has been raising a ruckus for years as one of the nation’s only labor groups running a grassroots campaign to reform temp agency hiring practices. The regional office of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is among the most active in the country in suing over temp industry job bias. And a Chicago union organizer-turned-workers rights attorney has unleashed multiple class-action lawsuits against temp agencies on behalf of black workers, recently clinching a $1.5 million settlement.

The temp agency tactics aren’t lost on job seekers who show up at stark storefront recruiting offices before dawn. Some take buses across Chicago as early as 4 a.m. – not for a job they can count on, but for a chance to snag a shift making as little as $8.25 per hour.

They sit next to each other with packed lunches, in rows of plastic chairs or wooden benches. They wait for hours to see whether they will get a spot on the vans that transport temp workers to various plastics manufacturers, food factories, printing plants and packaging facilities.

I know how hard it is when you need to be there and looking for a job and they don't pick you -- Pamela Sanchez Former dispatcher at Most Valueable Personnel

For Derell Pruitt, it was bad enough watching Latino workers board the vans while black workers like him were left behind. The worst, he said, was one time last year when he actually did get sent out for a job. It was for a temp agency called Most Valuable Personnel, or MVP.

As soon as the vanload of workers arrived at the job site, a packaging plant, Pruitt said a supervisor picked all the Latinos and sent back all the black workers. They weren’t needed, they were told.

“I could not believe that they would not pick one black, not one,” said Pruitt, talking in a McDonald’s near his Waukegan home. “It was very bold and humiliating, too.”

Rosa Ceja said the same thing happened on her watch. Back when she learned that black workers were “guapos” to be avoided, she was a dispatcher for MVP, working on-site at the same packaging plant.

“Right now, if I think about it, it's really, really sad,” she said.

Another former dispatcher, Adriana Hernandez of Round Lake, has similar stories: “They would tell me, ‘Remember, the supervisor doesn’t want any older ladies, and she doesn’t want any black people.’ ” She provided a text message that she claimed showed the codes for men and women, an order for “10 lights and 4 heavys.”

In response to the allegations, an attorney for MVP, Elliot Richardson, said, “We deny that we discriminate on any basis, including race or gender or for any other reasons whatsoever.”

He declined to address specifics.

“It’s not our desire to be litigating this in the media,” Richardson said. “We have directed our clients not to speak to the media about these pending matters.”

The packaging plant, called Metropolitan Graphic Arts, or MGA, doesn’t hire by race, said its president, Greg Szymanski. If any workers were sent back, he said, it was because they didn’t want to do the job.

“We’ll hire the United Nations, and we’ll look for good workers, period,” he said.

But Szymanski acknowledged requesting male workers for certain jobs and women for others.

“If it’s picking up very heavy things, men are stronger, sure,” he said. “We’ve been in this business, and we know that men do this job better and women do this job better.”

MGA’s clients include a long list of name-brand companies that once scrolled across its website: Advil, Dove, Crest, Tide, Huggies, Tums, L’Oreal, Arm & Hammer, Target, Starbucks, Walmart and Unilever.

Pruitt is part of class-action lawsuits claiming that MVP discriminated against black workers and didn’t pay him for his time. MVP responded in court filings that Pruitt never worked for the company.

Pruitt, 40, said he had to go to counseling for his rage – against Latinos.

“I was starting to hate them,” he said. “I knew that I shouldn’t be thinking the way that I was thinking, but I was frustrated and angry.”

Pruitt said he has gone from backing Obama to full-throated support for Donald Trump, citing the Republican presidential candidate’s combative stance on immigration.

“I want to help build that wall,” he said of Trump’s plan to seal off the U.S. border with Mexico. “I want to help get rid of some of these people.”

Racial preferences loom over recruiting offices around the country, lawsuits and interviews show.

A trio of temp agencies in Tennessee, for example, systematically recruited Latinos at the expense of black workers, according to government lawsuits.

“Whether it’s low-wage Hispanic workers or low-wage African American workers, each of them are trying to make a decent living, and they’re being pitted against each other,” said Faye Williams, regional attorney for the Memphis office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

This dynamic goes back to the 1990s, when global economic competition drove employers to seek a cheaper, more flexible workforce, said Virginia Tech sociology professor Barbara Ellen Smith.

They found a solution in temp agencies, which allowed for quick and easy hiring and firing. And they found a willing workforce in a growing stream of Latino immigrants, desperate for work of any kind, she said.

“In effect, employers were replacing black workers with Latino immigrant workers,” said Smith, who studied the phenomenon among warehouse workers in Memphis. “You’ve got a population that’s really kind of exploitable.”

The ensuing conflict between black and Latino workers served employers’ interests, too: “It keeps people from organizing,” she said.

Overcoming that racial divide has been the ongoing struggle of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative. The group, formed in 2000, traditionally advocated for Latino workers, campaigning against problems such as wage theft and sexual harassment. But a few years ago, its leaders reached out to black workers and discovered a reservoir of frustration and resentment.

“Their view was those 10 Latinos … getting in that van are the reason I’m not going to work,” said Leone Bicchieri, the group’s executive director. “As opposed to, it’s the dispatcher following orders from someone higher up.”

Black workers, he said, are more likely to complain about wage theft or workplace injuries than Latino workers, who might be worried about their immigration status or unsure of other options.

Bicchieri’s wife emigrated from Mexico and worked for years as a temp. He’s trying to convince Latino workers it’s in their long-term interests to fight job discrimination that actually favors them.

The group’s pitch is this: Black workers are losing jobs, and Latinos are losing their rights. Only united can they hold temp agencies accountable.

Photo by Stacey Rupolo

Most Valuable Personnel recently transferred its Illinois branches to Elite Staffing. This is their office on 55th Street in Gage Park on the Southwest Side.

Rejected black workers left sitting in temp agency lobbies may feel discrimination, but they can’t quantify it.

Despite lobbyist Dan Shomon’s repeated assurances that federal regulators already collect the data, it’s just not true. Officials with both the American Staffing Association and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission agree on that point.

The federal government compiles the demographics only of employees, not of job applicants. And the temp industry pushed for a federal exemption to those reporting requirements in the 1960s.

There is a state law in Illinois requiring agencies to keep a record of the race and gender of each temp worker who is hired. But it appears that law isn’t always followedor enforced.

MVP lawyers told a judge in 2014 that the company doesn’t record the race of its workers and doesn’t keep any record of job applicants.

The Illinois Department of Labor doesn’t inspect temp agency records unless it receives a complaint, and there haven’t been any related to race and gender recordkeeping, according to the department.

That raises the question: Even if the reform were enacted, would new rules also be ignored?

Shomon, the lobbyist, declined to answer questions from Reveal or provide information that backed up his assertions to lawmakers. Instead, he pointed to the long-standing federal law against hiring bias, writing by email, “This discrimination is already prohibited by the EEOC.”

The nonprofit trade group he represents came together, according to its website, to “fight to keep our industry free of unnecessary regulations.”

Its leadership is quite familiar with the discrimination problem.

The secretary of the board of directors is Chuck Porcelli, CEO of Bensenville-based ASG Staffing, recent federal and state filings show. A former office manager sued the company in 2014, accusing it of catering to customer requests for workers of a certain race or sex. The company used a coding system, the suit said, for “racial ‘earmarking.’ ” A “Code 3, heavy,” for example, meant a request for a Latino man.

They would tell me, ‘Remember, the supervisor doesn’t want any older ladies, and she doesn’t want any black people -- Pamela Sanchez Former dispatcher at Most Valueable Personnel

The company denied the allegations and settled confidentially with the former employee. ASG’s attorney, Bethany Drucker, said it does not discriminate.

Another association board member, Scott Reedy, is president of the Chicago-area firm Source One Staffing. His company agreed to pay $800,000 last year to resolve two lawsuits by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The government accused Source One of discriminating against temp workers by race, gender and disability.

“That’s a significant case and significant relief with respect to serious systemic discrimination,” said commission regional attorney John Hendrickson.

It all started in 2007, when a few female temp workers complained that a supervisor at a West Chicago plastics plant had sexually harassed them.

The government found that Source One segregated jobs into “men’s work” and “women’s work” and sent women to inferior, lower-paying jobs. The company sometimes assigned women to hostile work environments and then retaliated against those who complained.

One client, according to email requests, repeatedly asked for “girls.” Another, according to a deposition, wanted only “pretty girls.”

As for race, Source One also filled client requests for Latino workers, discriminating against white and black applicants, according to the commission.

Reedy, the company president and association board member, was personally swept up into the case. A former employee testified that he instructed her to fill gender-specific requests, but to lie to government investigators about what was happening.

The government called it witness tampering and said it “raises serious questions about unethical or even criminal conduct by Source One’s owner and/or its attorney.”

Source One denied wrongdoing but agreed to the settlement and ongoing supervision by an independent monitor. Reedy had to personally guarantee $150,000 of the settlement, a requirement Hendrickson, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission attorney, called “extraordinarily rare.”

Reedy, reached by phone, said of the government allegations: “That’s done and gone, and I already spent eight years on it.” He declined to answer other questions, saying, “I don’t have any comments regarding anything,” and hung up the phone.

Companies run by other association board members face pending discrimination complaints with the commission and in court.

At the Springfield hearings for SB 47, though, legislators seemed to doubt whether there was a problem to fix at all. Rep. Luis Arroyo, for one, didn’t believe it.

“They tried to say that the temp agencies only hire Latinos. I think that that’s wrong to say that,” Arroyo said in a January interview. “Did I do any investigations? Do I know that for a fact? No, I don’t.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Pamela Sanchez tried to tell them. She worked as a Most Valuable Personnel dispatcher in Cicero, a Chicago suburb, until February 2015. The workers collaborative invited her to Springfield to testify at a committee hearing in May 2015. She brought her daughter.

Rep. Elizabeth “Lisa” Hernandez, who represents Cicero, asked Sanchez whether temp workers are chosen on a first-come, first-served basis. She was surprised at the answer.

“No, ma’am,” Sanchez replied. “Most of the time, people will choose by race.”

Some wrote off the dispatcher’s firsthand account. The rumor going around, Arroyo said, was that Sanchez had been paid to say those things.

“That’s what they were saying in the halls and in the back,” he said.

After all, Arroyo said, “Why would a Latina say that they are only hiring Latinos?” It didn’t make sense that she would speak out against something that benefited Latinos.

“Latinos normally don’t do that,” he said.

Pamela Sanchez, a former dispatcher for Most Valuable Personnel, stands outside her home on the West Side of Chicago. She testified at a committee hearing in Springfield about discrimination against black workers.

Sanchez, a soft-spoken single mother of two from Chicago’s West Lawn neighborhood, said she went public because she used to be a temp worker herself.

“I know how hard it is when you need to be there and looking for a job and they don't pick you,” she said. “I cannot be shutting my mouth no more.”

There was also an element of guilt, of making things right. She says she still feels bad about the time she confirmed a black worker for a temp job, telling him to come into the office the following day around 4 a.m. He waited for five hours, she said, but was passed over. She said her manager told her, “Oh, you know they don’t want no blacks.”

Sanchez said MVP fired her last year after she complained to upper management about problems at the Cicero office. Shortly afterward, she signed a court declaration for lawyers suing MVP over discrimination. It makes it clear that Sanchez had much more to say, had legislators asked.

In it, she describes the multitude of ways the system is rigged against black workers:

MVP had her pass out fliers advertising work in Spanish only, she said. Van drivers picked up laborers in Latino neighborhoods such as Little Village. Recruiters like herself kept their own lists of Latino workers to call if a job came open.

Latinos who ventured into a recruiting office were given an application and often sent out to work right away. Black job seekers were told they couldn’t fill out an application unless there was a job opening. They had to sign an authorization to run a criminal background check, but Latino workers didn’t.

MVP, Sanchez said, would send black workers to jobs no one else wanted, such as meatpacking plants. The cold conditions were so uncomfortable that Latino workers asked to be transferred elsewhere. With no other option, the black workers would go, she said.

MVP recently transferred its Illinois branches, including the Cicero one, to Elite Staffing, but maintains branches in other states. Elite Staffing is a founding member of the Staffing Services Association of Illinois, and an Elite executive currently serves as board president.

As for Arroyo’s rumor about her testimony, Sanchez said she wasn’t paid a penny. Arroyo, however, was.

Three months after the hearing at which Arroyo lambasted SB 47’s sponsor for “hurting my community,” several temp agencies gathered for a fundraising dinner Aug. 24. Six agencies pooled together $5,000 for Arroyo’s campaign account, according to campaign finance records.

One of the donors was Personnel Staffing Group, the parent company of MVP, where Sanchez worked.

Another was ASG Staffing, the company accused of coding workers by race and sex.

A third was ClearStaff, a Woodridge-based agency sued in 2014 by a former sales representative who complained about office talk involving racial slurs and sexual favors for clients. She lost her suit but had prompted an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation.

The commission found reasonable cause that the company discriminated against black job applicants and paid Latino workers less than non-Latinos. The commission couldn’t come to a resolution with ClearStaff and decided not to file suit, according to court records. ClearStaff’s president, Richard Seeman, formerly served on the board of the industry association. He didn’t respond to phone calls.

This wasn’t a routine show of support for Arroyo. None of the agencies had donated to him before, campaign contribution records show. But Arroyo said the donations had nothing to do with his stance on SB 47.

“I've always supported the temp agencies, because it works in the Northwest Side, he said. “You got to support the people that support you.”

This story was published in partnership with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read part two of this story here.

Will Evans is a reporter for Reveal, covering labor and workplace issues. Follow him on Twitter: @willCIR

ILO Sets Ultimatum to Government to End Modern Slavery of Migrant Workers 23 March 2016

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 19:29:00 +0000

The International Labour Organisation has given Qatar 12 months to reform its labour laws and ensure effective labour inspection, or face the prospect of an ILO Commission of Inquiry being launched next March.

Government, employer and worker delegates to the ILO’s Governing Body meeting in Geneva set the deadline yesterday, despite a major lobbying effort by the Qatar government. An ILO Commission of Inquiry is one of the most powerful elements in the UN body’s mechanisms to help ensure compliance. In close to a century of history of the ILO, the procedure has been invoked only 13 times.

The meeting received a report from a high-level mission of union, employer and government representatives in February, which underlined Qatar’s failure to comply with key international labour standards that it has ratified but not implemented.

Sharan Burrow, ITUC General Secretary, said: “Qatar now has 12 months to do what it has so far refused to do. It must end the use of modern slavery in the huge migrant workforce by bringing its laws in line with ILO standards. An immediate start is needed, to start treating the hundreds of thousands of migrant workers as human beings with human rights and end the appalling treatment of the people delivering its massive infrastructure programme – construction workers, domestic workers and those providing the services on which one of the world’s richest countries depends.”

The complaint against Qatar, brought by ILO delegates in 2014, calls for the government to respect ILO Conventions 29 on Forced Labour and 81 on Labour Inspection. Cosmetic reforms announced by the government have failed to convince the international community that it is yet serious about ending forced labour. Key steps which the government needs to take are:

Ratification of the Protocol updating Convention 29, adopted by the ILO in 2014;
Complete abolition of the notorious exit visa, which is used to force migrant workers to remain in Qatar;
A non-discriminatory living minimum wage; and
Allowing migrant workers to have a collective voice without fear of punishment.
“Qatar embarked on a massive infrastructure programme to underpin its hosting of the World Cup in 2022, but it did so without regard to the consequences for the very people who are delivering the roads, bridges, utilities, sports facilities and all the rest needed to become a global sporting centre. The death and injury toll continues to rise, and migrant workers remain impoverished and trapped in servitude. Qatar has the financial means to make the real reforms, ensure safe work and decent wages, and the international community is ready to help when the government finally shows that it is serious. That day has yet to come, but the new ruling from the ILO should hasten Qatar’s realisation that the world will only be convinced by real change, not by public relations exercises,” said Burrow.

For more information, please contact the ITUC Press Department on +32 2 224 02 10 or press@ituc-csi.org

Egyptian state takes on independent trade unions

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 19:27:00 +0000

EGYPT PULSEإقرأ باللغة العربيةنبض مصر

Staff and workers of Egypt's Ministry of Finance Tax Authority shout slogans during a protest in front of the Syndicate of Journalists in Cairo, Aug. 10, 2015. Trade union workers staged the protest to demand the abolition of the Civil Service Law and a minimum and maximum wage for public servants. (photo by REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh)

Egyptian state takes on independent trade unions
CAIRO — In what many critics see as an effort to eliminate union organization in Egypt and undermine all constitutional articles guaranteeing the right to establish trade unions, the state on March 1 declared that the stamps of independent trade unions will no longer be valid on official documents. The decision prohibits dealing with independent trade unions and considers them illegitimate entities.

Summary⎙ Print After Egypt recently declared independent trade unions invalid, many groups said they will fight the decision on the grounds that it violates the constitution.
Author Khalid HassanPosted March 24, 2016
TranslatorJoelle El-Khoury
The decision came following a more than five-year struggle between independent trade unions and the state, represented by the Ministry of Manpower, which is in charge of following up on the establishment and activity of trade unions. After the January 25 Revolution, dozens of independent trade unions started forming to express workers' demands.

With time, the independent trade unions’ influence increased, as members elected their leaders and saw them as rights advocates. Workers abandoned the pro-government Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF), which failed to unite them under its umbrella.

The Interior Ministry said the Ministry of Manpower had asked for the unions to be invalidated because they are not subject to the provisions of Law No. 35 of 1976 on trade unions, which prohibits union pluralism.

Article 13 of that law states that workers in the same occupational groups or industries, or in industries correlated to each other or jointly working for the same production, can only form one trade union across the republic and no other.

Hani Afifi, vice president of the Egyptian Democratic Labor Congress (EDLC), which is an independent alliance of unions, told Al-Monitor, “This law is faulty and has no value, as it contradicts constitutional Article 76, which allows trade union pluralism and guarantees workers’ right to establish trade unions upon notifying the concerned authority. Constitutional provisions are the important thing for us, and the government needs to adjust its situation according to the constitution and refrain from implementing a law that contradicts the constitution.”

Constitution Article 76 states that the establishment of federations and trade unions on a democratic basis is a right guaranteed by the law. The article says unions shall have legal personality, operate freely, contribute to higher competencies among its members, advocate for their rights and protect their interests. The article also says the state shall guarantee the independence of trade unions and federations, and their boards of directors shall not be dissolved without a court order.

“We have in the [EDLC] congress 125 independent trade unions and more than 800,000 workers, all of whom left the ETUF and decided to join us. The federation did not offer them anything and workers did not even elect their representatives, so how could ETUF be representative of workers in the state?” Afifi said.

He added, “Why does the state refuse to implement the provisions of the constitution and continue to procrastinate on issuing the laws on freedom of association, which the ministry had announced two years ago? Why is the state trying to suppress workers with an outdated law from 40 years ago, which was canceled in the [2014] constitution? We will not be affected by these measures and we will continue to fight for our usurped rights and exercise the freedoms of association to the fullest, as per the constitution."

In January, the Permanent Conference of Alexandria Workers launched a campaign dubbed "Together for Freedom of Association” calling on the government to yield to workers’ demands and implement the constitution’s provisions regarding the freedom to establish trade unions unconditionally.

The campaign has said it will take clear steps to pressure the government, including organizing seminars and meetings with workers from across the country’s different governorates, and collecting their signatures on a petition rejecting the decision. The campaign also plans to file lawsuits against the Ministry of Manpower for violating the constitution.

In press statements March 16, Khaled Tosoun, vice chairman of the Permanent Conference of Alexandria Workers, called upon the state to reject its thinking, which he said is negatively affecting its economic situation; to implement the international labor agreement it had signed; and to openly declare its support for the working class and workers’ right to establish independent unions.

Egypt is a signee of the International Labor Convention No. 87 for 1948, which states in its second and third articles that workers have the right to establish unions and organizations of their choice unconditionally, to set their bylaws and regulations and organize their administrative affairs and activities in full freedom. The convention’s Article 8 stipulates that the country’s laws shall not prejudice the provisions of the agreement.

Article 93 of the constitution says the state shall be bound to the international agreements, covenants and conventions on human rights ratified by Egypt, which shall enter into force after publication in accordance with the established procedure.

Abdel Monem al-Gamal, the ETUF deputy chairman, made scathing comments to Al-Monitor against the independent unions, calling upon them to respect the law and rejoin the federation, which is the only union legally recognized by the state.

“Law No. 35 of 1976 is the only law governing the establishment of independent trade unions and federations. The government has yet to amend it in accordance with the constitution. So until the government passes the new law, the independent unions are void and invalid,” he said.

About the accusations against that ETUF has not offered workers any benefits for the past 60 years, Gamal said, “If the ETUF has done nothing for workers, could anyone tell me what the independent unions have offered workers over the past five years since their establishment?

"Unfortunately, some workers have exploited the chaos that followed the January revolution to create fake entities, obtaining funds from abroad without any control. Today, we have to correct the path by operating under the umbrella of the official federation exclusively.”

Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/03/egypt-independent-trade-unions-battle-decision-law.html#ixzz44E9wFEBM

How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:17:00 +0000

Labor Notes

How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers

$15.00

Tells how activists transformed their union and gave members hope. Readers will learn how to run for office, work with their communities, build a stewards network, train new leaders, run a contract campaign, and strike. By Alexandra Bradbury, Mark Brenner, Jenny Brown, Jane Slaughter, and Samantha Winslow. 232 pages.

“How to Jump-Start Your Unionshould be a beacon to all rank-and-file members on how to bring democracy to their locals. It’s a toolkit that shows how good old-fashioned hard work and faith in the membership can empower every frontline worker.”
—KAREN LEWIS, President, Chicago Teachers Union

“Labor Notes has done it again! Every unionist should read this book that chronicles how the new leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union organized their members, built strong support with the community, and waged a strike against formidable adversaries. But this book is more—it’s a manual on how all unions can revamp to win justice, with lessons that every union can apply to their own situation.”
—STEVEN ASHBY, Professor of Labor Relations University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“This play-by-play account of one of the most successful strikes in modern U.S. history documents what it takes to level the playing field against corporate masters and politicians. The lessons put forth by Labor Notes should serve as ‘common core standards’ for unionists who seek to re-energize their own organizations.”
—ED SADLOWSKI, JR., Council 31 AFSCME, Illinois

“The power of public sector unionism stems from our ability to be the voice that advocates directly both for democracy and for the consumers of services. In this book we learn how grassroots organizers used this singular role to revolutionize their own union.”
—HETTY ROSENSTEIN, New Jersey State Director, Communications Workers

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VIDEO: What If UnionsTook to Heart the Need to Organize Their Own Members?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:15:00 +0000

Labor Notes

VIDEO: What If Unions Took to Heart the Need to Organize Their Own Members?

Too often when we start talking about organizing, we immediately focus on workers outside of unions. Labor Notes Director Mark Brenner spoke at a January 15 conference on the labor movement's future. Video: Albert Shanker Institute.

Recently I was invited to speak at the Albert Shanker Institute, the think tank run by the American Federation of Teachers. I know, it kind of makes your head explode, right?

Heavyweights from across the country gathered there in January to discuss the future of our movement. After I got past the suits and lingering hot air, I was struck by just how far the discussion—even in official circles—has swung towards labor’s troublemaking wing.

AFL-CIO Vice-President Tefere Gebre, for example, made a point of saying we can’t do anything without rank-and-file members at the center. Speaker after speaker said our power comes from our ability to disrupt. And to my pleasant surprise, more than one raised the thorny topic of union democracy.

Although actions speak louder than words, I tried to sharpen the discussion without throwing any elbows. (You can watch the full video of my talk, at left.) A few points I think bear repeating:

IT’S ABOUT POWER

Our goal is power for working-class people—so we have more control over our lives, on and off the job.

As a young activist I was taught there’s only two kinds of power: organized money and organized people. The bankers, billionaires, and corporate execs win every time if we try to compete on their terms.

Labor’s power is organized people.

But too often when we start talking about organizing people, we immediately focus on workers outside of unions. Even worse, we forget that our numbers only represent potential power.

That’s why we need to organize the members we’ve already got before we can recruit new folks on any scale.

ORGANIZE THE UNIONIZED

When I first signed a union card 20 years ago, the veterans told me we needed one steward for every 10 members. How’s your union doing by that yardstick?

Scratch the surface of any of labor’s recent victories—from teachers in Portland to Cablevision techs in Brooklyn—and you’ll find a union that took internal organizing to heart.

Imagine if every union put the one-to-10 principle into practice. We’d have 1.3 million cadre, ready to carry the union gospel into open shops and promote a different common sense on everything from health care to the tax code.

We’ve got to exponentially expand the number of members who have the skills and confidence to act like the union—and give them the authority to do it.

MOBILIZING VS. ORGANIZING

In most unions, that means an overhaul of the relationship between members and the officers and staff down at the union hall.

For decades unionists have debated which model is best: servicing or organizing? But this dichotomy cloaks the fact that what most unions call organizing is really mobilizing. Members are just being moved from Point A to Point B, like turning a faucet on or off.

Organizing is all about self-activity. It’s about meeting members where they’re at, and moving somewhere different together.

It’s about more than paying dues and voting. Unions have to create the space for rank and filers to strategize and plan. Democracy can be a hot mess—but there’s no shortcut around building leaders who know what they’re fighting for.

The best leaders trust the members. They have faith that their co-workers, when presented with the same information and analysis they have, will reach the same conclusions.

Their job is to get the ball rolling and get out of the way.

Mark Brenner is the Director of Labor Notes. He can be reached at mark@labornotes.org

Organizing Is the Key to Surviving Friedrichs

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:12:00 +0000

Labor Notes

Organizing Is the Key to Surviving Friedrichs

A decision that makes the whole public sector “right to work” could be devastating. But it won’t make unions powerless. Photo: Culinary Workers Union Local 226.

When news broke that the Supreme Court would hear Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, headlines instantly projected the worst, calling it “The Supreme Court Case That Could Decimate American Public Sector Unionism,” “An Existential Threat,” and even “The End of Public-Employee Unions?”

Hyperbole aside, a decision that makes the whole public sector “right to work” could be devastating. But it won’t make unions powerless.

After all, public sector workers didn’t always have legal protection to unionize, bargain, or strike, much less enforce agency shop. Not too far back in history, they won those rights—by organizing without them.

THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

The 1935 Wagner Act, which gave most private sector workers the legal right to organize, didn’t cover public employees.

So how did teacher unions, for instance, grow? New York City teachers struck for collective bargaining rights in 1960—touching off a decade of 300 teacher strikes, as the ranks of the American Federation of Teachers swelled from 60,000 to 200,000.

Strikes led to more formal organizing. From 1970 on, 100,000 joined the National Education Association each year. By 1980 it had 2 million members.

In many states, it took strikes and demonstrations to press lawmakers to recognize public workers’ right to organize. And many of these strikes were illegal.

The first legal statewide strike by public workers wasn’t till 1975, by 40,000 AFSCME members in Pennsylvania.

Last month I wrote about how unions are preparing to lose the right to require non-members to pay fair-share fees. United Teachers Los Angeles Vice President Daniel Barnhart pointed out that his union has only had these fees since 1992.

CLEAR EYES

Of course, none of this makes right to work a union-building policy, as some argue. Let’s not kid ourselves that the disappearance of agency shops will somehow spark a renaissance of worker self-organizing, or automatically draw unions closer to their members.

We’ve seen the results in Wisconsin, after just a few years of a law that severely restricts union rights. It’s not pretty. Member rolls shrank 30 percent in education locals, and even more in AFSCME. (It didn’t help that many unions poured resources into recalling Governor Scott Walker rather than internal organizing, then pulled out when they lost.)

There’s a reason why bosses push these laws: they weaken unions. It hurts solidarity when members have to work alongside “free riders.” Union budgets will probably shrink. And activists and staff will have to dedicate more time to simply maintaining numbers.

That said, time devoted to internal organizing isn’t wasted. Some unions have learned to integrate member signup—even when it’s optional—into ambitious programs.

A GOOD OFFENSE

For instance, Las Vegas’s Culinary Union, in right-to-work Nevada, has 90 percent of its 55,000 casino workers paying dues. It also has high density and prioritizes new organizing.

How does Culinary do it? The union involves members in strong contract campaigns. It’s won good wages and benefits for what were once (and are still, in non-union casinos) low-wage jobs.

Teacher unions in Milwaukee, Madison, and Racine, Wisconsin, too, have kept membership above 70 percent—and that’s with a law that virtually prevents them from bargaining, and requires them to recertify annually.

Members there have voted to rejoin multiple times, because the unions fight for what they care about: defending public education.

Too many unions mistakenly see two competing priorities: we won’t have time to engage workers in inspiring fights, because we’ll be too busy trying to sign them up as union members!

But that’s a losing strategy. When internal organizing is done right, the two tasks are one and the same.

Samantha Winslow is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.samantha@labornotes.org

How Abusive Police Practices Target Women of Color - and What Women Are Doing About It

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 08:54:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

The transformation of police practices in this country cannot happen without a national reckoning regarding the ways both white supremacy and misogyny have shaped and continue to influence law enforcement practices in the United States.

Alexa Van Brunt and Sheila A. Bedi

Truthout

December 28, 2015

Mourners and demonstrators gather for a candlelight vigil on July 13, 2015, in Ottawa, Canada, in honor of Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a Waller County jail cell in Texas.

Robert Fairchild

On December 11, 2015, a jury convicted former Oklahoma City police officer and serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw. On December 15, 2015, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released - for the first time ever - guidance on "Identifying and Preventing Gender Bias in Law Enforcement." And on December 22, 2015, a grand jury refused to indict anyone for the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail cell. These events reveal a truth about law enforcement in the United States that has remained in the shadows for too long: Police departments across the country have well-documented histories of devaluing and brutalizing women of color. But women (and particularly Black women) are not just victims of police misconduct; they are also leading the movement to transform this entrenched system of injustice.

Until recently, Detroit had a backlog of 30 years' worth of rape kits, the contents of which had never been processed nor the underlying crimes investigated by the city's police department. Eighty-one percent of Wayne County victims whose kits were never tested were Black. As a result, women who were subject to often brutal attacks never had the opportunity to learn the identity of their attacker or receive a semblance of justice for the pain they suffered. What they did learn is that they were not valued by the system. It was not until Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy galvanized female business leaders in the Detroit community to raise private funds that the testing of decades' worth of rape kits went forward. As a result of the private sector's involvement, victims in that city have begun receiving attention that is long overdue.

Such disregard for rape victims of color is not unique to Detroit. In 2010, the DOJ uncovered a pattern of misconduct in the New Orleans Police Department's sex crimes unit, which included the failure to test rape kits, "downgrading" of rape complaints and victim-blaming for sexual assaults. Since then, the police department entered into a consent decree with the DOJ, aimed at fixing both the kit backlog and officers' treatment of victims. But as recently as August 2015, problems persist in the sex crimes unit. Women With a Vision, a New Orleans nonprofit organization founded by a grassroots collective of African-American women, fills the void left in the wake of the DOJ consent decree. The organization advocates for the "human rights protection of street-based sex workers" who often endure sexual abuse on the streets and are then subject to "the threat of prosecution even when reporting violence done to them."

Chicago law enforcement has exhibited a similar lack of respect for female crime victims. Significant public attention has been paid over the years to Chicago's spate of wrongfully convicted men(mostly men of color) who were arrested by police for crimes they did not commit. What has been less of a point of focus is the women who were victims of these crimes. Officers intentionally bungled these investigations. As a result, innocent men languished in prison and the lives of the women and girls who were victimized were devalued.

This is true for Nina Glover, a rape and murder victim in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago in 1994. As alleged in a civil suit brought on behalf of our client, Terrill Swift, he and four other teenagers were coerced by detectives into confessing to the crime. Consequently, the true perpetrator, a serial rapist, was never caught. The same is true for Sharon Haugabook, a woman killed execution-style in 1992, but whose murder went unanswered when Daniel Taylor, also a client, and other Chicago teens were forced to confess to her murder. They have since been exonerated and have also brought suit against the City of Chicago. Haugabook's murder was never solved.

Outside Chicago, nearby Lake County, Illinois, has been similarly plagued by wrongful convictions. Last May, Lake County resident Jason Strong was released by the state, cleared of murdering Mary Kate Sundelin, a disabled woman who was not even identified until six years after Strong was convicted. To say Sundelin was denied a fair investigation is an understatement. The list of men in this area of the country who were falsely imprisoned - and the female victims whose murders went unsolved - goes on.

There is also ample evidence that Chicago police officers regularly abuse women while on the job. Chicago paid out over $500 million between 2004 and 2014 to compensate people alleging violations of their constitutional rights by police. Contributing to this number are numerous settlements on behalf of women who endured physical brutality at the hands of law enforcement, as detailed in a complaint concerning police misconduct in Chicago that we submitted to the DOJ on December 7, 2015. Women allege in court filings that Chicago police slammed them into cars, choked them, punched them, beat them with blunt objects and taunted them based on their perceived sexuality. The most well-publicized case is that of Rekia Boyd, who was shot to death by an off-duty police officer in 2012. He has since been acquitted of her murder.

There can be no doubt that women, and particularly women of color, are consistently targeted, abused and discriminated against by those in uniform. But as documented by the Black women leading the Say Her Name movement, while the names of men of color who are murdered by police officers become rallying cries, the names of women who endure brutal maltreatment are too often relegated to obscurity. Sparked by community outrage after the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, the DOJ, this December, launched an investigation into the Chicago Police Department's use of force. But the US attorney general's announcement of the investigation contained no mention of the federal agency's intent to examine police handling of crimes against women or uses of force directed at women. Nor have interventions by the DOJ in other jurisdictions included a gendered focus - though the subsequent federal investigations unsurprisingly revealed police cultures that tolerated violence against women.

Women may be sidelined by official systems of inquiry, but as the Detroit and New Orleans examples make clear, it is women who are leading the crusade nationwide to change policing practices that terrorize people of color. It was three Black women who began the Black Lives Matter movement that roused a countrywide following and sparked civil rights protests throughout the United States. The Black Youth Project and We Charge Genocide are two efforts largely led by Black women that have focused the nation's attention on the abusive law enforcement culture in Chicago and elsewhere. Both groups have called repeatedly for justice on behalf of women mistreated by police.

Largely because of the advocacy of Black women throughout the country, the nation is paying unprecedented attention to the violence and misconduct perpetuated by police officers in communities of color. But the narratives shaping the nation's focus belong almost entirely to men. This must change. The epidemic of police brutality, misconduct and discrimination undeniably affects women and especially Black women, who are targets of abusive police interactions - whether that abuse takes the form of police violence or a refusal to take crimes against Black women seriously.

Sheila A. Bedi is a clinical associate law professor at Northwestern University law school and an attorney at the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center. She was a fellow with The OpEd Project's Public Voices Fellowship at Northwestern.

Alexa Van Brunt is an attorney and clinical assistant professor with the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

Posted by Portside on January 5, 2016

- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-11/how-abusive-police-practices-target-women-color-and-what-women-are-doing-about-it#sthash.NgO42mK3.dpuf

Chinese Railroad Workers

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 08:53:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

During the 1860's, Chinese laborers were brought in to help construct the first U.S. trans-continental railroad between the Atlantic & the Pacific coasts. They worked long hours & were underpaid, and most of the time in extreme weather conditions. Many lost their lives in this historic epic, but their contributions were buried & their history untold.

Center for the Study of Political Graphics

January 5, 2016

Chinese Railroad Workers

Yi Kai; Northland Poster Collective

Silkscreen, 1993

Minneapolis, Minnesota

30059

The construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860's led to a demand for cheap and reliable labor, and Chinese were often recruited because they worked for low wages in very difficult conditions. Despite their hard work and many contributions, Chinese laborers faced discrimination and hostility from their non-Chinese counterparts who blamed them for unemployment and decreasing wages.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese workers. It was the first law that prevented a specific ethnic group from migrating to the U.S. and was one of the most significant restrictions on free immigration in U.S. history. The Chinese Exclusion Act was officially repealed on December 17, 1943. Seventy-two years later, the racism and xenophobia that first established the Chinese Exclusion Act is very much alive, with politicians and citizens again attempting to blame specific ethnic groups and religions for broader social and political issues.

In the past few months, hostility towards Mexicans, Syrians, and Muslims has been fueled by presidential candidates whose platforms also propose revoking citizenship from the children of undocumented migrants and banning Muslims from entering the U.S. When will we ever learn?

Poster Text:

Chinese Railroad Workers During the 1860's, Chinese laborers were brought in to help construct the first U.S. trans-continental railroad between the Atlantic & the Pacific coasts. They worked long hours & were underpaid, and most of the time in extreme weather conditions. Many lost their lives in this historic epic, but their contributions were buried & their history untold. © 1993 by Yi Kai Northland Poster Collective www.northlandposter.com 1-800-627-3082

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Gutting Public Unions

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 22:59:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

Daniel DiSalvo's self proclaimed 'non-partisan' attack on public unions as greedy, inefficient and undemocratic, 'Government Against Itself,' has been welcomed by the right and granted recognition for its 'scholarship' even by some on the left. Not so fast, argues William P.

William P. Jones

Dissent

October 22, 2015

Wisconsin public employees protest right-to-work legislation, 2011

Matt Baran via Flickr

Government Against Itself: Public Union Power and Its Consequences
by Daniel DiSalvo
Oxford University Press, 2015, 304 pp.

Since the enactment of Act 10, the law that sparked massive protests four years ago in Wisconsin and that now forms the centerpiece of Governor Scott Walker’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, average weekly wages for employees of that state have barely kept pace with inflation. And, with increased responsibilities for health insurance and pension costs, many state employees saw their take-home pay decline by 10 percent or more between 2011 and 2014. Leah Lipska, president of Local 1 of the American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which was founded in Madison in 1932, told the New York Times that, by 2014, she had been forced to apply for food stamps to support her family.

Walker’s law limits collective bargaining contracts to one year and requires unions to win a majority of all eligible voters—rather than the more common standard of all votes cast—in annual certification elections. Even if unions cross that hurdle, public officials are prohibited from deducting union dues from paychecks, negotiating over benefits or working conditions, or raising wages faster than the rate of inflation. Lest workers grow impatient with that administrative quagmire, Act 10 allows the governor to declare a state of emergency during which state employees can be fired for participating “in a strike, work stoppage, sit-down, stay-in, slowdown, or other concerted activities to interrupt the operations or services of state government, including specifically purported mass resignations or sick calls.” Stripped of any real power, unions watched helplessly as their members turned to other sources of support. “I don’t see the point of being in a union anymore,” one teacher told the Washington Post, explaining that he sought a part-time job to make up for the losses. “The money I’d spend on dues is way more valuable to buy groceries for my family.”

Unions greeted Act 10 as a potentially fatal blow, not just in Wisconsin but also across the country. The year 2010 was the first in history that public employees accounted for more than half of all union members in the United States. This was not just due to the expansion of government and the decline of manufacturing but also to the steady erosion of legal protections for unionization and collective bargaining in the private sector. Unions won early victories in 2011, when voters sided overwhelmingly with a referendum that overturned an Ohio law similar to Act 10 and forced Walker into a recall election in Wisconsin. Hopes faded, however, as Walker won the recall by a larger margin than his original election, survived a series of legal challenges to Act 10, and used those victories to deepen his party’s majority in the state legislature. In 2012, Indiana became the first Midwestern state to pass a right-to-work law, which bars unions from charging workers to represent them, followed shortly by Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, a series of legal cases imposed similar restrictions on public sector unions nationally. In the fall of 2015, the Supreme Court will rule in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that challenges a unions’ ability to charge any fee for representing or negotiating on behalf of a public employee.

Given the central role that public-sector unions have played in mobilizing voters and lobbying elected officials to defend public investment in education, health care, and other social services, these were setbacks not just for organized labor but for anyone who believes the state should ensure access to such goods.

However, according to Daniel DiSalvo, a political scientist at the City University of New York and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute (a libertarian think-tank), Walker’s law stands as a model for addressing “one of the diseases most incident to contemporary American democracy.” Before 2011, he contends, Wisconsin’s collective bargaining law allowed unions to increase wages, benefits, and job protections for public employees, block reforms aimed at making government more efficient, and expand the size of government beyond what taxpayers needed or could afford. Yet according to DiSalvo, the biggest problem was not financial, but that collective bargaining allowed unions to “distort democracy” by giving public employees more influence over elected officials than other citizens.

Government Against Itself carries the scholarly credentials of Oxford University Press, but it hones closely to DiSalvo’s 2011 polemic, Government Unions and the Bankrupting of America. Published in the midst of clashes over public-sector unions in Wisconsin, Ohio, and other states, that pamphlet appeared in a series of broadsides claiming to “make the case for liberty and the institutions of democratic capitalism at a time when they are under siege from the resurgence of collectivist sentiment.” I point this out not to discredit DiSalvo; as a state employee in Wisconsin, I am clearly more invested in this debate than he is. Rather, I offer this as an explanation for his tendency to ignore obvious contradictions in his thesis, rely on scholars who share his ideological background while ignoring those who contradict him, and support his argument through theory and speculation more often than empirical data.

The most obvious weakness of DiSalvo’s thesis is a fact that he concedes: “existing research does not point to a broad generalization that ‘government workers are overpaid (or underpaid).’” He begins the book with the horror stories of “lavish” pension and health care policies that are the stock-in-trade of conservative attacks, but clarifies later that such benefits are neither typical nor generous enough to offset the low wages earned by most public employees. The few studies that show otherwise assign a “market value” to pension plans, which accounts for the greater security offered by defined benefit plans that are more common in the public sector but overstates the actual cost of those plans to employers. Since DiSalvo is concerned about the impact of benefits on public budgets, a more relevant measure is used by national studies, which show that total compensation for public employees averages 4 percent less than that of comparable workers in the private sector. In Wisconsin, before Scott Walker slashed public-sector compensation even further, that disparity approached 5 percent. If unions are the pillaging tyrants DiSalvo claims they are, why would they settle for such meager spoils?

DiSalvo’s shoddy approach to history is exemplified by the epigraphs to his book: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s warning that “collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” and AFL-CIO President George Meany’s complaint that it is “impossible to bargain collectively with the government.” Like many conservatives, DiSalvo interprets those statements as evidence that “through the 1950s, most politicians, labor leaders, economists, and judges did not believe that collective bargaining was proper in the government arena.” What broke the consensus, he contends, was the empowerment of public employees through civil service laws and increased demand for public services following the Second World War, which “gave politicians the incentive to link arms with the public sector unions and make them bigger and more powerful to increase their own electoral fortunes.” Depicting that alliance in Faustian terms, DiSalvo writes: “It was a revolution with major consequences for American politics, as governments across the country effectively created a powerful new interest group.”

While Roosevelt justified the exclusion of public employees from the federal law promoting unionization and collective bargaining in the private sector, he authorized alternative forms of collective bargaining in the Government Printing Office, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other agencies. State and local governments followed suit, and by 1946 the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified hundreds of written agreements between public officials and their employees. In 1948, the American Federation of Labor urged state legislatures to provide public employees with “the same legal rights and privileges” that federal law granted to workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO reiterated that position after the labor federations merged in 1955, indicating that George Meany’s famous statement, issued the same year, expressed frustration with the continued resistance from public officials rather than opposition to public-sector unions. By 1959, when Wisconsin passed the first statewide law governing collective bargaining in the public sector, the American Bar Association, the International City Managers Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union had all endorsed the position that collective bargaining could and should be “modified to meet the unique needs of the public service.” Even Business Week, noting that unions were growing more rapidly in government than in any other sector, dubbed AFSCME the “Union of the Future.”

The acceptance of public-sector unions stemmed not from the empowerment of government workers but quite the opposite, from the chaotic and contradictory character of the public labor market. Demand for public services expanded rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s, due in large part to the ability of industrial unions to increase wages and benefits for their members. But the exclusion of public employees from federal labor laws meant that their own wages, benefits, and working conditions lagged far behind the rising standards of the private sector. One example is that maids and janitors in New York City’s public hospitals, centerpieces of the postwar welfare state, worked forty-eight-hour weeks and still qualified for public assistance. Such contradictions created an unwieldy rate of labor turnover in public employment, and an over-concentration of women and non-white workers, whose alternatives were constrained by discrimination in the private sector. It also inspired a wave of labor unrest by public employees. AFSCME recorded nearly 200 strikes between 1950 and 1961, most of them by nurses aides, sanitation workers, custodians, and others who enjoyed none of the “job security and prestige” that DiSalvo credits with turning liberal opinion in favor of public-sector unions. Challenging the same misconception in 1959, Business Week noted that while “AFSCME is frequently thought of as a white-collar union,” 70 percent of its members were “blue-collar workers.”

The law that Wisconsin adopted in 1959, and which became a template for federal and state governments across the country, sought to address those contradictions within the framework set out by President Roosevelt two decades earlier. Most importantly, legislators granted public officials wide latitude in excluding certain issues from negotiations and in determining the means of enforcing any agreements. While unions pushed for legally binding collective bargaining contracts, sought arbitration when negotiations broke down, and won “a very limited right to strike” in some states, the system remained, according to legal historian Joseph Slater, “far removed from bargaining in the traditional private sector sense”

You wouldn’t know it from reading Government Against Itself, but a long line of court cases and scholarly studies have assessed the impact of collective bargaining in the public sector. DiSalvo cites legal theorists Harry Wellington, Ralph Winter, and Clyde Summers to claim that public-sector unionism “compromises the sovereignty of democratic government and distorts the democratic process,” but does not tell us that they favored collective bargaining laws that addressed those threats or that their recommendations have informed court cases and legislation since the 1970s. Their concern that unionization might lead to strikes that forced the hands of elected officials was alleviated by evidence that strike activity declined after collective bargaining became routinized and remained more common in states without collective bargaining laws. It is true that collective bargaining improved wages and benefits for public employees, but this tended to bring them in line with comparable workers in the private sector rather than producing inequalities.

Ironically, in conceding that “unionization has tended to reduce inequalities in the governmental workplace,” DiSalvo turns this around to contend that equality “comes at the price of making government work less attractive to the talented and ambitious, reducing productivity, and driving up the costs of government services.” Here too, DiSalvo relies on speculation more than evidence. After half a century of public-sector unionism, for example, Wisconsin ranked thirty-first among states in per capita spending for government employees and thirty-ninth in the relative size of its public workforce. Nevertheless, while DiSalvo admits that no “scholarly consensus” demonstrates a correlation between unionization and productivity in the public sector, he insists “basic economic theory says that when there is little competition and vague performance metrics in the provision of a good or service, worker productivity will decline.”

Failing to demonstrate that collective bargaining “distorts democracy,” DiSalvo complains that public-sector unions get a “second bite at the apple” by mobilizing their members and contributing to electoral campaigns. At times, this amounts to blaming public employees for voting “at much higher rates than average citizens” and being “the foot soldiers for registration and get-out-the-vote drives in key races.” In contrast to other interest groups, however, DiSalvo charges that “unions are more focused in their drive to influence policy than most other groups” and that collective-bargaining laws “guarantee unions both members and revenue.” Public employees may not be overpaid, he contends, but Scott Walker and others still deserve credit for seeking to reduce their political power.

Ultimately, DiSalvo seems to fault unions for exerting any influence at all. He claims that agency fees, which unions charge to non-members who benefit from collective bargaining contracts, “in effect force a percentage of their members” to join the union. The deduction of union dues or agency fees from paychecks, a service also often offered to private charities and clubs, in his view, privileges unions unfairly. His critique of electoral spending by unions relies heavily on studies by political scientist Terry Moe, which show that teachers’ unions outspent “other interest groups” in twenty states and ranked first or second in thirty. Only in a footnote, however, do we learn that Moe, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, “excluded political donations by party committees, candidate PACs, and wealthy individuals” from his study. DiSalvo is less concerned with spending by corporations and wealthy individuals, he explains, because they are more fragmented and less directly invested in the specifics of public policy, and because they tend to spread their donations more evenly between Democrats and Republicans. “Businesses, too, are undoubtedly self-interested, but the market helps ensure that their pursuit of their private interests yields public benefits in the form of innovative products, new jobs, and economic growth,” he concludes, adding that “[g]overnment workers’ unions offer few if any such generalized benefits.”

The solution, DiSalvo contends, is to reverse the Faustian bargain that led Wisconsin and other states to legalize collective bargaining in the public sector. This means excluding benefits and working conditions from collective bargaining, capping wages at the rate of inflation, and banning agency feeds and dues deduction—all measures pioneered by Scott Walker and being adopted by elected officials and judges across the land.

History suggests, however, that DiSalvo has confused the symptom with the disease. Public-sector unions emerged to balance the interests of public employees with what President Roosevelt called “the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.” Disempowering Leah Lipska and her co-workers will not resolve that tension, but instead force them to address it by seeking public assistance, neglecting their duties, or leaving public service. That may please small government ideologues like DiSalvo and Walker, but it is difficult to see how it serves the interests of society as a whole.

William P. Jones, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin Madison, is author of The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights (W.W. Norton & Company, 2014)

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Inside Bangladeshi Factories: The Real Story

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:51:00 +0000

Inside Bangladeshi Factories: The Real Story

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

A new report goes beyond the sanitized inspection regimes to hear from the workers themselves.

Robert J. S. Ross

The American Prospect

January 8, 2016

Bangladesh garment workers hold a demonstration in Dhaka on September 17, 2015.

AP/Mehedi Hasan

A congressional briefing to be chaired by Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky later this month will contest the claims that the lives of Bangladeshi garment workers have improved since the Rana Plaza building collapse of April 2013, which killed at least 1,138 workers. The briefing will feature a new report authored by Bjorn Claeson and released by the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), which documents the violence, intimidation, danger, and degredation that industry workers still face.

What makes this report different from the other accounts of work in the Global South is the testimony of the workers themselves. Conversation in North America and Western Europe about labor abuses and factory tragedies like the Rana Plaza collapse most usually comes around to what the conscientious consumer or reputation-vulnerable brands and retailers can do to meliorate conditions. By contrast, “Our Voices Our Safety” listens to workers who “report they will not be safe without a voice at work.” The report poignantly tells the story from the point of view of women garment workers—80 percent of Bangladesh’s ready-made garment workforce.

Among the tough topics and conversation-changing dimensions of the report is the direct challenge it poses to the narrative that argues that “garment sweatshops liberate women because they can now earn wages.”

Factory safety reforms are advancing in Bangladesh, where the study was conducted in 2014 and 2015, but these reforms and repairs, the report shows, “must be the foundation for additional reforms that address the intimidation and violence that keep workers silent, afraid to voice concerns and put forward solutions to ensure their own safety. A next phase of reforms must instill the lessons that respect for workers is as important to safety as are fire exits.” Among the tough topics and conversation-changing dimensions of the report is the direct challenge it poses to the narrative that argues that “garment sweatshops liberate women because they can now earn wages.”

Under the sponsorship of a labor NGO and a Bangladeshi union, Claeson directed the work of Bengali-speaking interviewers. Able to speak out of view of their often threatening employers, and trusting the interviewers endorsed by these worker-friendly organizations, 57 workers and 13 union and NGO staffers told their stories, which Claeson knits into well-edited selections around the topics of safety, freedom of association, gender, wages, and social compliance. (Only three informants are identified by their real names.) One section directly addresses the problem of violence and the connivance of authorities to ignore it:

“What happened when you formed the union?” asked the interviewer from the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. Aleya Akter, the General Secretary of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers’ Federation (BGIWF), employed at Lufa Garments, responded:

I was severely beaten when I tried to bring together workers to make them understand why it’s necessary to form a union. I was beaten on three separate occasions from 2006 to 2007, once inside the factory conference hall, once in a meeting room with the presence of the police, who observed and did nothing, and once in front of the factory.

Shobita Byapari, a sewing machine operator, 28 years old was asked, “What do you think stands in the way of progress for Bangladeshi garment workers?” Her answer: “Police, thugs.”

Ritu Khan, a helper, 40 years old, was asked the same question, and responded, “Police, thugs, the supervisor, the line chief. These are the biggest problems.” The exchange continued:

What does the police do?
Suppose the owner got a cop to harass me, or they got a thug to beat me.
How about the supervisor?
Suppose if I did something. In the office, they…
Do they lay a hand on the girls?
Yes.
So the girls don’t say anything about that?
What will they say? For the fear of losing our job, no one says anything.

Sabina Ara, a sewing-machine operator, who believes she is 25 or 26 years old, was asked “Suppose you asked for a salary increase. What would happen?” She answered:

They threaten us with many things. They threaten us with the police. Then there are local politicians; they threaten us with them. There are landlords; they threaten us with them.

Back in the day, social science graduate students learned that when Marx referred to class relations in capitalism, he used the phrase “the social relations of production.” Claeson refers to these stories as evidence of the “social relations of intimidation.”

The conventional story of the “progress” that has come to Bangladesh with the arrival of low-wage manufacturing touts the growth that has made the country the world’s second-largest exporter of clothing, employing up to four million workers, has reduced poverty and infant mortality, and increased life expectancy and literacy. Bangladesh government ministers, garment-industry leaders (that is, factory owners), and Ellen Tauscher, the head of the U.S. firms’ voluntary safety initiative, known as the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, are all on record—and quoted in Claeson’s report—hailing the Bangladeshi rag trade as the great liberator of women.

The chapter on “Factory Managers and Husbands” is a salutary vaccination against this Panglossian virus. The report notes that 65 percent of the nation’s married women, according to a Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics survey of over 12,000 women, suffer physical abuse from their husbands.

Despite the nation’s economic dependence on female factory labor, Babul Akhter, president of the BGIWF union federation, says: “Many people still think, ‘Oh, you are a woman so you should not work, you should stay in the home.’ Or if you go to work, then you should go home immediately after work and make food for your husband. You should not go to a union federation office or join protests after work.” Women’s pay reflects their subordinate status: “None of the 39 workers we interviewed about incomes and expenses report that they are able to cover their household’s expenses without overtime pay despite their modest living.” The report goes on to note that the only ones who can meet their expenses even when overtime pay is included are single women or men with no children or dependents.

The Garment Liberation Theory of Global Development and Women not only misses the harsh reality of inadequate wages.

The Garment Liberation Theory of Global Development and Women not only misses the harsh reality of inadequate wages. It also overlooks the grim interaction among the culture of the nation, the factory, and the household. Claeson notes that 79 percent of a sample of women studied by the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity “reported giving their husbands their wages every month.” Sixty-three percent of the 27 unmarried women in the study “lived with their parents and reported giving their earnings to their father or mother. The rest of the unmarried women reported sending 2,000 to 2,500 taka (US$ 25-32) to their parents in the countryside every month. Only the single mothers retained full ownership of their earnings, being solely responsible for their own and their children’s livelihood.”

The regime of gender subordination also works on the factory floor. The testimony of Taslima Sultana, sewing-machine operator, 31 years old, typifies much of the testimony in the report:

Inside the factory no one can really abuse a male operator the way they do to women. We don’t protest very much so that’s why they do that to us. And besides, they don’t even hire men very much anymore. And this is why they don’t take men. For example, the end of the workday is supposed to be at 7 p.m., but they don’t give us leave until 8 or 9 or 10 p.m. They wouldn’t do that with a man, would they?

The report spears at least one other bloated myth—the validity of the audits conducted in the name of corporate social responsibility. (The social compliance auditing business has grown into a profitable global propaganda machine.) The Bangladeshi workers tell a very different tale from the one the audits convey. An exchange with Rabequl Barua, an iron operator who is more than 40 years old:

Do you participate in inspections?
No, no, no. We are not even called.
Do they ever come to talk to the workers, or do they only talk to the management?
No. They only talk to the management. They never talk to workers.
And with Tareq Islam, a 23-year-old quality controller:
In the fourth floor ladies toilet, water drips from the roof. The men’s doesn’t leak, but the women’s leaks from the roof.
Have you ever informed things like this to the people who come?
We don’t get any opportunity to inform them about this. We are always the victim of the situation. We are here. We have to stay like this. Otherwise, we fear losing our jobs.

The Alliance, run and funded by 26 U.S. firms led by Walmart and The Gap, conducts audits such as those the workers described, and compliance with the Alliance’s recommendations is voluntary. By contrast, the recommendations of a rival group, the Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety, are contractually binding on its more than 200 (largely European) members and the manufacturers with whom they contract, and its governance is shared with local and international labor unions. It makes a careful practice of informing unions (when they are present) and worker-safety committees (which it is organizing) when it does inspections. It is based on a principle of worker voice in safety and employees’ right to refuse dangerous work.

What policy recommendations might emerge from Schakowsky’s briefing? One possibility is a directive to the armed services to join with and comply with the Accord in the clothing purchases made by the 1,100 PX retail stores on military bases, which sell about $1.5 billion worth of clothing a year. (The Marine Corps has such a policy but only weakly enforces it, Claeson reports in another document.) The report also raises the question of whether the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact currently before the Congress contains adequate worker safeguards: Will interference with workers’ associational rights to form a union, for instance, be enforced with the same vigor as intellectual property rights or the strictures on trade dumping?

The report concludes by making unmistakably clear that the power to improve the workers’ lives resides at the top of the supply chain, with the Walmarts and the Gaps, should they truly choose to exercise it. As Aleya Akter of the BGIWF puts it, “If the buyer says, ‘I will not give work if there is no union,’ even the government’s Dad doesn’t have power to stop it.”

Posted by Portside on January 10, 2016

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The Radical Collective Action of Disney’s “Newsies” Is Still Relevant Today

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:05:00 +0000

TUESDAY, DEC 29, 2015, 5:37 PM

BY MATT HARTMAN

The film is not without serious limitations, but it still serves as a powerful reminder that we can fight and win.

Roughly halfway through the 1992 Disney musical Newsies, the eponymous group of young, mostly white newspaper boys comes together in the middle of a public square for a song-and-dance routine whose chorus goes:

Nothing can break us
No one can make us give our rights away
Arise and seize the day

The earnest and naive tones these words strike are likely to elicit exasperation in some, hostility in others. But, though there are good reasons for both of those emotions, I find the scene nothing short of invigorating. The song displays a mix of genuine commitment to justice and surprising arrogance about how easy it is to obtain, and, for just those reasons, Newsies is a film that merits critical attention. Though it may seem a stretch to look so closely at a '90s children's musical, there is much in Newsies worth examining, especially for any who also have an interest in progressive politics.

The film concerns a newspaper boy strike in 1899, and thus depicts the kind of labor-focused mass political movement that undergirds any socialist politics worth considering. Moreover, though the film flopped when first released, it became a cult hit throughout the ‘90s—helped by the frankly astounding fact that it starred Bill Pullman, Robert Duvall, and an 18-year-old Christian Bale—and was then revived for the stage during the surge of interest in progressive politics following Barack Obama’s first campaign, eventually winning two Tonys. In other words, this particular narrative has been prominent in the lives of politically engaged 20-somethings since their childhood (myself included). Alan Mencken, who wrote the film’s songs, even remarked, “It’s like Newsies is actually owned by this generation of kids.”

Some political hope, then, can be found in the fact that Newsies is a more radical film than you might expect. The central irony of Newsies is that it’s a film about fighting back against corporate giants made by the corporate giant. Yet the film directly addresses that dilemma. At the beginning of the newsies' strike, they receive favorable coverage from a friendly reporter. Once the strike gains momentum, though, Pulitzer, whose paper they work for, forces a moratorium on all coverage. In response, the newsies create their own paper after expropriating one of Pulitzer’s printing presses. (“It’s nice of Pulitzer to lend us this,” one of their comrades says.) The newsies’ paper calls for a general strike by all the working youth in the city, which finally forces Pulitzer’s hand and wins them their demands.

Further, Newsies refrains from tempering the violent reality of a nineteenth century strike any more than it has to, to maintain its childhood audience. In other words, it doesn’t adopt the bourgeois morality you might expect from Disney. The film does voice worries over the use of violence to protect the picket lines through the mouth of Davey, a newsie only selling papers until his father recovers from an injury, and thus a newsie whose slightly better class position puts him at odds with the others, who are orphans. But through the course of the narrative, it’s not the orphan newsies who receive enlightenment from Davey; it's Davey who comes to see the reality of their plight. He begins to take part in the melees with scabs and company muscle. When the film’s protagonist, Jack, briefly abandons the strike, Davey doesn’t debate him, he attacks him. Davey’s new worldview is depicted, at the end, by his participation in the symbolic roughneck, low-class practice of spitting in your palm before you shake on a deal—something he gawked at earlier in the film.

In short, then, the film’s central moral is one of collective, popular action. It’s filled with the exact kind of populist rhetoric that has been essential to recent political movements targeting economic inequality—including Occupy first and foremost. Newsies presents a vision of politics as it takes place outside of the ballot box: it glorifies organizing, the independent press, and self-defense, not the courting of powerful allies.

The film uses the musical form to heighten this emphasis. The songs function as a kind of extra-ordinary speech, voicing wrongs in a way similar to the commentary offered by classical choruses. The dancing highlights the dynamism of the striking workers and their ability to drive society. (In this light, it’s interesting to compare the depiction of the movement of bodies in the musical form to the movement of goods within capitalism.) Moreover, the subtle fact that it’s only the newsies who sing and dance, not the capitalists or their cronies, ensures that viewers come away from the film with a impression of a powerful working class.

However, the changes made to the narrative to bring Newsies to the stage undercut this moral of popular action, and thus raise a question about the costs of Newsies' continuing popularity. Newsies the play features a number of inane plot changes (including adding songs, though not dances, for Pulitzer), but of particular note is an expanded role for Theodore Roosevelt, who was the governor of New York at the time depicted. In the film, Roosevelt appears at the general strike, and though the newsies welcome him as a kind of hero, the film makes clear that it is the newsies who won their demands, not Roosevelt. In the stage version, however, Roosevelt appears earlier in the scene, joining Jack and Davey for negotiations in Pulitzer’s office. Though the newsies’ actions brought Roosevelt there, the play muddles the popular action narrative by implying that the politician’s power is necessary to force change.

Compounding this issue is one that plagues the film version of Newsies as well: a complete erasure of the role race and gender play in the construction of class in America. In true ‘90s multicultural fashion, the film's cast includes one black newsie whose race played no part in the plot; the same was true of the stage version I saw performed in Durham, North Carolina. Though Jack’s love interest in both versions supports the strike, there are no women newsies either. (The stage version does address women in the workforce in the person of Jack's love interest, but the attempt is overshadowed by the decision to turn that character into Pulitzer's daughter.) Yet to talk about labor issues or progressive movements within this country without explicitly addressing racism and misogyny is inherently self-defeating, and thus the good Newsies does is inherently limited.

Nonetheless, given the place of American politics today, with the Bernie Sanders campaign reviving a notion—though perhaps a watered down notion—of socialism at the same time that Donald Trump is offering a bolder version of America's tradition of nativist racism at the same time that Black Lives Matter is making it impossible to not address the racism built into our society, Newsies offers a fascinating case study in the ideals underlying progressive politics. No film puts me in a better, more hopeful mood: if this film could be made, by Disney no less, perhaps there is reason to believe a better world is possible. At the same time, the film elides so much that must be addressed, and the changes made to bring the film to Broadway—which were celebrated by critics—offer evidence that the film's success was not based on its most interesting elements. Yet it is this strange, ambivalent mix of factors that ensure this piece of our culture is a telling lens for politics today worthy of our attention.

MATT HARTMAN

Chicago Teachers Union Joins Demand for Rahm Emanuel, Anita Alvarez To Resign

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:01:00 +0000

WEDNESDAY, JAN 6, 2016, 10:30 PM

BY MICAH UETRICHT

The union also voted to call for a democratically elected police review board. (Scott Olson / Getty)

The Chicago Teachers Union's House of Delegates, the union's member-led governing body, voted tonight to demand the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and State's Attorney Anita Alvarez in the wake of the Laquan McDonald scandal, which has roiled the city for nearly two months and led to the resignations of multiple city officials, including Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy.

"Both Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez and Mayor Rahm Emanuel orchestrated and intentionally delayed the release" of multiple videos showing police killings of African Americans, the statement reads, "apparently for their own political gains in order to secure victory in their 2015 re-election bids. ... The only way to restore this trust is with their resignations."

The statement goes on:

[T]he CTU support[s] demands that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez resign immediately from public office forthe unconscionable delay of their governmental institutions in addressing Laquan McDonald's killing and other issues of excessive, unwarranted, unjustified, and lethal police force in the City of Chicago.

The move is unprecedented: The CTU has never before called for a sitting mayor to resign.

McDonald was a 17-year-old African-American boy who was shot 16 times by Chicago Police Department (CPD) officer Jason Van Dyke in October 2014. CPD squad car dash cameras captured footage of the shooting which contradicted the department's early statements saying McDonald had been shot as he lunged at police with a knife, but the city fought to suppress the footage for over a year as Mayor Emanuel sought reelection—leading to accusations that Mayor Emanuel and the city had engaged in a cover-up.

In December 2015, the CTU also passed a resolution calling to endorse a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC), which would be made up of democratically elected community members to oversee complaints around police brutality. The body currently tasked with such complaints, the Independent Police Review Authority, has been accused of colluding with the mayor's office in its responses to police abuse allegations.

Sarah Chambers, a CPS special education teacher and CTU executive board member, says the union, which passed the resignation resolution unanimously, is calling for CPAC for the same reason it supports an elected representative school board rather than a school board whose members are appointed by the mayor. "As teachers, we don't trust any committee Rahm appoints," she says. "Without community members on these boards, there's corruption.There's no accountability—they're all appointed by the mayor and just do what he says."

Chambers says CPAC is necessary to establish long-term accountability around police misconduct no matter who is mayor. "Of course, we want Rahm to resign or be recalled. But we still could end up with another corrupt mayor. CPAC would be longstanding, because no matter who's in office, there would be someone reviewing what the police are doing."

The union now officially joins protesters, a growing number of media outlets, and, according to a poll taken last month, a slim majority of Chicagoans who believe Mayor Emanuel should step down.

In a December 2015 interview with Chicago magazine, CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey was asked whether the union endorsed the call for resignation. "As a representative for this union, we haven’t taken an official position on the protests," he said, though he did allude to "discussions internally" about such a call.

While Sharkey's response could have been interpreted as backing the union away from protesters' demands, Chambers said the union's membership had to debate a call for resignation internally before its leaders could weigh in.

"As [CTU President] Karen [Lewis] always says, we the members are the union," Chambers says.

The call for Emanuel's resignation also comes just weeks after a successful strike authorization vote by the union, in what could be a repeat of the union's 2012 strike that became the mayor's first major setback in office. A strike this year that puts racial justice issues alongside a campaign for taxing the rich to pull the city out of its current financial crisis could prove even more damaging than the walkoff four years ago.

Chambers says union members felt they had to weigh in on the issues of racism and police violence in Chicago.

"An overwhelming majority of CPS students are black and brown children," she says. "Our students and their family members are the ones getting shot. So we can't just sit back and ignore what's happening."

MICAH UETRICHT

Micah Uetricht is the Associate Editor of In These Times. He is also a contributing editor at Jacobinand the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity. He has written for the Nation, the American Prospect, Al Jazeera America, Dissent, the Chicago Reader and elsewhere. He previously worked as a labor organizer.

Wisconsin Public Sector Unions Plot Fightback as Supreme Court Case Looms

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 04:39:00 +0000

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“When we talk to potential union members, we explain, ‘Your working conditions aren’t going to get better unless we act as a unit, as a union,’” Spink said. “We have to relearn the lessons of labor from the 1930s and 1940s – of collective action and collective message."

Steven Greenhouse

The Guardian

January 4, 2016

Protesters march around the Capitol after participating in a rally against a ‘right-to-work’ proposal in February in Madison, Wisconsin.

Steve Apps/AP

Wisconsin’s labor leaders cheered when their nemesis, Scott Walker, dropped out of the presidential campaign last September. Walker’s anti-union message failed to catch fire the way it did four years ago, when he pushed through legislation that hobbled public-employee unions. But while Walker’s political ambitions may have been thwarted, four years on Wisconsin’s public-sector unions remain humbled too.

With Walker’s hard-won 2011 law crippling their ability to bargain and diminishing their ranks, the state’s public-employee unions are struggling to figure out how to increase their strength, membership and collective voice. The plight of Wisconsin’s unions could point the way for public-employee unions nationwide if the supreme court, in a closely watched case to be heard on 11 January, prohibits any requirement that government workers pay any fees to the unions that represent them.

Paul Spink, president of the Wisconsin branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said his union (Afscme) is pushing hard to reverse its Walker-induced slide by explaining to workers how much unions can help them and why they should join and pay dues. For Spink’s Madison-based union, this is not a minor matter – it has lost two-thirds of its members and funding since the Republican-controlled state legislature enacted the anti-union bill, Act 10, notwithstanding protests by tens of thousands of union members.

Laurel Patrick, Walker’s press secretary, said the law restricting collective bargaining aimed to tackle large budget deficits and stand up to special interests. Indeed, when Walker was pushing the legislation, he said in a speech that enraged union members: “We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.”Protesters march around the Capitol after participating in a rally against a ‘right-to-work’ proposal in February in Madison, Wisconsin. Photograph: Steve Apps/AP

Spink, a 39-year-old state worker who inspects childcare centers, said public employees have become “easy scapegoats” for governors and mayors grappling with budget deficits. “We don’t have very good public relations, we don’t have a very good public image,” Spink said. “We don’t know how to talk to our members about what a union is for. All that has to change.”

With Act 10 crippling unions at many state and city agencies, Spink said that many employees have become too scared to speak out about work problems and many bosses have begun to pay scant attention to worker concerns. “Without a union to protect you,” Spink said, “if you go into your boss and say, ‘You should change your policies, things should be better,’ then your boss says, ‘Would you like to pack your desk now or after lunch?’”

Spink said public-employee unions have to convince the public that workers’ – and unions’ – concerns are also public concerns. Child protective services workers now often have a caseload of 50, he noted, and that’s bad for the children, the workers, and the public.

He pointed to a scandal that has rocked Wisconsin in recent weeks – the state department of justice raided a state-run juvenile prison to investigate accusations that guards had beaten inmates and concealed cases of abuse and neglect. Moreover, youths at the facility – the Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls – had assaulted several guards. One inmate had several toes amputated after a guard slammed a metal door shut, crushing the inmate’s foot.

Rick Badger, executive director of Wisconsin Afscme, said a major factor behind these problems was severe understaffing – many workers quit and many shun working there because of unsafe and stressful conditions and low pay compared with prisons in other states and local jails.

“A lot of the problems we believe go back to the loss of workers’ voice, not having formalized labor-management relations,” Badger said. “If people feel they’re not safe at work, they should be able to speak to supervisors without fear of retribution.” He said the guards were scared to talk because there was no longer a union at the juvenile prison.

Act 10, Walker’s signature piece of legislation, bars public-employee unions (exempting police and firefighters) from bargaining over health coverage, pensions, hours, workload and safety. The only issue to negotiate is wages, but raises can’t exceed inflation. Under the act, workers had to begin paying far more toward their pensions and health coverage, meaning an additional 10% of pay out of pocket for many workers.

Act 10 also bars any requirement that government workers pay union fees and prohibits government agencies from collecting employee dues on a union’s behalf. The law also requires any public-employee union that wants to bargain to hold an annual election to determine whether a majority of workers wants a union. Because the law sets a high bar – the union must win not just a majority of those who vote, but of all the workers in the bargaining unit – Afscme has decided against participating in those elections at many workplaces, seeing it as too time-consuming and expensive. Afscme thus gave up bargaining for many state, city and county employees in Wisconsin.

“Make no mistake about it, Act 10 was designed to weaken unions,” Badger said.

Patrick, Walker’s press secretary, praised the law. “In order to get Wisconsin’s fiscal house back in order, Governor Walker stood up to the big government special interests and enacted bold reforms through Act 10. These reforms gave local governments and school districts the tools to manage their budgets while saving taxpayers well over $3bn,” she said.

Leah Lipska, president of Afscme Local 1 – Afscme was founded in Wisconsin in 1932 – said many public employees earn so little that they say they can’t afford the $39 in monthly union dues. (Lipska, a program analyst in the corrections department, noted that some years her family has qualified for food stamps and heating assistance.) “People ask why should I join the union?” she said, noting that her local no longer bargains contracts. “We say, ‘It’s insurance. We will fight for you if you get in trouble.’ But a lot of people say, ‘I never get in trouble.’”

John Havlicek, a Spanish teacher who is head of the La Crosse Education Association, said Act 10 has increased teachers’ workloads, caused turnover to soar and discouraged people from going into teaching. He said high school teachers in his district must teach six classes a day, up from five, and now have less time to work individually with students who are doing poorly.

“We’re not able to bargain over very much any more,” Havlicek said. “We used to have much stronger say in our working conditions. This has really degraded the profession.”

But Vincent Vernuccio, a labor expert at the free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said Act 10 has helped school districts, making it easier for them to balance budget, cut health costs and embrace merit pay. He called the increase in turnover exaggerated, saying there was a jump in retirements right after the law was passed, but departures have dropped since.

Phil Neuenfeldt, the president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said Act 10 along with Wisconsin’s new right-to-work law would weaken unions politically. “You don’t try to outspend folks like the Koch brothers because that ain’t going to work,” he said. “You have to transition into a different model of organizing, mobilizing and getting out the vote, and you have to do that at the local level."

Neuenfeldt voiced confidence that the Democrats could win the governor’s mansion if Walker runs for a third term in 2018 – an October poll found that Walker had a 60% disapproval rating, with 39% approving. Neuenfeld said winning the statehouse would be far harder for Democrats because of what he called gerrymandering. A federal lawsuit seeks to have the Republican-led redistricting ruled unconstitutional; it notes that 53% of Wisconsin voters cast ballots for Democrats in the state assembly elections in 2012, but Republicans won 60 seats, and Democrats, 39.

Afscme has begun a nationwide effort to persuade the workers it represents to remain in the union and pay union dues – all part of an effort to retain membership in case the supreme court rules against “fair share fee” requirements in the public-employee union case, Friedrichs v California Teachers Association. Afscme said its effort has boosted membership by more than 150,000 over the past two years.

But all this is harder in Wisconsin, Spink noted, because government-employee unions here have such limited powers. Still, when corrections officers saw how Afscme spoke out over Lincoln Hills, some rejoined, he said.

“I think our message is having an impact,” Spink said. “People are starting to realize that this is truly the only way to improve our lives as public workers.”

- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-05/wisconsin-public-sector-unions-plot-fightback-supreme-court-case-looms#sthash.H86sIRFw.dpuf

Confronting Racism on US Campuses Requires Facing the Legacy of Segregation

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 04:35:00 +0000

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Cary Fraser

TruthOut

January 2, 2016

Daniel Brenner / The New York Times

The idea that leaders at all levels of the US educational system need to be trained to recognize and combat racism is finally receiving renewed attention within academia, thanks to the intensity of the protests that erupted on streets and campuses across the country in 2015.

The protests that spread to university campuses across the country following the student protests against a racist campus climate and an unresponsive leadership at the University of Missouri-Columbia have again forced Americans to confront the recurrent failures of their higher education institutions to provide leadership on the issue of cultivating a moral and civic sensibility that should inform the ideas, culture and practice of citizenship and life in a multicultural society.

At Yale University, the president, Peter Salovey - in response to an intense debate on the campus sparked by an administrator writing to students about "appropriate Halloween wear" - issued a press release that included this statement:

Educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion begins with the university's leadership. I along with the vice presidents, deans, provosts, and other members of the administration, will receive training on recognizing and combating racism and other forms of discrimination in the academy. Similar programs will be provided to department chairs, directors of graduate and undergraduate studies, masters and deans, student affairs staff, and others across the university.

As the leader of an Ivy League institution that has produced many leaders in US society, including both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, Salovey demonstrated the courage to state the obvious. Leadership is set by example, including the acknowledgment of personal and institutional inadequacies, and Salovey recognized the importance of the issue for his own institution and for others. It is a step that is worthy of emulation, especially since the president of the University of Missouri submitted his resignation when it became evident that his response to student discontent about the campus climate was inadequate.

The upsurge of protest in communities of color against the increasingly visible pattern of unrestrained police brutality revealed in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, combined with the rise of student activism over the climate on a variety of campuses in recent months have evoked memories of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. The 1955 Montgomery bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. - following the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling that segregated education was unconstitutional - was a catalyst for subsequent student sit-ins at department store lunch counters to protest against segregation in public spaces.

The current wave of social and student protests around issues of police brutality, compromised citizenship, and the climate and curriculum at colleges and universities have awakened the ghosts of failures past in the contemporary context. The issues being raised today were also central to the efforts of the civil rights movement to lift the US above its Jim Crow culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

The current discourse about racism in higher education, however, reveals a lack of awareness about the points of connection between current protests, and struggles against segregation and racism at educational institutions in the first half of the 20th century.

Protesting Racism at the University of Missouri, Then and Now

In 1936, a talented student, Lloyd Gaines, sought admission to the University of Missouri's law school, which was reserved for white people only. He had recently graduated from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri - a school established to educate African Americans.

Missouri had adopted the practice of paying for the tuition of African Americans who wished to attend law school in neighboring states in order to maintain its Jim Crow commitment to segregated education. Gaines' willingness to challenge the University of Missouri won the support of the NAACP and its leading legal luminaries - Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall - who sought to use the case to mount a challenge to the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The US Supreme Court ruled by majority decision, in favor of Gaines, that he was entitled to admission to the University of Missouri law school since he was entitled to an opportunity provided to white applicants and that Missouri was denying him the opportunity because of his "color." (Gaines v. Canada, 1938)On March 19, 1939, Gaines left his apartment in Chicago to purchase postage stamps and disappeared. He never enrolled at the law school and his disappearance remains a mystery. It wasn't until 1950 that Black students were actually enrolled at the University of Missouri. However, the Supreme Court decision in favor of Gaines is recognized as a legal precedent that helped to shape the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. As Devoney Looser has suggested in an Inside Higher Education article, the president of the University of Missouri from 1935 to 1954, Frederick Middlebush, would have been a very ardent opponent of the effort to admit Gaines and other people of color to the University of Missouri until 1950.

It is a measure of the transformation of US society that student protests could force the departure of the president of the University of Missouri system and the chancellor of the University of Missouri - given the legacies of racist politics that have defined the history of the state and its flagship institution. These recent developments should also be understood within the context of the suicide of Sasha Menu Courey, a young Canadian female student of mixed ancestry whose death was apparently related to allegations of rape and a resulting mental health crisis as presented in an ESPN report.

The ESPN report has raised questions about whether there had been serious mistakes made and whether mistakes resulted in the closure of the case without police being able to establish conclusive evidence about the events surrounding the tragedy that enveloped her years and death at the University of Missouri.

The University of Missouri - by virtue of its history as a reluctant participant in the desegregation of US higher education in the first half of the 20th century - has found itself embroiled in a struggle over its current climate for students of color in 2015 amid the unresolved questions about Sasha Menu Courey's death.

The current protests against the exclusionary climate at the universities and in the streets against police brutality have laid bare the limitations and failures of the post-1968 era in US politics. Richard Nixon's embrace of the segregationist wing of the Democratic Party - the so-called Southern strategy - provided the basis for his victory in the 1968 presidential election and breathed new life into the culture of white supremacy over succeeding decades of Republican domination of the national political agenda. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 heralded an intergenerational shift in US politics and has opened the space for a new generation of young activists to challenge the post-1968 dispensation. The immediate targets are the continued deference to the ethos of segregation, which legitimizes support for the culture of exclusion and police disdain directed against people of color.

Protests at Princeton

In this context of challenge to a discredited - but not defunct - order, it should not be a surprise that protests have also erupted at Princeton University. Woodrow Wilson, an architect of the vision for an "American century" and champion of the League of Nations, had served as president there before ascending to the office of the president of the United States in 1912.

Wilson established his reputation as an aggressive proponent of segregation who, during his two terms in office, institutionalized the culture of Jim Crow at the level of the federal government and in the wider society. It is a legacy that is reflected at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and to the surprise of many, The New York Times published an editorial in November that argued:

Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House. He was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy. The protesters' top goal - convincing the university to rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the residential complex known as Wilson College - has drawn heavy fire from traditionalists. But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson's presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university's board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo.

The Times' editorial about Princeton and the statement by Salovey, Yale's president, have clearly acknowledged - in response to the student protests - that the legacies of segregation remain deeply entrenched within the US academy. These statements also imply that the administrative structures within the universities and the boards of trustees have to become the agents of change responsible for reshaping the cultures of the institutions. It is a timely message given that the longstanding practice of token diversification of the student body and faculty ranks at universities has proven inadequate to the task of creating a culture of inclusion at these institutions. It appears that there has been a failure to understand that tokenism is merely another device designed to indulge in segregation by another name - marginalization.

The student protests of recent months should also remind US political leaders of the Warren court's unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. That decision repudiated the constitutional imprimatur of segregated education and opened a path for the United States to shed the illusions of race supremacy. Six decades on, the seeds of wisdom offered by Earl Warren and his colleagues seem to have fallen on barren soil.

Cary Fraser is a historian of international relations whose essays/articles have been published in the Caribbean, the USA, Canada and the United Kingdom. His work has explored the international relations of the contemporary Middle East and Persian Gulf, the history of the Cold War, American foreign policy, the politics of decolonization, and the politics of race in the US and the Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Geneva and most recently served as President of the University of Belize 2011-2014.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission. Truthout publishes a variety of hard-hitting news stories and critical analysis pieces every day. To keep up-to-date, sign up for our newsletter by clicking here!

- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-07/confronting-racism-us-campuses-requires-facing-legacy-segregation#sthash.bFFUHP51.dpuf

Climate Activists Can Learn a Lot From Black Lives Matter

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 04:32:00 +0000

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Lessons the climate movement can draw from Black Lives Matter.

Kate Aronoff

Waging Nonviolence

January 3, 2016

Yesterday afternoon, Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty told a cramped room of reporters that no officers would be tried for the killing of Tamir Rice. The announcement came just over a year after the 12-year-old was gunned down by police for waving around a toy rifle in a Cleveland park. Within two seconds of arriving at the scene, officer Timothy Loehmann had fired two very real bullets at Rice — including the one that killed him.

Calling Rice’s death a “perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day,” McGinty spent several minutes laying out the ways in which the child should have known better than to play in a park while being black. It was “indisputable,” he said, “that Tamir was drawing a gun from his waist.” McGinty added that the boy’s “size made him look much older” and that he “had been warned that his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day.”

Before the press conference was over, Twitter had issued its own verdict. One of the most popular (and representative) came from “Selma” filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who posted a photo of Tamir smiling in a restaurant with a one-word caption: “Innocent.”

As the movement for black lives has pointed out over the last year, the fact that police can kill a 12-year-old boy with impunity is grounds for moral outrage and disobedience. Organizers are already channeling that outrage into protests in Ohio, New York and elsewhere. The non-indictments of the officers that killed Mike Brown and Eric Garner drove thousands into the streets last year. The rallying cry Black Lives Matter was birthed in similar environs two years prior, when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murder after shooting Trayvon Martin dead on a sleepy Sanford, Florida street. Continued police shootings around the country have prompted further escalation, with protesters moving to shut down business as usual in shopping malls, airports and highways from coast to coast, most recently in a series of actions known as BlackXMas.

These efforts have catapulted a conversation about police brutality and systemic racism into the mainstream. Sixty percent of Americans — compared with just 43 percent the year before — now believe that black Americans’ fight for equal rights isn’t over. The movement has also racked up a string of legal and political victories, including California Gov. Jerry Brown’s decision to ban the use of grand juries in cases of excessive police force.

Central to the movement’s success has been its ability to outline the appropriate public response to killings and non-indictments. On top is a call for empathy, with the families of victims and the countless others who have experienced similar losses.

Alongside it is a sense of justified anger. Nearing 2016, law enforcement’s ability to kill unarmed children and walk free isn’t shocking. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of Rice’s case last year, “Convicting an officer of murder effectively requires an act of telepathy.” The anger that the movement for black lives has articulated, then, is not for specific incidents or errant prosecutors; it’s for a system that was designed to fail large chunks of the people living in it. Events like Monday’s non-indictment are reminders to keep fighting.

Samaira Rice, Tamir’s mother, said as much in her statement on the grand jury’s decision: “I don’t want my child to have died for nothing and I refuse to let his legacy or his name be ignored. We will continue to fight for justice for him, and for all the families who must live with the pain that we live with.”

The facts of her son’s case were all part of the discussion Monday — no less so than among legal analysts — but they served mostly to bolster the movement’s larger narrative that “the whole damn system is guilty as hell,” and shutting down business as usual is the only way to change it.

Of the many lessons the climate movement can draw from the one for black lives, this might be the most valuable. Building on a scaffolding erected by Al Gore and his ilk, mainstream climate activists have for years billed their battle as one for the truth, believing that if they tell the truth, the people (and the politicians) will follow. But faced with disappointments like the Paris agreement, more environmentalists are coming to realize what many organizers in the movement for black lives already knew: that changing anything means building a big, brash movement. And doing that means talking about people, not statistics.

To be fair, climate denial is a colossal problem. There are still plenty of truths to be told. The GOP’s party line is to disagree with 97 percent of scientists, and its 2016 hopefuls range from quiet skeptics to dues-paying members of the Flat Earth Society. A year-long investigation by Inside Climate News revealed that ExxonMobil funded cutting-edge research into climate change starting in the 1970s, only to spend millions covering up its findings over the next 40 years. Republican obstinacy provided an easy excuse for U.S. negotiators to excise the Paris agreement’s few binding sections, on the grounds that any agreement that had to pass through a GOP-controlled Congress would be dead on arrival at American shores.

Only sheer stupidity, the argument goes, could obscure the links between devastating floods in the United Kingdom, a nearly 70 degree Christmas in New York and the impotence of the climate deal reached in Paris a few weeks back. “If only they knew better,” goes the thinking of mainstream climate activists.

Content explaining how stupid Republicans are on climate is its own renewable resource — just look at the climate change tab of any major progressive news outlet. A cottage industry has cropped up to generate rapid-fire fact-checks on Republican presidential debates and just about anything Donald Trump says.

But what good does caring about the truth really do? Trump’s resilience against reality is a case in point. As journalist Paul Waldman recently explained, “Not only does [Trump] refuse to be held to any standard of truth, he refuses to act ashamed when he gets caught in a lie, or even grant that he might have been mistaken. And his supporters go right along — if Donald says it, it’s true, and no bunch of media jerks are going to tell them otherwise.” For Trump supporters, facts are irrelevant. The same might well be said of many Americans — not because they’re ill-informed, but because stories do more work than a slideshow ever can. And most people generally don’t like being called stupid. Trump and the climate deniers are telling one story, and the media jerks another. Movements have to up-end them both.

As the movement for black lives already understands, dismantling racism is not about proving racists wrong. Climate change will not be solved by convincing climate deniers of their own idiocy. Each are about power and affecting near-tectonic shifts in national values and priorities: Whose lives matter? Who controls our future? What does security mean amidst rising tides, and who deserves it?

The point here is not to draw a hokey analytic comparison between the movement for black lives and the one against climate change. For one, the links between climate and racial justice aren’t abstract. Reducing that relationship to “links” at all belies how deeply interwoven the two really are. It was Cleveland’s polluted Cuyahoga River, after all, which sparked national outrage when it caught fire one June morning in 1969 — a scandal that led to both the Clean Water Act and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Additionally, some of this country’s longest-running fights against pollution and extractive industry have taken root in the communities of color that are first to feel their worst impacts. It’s no secret, either, that the nations currently feeling the blunt force of climate change tend to be poorer and browner than the ones that contributed most to it.

These connections aren’t just facts. They’re lived reality. Necessarily, the movement for black lives has always been a struggle for life and death. The climate fight — for many — is no different. As protesters respond to yesterday’s grand jury decision, environmentalists should be taking notes and joining in.

- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-07/climate-activists-can-learn-lot-black-lives-matter#sthash.wxCf5q37.dpuf

African Women Organize To Reclaim Agriculture Against Corporate Takeover

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Fri, 08 Jan 2016 04:28:00 +0000

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From an interview with Mphatheleini Makaulele, an award-winning indigenous leader, farmer, and activist, and Director of Dzomo la Mupo, a community organization in rural South Africa. She is also part of the African Biodiversity Network.

Simone Adler and Beverly Bell

Other Worlds

January 6, 2016

Mphathe, kneeling bottom row on right, with women of Dzomo la Mupo. Photo courtesy of Mphathe Makaulele.

Everybody originated with indigenous ways of living and the way of Mother Earth.

The real role of women is in the seed. It is the women who harvest, select, store, and plant seeds. Our seeds come from our mothers and our grandmothers. To us, the seed is the symbol of the continuity of life. Seed is not just about the crops. Seed is about the soil, about the water, and about the forest.

When we plant our seeds, we don’t just plant them anytime or anywhere. We listen to our elders, who teach us about the ecological calendar. The seed follows this natural ecological flow. When it bears another seed, that one is planted and the cycle continues.

If you cut the cycle of the seed, you cut the cycle of life. We do not understand how something [like genetically modified and chemically treated seeds] can be called seeds if they cannot continue the cycle of life.

Reviving African Agricultural Values

In South Africa, we know there is a freedom of plants to germinate and grow. People are now awakened to the word GMO, and many people are trying to bring forward the issue of food sovereignty.

Here in Limpopo Province, in the indigenous region of Vhavenda, we are organized as the Dzomo la Mupo, the Voice of the Earth. I founded it in 2008. The meaning of mupo is the natural creation of the universe, giving space to every being on the Earth. We have led several campaigns to protect our environment, including campaigns against the Australian mining company Coal of Africa, court cases against development on sacred sites, and registering sacred forests as protected areas under the South African Heritage Resources Agency.

The African Biodiversity Network (ABN), [a regional network of individuals and organizations across twelve countries], is also looking at the issues facing Africa, women, and traditional agricultural practice. The ABN works toward deepening these values and is becoming a big voice in Africa and across the world. The ABN is a home for reviving African values of biodiversity, indigenous practices that bring us health, and traditional farming systems.

The Global Loss of Seed and Food Sovereignty

I live in an environment of mountains, dense forest, and fertile soil. Our mothers, they selected seed from the previous harvest, which they would plant. We had a way of growing seasonal food and of storing seed from season to season.

Mining is wrongly threatening our water, soil, mountains, and seed and food sovereignty. The government is allowing mining in our soil and the dense, thick mountains, including in tropical areas with good soil and pure water. We need to dialogue about the alternatives to save the forest, rivers, plants, everything in mupo, the Earth.

Commercial farming has dominated traditional farming and food sovereignty, too. It looks only at money as the end product. The seeds depend on chemicals and don’t grow following the ecological, natural flow. Chemical seeds and fertilizers make the soil dry like a crust, like plywood. Our soil is damaged and dry. Our natural seeds that germinated on their own no longer grow in that soil. And this problem is causing the loss of natural foods and traditional farming systems, making our food sovereignty vanish.

When the soil is damaged, when the forest no longer has trees to pick fruit from, it affects women first. In Africa, most women are not employed. Our income is the soil where I can grow food, the forest with trees where I can harvest wild, organic fruits, the stream and river where I can fetch clean, pure water. Globally, women who are not employed or educated are experiencing the problem of where to get food and eat the way we have been for generations.

Now, people are depending only on markets [for the food we eat] because their fields are no longer producing natural food, and they have to buy everything, including seeds, resulting in hunger and poverty. People no longer touch the soil for their food; they find the same frozen and packed food in the same shelf in every season.

Not only is this causing a loss of seed and food sovereignty globally, but we women of indigenous ways know that health is affected by the food we eat. We need variety in food. But going to the store year-round and not finding our natural [and seasonal] foods affects our family’s health.

When children and family members are sick, this impacts women first. Women can no longer find the herbs in the forest to cure their sickness because the trees are being cut down and the soil can no longer let the seeds and plants germinate for us to pick the wild greens.

Women Will Carry Forth the Alternatives

Still, traditional farming is practiced in rural areas, such as -Mahayani in Vhavenda, where there are elder women who have the ancestral knowledge of growing food.

The alternative is to bring back the role of the woman. Young women and girls have to reconnect to the soil and fields of our grandmothers, the forest near our homes, and the indigenous local seeds. Every woman needs to reconnect to the soil. Women also have to teach young girls and young women about seed and food sovereignty and the importance of soil because they’re the ones who will remain to pass that on.

Women are the alternative. We need to revive our technical methods [of farming] through permaculture or agroecology. Even though the soil has been damaged by chemical fertilizers and chemical seeds, there is opportunity to rebuild, harvest, compost, and work the soil to become alive again.

The women of Dzomo la Mupo are bringing food sovereignty to their families. In our home gardens, called muse, and our fields called tsimu, we teach children that food comes from soil, not the market shelves.

Women listen to the ecological calendar and know the seasons for planting, when to select [certain] seeds, and which will produce food. This is the knowledge of women all over the world. Children no longer know about the ecological calendar. What is the future for if we give that up? If we don’t talk about this as women, who will understand?

Women have to fight against the complete destruction of the nearby fields, mountains, and rivers so we can again eat the wild fruit and seasonal food. We are the ones who should defend the remaining indigenous forests from vanishing. Women need to fill the role of talking about [and acting on] the threats to a healthy future generation.

This is the fifth article in a series which features interviews with grassroots African leaders working for seed and food sovereignty, the decolonization of Africa's food system, and the preservation of traditional farming practices. This series is made possible with support from New Field Foundation and Grassroots International.

Many thanks to Lizzie Fainberg for transcribing the interview.

Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Other Worlds.

- See more at: http://portside.org/2016-01-07/african-women-organize-reclaim-agriculture-against-corporate-takeover#sthash.juNko8vU.dpuf

The Union Behind the Biggest Campaign Against Walmart in History May Be Throwing in the Towel. Why?

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Sat, 15 Aug 2015 07:29:00 +0000

In These Times

OUR Walmart members from across the country descend on Bentonville, Ark., for Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting in June. (OUR Walmart)

FEATURES » AUGUST 11, 2015

With major cuts rumored, the future of the campaign against America’s largest private employer is uncertain.

BY DAVID MOBERG

In the pre-dawn chill of Black Friday 2012, a half-dozen yellow school buses pulled up at a South Side Chicago Walmart store, disgorging a small group of striking Walmart workers and nearly 250 supporters.

Along with strikers and allies in 100 other cities around the country, they had come out that day under the aegis of the year-old Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart), created to give Walmart workers a vehicle to protest their mistreatment—including low wages, skimpy benefits, erratic scheduling and aggressive management suppression of employees’ voices at work.

“Somewhere, somehow, down the line, it’s going to make a big difference,” said Tyrone Parker, a striking night-shift stocker, at that first Black Friday action.

“If you weren’t excited after some of those Black Fridays, you were dead,” says former United Food and Commercial Workers(UFCW) President Joseph Hansen, who started OUR Walmart and the labor-community coalition Making Change at Walmart in 2005. “It was going to be a long haul, but I thought we had no choice.”

After Hansen’s retirement last fall, the union’s 55-member executive board elected Secretary-Treasurer Anthony “Marc” Perrone as the next president. Leading up to the vote, Perrone had questioned the amount of money that had been devoted to the Walmart campaign without gaining any new members for the union, whose membership has declined in recent years. Several sources close to the campaign, not named because they are not authorized to release financial information, estimate that the overall cost had been about $7 million to $8 million a year.

In April, four months into Perrone’s tenure, the Washington Post reported rumors of potential cutbacks to OUR Walmart. In These Times’s sources say the union plans to cut the campaign’s budget by as much as 65 percent.

Sources close to the new leadership say no cuts are planned, only realignments, such as spending more money on advertising and public relations campaigns to highlight Walmart’s faults. At the same time, UFCW will try to parlay the Walmart efforts into “a broader retail campaign,” according to new Executive Vice President Stuart Appelbaum, regarded as an ally of Perrone. This probably will encourage more organizing at other retailers to win contracts and dues-paying members.

As Buzzfeed reported in June, the union also removed two directors of the Walmart effort, Dan Schlademan and Andrea Dehlendorf, in May. Meanwhile, the board of OUR Walmart—five worker-members and the two directors—has sought and received new funding from two progressive donors, according to the director of a funders’ group to which both belong.

Most key labor leaders, whatever their view of OUR Walmart, are unwilling to talk very much, because they hope to continue to work with UFCW on the Walmart campaigns, if possible.

Although OUR Walmart and the Fight for 15 (the Service Employees International Union-backed fast-food workers’ campaign, which has targeted McDonald’s) have been expensive for the unions, they’ve stoked worker and public fervor against two of the mightiest global corporations.

“The union’s biggest accomplishment is the development of OUR Walmart,” says an ally in the campaign who feels that new spirit may be lost in the reshuffling.

How big is too big?

The UFCW largely ignored Walmart when it was a small-town, Southern five-and-dime chain. But as Walmart moved north and west and into groceries, the union had to challenge the mega-retailer to protect its contracts. A massive array of strategies has been tested, with little success: organizing department by department (when butchers at a Texas store voted for the union, Walmart eliminated all its butchers); organizing in Quebec, where laws favor unions (Walmart closed the store); organizing in strong union towns, like Las Vegas (several campaigns failed after supervisors intimidated a majority of workers out of unionizing).

UFCW has also tried educating the public about the high costs of Walmart’s low prices. In 2005, both SEIU and UFCW began publicity campaigns about the corporation’s misbehavior (called, respectively, Walmart Watch and Wake Up, Walmart). Walmart Watch revealed a 2005 internal company memo on how Walmart might cut its already low pay and benefits without incurring bad publicity by increasing the number of part-time workers. Such well-aimed, sharp darts wounded the company’s reputation and may have been a factor in declining profits, although customers have also faulted Walmart for badly stocked, disorganized stores, unattractive produce and poor service.

But these campaigns did not yield union members. By failing to organize the retail behemoth, which provides 8.9 percent of jobs in the sector (which in turn employs nearly 1 in 9 U.S. workers), unions lost power to set wage and labor standards. Since 1983, the percentage of retail workers who belong to unions has declined by half—to 4.4 percent.

When Schlademan started work at the UFCW in 2010 on what would become the new Walmart strategy, he tried to learn from workers and organizers in past campaigns, as he explained in an interview with In These Times in December. First, he concluded, the campaign had to break down the barriers isolating workers from each other, both within and among stores. Second, Walmart workers wanted to be “front and center” in the campaigns and in solving problems. Third, workers had to discover the power of collective action, primarily through strikes, which Schlademan called “probably one of the most liberating things labor does. Striking—just [the act of] striking—helps build leaders.”

Over the next three years, OUR Walmart’s key achievement was mobilizing workers to take direct action against the company. OUR Walmart members challenged management at both their workplaces and at shareholder meetings in Bentonville, Ark., often with work stoppages, sit-ins or similar protests. In the process, effective and committed rank-and-file leaders emerged.

The campaign also won praise for its effective use of online organizing. Organizers and members used the web to move workers into reallife collective protests, build small groups of leaders at individual stores, and arrange local and national direct actions. The online connections produced more direct, horizontal relationships between Walmart workers than in most unions, which have a more hierarchical organization.

OUR Walmart said the campaign was just trying to make Walmart a better corporate citizen, not organize a union. Technically that was true (and tactically necessary, given labor law restrictions on picketing employers for long periods). But in spirit, OUR Walmart resembled a strong minority union, without enough votes to win a formal union and collective bargaining, but with other tools that could be used to solve workers’ problems.

The campaign wrung several concessions from Walmart. Workers won a few pilot programs to reduce inconsiderate scheduling, and a worker-led campaign to “Respect the Bump” yielded better pregnancy accommodations. Accompanied by publicity campaigns attacking the company’s stinginess and its owners’ extreme wealth, worker actions undoubtedly helped prompt Walmart’s decision in April to raise its lowest wages to $9 an hour this year and $10 next year.

Hopes for transforming Walmart—and thereby the whole low-wage economy—rose among supporters.

OUR Walmart is “a little IWW-ish,” Schlademan said in December. In their early 20th-century heyday, the Industrial Workers of the World eschewed contracts in favor of direct action at work. In OUR Walmart, Schlademan sees a similar appetite for militant action and a more vigorous involvement in the collective, horizontal conversation.

At the time, Schlademan said, OUR Walmart was preoccupied with securing its right to exist without being attacked all the time: “Walmart must realize OUR Walmart is not going away.”

But sustaining an expensive campaign like OUR Walmart is difficult with voluntary dues of $5 a month per member. Schlademan has since been cut from the UFCW payroll but is still working with OUR Walmart. And rumors of UFCW withdrawing funds have begun circulating, although a network of progressive donors recently pledged money for OUR Walmart to maintain its work.

If UFCW, the organization’s sponsor, cuts back on OUR Walmart, how will managers—and workers—interpret the move?

Critics of the union’s focus on OUR Walmart believe that broadening the agenda to all retail will spread around organizing dollars more effectively, yielding more unionized shops and more dues-paying members. No organizing is easy, but looking beyond Walmart may provide more realistic targets. In New York—the historic stronghold of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (now a department within UFCW)—UFCW Vice President and RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum has overseen successful organizing of clothing boutique workers, such as clerks at the Swedish-owned “cheap chic” H&M stores.

Victory at such companies will bring new members but will not necessarily transform the retail industry the way success at a major chain like Walmart or Home Depot could.

The union will almost certainly maintain some special focus on Walmart. “Nobody wants to walk away from or abandon effort on Walmart,” says one union staffer, who was not authorized to speak with reporters. But the union’s Walmart project “will be a more media-focused campaign,” relying on print and television ads, says the staffer.

Media buys can be very expensive, however. Forbes reported that UFCW “spent six figures” on a Fourth of July ad blitz portraying Walmart as unpatriotic for stashing $76 billion in 15 foreign tax havens. And if past attacks haven’t altered Walmart’s stance on unions, will more exposés do the trick?

On the other hand, the sweeping victories of the 1930s and 1960s in industries from automobiles to healthcare suggest the value of a sector-wide strategy for retail. But can one union take on a sector with 16 million workers?

It starts with the workers

Stephen Lerner is the architect of SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign, one of the most successful sector-wide organizing efforts of the past three decades. He argues that, with labor hanging by a thread, most U.S. unions have gone into defense mode—which only occasionally delays further slippage—rather than playing offense using creative, large-scale campaigns.

Though most analysts see the evershifting Walmart campaign as a defensive effort to keep Walmart from driving down labor standards at other, unionized grocery chains, Lerner believes OUR Walmart is an example of a sweeping, innovative effort. “It’s pretty impressive what workers in OUR Walmart have achieved so far,” he says. He notes that strikes have yielded concrete victories and that creative online organizing has allowed workers to help move people into action, not simply to “scream into the void.”

For workers to form a union against the will of an industry or a big company like Walmart requires “an enormous amount of time” to understand the issues, overcome fears, develop leaders, and formulate a “theory of how to beat the company,” which may vary from target to target, Lerner says. Justice for Janitors’ big breakthrough, in a 1988 organizing campaign in Denver, came in part from understanding that targeting building owners, for whom janitorial costs are minuscule, was essential to organizing the small, costsensitive cleaning companies. “There’s not one tactic or secret sauce to take on an entire industry,” he says.

As UFCW revises or expands its organizing mission, it would seem smart to look for ways to apply the strategy and style of work of OUR Walmart—that is, educating and empowering member-organizers and leaders—throughout its retail organizing. That includes recognizing the utility of the internet for real organizing, breaking barriers and building solidarity and expanding open, direct, horizontal lines of communication among members and workplace leaders. It also includes realizing the crucial role of strikes and direct action in building a sense of collective power and communicating with supporters and the public.

OUR Walmart member Tyfani Faulkner, 32, a high school graduate from Sacramento who knew nothing about the labor movement when she took her job, now loves going online to answer questions or solve others’ problems, or to work for legislation or a candidate she favors (most recently, Bernie Sanders). Her “proudest moment,” she says, was participating in a two-hour sit-in at Walmart this past November. OUR Walmart has produced many powerful worker-leaders and vocal progressives like Faulkner who organize effectively—and at no cost.

The emergence of leaders like Faulkner reinforces the urgency of taking seriously Lerner’s key advice, which is as simple as it is often ignored: “You can’t win without the workers.”

DAVID MOBERG

David Moberg, a senior editor of In These Times, has been on the staff of the magazine since it began publishing in 1976. Before joining In These Times, he completed his work for a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago and worked for Newsweek. He has received fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nation Institute for research on the new global economy. He can be reached at davidmoberg@inthesetimes.com.

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Union President: Supermarket Chain A&P Will Fire 25,000 Grocery Workers

Chicago Armored Truck Employees Say They Were Fired for Participating in Fight for 15 Strike

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Sun, 31 May 2015 05:55:00 +0000

In These Times

FRIDAY, MAY 22, 2015, 11:31 AM

BY ARIELLE ZIONTS

Background: Brink's workers on strike on April 15. Foreground: Darletta Scruggs and her son. (Arielle Zionts, 15Now)

Former Brink’s route coordinator Darletta Scruggs says she always tried to keep her activism separate from her work. But when she learned about the working conditions of the armored truck drivers and messengers she scheduled, she felt she couldn’t stand idly by.

Among the workers’ other grievances, many say they are paid under $15 an hour, rely on poorly maintained trucks and only receive five hours of overtime even though many workers work 60 to 80-hour weeks—all for a job that requires them to risk their lives every day shuttling money and other valuables in their armored trucks. Scruggs said when workers aren’t happy, or their trucks are breaking down, it makes her coordinating job more difficult.

Scruggs says she encouraged the workers to form a union and walk of the job on April 15 to join the worldwide Fight for 15 protests but did not walk off the job herself. A week later, Scruggs tried swiping her ID card into work—only to find that she was denied entry. Last week, messenger John Downes was also fired. He participated in the walkout and personally delivered the message notifying managers that the workers were attempting to form a union.

In addition to their workplace activism, Scruggs and Downes cite “blatant” intimidation tactics that lead them to believe they were fired in retaliation for organizing. They say workers are facing threats of pay cuts or termination, and management has brought in executives from Brink’s Richmond, Virginia, headquarters who arrived at their West Chicago base site—one driving a Maserati—to observe and question workers. Brink’s has not responded to several requests for comment for this story.

The day before she was fired, Scruggs says she was sent out to work on a truck, even though she was not hired nor trained to be a delivery person. Because delivering is not her job, she was never assigned to a specific gun, which all drivers and messengers carry, and sometimes had to use a gun she was not certified to use (though she did have certification to use another gun). At the destination, Scruggs says she and her driver were unable to open the back of the truck; the locks appeared to be smoking.

When Scruggs returned to the base, she told her manager that poor truck maintenance regularly leads to malfunctions that cause trucks to break down or stop, putting workers at risk of a robbery or death, as in the recent case of a Houston Brink’s guard who was killed during a robbery. Scruggs said the managers’ response to news of the guard’s death was “very robotic,” emphasizing that “we just need to service the customers. … It shows that the lives of the workers are not the priority. It’s just the profits.”

When the manager asked Scruggs to work past her normal hours and go back out on the route, Darletta said she was not able to stay late. When asked if she was “refusing to work,” the single mother said she needed to pick up her three-year-old from preschool. The next morning, she was denied entry to work.

Usually, as in Downes’s case, workers are given several days notice before they are fired. Downes was told he was fired for accidently leaving money in a van—something he says other workers have done before without being fired. Neither Downes nor Scruggs had received any prior disciplinary actions before being fired.

The 15 Now movement has started a campaign to raise awareness and money for Scruggs, and both workers have both filed wrongful termination suits with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Scruggs will also argue against her classification as “management,” as employees working under this classification don’t have the same protections as workers. Brink’s classified Scruggs as management because she receives a salary, but she argues this label is misleading since she doesn’t have any disciplinary powers over any other workers.

Scruggs says she wants to be rehired because she is good at her job and is close with her co-workers. Since being fired, she says she has lost her health insurance, had to pull her son out of preschool and signed up for unemployment benefits.

The majority of Brink’s workers have signed union cards and would like to join the International Guards Union of America (IGUA). So far, Brink’s has refused to enter into any formal conversations with workers who wish to unionize.

Because of some unusual laws and precedent, Brink’s workers are essentially unable to join or even receive assistance from larger unions like SEIU that have more resources. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act prohibits unions that represent non-guards from also representing guards, and in 1953, a ruling classified armored car drivers and delivery-people as “security guards.”

These laws allow companies to voluntarily recognize guard units of non-guard unions, but they can withdraw recognition at any time and the NLRB can’t offer any protection to the workers. Retired AFSCME Local 2858 president Steve Edwards writes in Labor Notes, “For decades guard unions were strong enough to enforce their collective bargaining agreements without a legal framework. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brink’s launched a wave of de-certifications.” Similar companies soon followed suit.

Brink’s Chicago workers have been unionized and gone on strikes in the past. In 1955, when over 400 Brink’s workers struck for five and a half weeks, they were represented by the Baggage and Parcel Drivers Local 725. The most recent strike seems to have been in 1983.

Before the April 15 strike, Scrugg’s colleagues asked her why she was risking possible retaliation to fight for conditions that don’t directly affect her. She replied that she doesn’t have the “right to sit by the side and ignore it. If I know it’s wrong, I have a duty to speak up, regardless of whether it’s going to jeopardize my job or my livelihood.”

ARIELLE ZIONTS

Arielle Zionts is a Spring 2015 In These Times editorial intern and freelance reporter. In August she will join the Interfaith Voices radio show as a producer. She studied anthropology at Pitzer College and radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Arielle loves to ride her bike and listen to public radio. She tweets at @ajzionts and her website is ariellezionts.com.

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California Walmart Workers Go on Hunger Strike After Stores Closed in ‘Retaliation’ for Organizing

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Sun, 31 May 2015 05:51:00 +0000

In These Times

FRIDAY, MAY 29, 2015, 2:12 PM

BY JULIA KANN

Workers set up camp outside a Los Angeles Walmart this week and held a one-day fast to protest the corporation’s "retaliation" against their organizing.

This post first appeared at Labor Notes.

With tents and sleeping bags in tow, workers set up camp outside a Los Angeles Walmart this week and held a one-day fast to protest the corporation’s retaliation against their organizing.

Walmart recently closed five stores, including one in Pico Rivera, California, where workers were especially active in OUR Walmart, the Food and Commercial Workers-backed effort to boost standards at the retail giant.

Walmart management asserted the stores were having plumbing issues. But workers said the Pico Rivera closure was retaliation for their organizing. The UFCW has filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB, and workers are keeping up protests despite some recent cuts to the campaign’s funding.

Evelin Cruz was an activist at the Pico Rivera store. She was fired from the store in November, before the closure, “due to my activism,” she says. Since then, she’s dedicated her time to supporting organizing at Walmart.

On April 13, workers at the Pico Rivera store were pulled into a meeting at 1 p.m. According to Cruz, “management told them it would close at 7 p.m. and they would lose their work.”

Twenty-two hundred workers lost their jobs in the five closures. Their two months of severance pay is about to run out, and despite promises of relocation and transfers, few have been given new positions. “Just those in good with management,” says Cruz.

“We would like every employee that was laid off to be reinstated with their full benefits, hours, seniority, wages,” said Martha Sellers, who works at another area Walmart.

On May 27, Cruz and Sellers were joined by 30 Walmart workers—some current, some recently fired—as they set up camp across the street from a still-open Los Angeles Walmart store, ironically located on Cesar Chavez Street.

Hunger strike

Sellers is coming up on 13 years working for Walmart. She was one of the activists not only camping out in front of the store, but also taking part in a 24-hour fast.

The fast isn’t just for publicity. “It’s a representation of starvation labor,” said Sellers.

When her husband died, Sellers “was begging for hours to make more money,” but managers kept hours sparse and wages stayed low. “Every paycheck I decide whether I’ll pay my rent, buy groceries, or which bill to pay,” said Sellers. She estimates 90 percent of her co-workers are on food stamps.

“The fast is to show Walmart that this is what they’re driving people to—hunger,” explained Cruz.

Got organizers?

The 24-hour action culminated in a march to the store, where workers were joined by community and labor supporters.

But the support from the union that has underwritten the entire organizing project—the United Food and Commercial Workers—is thinning.

The new national union president has cut the funding to support OUR Walmart by 60 percent.

The cut has “affected the amount of organizers on the ground,” said Cruz. “But we’re still determined to change this company.” She said the cuts “only motivated us more to step up and organize workers… it’s more of a drive for us to do it for ourselves.”

Salomon Fuentes, a local Walmart worker with nine years at another nearby store, is concerned about the impact Walmart has on the rest of the industry. He says that if they don’t change Walmart, “it’s going to set a standard for the future for other companies,” many of them represented by the UFCW.

Sellers says the OUR Walmart organizer who once walked the aisles at her store has been transferred to another campaign. But she doesn’t see it as a big problem.

“Since his transfer, I do the walk-through alone, and when I have a problem I call another organizer.”

She does anticipate some financial trouble “when we need to rent a truck or a bus.” With workers earning incredibly low wages, “we can’t even chip in the resources.” But that means “we just have to do a little more local coordinating ourselves,”

The store closures and claims of retaliation are spurring other Walmart workers into action, says Sellers. “Co-workers are going, ‘well, what if they close this one?’ And that’s motivating folks to get involved.”

JULIA KANN

Julia Kann is a staff writer and organizer for Labor Notes.

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After Striking and Occupying Their Factory, Chinese Bike Light Workers Face Firings and Arrests

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Sun, 24 May 2015 04:43:00 +0000

WEDNESDAY, MAY 20, 2015, 3:41 PM

BY ELAINE HUI

Among the list of grievances: the workers are owed money, there are only eight bathrooms for 70 women and the company's practice of locking alleged troublemakers in solitary confinement. (Labor Notes)

This article was originally published on Labor Notes.

Workers who make bike lights at a factory in Shenzhen, China, have been on strike since April 30, demanding that the company pay up what it legally owes them.

The strikers stayed overnight in the factory, stopping production and delivery for two weeks, until police came to evict them and arrest worker leaders on May 13.

New An Lun Lamp, a Taiwanese-owned factory, produces bicycle lights for brands including the German Messingschlager and Buchel and the Dutch AXA.

There are about 100 workers in the factory, mostly middle-aged women, with some nearing retirement.

Though their actions have been peaceful, thus far 13 workers have been fired and nine arrested by police for “disrupting public order.” Seven out of the nine detained workers were released within 24 hours. The other two—including one of the workers’ elected representatives—were held by police for seven days. During the police raid on May 13 these two clutched the legs of the general manager and his son, crying and begging them not to remove the finish goods.

Last year, according to a conservative estimate by China Labour Bulletin, there were 1,379 strikes and labor protests in China, up from just 185 in 2011. One of the biggest was a strike by 48,000 workers at the Yue Yuen shoe factory, the world’s largest manufacturer of athletic shoes, whose customers include Nike and Adidas.

Money owed to workers

New An Lun Lamp has broken China’s labor laws and social insurance policies by failing to contribute to both the workers’ pension fund and a housing fund aimed at helping workers buy or rent apartments.

The workers also haven’t been paid for the sick leave, maternity leave, work injury leave and marriage leave to which they are legally entitled. And they have been requested to report for duty 10 minutes earlier in the morning and after lunch every day, without being paid overtime. In addition, the company has failed to pay a legally-required high temperature allowance.

Access to bathrooms is another major grievance. Bathrooms are locked during working hours—leaving the more than 70 women to use the eight female stalls during the break.

The company has adopted dictatorial managerial practices, including penalizing workers who fail to meet the production targets or are seen as troublemakers by locking them in Solitary Confinement. The strike was partly triggered by an incident in which one female worker fainted and was hospitalized after being put into Solitary Confinement for a whole day.

In April, workers sent a petition demanding that the factory correct these problems. In response, the company asked them to elect representatives, with whom it held one negotiating session.

When workers didn’t get a satisfactory response, they went on strike on April 28 and began an occupation of the factory the next day.

Factory sent thugs

Once the strike began, the company, together with various government representatives at the district level, asked the workers for further negotiations. But so far it has refused to fully address their demands.

For instance, while many workers are owed seven to 12 years of pension fund contributions, the company is only offering to pay for two years, claiming this is in line with government policies.

Factory management has deployed dirty tactics. It sent a gang of thugs on May 11 to attack the workers and try to remove finished bike lights from the worker-occupied factory. Workers successfully stopped the thugs from removing boxes of products, but some workers were injured in the conflict.

On May 13, the factory fired six of the worker representatives without following the procedures dictated by national and provincial labor laws, which state that companies must notify trade unions of any dismissals and promptly consider any objections from the unions. Moreover, management has turned a blind eye to the new Guangdong Provincial Regulations on Collective Contracts for Enterprises, which state that enterprises cannot fire worker representatives while they are performing their duties of negotiation.

But new regulations in Guangdong (where the New An Lun factory is located) also make it illegal to strike during negotiations—the first such law officially prohibiting strikes. Worker advocates fear that this law will be used to crack down on the growing number of strikes and sentence worker leaders to long Prison Terms—something the Chinese government has thus far hesitated to do in most cases.

Police raid

Even worse, the same day the workers were fired, the local police station sent 100 police officers to the factory to help the company transport the finished bike lights.

Police arrested nine workers, including four of the fired strike representatives. They accused the nine of disrupting “public security,” despite the fact that the strike has been entirely peaceful. In China the government seldom arrests workers on the grounds of striking. Instead, workers are arrested under various charges of disrupting public order when they march outside of factories or prevent the delivery of finished products.

On May 18 the company fired another seven workers for not performing their duties. One was a worker representative, while five others were among those arrested by the police.

Labor groups and trade unions from Taiwan have launched a petition to urge the Taiwanese boss to respect the rights of the New An Lun Lamp workers. In a May 15 press conference they condemned the company’s illegal actions.

The same day, labor groups and trade unions visited the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office and the Taiwan Business Association in Hong Kong, to urge them both to more seriously monitor Taiwanese firms in China.

Inside China, 14 organizations have signed a joint letter to New An Lun Lamp and its major European customers. Labor groups supporting the strikers are also seeking solidarity from trade unions in Germany and the Netherlands.

ELAINE HUI

Elaine Hui is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the City University of Hong Kong.

New Attack on Public Employee Unions: Not About ‘Free Speech

noreply@blogger.com (Roger Mckenzie) — Sun, 17 May 2015 04:23:00 +0000

PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION

Attacks on public employee unions, especially teachers unions, have become a permanent feature of the political landscape. One glaring example is the lawsuit filed last month in federal court in Los Angeles against six California and national teachers unions. The lawsuit purports to defend the “free speech” rights of four California schoolteachers, but its real goal is to silence the collective voice of union members on political and educational issues.

Michael Hiltzik

Los Angeles Times

May 10, 2015

Former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, founder of StudentsFirst, which is bankrolling the suit against the California Teachers Association et al.

Rikki Ward

Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 License

Attacks on public employee unions, especially teachers unions, have become a permanent feature of the political landscape. But you’d be hard pressed to find one as incoherent and dishonest as a lawsuit filed last month in federal court in Los Angeles against six California and national teachers unions.The lawsuit purports to defend the “free speech” rights of its plaintiffs, four California schoolteachers. But its real goal is to silence the collective voice of union members on political and educational issues. Its lesson is simple: If you don’t like the decisions your organization or community reaches through the democratic process, just refuse to pay for them.

The plaintiffs in Bain vs. California Teachers Assn., et al, say the conditions of union membership coerce them into supporting “political or ideological” viewpoints they don’t share. StudentsFirst, an education reform group supported by wealthy hedge fund managers and the Walton family, is bankrolling the lawsuit. StudentsFirst was founded by onetime Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who, before leaving the organization in 2014 under a cloud, established its philosophy that the problem with education is that teachers have too much power and job protection.

Bain vs. CTA should be viewed in the context of a long war against public employee unions. Among its landmarks were Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2005 ballot initiatives to reduce teacher tenure rights and hamstring public employee unions’ authority to spend member dues on political activity. Both failed.

The lawsuit’s prime target is the “agency” or “fair share” fee. Under the law and according to a 1977 Supreme Court decision known as the Abood case, workers can be assessed non-member fees to cover solely the cost of negotiations and contract enforcement, without being compelled to join the union and support its political activities with their dues. That’s the arrangement in California. For decades, union opponents have been trying to get Abood overruled. The Supreme Court is pondering whether to hear one challenge from California, Friedrichs vs. California Teachers Assn. Bain “helps create a favorable political climate for the Supreme Court” to accept the Friedrichs case and overturn Abood, says Joshua Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers, a defendant in Bain. Its purpose is “pretty clear,” he says: “The erosion of unions’ ability to be involved with politics.”

The lawsuit’s promoters don’t describe their goals this way, of course. The four Bain plaintiffs — two Los Angeles teachers and one each from Richmond and Arcadia — seek the right to refuse to contribute to their unions’ political activities, but to do so without giving up their union membership. That sounds like a modest request, but it strikes at the very heart of collective action.

If every union member could pick and choose which positions he or she would pay for, union solidarity would evaporate.

By plying members with benefits that non-members can’t enjoy, asserts StudentsFirst’s attorney, Joshua Lipshutz, the unions are coercing the plaintiffs into giving up their 1st Amendment rights.

But are union members really deprived of their free speech? The answer is no, not any more than participants in any democratic process when a vote goes against them. American citizens, who influence national policy through the ballot box, can’t withhold taxes that pay for policies they disagree with. Nor can members of a volunteer fire department refuse to put out a fire at a house in their district that is flying a banner for a candidate they don’t like.

Almost every membership organization has dissenters. The key question is whether those dissenters have a chance to shape its policy their way. That’s certainly the case with the unions sued by Students-First: Their political positions are the product of open debate among members, expressed through the election of officers and delegates who gather at conventions to decide which policies to support or oppose and how much to spend to advance their goals. Indeed, one of the Bain plaintiffs, Kiechelle Russell, is a member of the House of Representatives of United Teachers Los Angeles, which sets UTLA policy.

Lipshutz says the plaintiffs aren’t objecting to unions’ engagement in political activity as such — they “don’t take the position that unions shouldn’t spend money on political issues,” he says. What they’re objecting to is that their union dues support positions taken through votes that didn’t go their way. Effectively, the plaintiffs are claiming a free-speech right to always be in the majority.

Evidence of that permeates the Bain case. Plaintiff Bhavini Bhakta told a San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer last month that her view of the union was affected when she went to Sacramento in 2013 to testify in favor of a bill that she thought would have made teacher evaluations more effective. After hearing a CTA lobbyist testify in opposition, she concluded that the union was “fighting for the exact opposite of what I and many other teachers are fighting for.” That implies that had the CTA’s position matched her own, she would have had no issue with paying for political activities.

Another plaintiff, Clare Sobetski, 23 — a union representative at Richmond High School — says she sees the lawsuit as a blow against union leaders’ taking members’ views for granted. “There’s a diversity of opinion that union leaders may not fully take into account,” she told me.

The lawsuit says that the plaintiffs are effectively coerced into supporting political positions taken by their unions because withdrawing from the unions and paying an agency fee means giving up benefits that belong only to members.

These include disability and liability coverage for members and access to cut-rate credit cards and entertainment discounts. The lawsuit calls these “employment-related” benefits, but that’s a flagrant distortion aimed at making them appear to be the right of every school employee, union member or not. But these benefits are financed entirely from union dues, not by employer contributions. Just because one has to be a member to enjoy them doesn’t mean nonmembers are the victims of discrimination.

The people behind the lawsuit caricature unions as steamrollers that give members no say over their policies or practices. But the talk of “free speech” is a smoke screen: They’re feeding popular prejudice against unions for their own end, which is to get their way in education policy without interference from educators.

The Bain case is a teachable moment, with the lesson drawn from an ancient fable often attributed to Aesop.

It’s the one about the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

[Michael Hiltzik’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays in the Los Angeles Times. Read his blog, the Economy Hub, at latimes.com/business/ hiltzik, reach him at mhiltzik@latimes.com and follow @hiltzikm on Twitter.]

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