Good News for those Who Work for a Living

July 31, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Two bits of good news for the laboring classes today:

The shell game in which employers push off responsibilities for workers onto subcontractors or franchisees may be over

The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Tuesday that McDonald’s could be held jointly liable for labor and wage violations by its franchise operators — a decision that, if upheld, would disrupt longtime practices in the fast-food industry and ease the way for unionizing nationwide.

The ruling comes after the labor board’s legal team investigated myriad complaints that fast-food workers brought in the last 20 months, accusing McDonald’s and its franchisees of unfair labor practices.

Richard F. Griffin Jr., the labor board’s general counsel, said he found merit in 43 of the 181 claims, accusing McDonald’s restaurants of illegally firing, threatening or otherwise penalizing workers for their pro-labor activities.

In those cases, Mr. Griffin said he would include McDonald’s as a joint employer, a classification that could hold the company responsible for actions taken at thousands of its restaurants.  NY Times: Greenhouse

The awarding of government contracts to those who can’t get their houses in order may be coming to an end.

President Obama is expected to sign an executive order on Thursday that could make it harder for companies that violate wage, labor and anti-discrimination laws to win federal contracts, administration officials said on Wednesday.

Under the order, Mr. Obama will require federal contractors to disclose any labor violations that their companies committed over the previous three years, with government procurement officials then being advised to steer clear of those with repeated and egregious violations.

“The president’s view is that taxpayer dollars should not reward corporations that break the law,” …

NY Times: Shear and Greenhouse

 

Filed under Labor / Unions, Organizing Tagged with ,

Earning Enough to Eat By

July 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mark Bittman, a New York Times food columnist and author of a small 4 volume set [The Mini Minimalist] of easy recipes of which I am a big fan, does what more foodies should do — looks at the conditions of the many tens of thousands who work in food services around the country.  Good for you Mark!

 

…a rapidly increasing number of food industry and other retail workers are now fighting for basic rights: halfway decent pay, a real work schedule, the right to organize, health care, paid sick days, vacations and respect. Next week, organizers say, we’ll see a walkout of thousands of workers at hundreds of stores in at least seven cities, including New York and Chicago.

Something is happening here, though exactly what isn’t quite clear. Fast food was never a priority of organized labor — it’s difficult to imagine a traditional union of four million fast-food workers in something like 200,000 locations — but dozens of organizations are now involved, including, to its credit, the Service Employees International Union, which is providing financing and counsel. The upshot: Workers with nothing to lose are demanding a living wage of $15 an hour, and gaining strength and confidence.

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Moral Mondays in North Carolina

July 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A friend of mine from the way-back years recently paid a visit from her home state of North Carolina. She was the first to tell me of a rising coalition called Moral Monday. Here’s the Why and then the What

So far this year, legislation passed or pending by [North Carolina] Republicans would eliminate the earned-income tax credit for 900,000; decline Medicaid coverage for 500,000; end federal unemployment benefits for 170,000 in a state with the country’s fifth-highest jobless rate; cut pre-K for 30,000 kids while shifting $90 million from public education to voucher schools; slash taxes for the top 5 percent while raising taxes on the bottom 95 percent; allow for guns to be purchased without a background check and carried in parks, playgrounds, restaurants and bars; ax public financing of judicial races; and prohibit death row inmates from challenging racially discriminatory verdicts.

*

On an overcast afternoon in early July, 300 activists pack into the white-columned Christian Faith Baptist Church to prepare for the ninth wave of Moral Monday protests at the state legislature. “Supporters on the right, civil disobedience on the left,” they’re told as they enter. The racially and socioeconomically diverse crowd has the feel of an Obama campaign revival. Eighty people take the left side of the pews, wearing green armbands to signal their intention to get arrested, nearly all of them for the first time. “The goal of Moral Monday,” says the Rev. William Barber II, president of the North Carolina NAACP, “is to dramatize the shameful condition of our state.”

Read more at The Nation:

One of the recent participants in a Moral Monday was Baldemar Velasquez, a long time farmworker organizer, in the mold of Cesar Chavez,  in Florida, Ohio and the eastern United States. {Here with Bill Moyers.]

The president of Toledo-based Farm Labor Organizing Committee was arrested for civil disobedience Monday at a protest in Raleigh, N.C.Mr. Velasquez, 66, was among more than 80 protesters arrested at a rally held at the North Carolina General Assembly building in Raleigh to oppose the state’s budget cuts to unemployment benefits, health-care funding, education, and other social benefits.

More than 3,000 protesters attended the rally, organized by the North Carolina NAACP.

Filed under Citizen Action, Organizing, Republicans Tagged with , , ,

Rosa Parks: More Militant than Meek

February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Charles Blow at the NY Times, brings to view a new book on the woman whose Civil Rights fame is second only to Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks.  She was not, it turns out, the humble seamstress she is often portrayed as being.  She had long rankled at the treatment of her family and friends by whites.  She talked back and on more than one occasion was restrained by those older and more experienced.

When she was a child, a young white man taunted her. In turn, she threatened him with a brick. Her grandmother reprimanded her as “too high-strung,” warning that Rosa would be lynched before the age of 20. Rosa responded, “I would be lynched rather than be run over by them.”

the idea that she stayed seated on the famous bus ride because of physical fatigue is pure fiction.

“I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting,” the book quotes her as saying. “It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.”

The book also lays out Parks’s leading role in the bus boycotts and her decades of activism after the civil rights movement.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, by Jeanne Theoharis, you might want to read it.

Filed under Books, Organizing, Race Tagged with ,

And Then The Organizers….

June 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Thomas Friedman reminds us, in the euphoria of instant communication, that old fashioned organizing — providing actual services, or the means for people to provide their own– is fundamental.

What happened to the “Facebook Revolution”?

Actually, Facebook is having a bad week — in the stock market and the ideas market. As a liberal Egyptian friend observed, “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate.” No doubt Facebook helped a certain educated class of Egyptians to spread the word about the Tahrir Revolution. Ditto Twitter. But, at the end of the day, politics always comes down to two very old things: leadership and the ability to get stuff done. And when it came to those, both the Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood, two old “brick and mortar” movements, were much more adept than the Facebook generation of secular progressives and moderate Islamists — whose candidates together won more votes than Morsi and Shafik combined in the first round of voting but failed to make the runoff because they divided their votes among competing candidates who would not align.

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How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back

January 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Not much has changed in the Obama White House since Marshall Ganz wrote this opinion piece 14 months ago.  It is worth reading a concise and exemplary critique even at this late stage.  When the DNC calls, have a few things to say to them….

November 03, 2010|By Marshall Ganz

Barack Obama went from being a transformational leader in the campaign to a transactional one as president. It didn’t work, and he must reverse course.

President Obama entered office wrapped in a mantle of moral leadership. His call for change was rooted in values that had long been eclipsed in our public life: a sense of mutual responsibility, commitment to equality and belief in inclusive diversity. Those values inspired a new generation of voters, restored faith to the cynical and created a national movement.

Now, 18 months and an “enthusiasm gap” later, the nation’s major challenges remain largely unmet, and a discredited conservative movement has reinvented itself in a more virulent form.

LA Times  Nov 3, 2011

for more from Ganz see this Feb 2011 interview in The Nation

President Obama, Ganz says ruefully, seems to be “afraid of people getting out of control.” He needed the organizing base in 2008, but he and his inner circle were quick to dismantle it after the election. Yes, Ganz concedes, they kept Organizing for America, with its access to the vast volunteer databases, alive; but they made a conscious decision to neuter it, so as to placate legislators who were worried about the independent power base it could give Obama. Following a meeting of key members of the transition team, they placed it under the control of the Democratic National Committee. It became, if you like, something of a house pet. Yes, President Obama proposed, and continues to propose, many good policies; but, the community organizing guru concludes, the fire, the passion and the moral clarity were left out of his postelection rhetoric.

Returning to his kitchen table after a brief quest amid the clutter for his eyedrops, Ganz surveys what’s left of candidate Obama’s promise to deliver a cleaner, more uplifting style of politics. After winning in November 2008, Obama and his inner circle wanted to control the terms of the debate rather than be pushed from below by a chaotic, empowered, activist community. They wanted to shift Obama’s leadership style, Ganz believes, from the transformational aura of his candidacy to something different; they wanted him to be a transactional leader, a maker of deals, a compromiser in chief.

“He’s not a bad man,” Ganz says of the president. “His policy intent is not bad. But you don’t have the opportunity to change history every day. The Obama campaign excited the whole world. It created an opportunity to build capacity and do real movement-building.”

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