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Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Call for Labor Action Nov. 7, 2012
Saturday, October 27, 2012
General Strike Called in Europe and U.K.
UK TUC march dominated by calls for a General Strike
YouTube - Videos from this emailFirst Workers' Warehouse Action in 3 Decades
Riot Police Called In To Arrest Peaceful Protesters Outside Walmart Warehouse
Members of Chicago's southwest suburbs' 'mobile force team' arrested peaceful protesters outside a Walmart warehouse yesterday. (Courtesy of Pat Barcas)
Several hundred supporters of strikers at a giant Walmart warehouse near Chicago converged on the tiny town of Elwood, IL, on Monday, effectively shutting down this key hub of the big retailer's distribution center for most of the day.
"Today's CPH—zero," cheered warehouse worker Phil Bailey, using the managers' abbreviation of "cartons per hour," the dreaded standard for the seemingly always more intensified pace of work in the warehouse. Warehouse Workers For Justice (WWFJ), an organization launched and supported by the United Electrical Workers (UE) to raise standards for the industry, reported that managers had sent the day's workforce home early.
Union and community organization members, clergy, Walmart retail workers, and civic leaders rallied in a nearby parking lot and marched around the two big buildings, before 17 leaders from the supportive constituencies sat down in the late afternoon across Centerpoint Drive, outside the main gate
A couple dozen police officers, clad in heavy black helmets and riot gear, and backed by military-style vehicles, assembled on Walmart's property. Their equipment—which seemed like overkill for a protest negotiated in advance—had all been purchased with money from the Illinois Terrorism Task Force, specifically for this "mobile force team" jointly operated by a consortium of local police forces, according to Elwood police Chief Fred W. Hayes.
The riot police marched trough the main gate of the warehouse, then handcuffed and arrested the non-violent sit-down protestors on minor traffic obstruction charges, as both they and other demonstrators sang, "We shall not be moved."
On September 15 a small group of workers walked out of the non-union facility after management fired—then later changed tactics and "suspended"—some key leaders, including Bailey. He is one of four named plaintiffs in a class action suit that lawyers working with WWFJ filed two days earlier. Workers charged their immediate employer, Roadlink Workforce Solutions, with committing wide-ranging wage theft and related violations of state and federal employment law.
Although Walmart owns the warehouse, it contracts with Schneider Logistics to manage operations, including the further subcontracting of actually providing workers to temporary employment firms like Roadlink, which employs about 125 people at Elwood.
In a situation made more chaotic by management's actions, more workers were fired or suspended on September 15 when they tried to present a petition about their grievances to management. About 30 Roadlink workers initially, now up to 38, said they were striking over unfair labor practices—management penalties for engaging in legally protected collective action—as well as the issues in the lawsuit and petition.
This may be the first warehouse strike in the huge warehousing operations that have grown rapidly over the past three decades in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, which according to World Business Chicago is the world's third-largest intermodal transportation hub.
The Walmart warehouse is located in a logistics business park, in an isolated and largely rural spot, connected to the nearby interstate highway by roads jammed with trucks even on a day when Walmart was not operating. Yet people, let alone protests, are rarely visible.
"I was like, 'Wow!' on Monday when I saw people picketing, and I joined in," Mike Patton, 45, said. "I couldn't believe someone was taking a stand. It's nice to see people came around to doing what's right. You work like a dog in there—faster and faster, and then they cut your hours."
Many workers complain about the unpredictable hours as well as the low pay--$10 an hour with no prospect of a raise—for heavy work in harsh temperatures. Striker Mike Compton told the solidarity rally that managers routinely referred to workers as "bodies" that were deployed in an endless quest for a higher CPH, deprived of breaks, and exposed to dangers.
"The carts we use are suppose to have brakes, but they're broken," he said. "All of us have bruises on our legs that never heal. ... What we asked for is some basic rights. When they illegally fired some of us, we started picketing. We'd had enough."
The demonstration of solidarity included relatively large groups from unions such as SEIU (Service Employees) and UFCW (Food and Commercial Workers), supporters from the OUR Walmart organization of retail workers and from Action Now, a Chicago community group, and an elected commissioner of the Will County Board, the county's governing body. "I believe elected officials should stand up to corporate power for our constituents," Jacki Traznere said as she sat in front of the warehouse awaiting arrest.
There was also one representative from the Sensata factory in northwest Illinois. Bain Capital, formerly led by Mitt Romney, owns Sensata and is in the process of closing the plant and outsourcing the factory's well-paid jobs to China.
"Your present is our future," Sensata worker Ted Gaulrap told the strikers, "crappy jobs and no benefits. But remember that working people standing together can do anything."
But the complex subcontracting and high turnover in the warehouse industry makes it harder for workers to pursue the obvious path of forming a union. UE national director of organizing Bob Kingsley says Warehouse Workers for Justice is trying to "develop a model" that will work in the industry.
It will involve, he says, "straight-up organizing" of temp and permanent employees but will probably require changes in labor laws as well. UE strongly emphasizes relying on the warehouse workers themselves in making decisions and "leading the struggle," he says. Much as UE did decades ago in organizing at General Electric, he says, workers may form organizations that function as unofficial unions for long periods before seeking formal recognition.
But "we have got to have some breakthroughs to engage and empower warehouse workers," Kingsley says, expressing pleasure with the size and diversity of the turnout. "That's why what's happening here is so important."
Monday, October 22, 2012
UK Fire Union Chief Calls to Nationalize the Banks
| UK Fire Union Leader Calls For Nationalization Of Banks |
| By Matt Wrack (General Secretary FBU) | |
| Friday, 19 October 2012 | |
On Sat Oct 20, thousands of workers, pensioners, unemployed and youth will march in London, Glasgow and Belfast against the attacks of this Tory-led government. Matt Wrack, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, sends a special message through the pages of Socialist Appeal to all those marching for a better future:
The economy staggers from crisis to crisis. Overly optimistic government predictions are refuted by the harsh reality of a double-dip recession. The crisis has devastated the lives of workers in Britain and across the world. Austerity measures mean real wages cut, unemployment, pensions destroyed and public services slashed. They are on a scale not seen before.
The aim is to make working people pay for a crisis we did not cause. We need to set out clearly what lies behind the crisis.
The Con-Dem coalition argues that further privatisation and deregulation is the route out of recession but it was the deregulated private finance sector that sparked the crisis. The government's arguments need to be challenged. The banks cannot be allowed to carry on the way they've done before. We need a sharp break with the practices of the past.
Service
The Labour movement should place on the agenda the call for a publicly owned finance industry which would provide a public service to industry and working people.
Taking over the banks will enable the state to plan investment. Instead of investment bankers gambling with money in financial markets, funds could be switched to creating millions of sustainable jobs and investing in the housing, public services and infrastructure we need. The privately owned banking system created a huge credit bubble that burst and triggered the biggest economic slump in Britain for generations.
When the crisis broke, the government took shares in RBS and Lloyds and took over mortgage lenders Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley. The taxpayer advanced £133 billion to restore the capital of these banks.
So far, only £14bn of the original cash outlay has been recovered. The banks are still rigging interest rates, laundering illegal cash, gambling in exotic financial assets and paying their top executives grotesque salaries and bonuses.
Deceit
Three-quarters of the assets of Barclays bank are invested in trading on the stocks, bonds and currency markets. Barclays's elite traders and top executives took £1bn home between them this year to "reward" this gambling.
Banks still engage in outright deceit and law-breaking. Barclays was caught out over the Libor scandal, HSBC in laundering Mexican drug money and Standard Chartered with Iranian banks. The banking system is not doing its job in providing loans on reasonable terms to help the economy recover.
Banks are needed to provide financial services to firms and households. Most workers have wages paid directly into a bank. We need to be able to access our money. Sometimes we need to be able to borrow money. At other times, we need to save.
In addition, we need banks to raise funds and provide credit to finance investment and growth across an economy. This is what banking as a public service should be about. Britain's big banks dispose of £6 trillion in funds. Yet they earmark just £200bn of this to investment in industry, a measly 3 per cent of the total.
Four years after the crisis began, bank lending is falling, not rising. The banking sector stands indicted by these figures. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer the banks continue to fail to assist in any sort of recovery.
Regulation failed to stop banks collapsing and bringing down the economy. More regulation won't work now. It's expensive, bureaucratic and ineffective. Despite the mess the banks have caused, we are still told we should leave them as they are because they make money. But a survey of the period from 2002-2008 shows that the finance sector paid £203bn in tax, while manufacturing paid nearly twice as much. Tax revenue from the finance sector during that period was less than the estimated up-front costs of the bank bailout of £289bn.
Competition
Some argue that the banks should be broken into smaller units so that competition can flourish and the monopoly of the big five can be broken. But the banks are too interconnected - if one goes down, they can all go down like a row of dominos.
In any case, the crisis did not start with the big banks. In Britain, it started with the smaller lenders like Northern Rock. More regulation or a break-up of the banks will not make them operate in the interests of the wider economy. Their main objective will still be to maximise profits for their shareholders and bonuses for their top executives. Private ownership means profit comes before everything else. New regulations can be bypassed. That will continue as long as banks are under private ownership.
The public has no control over the banks' decision-making, even in banks that are majority state-owned. Only public ownership of the major banks with a new democratic structure of control can turn banking into a public service. A publicly owned banking system could finance a mass programme of useful public works, to create jobs and modernise infrastructure.
Public ownership
We therefore welcome that for the first time in history, the TUC has adopted the policy of the public ownership of the banks.
9In the past, Margaret Thatcher attacked us not because she was mad, but because she was acting in the interests of the ruling class . Today, in the face of economic crisis, this same class wants to restructure the economy in the interests of capitalism and make the working class pay. But local communities will not sit back and see their services destroyed. In this fight, we must take direct action such as occupying hospitals or schools.
We must see the end of this government at the earliest opportunity. But what happens next? Under New Labour we had attacks on jobs, wages and conditions. No one wants to see the Coalition government that attacks us replaced by another Labour government that attacks us. We need a change in policy.
The resources are there. But they are in the hands of the Billionaires, not in our hands.We need to ask ourselves what sort of society we want – one where spivs and gamblers decide what happens or where the majority decides?
We face a huge challenge. We must rise to the occasion and act decisively in the interests of our class.
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Saturday, October 20, 2012
Can. Supremes Rule Workers Have Right to Privacy
Canadian Supreme Court rules employees have right to privacy on work computers
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Democrats Desert Labor Allies
Labor’s Hail Mary pass
This is a maddening time for anyone concerned about the lives of working-class Americans. The frustration and anger that suffused AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s declaration last week that labor would distance itself from the Democratic Party was both clear and widely noted. Not so widely noted has been a shift in the organizing strategy of two of labor’s leading institutions — Trumka’s AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union — that reflects a belief that the American labor movement may be on the verge of extinction and must radically change its game.
It took a multitude of Democratic sins and failures to push Trumka to denounce, if not exactly renounce,the political party that has been labor’s home at least since the New Deal. In a speech at the National Press Club last Friday, Trumka said that Republicans were wielding a “wrecking ball” against the rights and interests of working Americans. But Democrats, he added, were “simply standing aside” as the Republicans moved in for the kill.
primary source of labor’s frustration has been the consistent inability of the Democrats to strengthen the legislation that once allowed workers to join unions without fear of employer reprisals. American business has poked so many holes in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act that it now affords workers no protections at all. Beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, every time the Democrats have held the White House and strong majorities in both houses of Congress, bills that strengthened workers’ rights to unionize have commanded substantial Democratic support — but never quite enough to win a Senate supermajority. And during that time, the unionized share of the private-sector workforce has dwindled from roughly 30 percent to less than 7 percent.
Many union activists viewed the 2009-10 battle for the most recent iteration of labor law reform — the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) — as labor’s last stand. EFCA could never attain the magic 60-vote threshhold required to cut off a filibuster, despite the presence, at one point, of 60 Democratic senators. Given the rate at which private-sector unionization continues to fall (which in turn imperils support for public-sector unions), many of labor’s most thoughtful leaders now consider the Democrats’ inability to enact EFCA a death sentence for the American labor movement.
“It’s over,” one of labor’s leading strategists told me this month. Indeed, since last November’s elections, half a dozen high-ranking labor leaders from a range of unions have told me they believe that private-sector unions may all but disappear within the next 10 years.
While some unions still wage more conventional organizing campaigns, the campaign that best captures the desperation of American labor today is that of the SEIU. Perhaps the best-funded and most strategically savvy of American unions, SEIU has embarked on a door-to-door canvass in the minority neighborhoods of 17 major American cities. The goal isn’t to enroll the people behind those doors in a conventional union but, rather, into a mass organization of the unemployed and the underpaid that can turn out votes in 2012 and act as an ongoing pressure group for job creation and worker rights during (presumably) Barack Obama’s second term.
“We realized we could organize one million more people into the union and it wouldn’t in itself really change anything,” SEIU President Mary Kay Henry told me earlier this year. “We needed to do something else — something more.”
The SEIU’s program — like its semi-counterpart in the AFL-CIO’s Working Americaprogram, a door-to-door canvass in white working-class neighborhoods — will surely help Democratic candidates, despite the frustrations that nearly all labor leaders feel toward the party. But, like Working America, it signals a strategic shift by American labor, whose ranks have been so reduced that it now must recruit people to a non-union, essentially non-dues-paying organization to amass the political clout that its own diminished ranks can no longer deliver. Since labor law now effectively precludes workplace representation, unions are turning to representing workers anywhere and in any capacity they can. It’s time, they’ve concluded, for the Hail Mary pass.
The unions’ support for the Democrats’ party committees has already diminished considerably, though, as Trumka made clear last week, they will continue to support individual pro-union Democrats. But the greater change in union strategy is the one that’s been forced upon them. They are going outside the workplace. They have no place else to turn.
Friday, October 12, 2012
Union Lock-outs on the Increase
- Lockout. It's a word that football, hockey, basketball and now the Minnesota Orchestra have put into mainstream discussion.
First, let's be clear what a lockout is: It's the opposite of a strike. The employer withholds work in order to gain concessions from workers.
Lockouts are growing in frequency. Sotheby's auction house locked out art handlers. Cooper Tire did the same to its workers. Drivers for SuperMom's bakery in the Twin Cities were recently locked out for two weeks. One of the most egregious examples is in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota, where 1,300 skilled, highly trained workers who turn beets into sugar have been locked out for nearly 15 months by their already profitable employer -- American Crystal Sugar.
Lockouts have not been very common in the past, because usually businesses would prefer to keep operating and getting the value of workers' labor. But in the current economic climate, even profitable enterprises are seeking to wrangle a few extra dollars out of workers.
But these lockouts have real consequences. There are the obvious ones we can see publicly. In the NFL, millions of viewers saw replacement referees blow call after call. The NHL season is in jeopardy of being canceled once again. Now, Orchestra Hall, a major Twin Cities attraction, has fallen silent.
Some lockout consequences, while not necessarily obvious, are even more painful. In the Red River Valley, the casualties have included homes and marriages.
Crystal Sugar's farmer-shareholders haven't been spared pain, either. Shareholders have typically been paid about the same per ton of sugar beets -- or more -- as shareholders in the nearby Minn-Dak Sugar Cooperative. But this year, Crystal Sugar has estimated a beet payment of $59 per ton, while Minn-Dak's latest estimate is for a payment of $74.05 per ton. At the same time, executive pay is up. In the past three years, the top four officers saw their total compensation increase upwards of 34 percent, with CEO Dave Berg seeing a whopping 52 percent increase between 2009 and 2011.
This trend represents an overreach on the part of employers. The response of fans to the NFL referee conflict is a great example of how the average American sees this issue. We are not sympathetic to rich people deciding that they want to rewrite the rules of the game when they are already winning. Nor are we sympathetic to corporate executives mismanaging their shareholders' investment and rewarding themselves with a raise.
The attacks on public-sector collective bargaining rights are similar. Most Americans continue to believe that we all benefit when workers get some say in their jobs. Just look to the overturning of restrictions on collective bargaining in Ohio, and the overwhelming support by public-school parents for the Chicago teachers' strike.
Why does this support persist despite high unemployment and decreasing union density? It's because most of us know that nobody cares more about the quality of the work than workers themselves. It's true for referees, hockey players, musicians, teachers and technicians in a sugar-beet factory.
UU Editor: The answer to the spread of lock-outs is SIT-DOWN STRIKES. Throw Management OUT. Sit-down Strikes end soon in solid VICTORIES.
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Shar Knutson is president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, a labor federation of more than 3,000 local Unions that represent more than 300,000 working people.
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