In a milestone for the fight for fair treatment of the lowest paid workers, New York City will become the first place in the country to raise the minimum pay for food delivery workers to something approaching a decent standard. These workers, who deliver meals to our doors when we don’t feel like or are otherwise unable to do our own cooking, average a shameful $7.09 an hour in wages plus the few dollars they can collect in tips. The city has now raised their minimum to $17.96 an hour, going up to $19.96 an hour in two years. They will still be able to collect tips. The two large companies that employ these workers, Uber Eats and DoorDash, are, expectedly, protesting the new law, claiming facetiously that it harms workers when all it really does is to make a small dent in both companies’ big profits.
The trend among some states to exploit the labor of children took another step forward in Iowa May 26 when the state’s governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a bill that conflicts with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act’s prohibition of “oppressive child labor.” The federal statute outlaws teen-agers working under hazardous conditions or excessive hours that interfere with their schooling or health and well-being.
Among the Iowa act’s provisions are:
It allows employers to hire teens as young as 14 for previously prohibited hazardous jobs in industrial laundries or as young as 15 in light assembly work;
It allows state agencies to waive restrictions on hazardous work for 16–17-year-olds in a long list of dangerous occupations, including demolition, roofing, excavation, and power-driven machine operation;
It extends hours to allow teens as young as 14 to work six-hour nightly shifts during the school year;
It allows restaurants to have teens as young as 16 serve alcohol; and
It limits state agencies’ ability to impose penalties for future employer violations..
The Iowa law is the latest in a series of similar laws enacted or proposed by Republican dominated state governments in the past few months. It follows an Arkansas’ law in March signed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trump’s former press secretary, that loosened child labor protections.
The attack upon a century of steps protecting children from being exploited is part of a big effort by many companies around the country to gain access to low wage labor and weaken worker protections.
WORKING AT DOLLAR GENERAL IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR SAFETY
Dollar General, is a retail chain with 18,000 stores in 47 states. It is also at or near the top of the list of places with the most safety violations in the country, violations that put its workers and customers in daily danger. Over the past six years, the chain has been cited for fines that total more than $21 million for “systemic hazards.”
“Fred Wright cartoon courtesy of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE)”.
These hazards, cited by the US Labor Department as “severe violations,” include aisles, emergency exits, fire extinguishers and electrical panels blocked by merchandise and unsafe stacking of boxers. In addition to the looming fines, the company has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits involving injuries sustained as a result of unsafe conditions in is stores.
“Dollar General continues to expose its employees to unsafe conditions at its stores across the nation,” declared OSHA’s assistant secretary Doug Parker. Workers at the store report Dollar General’s general disregard for its workers in the form of low wages and poor working conditions while the company registered a profit of $3.3 billion last year. Its CEO raked in $16.6 million while the median wage of its employees was less than $20,000.
In his testimony before a congressional committee in March, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz asserted that the company did not fire any employee for union activity. Yet, just two days later, a shift supervisor at a Buffalo store and one of the first members of the union, Starbucks Workers United, was fired from her job.
Alexis Rizzo, an employee for seven years was fired for her alleged tardiness, twice for being one minute late, once for four minutes and once for five minutes. Before she was involved in the union campaign, there was never any problem between her and the company.
Starbucks Workers United has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board, in addition to the hundreds already pending.
BEN & JERRY’S BUCKS THE TREND OF EMPLOYERS FIGHTING UNIONS
In a modern exception to the traditional hostility that employers have toward unions, Ben & Jerry’s recognized the union in its Burlington, Vermont, flagship store after its 39 workers voted for it. During the union’s organizing campaign, the company, unlike Starbucks, maintained strict neutrality. It did not conduct forced meetings to lecture workers on the “evils” of unionism or threats to move its facility or intimidate union activists or any of the other tactics that are the standard operating procedure of anti-union employers. Instead, it allowed the union, Scoopers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, to have time to talk to workers and space to post union material in the store. The company has committed itself to bargaining with the union. “We look forward to a sweet and collaborative future,” said a company statement.
The Office of New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Inspector General released a report finding that over 4,000 LIRR employees were working 24 hours or more at a time. These workers are not covered by Federal Railroad Administration hours-of-service regulations. The crucial roles of engineering department workers, especially track workers, fall into this category. The accompanying fatigue leads to an increased risk of accidents.
Starbucks, which has been using all kinds of tricks, legal, borderline, and down-dirty, to combat the union organizing drive in its stores, now is possibly involved in a new one. At three Starbucks locations where workers have voted for the Starbucks Workers United union, a worker has filed a petition to decertify the union.
The three stores are all in New York State, two in Buffalo where the union first took hold, and one in New York City. In NYC, the petition filer is represented by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an outfit connected to right-wing, anti-union financiers.
The union expects that the decertification will be dismissed in light of the charges of unfair labor practices filed by the union against the company now pending before the National Labor Relations Board. In cases like this, the NLRB can bar decertification elections from being held until the allegations are adjudicated on grounds that company actions cannot guarantee that a fair election can take place. But it is part of a Starbucks strategy to delay bargaining with the union among its other tactics of firing union activists and providing benefits to workers at its non-union stores.
FLAGSHIP BARNES & NOBLE STORE WORKERS FILE FOR UNION
Workers at the Barnes and Noble flagship store in Union Square, New York City, have filed for a representation election after they announced the formation of a union. They have affiliated with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The election filing came after the union said that the company had refused to voluntarily recognize the union. The store employs over 100 workers. The union says a majority of them have signed union authorization cards.
In the face of the stiffest company opposition, workers at Starbucks continue their organizing drive. A store in Sacramento, CA has become the 300th Starbucks facility to win a union election.
Starbucks United website, 4/28
YOUNG WORKERS ARE SPARKING MOST UNION DRIVES
According to a Gallup poll, the new spark in union organizing has come from young workers, many of them college educated. The poll reveals that 77 percent of people under 35 approve of unions and form the backbone of people joining and organizing labor unions. The New York Times has referred to the development as “the revolt of the college-educated working class while others call them “Generation U).
A three-day strike beginning April 23 at the two campuses of New York’s Fordham University has resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of classes on those three days. The strike was called by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers Union after a series of fruitless negotiating sessions.
The union is affiliated with Local 1104 of the Communications Workers of America. The union is demanding significant pay increases, more administrative support for international students, adoption of a “just cause” standard for disciplinary actions, university-provided computers, a ban on non-disclosure agreements, and $4,000 in annual child care subsidies for workers with children under the age of 5.
In the face of sometimes dangerous and unsafe conditions, workers at New York City’s outdoor farmers markets are forming a union. The move comes in the face of several incidents at the Union Square and Tompkins Greenmarkets in which workers faced incidents of harassment and racial threats by passersby and an out-of -control car crashed across the curb nearly killing workers and customers at Tompkins Square.
The markets that sell produce, organic baked products and eggs from farms in the NYC metropolitan area are run by GrowNYC, a non-profit group. Market employees are hourly employees earning about $20 an hour with no benefits or job security. They sometimes have to work 12-hour shifts with erratic schedules under various weather conditions. They seek to improve their wages, benefits and safety conditions.
On April 26, 200 workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for a union election after management did not respond to their earlier request for voluntary union recognition. They are being represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
NY Times print edition, 4/27
TEAMSTERS BEGIN TOUGH NEGOTIATIONS WITH UPS
With the Teamsters Union set to begin bargaining sessions with United Parcel Service, some major obstacles have popped up in the opening stance of the company.
UPS now says that it will not discuss economic questions with the union, which complicates the bargaining process set to begin April 17. Economic questions are the heart of any collective bargaining agreement. Union contract proposals were advanced earlier this month. They included more holidays and ick days, improvements in the grievance procedures, more full-time jobs, along with payroll issues. They have rejected concessions and what the company calls “cost-neutral” bargaining.
After striking for nearly two months, frontline health care workers at Kaiser’s Maui Health System in Hawaii ratified a three-year contract that provides a 10.5 percent pay raise for all, pay scale adjustments for all job classifications and a one-time lump sum payment. More specific details of the new contract have not been widely circulated. The workers are represented by United Public Workers Local 646, AFSCME.
The striking workers included licensed practical nurses, nurses aides, respiratory therapists, cooks, housekeepers, and other employees at Maui Memorial Medical Center, Kula Hospital, and L’ana’i Community Hospital.
Two days after the Starbucks chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz was grilled during a Senate committee hearing on the company’s response to union organizing at its stores, and after he vehemently denied firing workers for union activity, Starbucks fired three union organizers and disciplined another organizer in the Buffalo, New York, area where the union campaign began. (See item on Starbucks below.)
Among those to lose their jobs was Lexi Rizzo, a shift supervisor for seven years in Buffalo at one of the first stores to unionize and a leading founder of the union campaign. The union has characterized the actions as retaliation.
Amid a years-long wave of unionization in the hospitality industry, the workers behind two of Food Network’s most popular television shows have formed a union. According to the anWriters Guild of America, East, “overwhelming majority” of workers of BSTV Entertainment, the studio that produces The Kitchenand Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, have signed cards to form what organizers say is the first nonfiction food television union.
In recent months the illegal use of chid labor has increased, often under wraps, as a recent NY Times expose revealed. Corporate lobbyists have been at work trying to get state legislatures to cancel the protections for child labor that have been in place for about a hundred years. In the most extreme recent case, a bill under consideration in Iowa, pushed by the state’s Restaurant Association would allow children as young as 16 to work in very dangerous meatpacking facilities, high-volume soda bottling plants and demolition construction sites where more than 5,000 workers nationwide died last year. Is this the 21st century or the world of Charles Dickens?
More Perfect Union, 4/3
STARBUCKS GRILLED ON UNION-BUSTING ACTIVITIES
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz came under sharp questioning March 29 at a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Democrats on the committee, led by its chairman, Sen.Bernie Sanders, cited incidents of illegal union busting including, among other things, firing workers for union activities, threatening workers who want to join the union, denying workers at unionized stores the benefits and pay raises at other stores and refusing to bargain with workers at stores that have chosen the union. Schultz’ insisted he had done nothing illegal. The hearing, called to highlight and correct lapses in the country’s labor laws and their enforcement, was attended by a contingent of members of the union, Starbucks Workers United, who wore shirts prominently displayed with the union logo.
By contrast, committee Republicans were effusive in their praise for Schultz for leading a billion dollar business and getting people to pay a big price for a cup of coffee while they ignored the issue of union busting around which the hearing was based.
For a view of the hearing, followed by and the testimony of Starbucks workers , you can watch the video below.
JUNE BITS AND PIECES
Labor BriefsNYC RAISES MINIMUM PAY FOR FOOD DELIVERERS
In a milestone for the fight for fair treatment of the lowest paid workers, New York City will become the first place in the country to raise the minimum pay for food delivery workers to something approaching a decent standard. These workers, who deliver meals to our doors when we don’t feel like or are otherwise unable to do our own cooking, average a shameful $7.09 an hour in wages plus the few dollars they can collect in tips. The city has now raised their minimum to $17.96 an hour, going up to $19.96 an hour in two years. They will still be able to collect tips. The two large companies that employ these workers, Uber Eats and DoorDash, are, expectedly, protesting the new law, claiming facetiously that it harms workers when all it really does is to make a small dent in both companies’ big profits.
Labor Press, 6/15
IOWA ENACTS HUGE ROLLBACK IN CHILD LABOR LAWS
The trend among some states to exploit the labor of children took another step forward in Iowa May 26 when the state’s governor, Kim Reynolds, signed a bill that conflicts with the federal Fair Labor Standards Act’s prohibition of “oppressive child labor.” The federal statute outlaws teen-agers working under hazardous conditions or excessive hours that interfere with their schooling or health and well-being.
Among the Iowa act’s provisions are:
The Iowa law is the latest in a series of similar laws enacted or proposed by Republican dominated state governments in the past few months. It follows an Arkansas’ law in March signed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, President Trump’s former press secretary, that loosened child labor protections.
The attack upon a century of steps protecting children from being exploited is part of a big effort by many companies around the country to gain access to low wage labor and weaken worker protections.
Economic Policy Institute, 5/31
WORKING AT DOLLAR GENERAL IS HAZARDOUS TO YOUR SAFETY
Dollar General, is a retail chain with 18,000 stores in 47 states. It is also at or near the top of the list of places with the most safety violations in the country, violations that put its workers and customers in daily danger. Over the past six years, the chain has been cited for fines that total more than $21 million for “systemic hazards.”
“Fred Wright cartoon courtesy of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE)”.
These hazards, cited by the US Labor Department as “severe violations,” include aisles, emergency exits, fire extinguishers and electrical panels blocked by merchandise and unsafe stacking of boxers. In addition to the looming fines, the company has paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits involving injuries sustained as a result of unsafe conditions in is stores.
“Dollar General continues to expose its employees to unsafe conditions at its stores across the nation,” declared OSHA’s assistant secretary Doug Parker. Workers at the store report Dollar General’s general disregard for its workers in the form of low wages and poor working conditions while the company registered a profit of $3.3 billion last year. Its CEO raked in $16.6 million while the median wage of its employees was less than $20,000.
The Guardian, 5/31
STARBUICKS FIRES ANOTHER UNION ACTIVIST
In his testimony before a congressional committee in March, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz asserted that the company did not fire any employee for union activity. Yet, just two days later, a shift supervisor at a Buffalo store and one of the first members of the union, Starbucks Workers United, was fired from her job.
Alexis Rizzo, an employee for seven years was fired for her alleged tardiness, twice for being one minute late, once for four minutes and once for five minutes. Before she was involved in the union campaign, there was never any problem between her and the company.
Starbucks Workers United has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company with the National Labor Relations Board, in addition to the hundreds already pending.
Portside, 6/5
BEN & JERRY’S BUCKS THE TREND OF EMPLOYERS FIGHTING UNIONS
In a modern exception to the traditional hostility that employers have toward unions, Ben & Jerry’s recognized the union in its Burlington, Vermont, flagship store after its 39 workers voted for it. During the union’s organizing campaign, the company, unlike Starbucks, maintained strict neutrality. It did not conduct forced meetings to lecture workers on the “evils” of unionism or threats to move its facility or intimidate union activists or any of the other tactics that are the standard operating procedure of anti-union employers. Instead, it allowed the union, Scoopers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, to have time to talk to workers and space to post union material in the store. The company has committed itself to bargaining with the union. “We look forward to a sweet and collaborative future,” said a company statement.
Portside,6/7
SOME LIRR WORKERS ARE DOING 24 HOUR SHIFTS
The Office of New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority Inspector General released a report finding that over 4,000 LIRR employees were working 24 hours or more at a time. These workers are not covered by Federal Railroad Administration hours-of-service regulations. The crucial roles of engineering department workers, especially track workers, fall into this category. The accompanying fatigue leads to an increased risk of accidents.
Labor Press, 6.9
MAY BITS & PIECES
Labor BriefsSTARBUCKS TRYING TO DECERTIFY 3 UNION STORES
Starbucks, which has been using all kinds of tricks, legal, borderline, and down-dirty, to combat the union organizing drive in its stores, now is possibly involved in a new one. At three Starbucks locations where workers have voted for the Starbucks Workers United union, a worker has filed a petition to decertify the union.
The three stores are all in New York State, two in Buffalo where the union first took hold, and one in New York City. In NYC, the petition filer is represented by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, an outfit connected to right-wing, anti-union financiers.
The union expects that the decertification will be dismissed in light of the charges of unfair labor practices filed by the union against the company now pending before the National Labor Relations Board. In cases like this, the NLRB can bar decertification elections from being held until the allegations are adjudicated on grounds that company actions cannot guarantee that a fair election can take place. But it is part of a Starbucks strategy to delay bargaining with the union among its other tactics of firing union activists and providing benefits to workers at its non-union stores.
Restaurant Dive, 5/12; Courtesy Locker Associates, New York.
FLAGSHIP BARNES & NOBLE STORE WORKERS FILE FOR UNION
Workers at the Barnes and Noble flagship store in Union Square, New York City, have filed for a representation election after they announced the formation of a union. They have affiliated with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The election filing came after the union said that the company had refused to voluntarily recognize the union. The store employs over 100 workers. The union says a majority of them have signed union authorization cards.
The Villager, 4/28, Publishers Weekly, 5/1
STARBUCKS UNION MARKS 300th STORE
In the face of the stiffest company opposition, workers at Starbucks continue their organizing drive. A store in Sacramento, CA has become the 300th Starbucks facility to win a union election.
Starbucks United website, 4/28
YOUNG WORKERS ARE SPARKING MOST UNION DRIVES
According to a Gallup poll, the new spark in union organizing has come from young workers, many of them college educated. The poll reveals that 77 percent of people under 35 approve of unions and form the backbone of people joining and organizing labor unions. The New York Times has referred to the development as “the revolt of the college-educated working class while others call them “Generation U).
The Nation, 5/1
APRIL BITS AND PIECES
Labor BriefsFORDHAM GRAD SCHOOL WORKERS STAGE 3-DAY STRIKE
A three-day strike beginning April 23 at the two campuses of New York’s Fordham University has resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of classes on those three days. The strike was called by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers Union after a series of fruitless negotiating sessions.
The union is affiliated with Local 1104 of the Communications Workers of America. The union is demanding significant pay increases, more administrative support for international students, adoption of a “just cause” standard for disciplinary actions, university-provided computers, a ban on non-disclosure agreements, and $4,000 in annual child care subsidies for workers with children under the age of 5.
The City,4/25
WORKERS AT NYC FARMERS MARKETS ORGANIZING UNION
In the face of sometimes dangerous and unsafe conditions, workers at New York City’s outdoor farmers markets are forming a union. The move comes in the face of several incidents at the Union Square and Tompkins Greenmarkets in which workers faced incidents of harassment and racial threats by passersby and an out-of -control car crashed across the curb nearly killing workers and customers at Tompkins Square.
The markets that sell produce, organic baked products and eggs from farms in the NYC metropolitan area are run by GrowNYC, a non-profit group. Market employees are hourly employees earning about $20 an hour with no benefits or job security. They sometimes have to work 12-hour shifts with erratic schedules under various weather conditions. They seek to improve their wages, benefits and safety conditions.
On April 26, 200 workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for a union election after management did not respond to their earlier request for voluntary union recognition. They are being represented by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.
NY Times print edition, 4/27
TEAMSTERS BEGIN TOUGH NEGOTIATIONS WITH UPS
With the Teamsters Union set to begin bargaining sessions with United Parcel Service, some major obstacles have popped up in the opening stance of the company.
UPS now says that it will not discuss economic questions with the union, which complicates the bargaining process set to begin April 17. Economic questions are the heart of any collective bargaining agreement. Union contract proposals were advanced earlier this month. They included more holidays and ick days, improvements in the grievance procedures, more full-time jobs, along with payroll issues. They have rejected concessions and what the company calls “cost-neutral” bargaining.
The current contract is set to expire in August.
Labor Press, 4/17
500 MAUI HEALTH CARE WORKERS END TWO MONTH STRIKE
After striking for nearly two months, frontline health care workers at Kaiser’s Maui Health System in Hawaii ratified a three-year contract that provides a 10.5 percent pay raise for all, pay scale adjustments for all job classifications and a one-time lump sum payment. More specific details of the new contract have not been widely circulated. The workers are represented by United Public Workers Local 646, AFSCME.
The striking workers included licensed practical nurses, nurses aides, respiratory therapists, cooks, housekeepers, and other employees at Maui Memorial Medical Center, Kula Hospital, and L’ana’i Community Hospital.
Portside, 4/14
STARBUDKS FIRES THREE MORE UNION ACTIVISTS
Two days after the Starbucks chairman and former CEO Howard Schultz was grilled during a Senate committee hearing on the company’s response to union organizing at its stores, and after he vehemently denied firing workers for union activity, Starbucks fired three union organizers and disciplined another organizer in the Buffalo, New York, area where the union campaign began. (See item on Starbucks below.)
Among those to lose their jobs was Lexi Rizzo, a shift supervisor for seven years in Buffalo at one of the first stores to unionize and a leading founder of the union campaign. The union has characterized the actions as retaliation.
The Guardian, 4/3
WORKERS AT TV’S FOOD NETWORK FORM UNION
Amid a years-long wave of unionization in the hospitality industry, the workers behind two of Food Network’s most popular television shows have formed a union. According to the anWriters Guild of America, East, “overwhelming majority” of workers of BSTV Entertainment, the studio that produces The Kitchenand Trisha’s Southern Kitchen, have signed cards to form what organizers say is the first nonfiction food television union.
Portside, 3/20
DANGERS MOUNT FOR CHILD LABOR PROTECTION
In recent months the illegal use of chid labor has increased, often under wraps, as a recent NY Times expose revealed. Corporate lobbyists have been at work trying to get state legislatures to cancel the protections for child labor that have been in place for about a hundred years. In the most extreme recent case, a bill under consideration in Iowa, pushed by the state’s Restaurant Association would allow children as young as 16 to work in very dangerous meatpacking facilities, high-volume soda bottling plants and demolition construction sites where more than 5,000 workers nationwide died last year. Is this the 21st century or the world of Charles Dickens?
More Perfect Union, 4/3
STARBUCKS GRILLED ON UNION-BUSTING ACTIVITIES
Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz came under sharp questioning March 29 at a hearing of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Democrats on the committee, led by its chairman, Sen.Bernie Sanders, cited incidents of illegal union busting including, among other things, firing workers for union activities, threatening workers who want to join the union, denying workers at unionized stores the benefits and pay raises at other stores and refusing to bargain with workers at stores that have chosen the union. Schultz’ insisted he had done nothing illegal. The hearing, called to highlight and correct lapses in the country’s labor laws and their enforcement, was attended by a contingent of members of the union, Starbucks Workers United, who wore shirts prominently displayed with the union logo.
By contrast, committee Republicans were effusive in their praise for Schultz for leading a billion dollar business and getting people to pay a big price for a cup of coffee while they ignored the issue of union busting around which the hearing was based.
For a view of the hearing, followed by and the testimony of Starbucks workers , you can watch the video below.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NCe_BHsCQQ[/embedyt]