Thinking About Good-bye

It’s been a week of saying good-by, to those I’ve admired for work done and lives lived, most ofwhom never knew me, one slightly and another dearly.

This morning, after a week of sitting with and walking silently around, a family member, meditating on breath and body and earth and beyond, news comes of the death of Philip Levine, the American poet whose work has most moved me of that generation coming from the second world war.  I knew him and his wife briefly when I worked in Fresno, CA in the mid 1970s. It was their home.  He was an honored and famed professor at Fresno State.  She helped me do land research to track large agricultural holdings in order find migrant farm workers and organize union elections.

Books Phil LevineHis poetic interests, coming from a hard scrabble life in Detroit, were of working men and women, grinding labor, bitter cold.  I had been in migrant shanty camps and border slums and could not stand the poems, when I found time to read, about autumn leaves, love in meadows, fleecy clouds.  He paid attention to what held my deepest attention — the lives of others, in extremis. He also wrote of the Spanish Civil war. Though too young to participate in it, as some of his older friends and neighbors did, he felt it deeply, as had I.  Though committed to a Gandhian nonviolence, I was pulled to the courage of those who fought, and lost, against the Mussolini and Hitler supplied forces of fascism. I read histories, memoirs, stories of the war. I was inspired by the self-organizing anarchists, took warning from George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. My contempt for standing by while others suffered was sealed in me forever. After knowing Levine and finishing my work in the Central Valley I went to Spain where one Spanish friend joked that I knew more about that war than her own generation.

It’s too bad we wait for a person’s death to return us to their work.  I’ll be re-opening my volumes of Philip Levine and thanking him for attention passed to others.  Here are two I like, and here a collection of many others.

 

For more, by Margalit Fox at the NY Times, read here.

Ω

On The Murder Of Lieutenant Jose Del Castillo By The Falangist Bravo Martinez, July 12, 1936
by Philip Levine
When the Lieutenant of the Guardia de Asalto
heard the automatic go off, he turned
and took the second shot just above
the sternum, the third tore away
the right shoulder of his uniform,
the fourth perforated his cheek. As he
slid out of his comrade’s hold
toward the gray cement of the Ramblas
he lost count and knew only
that he would not die and that the blue sky
smudged with clouds was not heaven
for heaven was nowhere and in his eyes
slowly filling with their own light.
The pigeons that spotted the cold floor
of Barcelona rose as he sank below
the waves of silence crashing
on the far shores of his legs, growing
faint and watery. His hands opened
a last time to receive the benedictions
of automobile exhaust and rain
and the rain of soot. His mouth,
that would never again say “I am afraid,”
closed on nothing. The old grandfather
hawking daisies at his stand pressed
a handkerchief against his lips
and turned his eyes away before they held
the eyes of a gunman. The shepherd dogs
on sale howled in their cages
and turned in circles. There is more
to be said, but by someone who has suffered
and died for his sister the earth
and his brothers the beasts and the trees.
The Lieutenant can hear it, the prayer
that comes on the voices of water, today
or yesterday, form Chicago or Valladolid,
and hands like smoke above this street
he won’t walk as a man ever again.
Ω
Gin
by Philip Levine
The first time I drank gin
I thought it must be hair tonic.
My brother swiped the bottle
from a guy whose father owned
a drug store that sold booze
in those ancient, honorable days
when we acknowledged the stuff
was a drug. Three of us passed
the bottle around, each tasting
with disbelief. People paid
for this? People had to have
it, the way we had to have
the women we never got near.
(Actually they were girls, but
never mind, the important fact
was their impenetrability. )
Leo, the third foolish partner,
suggested my brother should have
swiped Canadian whiskey or brandy,
but Eddie defended his choice
on the grounds of the expressions
“gin house” and “gin lane,” both
of which indicated the preeminence
of gin in the world of drinking,
a world we were entering without
understanding how difficult
exit might be. Maybe the bliss
that came with drinking came
only after a certain period
of apprenticeship. Eddie likened
it to the holy man’s self-flagellation
to experience the fullness of faith.
(He was very well read for a kid
of fourteen in the public schools. )
So we dug in and passed the bottle
around a second time and then a third,
in the silence each of us expecting
some transformation. “You get used
to it,” Leo said. “You don’t
like it but you get used to it.”
I know now that brain cells
were dying for no earthly purpose,
that three boys were becoming
increasingly despiritualized
even as they took into themselves
these spirits, but I thought then
I was at last sharing the world
with the movie stars, that before
long I would be shaving because
I needed to, that hair would
sprout across the flat prairie
of my chest and plunge even
to my groin, that first girls
and then women would be drawn
to my qualities. Amazingly, later
some of this took place, but
first the bottle had to be
emptied, and then the three boys
had to empty themselves of all
they had so painfully taken in
and by means even more painful
as they bowed by turns over
the eye of the toilet bowl
to discharge their shame. Ahead
lay cigarettes, the futility
of guaranteed programs of
exercise, the elaborate lies
of conquest no one believed,
forms of sexual torture and
rejection undreamed of. Ahead
lay our fifteenth birthdays,
acne, deodorants, crabs, salves,
butch haircuts, draft registration,
the military and political victories
of Dwight Eisenhower, who brought us
Richard Nixon with wife and dog.
Any wonder we tried gin.

The Supreme Court: Arming Goliath

While the activist judges on the Supreme court give more and bigger weapons to the powers that rule the land (You’re a corporation AND a person so you get the most favorable treatment for each and are protected from the liabilities) it is also busy stealing David’s stones.

On Monday a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court fired its own salvo in the war on unions. Though its decision in Harris v. Quinn was narrow, saying that, in some cases, unions could not collect fees from one particular class of public employees who did not want to join, its language suggests that this may be the court’s first step toward nationalizing the “right to work” gospel by embedding it in constitutional law.

…[As it has been ] workers can’t be forced to join a union or contribute to its political and ideological activities, but they can be required to pay for the cost of the union’s collective bargaining and contract-administration activities.

The majority in Harris saw things differently. Making workers pay anything to a union they oppose is in tension with their First Amendment rights — “something of an anomaly,” in the words of the majority. But the real anomaly lies in according dissenters a right to refuse to pay for the union’s services — services that cost money to deliver, and that put money in the pockets of all employees.

Once selected by a majority of workers in a bargaining unit, a union becomes the exclusive representative, with a duty to fairly represent all of them. That is the bedrock of our public and private sector labor laws.

Unless everyone is required to pay for those services, individual workers can easily become “free riders,” taking the benefits of collective representation without paying their fair share of the costs.

NY Times: Estlund and Forbath

Cambodia: Garment Workers End Strike

The latest strike by Cambodian garment workers has ended with most workers going back to work after two weeks, and violent responses by police killed three during demonstrations. NY Times

It is only the latest in a string of protests by the severely underpaid workers.

The Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia (GMAC) recorded 131 strikes last year, not counting December, when the recent national garment strike was declared. In 2011, the factory association logged 34 strikes for the entire year.

Although apparel manufacturing heavy weights such as Adidas, Levi Strauss and Puma have signed an open latter calling for negotiations to create a wage-review mechanism it is unclear if and how it will be answered.

 

Cambodian Workers on Strike

 Cambodia garment workers throw stones at riot police during a strike near a factory on the Stung Meanchey complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh on Jan. 3, 2014. At least three people were killed when police opened fire to break up a protest by striking garment workers demanding a doubling of the minimum wage, police and human rights workers said. Cambodia garment workers throw stones at riot police during a strike near a factory on the Stung Meanchey complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh on Jan. 3, 2014. At least three people were killed when police opened fire to break up a protest by striking garment workers demanding a doubling of the minimum wage, police and human rights workers said. (Heng Smith/Associated Press)


Cambodia garment workers throw stones at riot police during a strike near a factory on the Stung Meanchey complex on the outskirts of Phnom Penh on Jan. 3, 2014. At least three people were killed when police opened fire to break up a protest by striking garment workers demanding a doubling of the minimum wage, police and human rights workers said. (Heng Smith/Associated Press)

Known for Opposing Bilingual Education, Ron Unz says he Supports Rise in Minimum Wage

So this is interesting: Ron Unz who is known throughout California as being someone who has thrown his millions into ballot propositions to a) halt public affirmative action for women and minorities (Prop. 209, 1996) and b) to ban bilingual teaching in public schools (Prop. 227, 1998)  but who opposed Prop. 187 (1994), which tried to bar welfare, health care and public schooling to undocumented immigrants, is now pushing an initiative in favor of increasing the California minimum wage — by a lot.

From a conservative position of wanting to diminish the size and reach of government, he is being consistent.

…significantly raising the minimum wage would help curb government spending on social services, strengthen the economy and make more jobs attractive to American-born workers.

“There are so many very low-wage workers, and we pay for huge social welfare programs for them,” he said in an interview. “This would save something on the order of tens of billions of dollars. Doesn’t it make more sense for employers to pay their workers than the government?”

Whether he’ll be joined in that estimation by fellow conservatives who, can’t untangle their economics from their xenophobia –wild about Prop 187 in 1994 for example–  or business conservatives who will cry havoc if they have to pay workers to get near a living wage, remains to be seen.

What his own motives are, of course come into question. What he paid, and pays, his own workers would be interesting to know — not just the indispensable geeks for his software company but those who empty the wastebaskets and clean the toilets.

Those who have long pressed for higher minimum wages are not convinced as of yet:  oh, yeah?  Where have you been?

While unions have backed similar voter initiatives in San Jose and Long Beach, Calif., labor officials are now focused on permanently tying the minimum wage to the rate of inflation [which by the way, Mitt Romney has said he endorses] , and said the measure Mr. Unz is proposing could be a distraction. Steve Smith, a spokesman for the California Labor Federation, was hardly enthusiastic when informed of Mr. Unz’s plans.

“He has not shown a great deal of support for workers’ issues in the past and was nowhere to be seen in the legislative debate here, so it’s not really clear what the motivation is here,” Mr. Smith said. “But he is saying some things that are the same as what we’ve been saying all along.”

Although Robert Reich hasn’t weighed in on the Unz proposal yet, they both point to Henry Ford’s wisdom of paying his workers enough so they could buy his cars, as smart conservatism.

At any rate, it seems we’ll get a chance to consider all this:

He plans to pour his own money into a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage in California to $10 an hour in 2015 and $12 in 2016, which would make it by far the highest in the nation. Currently, it is $8 — 75 cents higher than the federal minimum.

Earning Enough to Eat By

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.

Walmart Strong Advocate for Cutting Fire Prevention Upgrades in Bangladesh

“…two officials who attended a meeting held in Bangladesh in 2011 to discuss factory safety in the garment industry said on Wednesday that the Walmart official there played the lead role in blocking an effort to have global retailers pay more for apparel to help Bangladesh factories improve their electrical and fire safety.

Ineke Zeldenrust, international coordinator for the Clean Clothes Campaign, an anti-sweatshop group based in Amsterdam, said Walmart was the company that “most strongly advocated this position.

“… According to the minutes of the meeting, which were made available to The Times, Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Walmart director of ethical (sic!) sourcing, along with an official from another major apparel retailer, noted that the proposed improvements in electrical and fire safety would involve as many as 4,500 factories and would be “in most cases” a “very extensive and costly modification.

NY Times

I wonder if Walmart Ethical sourcing is paying for the funerals? Still too costly?

Burials on Nov. 27 for some of the 112 victims of the garment factory fire in Bangladesh

Fast Food Slow Raise

Hidden away in the New York section of Thursday’s Times is an article about the poor standing up and beginning to fight their way out of poverty.

Unionizing

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States. The effort — backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union — has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s,Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city.

… Jonathan Westin, organizing director at New York Communities for Change, a community group that is playing a central role in the effort, said hundreds of workers had already voiced support for the campaign, called Fast Food Forward.

“The fast-food industry employs tens of thousands of workers in New York and pays them poverty wages,” Mr. Westin said. “A lot of them can’t afford to get by. A lot have to rely on public assistance, and taxpayers are often footing the bill because these companies are not paying a living wage.”

… Mr. Westin’s group, New York Communities for Change, has played a major role in the recent uptick in unionizing low-wage workers in New York, many of whom are immigrants. In the past year, his group, working closely with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and other organizations, has helped win unionization votes at four carwashes and six supermarkets in New York.

The sponsors of the fast-food campaign also include UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and the Service Employees International Union, a powerful union that is playing a quiet but important role behind the scenes.

Online update to print article

High Skilled Jobs Offering $10/hour. Few Takers

CBS 60 minutes a few weeks ago, had a piece on the shortage of skilled welders and metal cutters being reported endlessly in the press.  I have to say I was shocked to learn that after 2 years of intensive math and practical skills at a Community College the “valued” worker would be earning about $12 an hour.  At 2,000 hours of work a year (40 hour week) that’s $24,000!  In 2012 poverty level for a family of 4 was $23,050.  [At Costco a cashier assistant averages $11.92, with upside of $20 an hour.  MacDonalds crew averages $7.63 and hour.  Minimum wage in San Francisco is $10.24 an hour.]

Adam Davidson reinforced my shock with a piece in the NY Times  on Nov 20th: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

The secret behind this [so called] skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. “It’s hard not to break out laughing,” says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. “If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be rises in wages,” he says. “It’s basic economics.” After all, according to supply and demand, a shortage of workers with valuable skills should push wages up. Yet according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of skilled jobs has fallen and so have their wages.

In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.”

More Labor Bashing at Walmart

My goodness, on top of paying $9.10 /hour in Illinois  ( San Francisco minimum wage is $10.24) Walmart (along with 6 other corporations)  is now requiring workers to show up on Thanksgiving to get a jump on Black Friday sales.  Workers don’t like it much, of course, and some of them are planning to walk picket lines in protest.

Walmart, for its part, as anti-workers as a company can be, has filed with the NLRB, claiming there is illegal organizing going on and billion dollar corporations have their rights!

In a rare move, Wal-Mart is trying to stop a union-backed group from staging a series of demonstrations against the company on Black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year.

Wal-Mart Stores, the nation’s largest employer and retailer, has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board — its first in a decade — seeking to prevent the group, known as OUR Walmart, from holding what the group says will be the biggest protests of this kind against the company at hundreds of store

… In this week’s planned events, OUR Walmart, which stands for Organization United for Respect at Walmart, is enlisting a broad range of allies, arranging fliers and letters that community, church and civil rights groups can use to publicize the Black Friday protest. OUR Walmart has even prepared remarks that it is suggesting members of the clergy might use in prayer, “to call upon the world’s largest corporation to treats its workers with justice and fairness. [Greenhouse at NY Times]

More news of Walmart and the push back here, here and here.

Be good folks on two counts: don’t join the Black Friday madness and if you ever go to Walmart print this out and wear it somewhere visible.

 

And, OUR Walmart folks, get with caps and Ts for your supporters!