Hundreds of Chicago fast food and retail workers stage one-day strike, shutting some stores

by Laura Clawson

Hundreds of Chicago fast food and retail workers walked out for a one-day strike Wednesday, following similar one-day strikes among New York City fast food workers earlier in April and in November. As in New York, the Chicago workers are calling for a wage of $15 an hour rather than the near-minimum wages most of them make, and the right to join together in unions. The Illinois minimum wage is $8.25, a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage that applies in New York, but the stories the workers tell are similar. At an organizing meeting,Micah Uetricht reports:

An African-American man approaching what’s typically thought of as retirement age told of decades working in fast food and hovering near minimum wage, while a young Urban Outfitters worker said a raise would “make the difference between living and surviving.”When explaining what a raise to $15 per hour would mean to her, Trish Kahle, a Whole Foods worker, stated simply, “I could have heat all winter.”

The 99% are rising up in Georgia–Sanitation workers go on strike.

by Jim Nichols

(April16) Yesterday morning after work I headed down to the city of McDonough, to spend the day picketing with Republic Services workers who are in my union, Teamsters Local 728.

These sanitation workers went on strike at 5am yesterday after struggling over a year to gain a contract.

Hong Kong Dockworkers Strike Attracts Huge Solidarity

by Ellen David Friedman

Five hundred dockworkers are facing down the richest man in Hong Kong (and, according to Forbes, eighth-richest in the world) in a strike that has entered its third week and brought transport in the world’s third-busiest port to a virtual halt.

Li Ka-shing, the billionaire behind Hongkong International Terminals (HIT), controls more than 70 percent of Hong Kong’s port container traffic and oversees a vast transnational network of enterprises including the oil and gas giant Husky.

Arrayed against this financial titan often referred to as “Superman” are dockworkers exhausted by 12-hours shifts lacking even toilet breaks, surviving in one of the world’s most expensive cities on wages that haven’t risen in 15 years, and now waging a labor battle that observers are calling pivotal.

The confrontation appears to have tapped a vein of indignation against the “greed economy” and its glaring inequalities, bringing the workers broad public support.

Organizing Migrant Workers Key to Union Renewal in China and USA

by Paul Garver

On March 17th Talking Union, the Jacobin Magazine and Labor Notes sponsored a roundtable discussion at the CUNY Murphy Institute on China in Revolt. Over a hundred labor scholars and community and labor activists, including many from both Overseas and Mainland China, met to discuss the latest developments in the Chinese workers’ movement.

Eli Friedman, now teaching at Cornell University, summarized his hypothesis that China’s new working class of internal migrant workers might be developing a more politicized class consciousness as global manufacturers increasingly located their factories closer to their villages of origin deep in the interior provinces of China. Three highly regarded scholar/activists from the Chinese diaspora (Anita Chan, now teaching in Sydney, Chris King-Chi Chan of the City University of Hong Kong, and Elaine Sio-ieng Hui, a doctoral fellow in Kassel, Germany) commented on Eli’s hypothesis, and outlined some of their own extensive recent research findings and analyses of the current Chinese workers’ movement.

As a person with experience in the socialist and international labor movement, I was impressed and thrilled by the high level both of critical thinking and of passionate commitment to workers’ struggles present on the panel and in the room. Marxist critical theory is not only alive, but is actively at work in supporting one of the most important developments of workers’ struggles in global history. I was proud to have played a small role in facilitating this roundtable.

But as a rank amateur on Chinese worker issues who knows little more than what I learn at second hand from folks like Eli, Anita, Chris and Elaine, I want to reflect here on what implications we might draw from China for the American workers’ movement.

This is of course a stretch. Not only are China and the USA opposite poles of capitalist globalization – our political and union institutions are moving in different trajectories. Our industrial working class is shrinking – theirs is still growing. Our union membership is declining – theirs is nominally huge, but their trade union federations are essentially government/party bureaucracies with no input from or control by workers. We have a political party system of which one party is openly hostile to organized labor and the other at best an untrustworthy ally – China has one hegemonial political party nominally committed to working class interests and trade union organization but beholden to capitalist globalization and highly suspicious of and resistant to any autonomous workers’ movement.

Yet there is an analogous source of hope for these divergent labor institutions in the organization of migrant/immigrant workers.

Chinese “migrant” workers for over a generation have migrated from rural villages in China’s interior to work in factories and construction sites in coastal cities, where they make up a large percentage of the relatively unskilled manufacturing and construction workers. In recent years they have increasingly asserted their collective power through unsanctioned strikes and riots. The formal trade union structures had heretofore made little effort to represent their interests, but under pressure from the Party to deal with the growing social unrest and industrial actions of migrant workers, some local and provincial trade union federations are experimenting with reforms designed to open up channels for collective bargaining.

The American labor unions have long had checkered relations with immigrant workers, that at various times in U.S. history have also made up a significant portion of the working class. In recent years recent immigrants, even some without documents, are becoming leaders in local unions. For instance many SEIU locals particularly in the property services sector are being led by recent immigrants recruited through the Justice for Janitors campaign, and a top SEIU officer, Eliseo Medina, is a leader of immigration reform efforts. Even as the AFL-CIO unions are weakened by losses in membership, most of its national union organizations have become much more progressive in including immigrants, including ones without documentation, and the AFL-CIO is solidly backing comprehensive immigration reform and a path to citizenship.

Of equal importance, many of the most creative new union organizing efforts in the USA, from port truck drivers through fast food workers, warehouse workers, healthcare domestic and personal care service workers heavily draw upon recent immigrants both as the organizers and as the organized.

It is no accident that the reform agenda of unions both in China and in the USA have to be based on their ability to integrate newer entrants into the working class movement, whether these be internal migrants (China) or documented/undocumented immigrants (USA).

Those of us who advocate and support workers’ struggles and union reforms in both countries have much to learn from each other. Exchanges of experience like the roundtable on China in Revolt are extremely important.

“I Haven’t Eaten for 3 Days in Solidarity”–Stories from a Hunger Striker

 
By Michelle Gutierrez

(April 9, 2013) We are three days into a five-day hunger strike that was called to save the jobs of nine immigrant workers at the Hilton Mission Valley. I, along with six others, have refused to eat since Friday morning. The nine workers we are supporting are set to be fired on Monday April 8th and Tuesday April 9th because after they tried to organize a union, Evolution Hospitality decided to use E-Verify. This is a program that checks immigrants’ documented status, a program that isn’t even mandatory with the federal government.

The nine workers who will be fired are immigrant women who have worked at the Hilton Mission Valley between 2 and 18 years. They are mothers who play a vital role in supporting their families, even though they make as little as $8.50 an hour and are unable to afford the company’s expensive family health insurance plan. I don’t know how they do it. Somehow, these women have been raising their families on so little.

Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant with Three-Year Strike

by Jane Slaughter

Part 1 of a two-part series on the TRADOC worker cooperative in Mexico. Part 2, about how the co-op is functioning today, will appear tomorrow.

“If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.” When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up—and usually dies.

The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and once in business, the new worker-owners face all the pressures that helped the company go bankrupt in the first place. Most worker-owned co-ops are small, such as a taxi collective in Madison or a bakery in San Francisco.

But in Mexico a giant-sized worker cooperative has been building tires since 2005. The factory competes on the world market, employs 1,050 co-owners, and pays the best wages and pensions of any Mexican tire plant.

‘Hyatt Hurts’ Boycott Inflicts Pain on the Hotel Giant (Updated)

by Bruce Vail

 

Jeff Nelson (R), research director of UNITE HERE, with Charlotte Knox (L), a 25-year veteran housekeeper at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore who told the City Council that working conditions have deteriorated. (Photo courtesy of Bill Hughes/UNITE HERE)

UPDATE: The full 14-member Baltimore City Council voted unanimously on March 18 to approve a resolution aimed at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore hotel, where a union organizing drive is currently underway. The resolution, passed in a voice vote, calls on Hyatt to sign a ‘Labor Peace Agreement’ to improve hiring practices and to protect the city’s financial interests as a union-sponsored global boycott goes forward. 

BALTIMORE—Hyatt Corp received an implicit vote of ‘no confidence’ from the Baltimore City Council late last week when the Labor Committee advanced a resolution to halt the hotel giant’s union suppression efforts.

The resolution pressures Hyatt to sign a ‘Labor Peace Agreement’ that would allow UNITE HERE Local 7’s organizing campaign at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore to go forward without obstruction from managers. Approved in a 3-0 vote on March 14, the resolution now heads to the full City Council, where it enjoys overwhelming support.

Nation’s Top Latino Civil Rights Groups Join Global Boycott Of Hyatt Hotels

Groups join growing list of supporters urging Hyatt to improve substandard working conditions for housekeeping staff

 

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Today, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA), NCLR (National Council of La Raza), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF)  joined a global boycott of Hyatt hotels in response to widespread evidence of harmful working conditions for hotel housekeepers, who are predominantly women of color, including Latinas.  The groups pledged to not hold any conventions, conferences, special events or major meetings at Hyatt hotels covered by the boycott.

UNITE HERE announced the boycott on July 23, 2012.  Since then, the effort to push for the improvement of working conditions and ensure the right of workers to organize has received increasing support from more than 5,000 individuals and organizations, including the AFL-CIO, the NFL Players Association, the National Organization of Women (NOW), Feminist Majority, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, Netroots Nation and Interfaith Worker Justice.  To date, the boycott has cost the company more than $27 million in business.

General Strike Rolls Through India

by Roger Sikes

In the United States the general strike has been all but a myth for decades…  In India, there is a 1 day general strike at least once a year.  However, some Indian trade unionists have felt the yearly general strike has become more of a predictable tradition than an ineffective action that leverages economic power to meet the demands of Indian workers.  This years general strike is a shift from those of recent history for a number of reasons:

1) All of the Indian Trade Unions (from left to right on the political spectrum) have come together to participate.
2) This will be a two day strike.

This unity amongst the Indian trade union movement is a big step and is sorely needed to confront the aggressive neoliberal shifts pushed by powerful corporate interests and Indian government over the past 20 years.  The concept is that all trade union federations – regardless of political affiliation or orientation, must prioritize their class interests.  This massive strike of over 100 million Indian workers is a manifestation of this concept.

Our contingent met at the CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions) office in Delhi yesterday morning (the first day of the strike), to meet with Indian workers participating in the strike and to understand the main demands of the strike.  It was a whirlwind of activity as workers flowed in and out of the union office, building up numbers before the march.

At about 10:30 am we left the CITU building and began marching throughout the street in two lines wearing CITU visors, hoisting banners and carrying the 10 Point demands of the strike:

10 Point Demands of the Strike

A summary of the main demands include: 1) Protect the right to organize (end retaliation against organizing workers) 2) Stop using contract labor 3) Raise the minimum wage 4) Stop outsourcing labor

We marched for about half a mile before encountering a police barricade.  Some unionists sat down in this area to guarantee that the transportation flow was disrupted.  Others continued on and encountered a line of police at a busy intersection… The CITU members seemed to have a shared unspoken agenda and marched directly up to the police line taking the space so that traffic could not flow through the intersections controlled by us.  Protesters were peaceful and intentional and the police seemed wary of confronting the marchers with force – although there was certainly pushing and shoving at the tip of the line.

We rushed to a meeting after the march and ended up at the wrong location…  The driver of our vehicle informed us that it would not be possible to drive us any further at that time because many intersections and streets were flooded with trade unionists and supporters.  We were still trying to gauge the effectiveness of the strike, but we took this matter of fact statement from our driver as a good sign.

Roger Sikes is an organizer with Atlanta Jobs with Justice He is in India as part of a delegation which consists of Representatives from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), National Guest Workers Alliance (NGWA), Jobs with Justice (JwJ) and the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC).  The delegation seeks to learn from and engage with different sectors of the Indian trade union movement, community organizations and worker organizations.

What You Need to Know About the Seattle Teachers’ Rebellion and the Deeply Flawed Test That Inspired It

by Sarah Jaffe

Photo: Flickr creative commons: Fort Worth Squatch

High school teachers in Seattle are saying no to the spread of high-stakes standardized tests. On January 10, the staff of Garfield High School voted unanimously to refuse to administer the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test to their ninth-grade students. For two weeks they’ve held firm, even as the superintendent of schools has threatened them with a 10-day unpaid suspension, and teachers at other schools have joined their boycott.

“Garfield has a long tradition of cultivating abstract thinking, lyrical innovation, trenchant debate, civic leadership, moral courage and myriad other qualities for which our society is desperate, yet which cannot be measured, or inspired, by bubbling answer choice ‘E.’” wrote Garfield High history teacher Jesse Hagopian in a Seattle Times op-ed.