In recent Congressional testimony, Bill Beardell, Director of the Equal Justice Center, discusses a threatening phone call that was made by an employer to an undocumented worker. Before playing the recorded phone message, Bearsdall makes the point that lax enforcement of labor laws creates incentives for employers to prefer higher undocumented workers.

Although I am nobody’s referee, I know a foul when I see one. Some time ago I called one on national SEIU’s disruption of the Labor Notes Conference. Now I’ve detected another one in one piece of UHW’s negative campaign against Andy Stern.

The violation consists of imbalanced and tendentious criticism of an agreement between SEIU and UniteHere on the one hand and global service TNCs Sodexho and Compass on the other.

The UHW’s SEIUVoice site is carrying a front-page Wall Street Journal article of 10 May. The WSJ article “reveals” the existence of a three-year-old “secret pact” that allegedly raises substantial questions about union transparency and workers’ rights.

The “spin” that UHW is putting on this “revelation” can be seen in a Open Left blog article by UHW Online Communications Specialist Noel Rabinowitz entitled SEIU’s Substandard Secret Deal.
According to Rabinowitz, the deal locks workers into a low level of union density, scattered membership and powerlessness. It is a “bad deal that keeps workers in the dark with their hands tied” and fundamentally undercuts workers’ rights to a strong union and a real voice at work.

This is a legitimate expression of opinion. There is a genuine widespread debate about the extent to which agreements with employers that remove some obstacles to organizing new members may place too many limitations on what improvements might be achieved in collective bargaining. Limitations on the right to strike and on the union’s ability to campaign might be too high a price to trade off for the ability to increase union density and membership.

But I was troubled by several things. Why was UHW running an article from the Wall Street Journal on its web-site without comment? Why did the blog article criticize only Andy Stern and SEIU and not Bruce Raynor and UniteHere (equal partner in the venture)? Why was the WSJ suddenly interested in “disclosing” a three-year-old pact whose existence, if not precise terms, had long been known in union circles? Then, from a comment on Rabinowitz’s blog he made himself, I learned something new, that on 11 May the Chicago Tribune ran a similar story by Stephen Franklin entitled: “”Eager to recruit, unions make deals: Groups work with companies, keep quiet.”
Uh,oh! One story could just mean a slow news weekend - but two stories in papers seldom noted for their deep and abiding interest in labor unions means a negative campaigning strategy at work!

I do not want to delve into all the arguments for or against the agreement between SEIU/UniteHere and Sodexho/Compass (Disclosure: At the time I was employed by the IUF. the IUF helped facilitate the contacts between the European-based Sodexho and Compass corporations on the one hand and SEIU and UniteHere on the other that led to the negotiated agreements. I was not directly involved, nor was the IUF a party to the agreements that were reached). But from my own thirty years of organizing experience both in the USA and at the global level, I cannot be too quick to criticize any arrangements that facilitate the progressive deepening of union density in any global company. It is my understanding that under these agreements UniteHere and SEIU have organized several thousand new workers at U.S. institutions where Sodexho and Compass have operations, that these workers have better wages and conditions as a result, and that there is a reasonable prospect that these advances will continue. These workers are currently members of a joint Service Workers United (UniteHere/SEIU Local 2552), which has a web-site I was able to visit on 11 May, but which at last search was “temporarily closed for updating.” No doubt the site will eventually reopen to present its response.

Nadia on the SEIU staff commented on Rabinowitz’s blog this morning (13 May),and you can read her comment at the end of his blog article. I don’t know her, but because what she said rings true to my own experience as an organizer and I could not say it better, I will let her speak:

We organize in the global economy we have, not the economy we wish we had. There are a few crucial points that this post misses or misconstrues that need to be clarified: These agreements and the victories workers have achieved since they were negotiated were and are by no means secret within our unions, nor was the existence of Service Workers United. Workers employed by these companies learn about the agreements before anyone signs a union card. Knowing their employer has agreed not to interfere with their right to form a union allows workers to join together with their co-workers without the fear and employer pressure that typically stand in the way of workers’ organizing efforts.
No one is arguing these agreements are perfect. The only way to raise standards in the facilities services industry-without putting any individual company at a competitive disadvantage-is to unite workers throughout the country and across the largest employers. The companies requested that the agreements be kept confidential to ensure they had the flexibility to serve the interests of their clients.
And to be clear: these agreements do not ensure that workers have a union-only that workers have a fair process to freely choose whether to form a union. The vast majority of service workers in particular do choose to form a union once a majority sign-up process is established at their workplace. Workers then negotiate and ratify their own union contracts at each worksite.

Sure, this response represents another organizational spin, but it can be factually confirmed or rebuted. Why can’t we conduct debate over these important strategic issues in an atmosphere of civility and courtesy, and lay off ad hominem arguments and Gotchas! Leave them to the politicians and their spin doctors!

If you bought your Mom flowers for Mothers Day, chances are that they arrived on one of the 28 daily cargo flights into Miami from Colombia, where over 100,000 mainly female workers pick and process flowers for the U.S. market. They earn a minimal wage, are exposed to numerous toxins from pesticides and fungicides, and are systematically denied any right to representation by a union. Lobbyists representing big business and the Colombian and USA governments are using the slogan “Better Roses than Cocaine” to argue for the passage of the U.S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement. Every genuine union trying to represent flower workers in Colombia opposes this attempt to further exploit them in the interests of Dole and other major corporate interests.

For well presented details and images related to these campaigns, you can download the new Flower Toolskit produced by the International Labor Rights Forum . For regular updates on organizing Colombian flower workers, visit the Flower Workers and Economics Justice page on the site of the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP).

Rough economic times, changing demographics, the reinvention of work and workplaces, conflicting models for moving forward - both in the 1930s and the 2000s one result has been to split the labor movement.

AFL vs. CIO — AFL-CIO vs. Change to Win, how far do the parallels hold up?

Here is one ongoing story of struggle by workers against exploitative corporate globalization. It is part of the rich tapestry presented at the Jobs with Justice National Conference in Providence, which assembled several hundred activists from forty local coalitions that campaign for workers’ rights. These delegates, diverse in age, race and culture, shared their organizing experiences and successes, of perseverance in the face of adversity and corporate and political villany. This struggle by Indian workers against their exploitation by the U.S. government’s H2B “guest worker” program is continuing.

“Guest Workers” Replace African-Americans at Signal Shipyard

After Hurricane Katrina forced many African-American workers to flee their flooded communities on the Gulf Coast, and politicians failed in their elementary responsibilities to help their communities recover, corporations based in the area found the Federal Government acutely responsive to their needs to replace their scattered workers. One tool was the US government guest worker program known as H2B.

Signal International operates two shipyards in Pascagoula, MS and four in Port Arthur and Orange, TX. Signal makes the huge floating oil rigs for the offshore fields in the Gulf. Claiming that it could no longer recruit enough skilled craftsmen in Mississippi, in 2006 the company used the labor recruiting firm Global Resources to recruit Indian workers to fill first-class welder and fitter positions. By the end of 2006 there were over 300 skilled Indian workers at the Pascagoula shipyard, and the company had extended the H2B program to its Texas shipyards.

The Department of Homeland Security, so inept in relief and recovery efforts in New Orleans, found the resources to provide background checks on the Indian applicants, each of whom paid recruiters from Global Resources between $15,000 and $20,000 for the privilege of working for Signal International in America. The recruiters promised them permanent jobs, green cards, and eventually the right to bring their families to America. To raise the money the Indian workers borrowed large sums and often sold their homes. But when they got to America, they found out that all they were guaranteed was a temporary ten-month visa. The housing Signal provided them in Pascagoula consisted of a bunk-house, for which $1050 a month was deducted from their paychecks. According to a worker, that entitled him to three meals, and a bunk-bed in a room with 24 workers and two toilets.

Human Trafficking

So far this is an all-too-familiar story of the exploitation and victimization of migrant workers, not very different from the fate of tens of millions of victims of a version of 21st century slavery that tarnishes work from China through the Gulf Emirates, from the Ivory Coast through Europe to the Americas. A world where global capital is freed from restraints on its mobility while workers are processed through ever more stringent bureaucratic channels and fenced off by ever higher border walls is rife for the crudest forms of worker exploitation.

The Victims Organize

But the story of the Indian workers in Mississippi has not ended. Strangers in a strange land, for the most part speaking no English, they chose to play a role not that of the poster child for victimization, but of the human being fighting for dignity.

In May 2007, six of the Indian workers, including Sabulal Vijayan and Joseph Jacob, were held captive by armed guards in the shipyard and later fired for organizing against their mistreatment. The other three hundred Indian workers briefly went on strike in support of the six organizers, but were intimidated back to work. Holders of H2B visas are not permitted to seek other jobs, and are liable for immediate deportation back to India if they lose their jobs at Signal, which would be disastrous because of the debts the workers had incurred to pay the recruiters.

Fighting against despair (one attempted suicide), the fired workers made contact with the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA), a coalition of labor and civil rights groups that had championed the rights of Latino immigrant workers before and after Katrina. Lacking the linguistic skills for communicating with the Hindi-, Tamil- and Malayam- speaking Indian workers, MIRA called in Hindi-speaking organizer Saket Soni from the New Orleans Workers Center for Racial Justice. The workers began to organize under the aegis of the New Orleans-based Alliance of Guestworkers for Dignity.

Heirs to Gandhi and Martin Luther King March Together

On March 6, 2008, nearly a hundred Indian workers walked off the job in Pascalousa, sang “We Shall Overcome” in their native languages, and tossed off their hard hats as a symbol of their renouncing “human trafficking.” For this historical moment, the heirs of Gandhi began marching with those of Martin Luther King. A few days later, they began an eight-day journey through key sites of the civil rights struggle (Jackson, Selma, Atlanta, Greensboro) to Washington, DC, to demonstrate against the abuses and threatened expansion of the H2B guest worker program. Everywhere they carried the signs DIGNITY and I AM A MAN.

Speaking on their behalf, Saket Soni said: “It’s time for Congress to wake up to the fact that the guest worker program is a path to an American nightmare.” The workers demanded that the US and Indian governments negotiate an agreement on guest workers that reflects the interests of workers rather than merely that of recruiters and corporations.

A dozen Indian workers and their leaders together with Saket Soni attended the Jobs with Justice National Conference. Their inspirational story was a centerpiece of a major conference thread on organizing immigrant workers, and on the link between forced migration and corporate globalization. Far beyond any mere abstractions or ideological linkages, the Indian workers and their supporters embodied a powerful relationship with historical roots in non-violent struggle across borders.

We cannot know the outcome of this particular struggle, which faces overwhelming odds. The struggle of these workers is not about compensation for themselves as individuals. They have already lost everything material, though the value they have achived by standing up for their dignity as human beings is beyond calculation. They hope that it will benefit future “guest workers” from India and elsewhere. But maybe even more it will help some Americans “get over” their problem with seeing migrant workers as enemies of American workers.

Later this month many of the workers may begin a hunger strike, and organizers have promised there will be ways for us to support them. We must take our own responsibility by joining guest workers in forcing Congress to totally revamp a guest worker program that is the 21st century version of the slave trade. TalkingUnion will provide updates.

Signal International Admits Abuses by Labor Recruiters, Calls for Reforms in Guest Worker Program

The workers have already won a victory that I discovered only when I googled the Signal International web-site. In March 2008 I had accessed the site and read a company press release dated 3 January 2007, which gave the company’s perspective and provided some of the historical background for this article. It also contained a quote from Signal President and CEO Dick Marler defending the hiring of Indian workers on the Gulf Coast: “Workers from India have a reputation for being pleasant and hard-working. I believe they will contribute positively to the Company’s growth and to the local economies.”

Today that release is not longer available on the site, and has been replaced by two recent company press releases. One, dated 27 March 2008. calls on Congress to mandate a licensing requirement for the H2B Temporary Worker Program. Signal International President and CEO Richard Marler announced that Signal will no longer hire new temporary workers under the H2B Program until it is reformed to better protect foreign workers and U.S. companies that were misled by recruiters.

Signal also said that it will also pursue claims against Global Resources, its principal Michael Pol, other recruiters, and immigration attorney Malvern Burnett for charging the temporary workers excessive fees and making false promises about the green card process. Signal also promised to help its current temporary workers get the visas necessary to remain at the company.

On 5 May 2008, Signal issued a “Recruitment of Foreign Nationals Fraud Advisory.” Stating that Signal had recently received information of fraudulent activity abroad in Signal’s name in the recruitment of foreign nationals for H-2B visas, and was taking all measures possible to end this fraudulent activity including working with law enforcement and regulatory authorities. Signal advised that it is not currently recruiting abroad for foreign workers for any of its facilities, and that any such offer should be reported to local authorities, U.S. consultates, and Signal as fraudulent.

It may in fact be true that Signal International, which had not used the H2B program previously, was unaware of the excessive fees and false promises of recruiters from Global Resources in India. By forcing Signal to issue these statements, the heroic struggle of the Indian workers has already won a victory for all guest workers being recruited in India.

By David Bacon

May 1, 2008

In the big immigrant marches that swept the country on May Day in 2006 and 2007, one sign said it all: “We are Workers, not Criminals!” Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who looked as though they’d just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office building, or picking grapes.

The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people have come to this country to work, not to break its laws. Some have come with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society they’ve found here, not people who mean it harm. Again this May Day, immigrant workers are filling the streets, making the same point.

Yet today the Federal government is taking actions that make holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, are passing measures that go even further. These actions need a reality check.

Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn’t correct a mismatch between the Social Security number they’d provided their employer, and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number.

With 12 million people living in the U.S. without legal immigration status, the regulation would lead to massive firings, bringing many industries and businesses to a halt. Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well, since the Social Security database is often inaccurate.

Under Chertoff the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted sweeping workplace raids, arresting and deporting thousands of workers. Many have been charged with an additional crime – identity theft – because they used a Social Security number belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet workers using another number actually deposit money into that holder’s account, and these immigrants will never collect benefits their contributions paid for.

The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, which is even more incomplete and full of errors than Social Security. They must fire workers whose names get flagged. And Mississippi passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested. Employers get immunity.

Congress is now debating two bills, the SAVE Act and the New Employee Verification Act that would require similar use of the E-Verify database.

In 1986 the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime, for the first time in our history, to hire people without papers. Defenders argued that if people could not legally work they would leave. Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They will not simply go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that everyone else in our country believes in.

For most, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which they’ve come. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan community leader in Fresno, says, “The North American Free Trade Agreement made the price of corn so low that it’s not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We come to the U.S. to work because there’s no alternative.”

When Congress passed NAFTA, six million displaced people came to the U.S. as a result. If Congress stops passing new free trade agreements, and instead faces the damage NAFTA and other pro-corporate measures did in Mexico, the poverty and desperation that fuel migration can eventually be reversed.

Trying to push people out of the U.S. who’ve come here for survival simply won’t work. The price of trying is that the vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase. Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny overtime, minimum wage, or fire workers when they protest or organize. Increased vulnerability ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. Children live in fear that their parents will be picked up in raids.

After deporting over 1000 workers at Swift meatpacking plants, Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for linking “effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.” The government is really after giving cheap labor to large employers. Deportations, firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder. They contribute to a climate of fear and insecurity for everyone.

Instead of making work a crime and treating immigrants as criminals, we need equality, economic security, jobs and rights for everyone.

For more by David Bacon.

http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002

Stuart Elliott

Our friends at Dissent have made available on-line a very important article from their Winter 2008 issue–Stephen F. Diamond’s “Private Equity and the Public Good.” (It’s a reminder that subscribers get to read many articles before they’re on-line. I’m looking forward to getting the Spring issue in the mailbox to read “Show Me the Money”: Labor and the Bottom Line of National Health Insurance by Marie Gottschalk and A Southern Strategy For Unions by John Lalas. So subscribe, already)

Diamond argues that the emergence of private equity firms as an important form of capitalist organization marks “the arrival of a potentially new stage in the history of capitalism.”

To understand this new stage, we must understand the strengths and limitations of the model of capitalism developed in the classic 1932 study by Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property.

Diamond provides lots of insights into thinking what private means and the evolving attitudes of unions.

Here’s his conclusion

Private-equity-led buyouts represent an evolution in the effort by a significant fraction of sophisticated players in the economy to forge new methods of managing and controlling the process of creating and appropriating value from the labor force on behalf of investors. It is possible that the concentration of expertise in finance with operational know-how, may enhance the ability of capital to engineer greater returns. To recognize the magnitude of the accomplishment of PE funds is not to support the result. Instead, it helps to highlight the challenge for labor and the left. Private equity funds are doing what capital has always done and will continue to do unless an alternative form of organizing economic activity is established. A misguided fear of “financialization” does not bring us any closer to exploring that alternative.

Diamond’s article should be read in conjunction with a report by the UK’s GMB union, “Private Equity’s Broken Promises” and the IUF’s A Worker’s Guide to Private Equity.

In May Day Letter To SEIU President Andy Stern, 100 Scholars, Artists and Writers Defend Right to “Principled Dissent” and Caution Against UHW Trusteeship

“We are writing to express our deep concern about SEIU’s threatened trusteeship over its third largest local, United Healthcare Workers (UHW). We believe that there must always be room within organized labor for legitimate and principled dissent, if our movement is to survive and grow.”

More than 100 scholars, artists and writers have signed a letter sent to Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president Andy Stern today cautioning him against placing the union’s third largest local under “trusteeship.”

The threatened International union take-over of 140,000-member United Healthcare Workers (UHW) - SEIU’s third largest local - was first reported in a front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 27, based on a letter sent by Stern to UHW President Sal Rosselli, who has called for greater democratization of the union’s structure and functioning.

In their May 1 letter to Stern, the labor-oriented intellectuals note their past support for his union but
warn that “putting UHW under trusteeship would send a very troubling message.” It would, they said, “be viewed, by many, as a sign that internal democracy is not valued or tolerated within SEIU.”

“We believe that there must always be room within organized labor for legitimate and principled dissent,
if our movement is to survive and grow,” the letterendorsers said.

For text of letter, see below

# # #

An Open Letter of Concern To Andy Stern
About United Healthcare Workers-West

Mr. Andy Stern, President
May 1, 2008
Service Employees International Union
1800 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20036

Dear Andy:

We are writing to you as journalists, authors, political activists, and educators who are committed to organized labor because of its important role in social justice struggles in the U.S. Some of us have longstanding ties to SEIU and have done research, writing, or labor education work involving its members, organizers, andlocal leaders. Those of us who deal with graduatestudents or undergraduates have encouraged younger people to pursue internships or full-time jobopportunities with SEIU and other Change To Win or AFL-CIO unions. A number of us belong to unions ourselves.

Many of us have been part of community-labor coalitions or campus-based groups like Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice (when it was still active) because we support organizing and bargaining by janitors, cafeteria workers, and other service sector employees.

We are writing to express our deep concern about SEIU’s threatened trusteeship over its third largest local, United Healthcare Workers (UHW). We believe that there must always be room within organized labor for legitimate and principled dissent, if our movement is to survive and grow.

Putting UHW under trusteeship would send a very troubling message and be viewed, by many, as a sign that internal democracy is not valued or tolerated within SEIU. In our view, this would have negative consequences for the workers directly affected, the SEIU itself, andthe labor movement as a whole. We strongly urge you to avoid such a tragedy.

Sincerely,

Michael Albert, Author, co-founder South End Press and Z Magazine
Richard P. Appelbaum, Professor of Sociology, University of California-Santa Barbara
Stanley Aronowitz, Professor of Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
Sara Abraham, Sociology, University of Toronto

and 96 more

ITUC May Day Manifesto

Brussels, 29 April 2008 (ITUC OnLine): On this day, the 1st of May, millions of working people across the world join together to celebrate the achievements of more than a century of trade unionism. The high principles of equality, justice, human dignity and peace which have found expression through the trade union movement are just as relevant today as they were when working men and women first came together to fight for their rights at work. These principles gave rise to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and ILO Convention 87 in 1948. But the fundamental rights enshrined in these celebrated instruments are far from reality for much of humanity.

For most of the world’s people, decent work is but a distant dream. Millions of children are at work instead of school, workers are deprived of their fundamental rights and subject to exploitation by unscrupulous employers and repressive regimes, and inequality is growing within and between countries as a small minority accumulates incalculable wealth at the expense of others.

Not for many decades have the failings of global governance by “market solutions” been more apparent. Contagion continues to spread through world financial markets, with working women and men bearing the brunt of the unwillingness of governments to face up to the need for financial regulation. 100 million people more than last year do not have enough to eat as the global food crisis grows by day, threatening the very fabric of societies and fuelled by the legacy of decades of damaging policies at the world level. Action on climate change, perhaps the greatest test of human history, is feeble compared to the magnitude of the challenge. And the United Nations MDGs, goals which the global community set for itself, are far from being reached.

The means to deal with all these challenges exist, but the political will to resist the powerful interests that stand in the way of progress is lacking. Trade unions everywhere are confronting these interests, campaigning to put social concerns and sustainable development at the centre, rather than the margins, of policy. We demand a fundamental change to global governance, putting decent work at the core of a new globalisation and making the global institutions respond to the real needs of people instead of following the erroneous policies of the past.

On October 7 2008, the World Day for Decent Work, trade unions across the world will join together to issue a global call for rights at work. We will bring to the fore the great traditions of solidarity which have been the mainstay of trade unionism since its earliest days, and which are essential to solving the problems which confront the world today. We will show how decent work is central to ending poverty and ensuring equality for all men and women, and demonstrate our abiding commitment to solidarity with the marginalised and the dispossessed. We remain steadfast in our quest for a better world and renew our commitment to bring this about through united action of working people from every corner of the planet.

In his latest op-ed, the astute Harold Meyerson gives some advice to the Democrats about attracting white working class voters. The key is union. In the electoral long run, the Employee Free Choice Act and, this November, labor’s secret weapon–Working America.

Meyerson points out that unions make a difference in how whites votes.

For the past 40 years — ever since working-class whites began defecting from Democratic ranks — the voting behaviors of unionized and non-unionized whites have differed radically. In every election during this period, union members have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate at a rate about a dozen points higher than the general public and about 15 points higher than the non-union sector.

The problem is

… that American employers have waged a hugely successful campaign against unions for the past 35 years, abetted by a dysfunctional labor law that imposes negligible penalties on employers for violating its terms and their employees’ rights… Democrats stood by and failed to strengthen workers’ rights to organize. By the late ’90s, John Sweeney’s AFL-CIO had impressed upon Democrats that their inaction amounted to slow-motion suicide. Today, the party is united behind the Employee Free Choice Act, which, by enabling workers to join unions again without fear of being fired, would also greatly help Democratic prospects at the polls.

And labor has a program that can make the difference this fall.

Since 2004, the AFL-CIO has conducted a door-to-door membership drive in white working-class neighborhoods of key swing states, signing people up not for workplace representation but for certain union benefits — and to enlist them in the federation’s political program. That program, called Working America, has 2 million members in key industrial Midwest states, among others, and has turned out large majorities in recent elections for such Democratic candidates as Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland. While Barack Obama may prove a tough sell to some of these voters come November, Working America will surely be the Democrats’ best shot at landing their white whale.