Paul Abowd

Another Detroit is Happening, But Which One do We Need?

2010-06-21T15:41:00.000-04:00

Originally published in Truthout

Tens of thousands of activists are converging for the June 22-26 United States Social Forum. Detroit will host the second iteration of a global justice "movement of movements" revival, bringing together nearly every cause on the American left's radar. But Forum-goers are also focused on the host city at a time when the event's tagline - "Another Detroit is Happening" - is both promising and foreboding.

Soon after taking office in 2009, Detroit's new mayor, Dave Bing, assembled his "crisis turnaround team," a handpicked collection of exiled auto executives, financiers, and PR people. The NBA hall-of-famer and steel executive and his team have acted swiftly to reshape a city they view as a clean slate, a city as vacant as post-Katrina New Orleans.

The new mayor is promising to shrink Detroit and its infrastructure, and has gathered the business community and suburban philanthropies to put down-payments on a Detroit dreamscape: a downtown light rail line, a new hockey stadium, shiny charter schools to complement a slimmed down "traditional" district, an industrial farm on the East side, and new housing enclaves.

While the corporate class dreams of new investments, the community has been reminding Bing that Detroit is no empty city. "I think we need to use the Social Forum as an opportunity to say to city officials, look - you're dealing with a population that can mobilize 20,000 people to come to Detroit," says Lottie Spady, a food justice organizer working on the Forum. "Outside of a sporting event, when does that happen?"

Visions of Detroit consistently refer to a sparkling time of industry, shopping, and peace that never really existed. The Motor City's avenues hosted an eight-lane American dream cruise. And when the dream picked a freeway and left town, the city's persistent class warfare and racial segregation came into stark relief. Shea Howell says Bing envisions a city that would paper over the city's long-standing inequality, not confront it.

"Their focal point is creating these protected enclaves with good schools, good services, safety; all those nice things that everybody wants. Only some people will be able to have them, and the rest of us will be on the outside looking in," says Howell, a teacher, activist, and columnist organizing the Forum.

City planning documents bemoan city workers and their "large number of labor unions restricting management's ability to properly control and discipline the workforce." Bing has demanded 10 percent wage cuts and an end to defined-benefit pensions for the next generation of public employees. Bing is also moving to discontinue the Public Lighting Department and sell operations to DTE Energy, a company notorious for a string of fatal electricity shutoffs in the city.

Today, much of what's left of the proud auto worker corps is either making close to non-union wages, working non-union jobs, or out of work altogether. A four-month strike by workers at GM-supplier American Axle in 2008 was the rank-and-file's last big stand before the Big 3's government-guided implosion. Axle CEO Dick Dauch cut starting wages in half. Months later, he picked up and moved the whole operation to Mexico. Two downtown stadiums, three downtown casinos, and two medical centers have struggled to fill the gaps, but thirty percent of residents are without a job. That's the official tally.

Reinvestment and plans to shrink the city might be needed, says Bill Wylie-Kellerman, an organizer of the Forum's Spirituality Committee. "But how do you do it in a way that isn't high-handed, that doesn't write off people's lives and communities?" asks Wylie-Kellerman, a pastor at St. Peter's Episcopal. "How do we create democratic involvement in the process of envisioning the new city?"

Organizers have begun arriving for the five-day series of workshops, meetings, and action-oriented "People's Movement Assemblies" to tackle these questions. Some visitors are pasting revolutionary literature on telephone poles, others are jimmying the lights in burned-out apartments. Organizers are prepping tent-cities. Forum-goers will see that Detroit is not only the site of capitalism's brutality on showcase, but also of a community's resolve to face it. "For a very long time, there's been an underground, more sustainable version of work being done that has come about out of necessity," says Spady.

That necessary work precedes the Forum, and will continue when it's over. Organizers agree, though, that the June gathering is a golden opportunity to solidify alternative visions of the city at a moment when Bing and company are advancing a very different idea about how Detroit's schools, housing, and empty land should be leveraged, and to whose benefit.

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCKED

State-appointed schools manager Robert Bobb has run up against a legal challenge and neighborhood resistance to his plan to shutter 45 district schools next year. He's stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a foundation-funded plan to "replace, not reform" the public schools by opening 70 new charter schools by 2020 and handing control to Mayor Bing much sooner.

After a student walkout, teachers and alumni of Northwestern High vowed to sit down, chain the doors, and pursue injunctions - whatever was necessary - to keep the historic school open. Bobb kept 18 schools open, including Northwestern, but vowed to shutter 45 schools by 2013 anyway - if a judge allows him to. Many remaining district schools, some put under private management, will function as magnet schools, taking select applicants, not all comers. District schools will adopt the model of their non-union, charter school counterparts, skimming the best and brightest to raise test scores while pushing communities of "low-performing" students further to the margins.

Ismael Duran Galfano and Mary Duran say they won't go along with Bobb's plan for a K-14 "megacampus" that would consolidate three neighborhood schools into one contiguous campus. Bobb asked the long-time residents in the growing Latino neighborhood of Southwest Detroit for some real estate, namely their home, which has been in Mary's family since it was built in 1910. Galfano runs a community arts center and Duran is retiring this year from 30 years of teaching in the Detroit Public schools. The two have lived in their home and tended their garden there for three decades. Ismael says he didn't leave Pinochet's Chile to put up with more dictatorship in his backyard. By email, he told his neighbors he wouldn't be going without a fight.

"Bobb had no idea this guy's a community organizer - he's going to know a thing or two about creating resistance," says Howell. "I think if they asked people to sit in on their property, they'd have a lot of us right there."

Bobb eventually got the message, assuring the Duran family and their neighbors that no homes would be destroyed in the consolidation that would bring six-year-olds onto campus with 19-year-olds. The proposal is questionable, and has become the next focus of organizing in the neighborhood.

WORLD'S BIGGEST URBAN FARM!

Bing says he'll demolish 10,000 homes during his term to ready for rightsizing. But even the mayor has switched up his plans, firing a city planner after her proposal to consolidate two East Side neighborhoods hit the press to bad reviews. The phrase "eminent domain," loaded in Detroit's mind after a GM plant wiped out a Polish enclave in 1981, dropped from Bing's vocabulary. His May invite-only land use summit assembled foundations, investors, and city planners, then promptly went underground, promising to return in 18 months with more details.

Organizers for the USSF aren't twiddling their thumbs waiting for his re-emergence. Spady's East Michigan Environmental Action Council organizes around air quality and food justice, engaging Detroit youth with participatory environmental education programs that emphasize media making and civic action. In the lead-up to the Forum, EMEAC has linked with national organizations, hatching plans for a direct action against the city's trash incinerator. They're also hosting a youth-led film screening with media-based environmental justice groups like the Green Guerillas and Outta Your Backpack Media.

EMEAC was part of a collaborative effort to establish a Community Food Justice Task Force to examine the entire food system and evaluate where the community can take ownership to meet its needs, not market needs. While a growing network of city gardens builds long-term toward a self-sustaining food system, a financier has tried to take Detroit's urban agriculture phenomenon large scale. John Hantz has bought hundreds of acres of land on the East Side for what's being called the "corporate farm," a year-round operation producing for wholesale markets. But it's far from a done deal. "When people like Hantz want to come in and plunk down, we're going to have an educated citizenry to say no no no, this is not what we need," says Spady.

BETWEEN US AND HOMELESSNESS

A 2010 land study shows that 95 percent of Detroit's vacant single-family homes are still in liveable condition - that's 218,000 homes suitable for occupancy right now. Still, Detroit's homeless population is among the highest in the country, and has been on a steady rise. Two major housing projects near downtown have been torn down or vacated in the last decade, their former tenants re-assigned to mixed-income townhouses or displaced in the shuffle. Ballparks and casinos now sit nearby.

Maureen Taylor, a Forum organizer and activist with Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, says the recently demolished East Jeffries projects were not only communities, but solid, well built housing stock. MWRO fights for residents' basic needs. Their housing takeovers are featured in "Locusts," a hip-hop documentary by Detroit's own Invincible and Finale. The video jumps around Detroit to show how space remains contested and cordoned off, even in a city with so much of it.

"We have people who need housing, and we have available housing. So we got those people ready, and took them straight to those units, kicked in the door, got new locks on 'em," says Taylor, in "Locusts." "That's direct action - there's nothing else left between us and homelessness."

Fresh off a month of action that featured civil disobedience "live-ins" at government-owned or foreclosed homes in ten cities, Miami-based Take Back the Land will arrive in Detroit, joining efforts with MWRO and housing rights groups from Chicago and New Orleans at several strategy sessions.

MIDTOWN, USA

Detroit's Midtown area, a constellation of six central-city neighborhoods, is one of the clearest signs that reinvestment is more than a boardroom daydream. The area bordered by four freeways boasts nearly $2 billion in investment in the last decade. Midtown reaches south to a stunning downtown skyline, still blinking like a real corporate city. Downtown's entertainment district reaches back to meet it. In between sits the "South Cass" Corridor, a collection of hand-painted signs on bygone bars, plywood, and parking lots - as well as several social service and homeless organizations.

Midtown's "changing" neighborhood is rebuilding from the ground up, giving rise to a small business bohemia. Gentrification is not an issue now, and it might never be, says Sue Mosey. A long time Detroiter, Mosey heads up the University Cultural Center Association, a non-profit headed up by local business owners and redevelopers. UCCA has its hand in nearly all things Midtown, an idea more than a neighborhood radiating from the Wayne State University campus.

Mosey lists off in rapid fire the projects that her nonprofit has underway. With a $5 million annual budget raised from local foundations, the group funds small business start-ups and facade improvement, street beautification and urban gardens, and is planning an arts district based around an auto dealership turned contemporary art museum.

Then there's real estate. UCCA owns, manages, and helps develop housing for a mix of incomes - for now. "We haven't seen anything like other markets where people throw out low-income and go for lucrative high-end," says Mosey. "That's not the market here, and that's not what we're going for." All of the UCCA's projects, she says, have taken place in vacant or abandoned buildings, and many have a green ethos.

While the Midtown name imports its status from New York, the Cass Corridor is undeniably Detroit. The Corridor's legacy as home to a gritty arts community is too famous to be erased. But its authenticity is becoming marketable, too. "We're not about changing neighborhood names," says Mosey. "But we are about branding the bigger neighborhood that encompasses them all, and we call that Midtown." But slapping a brand on neighborhoods raises the question: can development be about more than just attracting new consumers?

"A little gentrification's good," says Pat Dorn with a smile. But it was his concern that the whole neighborhood would go high-end that got Dorn into affordable housing work. The neighborhood was home to a sizeable white, Appalachian auto worker community when he started the Cass Corridor Neighborhood Development Corporation in 1982. Two blocks of Brainard Street in the heart of the Corridor used to house thousands of people, but began clearing out when the Big 3 stopped hiring.

CCNDC eventually bought up that block for redevelopment. "We wanted to establish a percentage that would always remain affordable," says Dorn. "So we took the center, and we dedicated some units to people who get pushed out. "

DEVELOPING STORY

Midtown and the Corridor tout a growing number of community-based projects. A locally-owned organic bakery and health food store share a block. Around the corner, there's a community bike shop. Down Cass Avenue, across from the Mandarin signposts of old Chinatown, a recently closed school hosts an independent movie theater and studio space for artists and activists.

But while another layer of life and culture imprints itself on the city's rapidly changing palimpsest - a blend of decay and rebirth, exodus and return - Midtown's humble, village-like charm exists precariously. Because Detroit has gone from majority white to majority black, from industrial powerhouse to industrial graveyard, in a relatively short period of time, no degree of transformation seems untenable. The covered wagon and the kibbutz set off larger processes of settlement and takeover, and gentrification, too, happens in phases on the urban frontier. Larger commercial and real estate forces always hover, ready to capitalize on "cool," capable of enacting large-scale transformations in short periods of time.

For now, there's only one Starbucks in Midtown. And the high-end lofts that sit above it are half-empty. Around the corner, California investors took out a $2 million mortgage on the Hotel Eddystone. The purchase of the 13-story blown out structure comes after rumors that Detroit Red Wings owner Mike Illitch is considering the Corridor site for a new hockey stadium. A shredded "Move in Now" banner still hangs on the Eddystone's windowless shell, a reminder of a highly-touted 2005 redevelopment effort - one of many false starts that precede the current attempt to transform one of the poorest parts of the city.

Bing's remapping efforts will continue to bump up against pervasive inequality in the city. The most transient visitor, funneled from highway off-ramp to casino parking garage, will still see people posted up on every corner, asking for change.

The tens of thousands of visitors arriving in Detroit for the five-day Forum will take on superficial "renewal" plans with skill-building, strategy sessions, and direct action to shape community-driven solutions. They come together, however, with an understanding that no number of visitors can save the city in one week. "It can't be the end," says Spady. "We'll have to come back out from it stronger. It's got to be more of a beginning."

The Future of Detroit's Schools

2010-05-02T15:31:00.000-04:00

From Labor Notes, May, 2010. Reprinted on Counterpunch.

Before Detroiters voted last fall on a half-billion-dollar bond measure to renovate and build new schools, the state-appointed financial manager Robert Bobb launched an “I’m In” campaign to keep kids in the public schools, which are hemorrhaging students.

After voters approved the bond, Bobb announced that 44 schools would close. At the same time, a grouping of charter school companies and foundations with close ties to Bobb released their plan to open 70 new charter schools over a decade.

The closing of a quarter of Detroit schools, to be finalized in April, comes after 29 others were shuttered last summer. Bobb is calling for even more consolidation, pointing to the district’s drop from 164,000 students in 2003 to 84,000 this year.

Rank-and-file teacher reformers are trying to build opposition to Bobb, in a teachers union (DFT) facing threats to its very existence.

SCHOOL SHOPPING

Bobb is touting a “slimmer, smarter” district, and he’s throwing out some big numbers. Sixteen percent of the city’s 11th graders scored “proficient” on the state’s standardized math test last year. Bobb says 100 percent will pass in 2014. In the same year, he promises, all of the district’s remaining schools will meet federal standards for improvement—though only 31 percent did last year. Bobb claims he will push graduation rates, now at 58 percent, to 98 percent.

How does he plan to pull it off? Details are slim, but Bobb is placing great faith in charter schools to drive competition. Public schools now reach 70 percent of the city’s students, but as the district downsizes, charter school backers seek to flip that ratio.

The group led by several local foundations and a growing charter franchise called New Urban Learning released its plan, unsubtly named “Taking Ownership,” in mid-March.

In addition to calling for 70 new charter schools, the Ownership plan lays the foundation for an “education marketplace” where charter and district schools compete for students, using test scores as the marker of success.

An independent “standards and accountability” commission will grade schools on this basis, recommending closure for some and helping parents become “smarter shoppers.” They’re pushing to put new Mayor Dave Bing in control of the schools to expedite the overhaul and cut out elected school board officials.

These architects of privatization don’t have to convince Bobb and Bing to enact their vision. Bobb spoke at the release of the privatizing plan. Before his election, Bing sat on the board of University Preparatory Academy, a series of schools run by New Urban Learning. The charter operator fought off a teacher organizing drive last spring.

Now it’s building a new charter high school across from the American Federation of Teachers office—and naming it after the mayor.

Add to all this a new state law raising the cap on charter schools in the city, and the teachers union finds itself in a tough spot. The charter plan touts involvement from labor, but AFT-Michigan has not taken a position yet.

DISSENT

While the Detroit School Board contests Bobb’s powers to enact the overhaul, students have walked out to protest the closing plans, and teachers are organizing in the face of inevitable charges that they’re just protecting the status quo.

A months-long battle inside the Detroit Federation of Teachers escalated last winter when angry teachers tried to recall President Keith Johnson after he eked through ratification of a contract that included 10 percent wage cuts and stipulations for private management companies to contract with pilot schools.

Teachers in the Defend Public Education/Save Our Schools caucus have been a loud voice of opposition. Johnson fired back, charging two teacher leaders, Steve Conn and Heather Miller, with inciting a riot at a union meeting. After a late-night trial at the union hall, the two factions decided to table, but not drop, their respective charges.

The opposition caucus recently swept the DFT’s election for delegates to June’s national convention in Seattle. Teachers are hoping to build a broader challenge to AFT President Randi Weingarten. They say the AFT is not fighting President Obama’s education overhaul that is devastating public schools and local unions. Obama’s push to make teachers “accountable” quickly turned into mass firings, as witnessed at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island.

Conn and company went to D.C. for a small April 10 march on the Department of Education, where they were joined by teacher reformers from all over the country, but not the AFT officialdom. “Weingarten’s response to the Obama plan is just poison,” says Conn.

Back home, teachers and community groups are trying to shape the Bobb plan, acknowledging under-enrollment and poor facilities, but arguing they shouldn’t be used as excuses for a firesale that consumes innovative public schools.

Detroiters were especially puzzled when Bobb announced that the Catherine Ferguson Academy would be moved. The school for mothers and pregnant teens features an urban farm—which would seem to root it at its current location.

Bobb’s master plan for closures targets schools serving lower-income students. He vows to build and expand “schools of choice” in the city—where any student can attend, but only if they get accepted.

Students at neighborhood K-8 schools thus face massive displacement in a city already suffering from a 27 percent dropout rate. Eighty-two percent of the students at Owen Elementary School, for example, receive free or reduced lunch. Only 44 percent of the students at nearby Burton—a “school of choice”—get help with lunch money. Bobb seeks to close Owen and create a new, expanded campus for Burton. Neighborhood kids will have to apply to Burton, find another school, or get lost in the shuffle.

The plan would result in a district-wide staff shakeup, too, an enticing prospect for alternative-certification “new teacher programs” eyeing the city. Last year Bobb put nearly every high school in the city under contract with private management groups; there’s no indication he’ll stop there.

UNNATURAL DISASTER

Detroit teachers and students pleaded for their schools at April “town hall” meetings. Each school was given 20 minutes to make its case. Some brought out the marching band; others did a cheer; some cried as Bobb looked on, scribbling notes.

The high-stakes talent show at Northwestern High School got heated as students, alumni, and teachers of the legendary school—slated for closure—indicated they would not leave quietly. A crowd charmer, the schools chief indicated gently that their time was up. Ron Scott, class of ’65, stepped to the mic. “Lets be for real, Mr. Bobb: don’t tell my classmates we have a limited time in our house,” he said, as students cheered. “You have a limited time in our house.”

Detroit’s schools remake focuses on raising performance but ignores—or exacerbates—the poverty and segregation that underlie the education crisis. Persistent social and economic collapse is the rationale for more private interventions. And as the charter movement siphons more public dollars, district schools are even less capable of renewal. Set up to fail, they’re primed for takeover.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Hurricane Katrina was “the best thing that happened” to New Orleans schools, which were largely handed over to private operators. It’s clear that a school district with a decimated union and only a handful of public schools is the Obama model. The administration is looking to the economic storm, hitting Detroit harder than anywhere, to drive the model home.

Detroit voters will decide on a second $500 million bond measure later this year. If Bobb has his way, much of that will end up in private hands.

Video: Troublemakers Flip Conference into Action with "Hyatt 100"

2010-04-30T15:23:00.000-04:00

Twelve hundred troublemakers found themselves inside the Dearborn Hyatt for Labor Notes 2010 last weekend. So they took the opportunity to march on the boss. First they heard from Aracelly Arango, one of 100 Boston hotel workers fired from three non-union Hyatt hotels last summer.

The "Hyatt 100" were tricked into training their replacements--subcontracted workers who make half the wages and receive no benefits. Since then, they've linked up with UNITE HERE Local 26 in an effort to get their jobs back, and union recognition too. Arango urged support for a boycott in Boston that has drained millions in business from the Hyatt.

She joined Labor Notes at a meeting with management inside Dearborn's union shop to ratchet up the pressure. The Boston fight has lit a fire under organizing drives at Hyatt hotels in San Antonio, Indianapolis, and Long Beach. If a national boycott emerges from the multi-city campaign to organize and win strong contracts at hotel giants, Labor Notes 2012 will not be at the Hyatt.

Labor Notes Conference 2010 - Hyatt 100 Action from Labor Notes on Vimeo.

Labor Notes Conference 2010: Troublemakers Join Restaurant Worker Pickets (Video)

2010-04-28T15:19:00.000-04:00

A long caravan of cars pulled out of the Labor Notes Conference last Friday to join restaurant workers down the street in front of Andiamo, a fine dining chain in Metro Detroit. The raucous march and street theatrics were the latest action in a months-long campaign organized by Restaurant Opportunities Center of Michigan over Andiamo's wage theft violations, racial and sexual discrimination, and retaliatory firings.

Among the marchers were ROC members in town for Labor Notes 2010 from all over the country, who have their own workplace justice campaigns underway in New Orleans, Maine, Chicago, and New York.

Videos were taken by Labor Notes conference attendees.

Marchers took to the street in front of the restaurant, garnering a high honk rate from passing cars.

Naomi Debebe explains why she and other restaurant workers have been targeting Andiamo, and why they'll keep the pickets up as long as it takes.

Jose Oliva building people power to take down the wicked, greedy bosses at Andiamo restaurant.

Captain ROC gets some back up from Mother Jones, Cesar Chavez, and hundreds of supporters in front of Andiamo.

DC Teachers to Vote on Privately Funded Merit Pay Plan

2010-04-09T15:17:00.000-04:00

After nearly three years without a contract, Washington Teachers Union President George Parker and DC Schools Chief Michelle Rhee announced a tentative agreement this week. Flanked by Mayor Adrian Fenty and AFT President Randi Weingarten, the two lined up behind a privately-funded agreement that would institute merit pay while continuing to whittle away at teacher job security.

The agreement is sure to receive scrutiny from teachers and city council. The council’s financial officer has yet to approve the newfangled funding mechanism, which draws on foundation money. The timing of the deal, and the teacher ratification vote, comes not a moment too soon for Parker, who hopes to seal an agreement before facing current Vice President Nathan Saunders—an outspoken critic of both Rhee and Parker —in May’s union election.

Rhee was appointed by Fenty in 2007, and got to work pushing her “sweeping” reform: to give unprecedented, privately-funded merit pay awards to teachers who were willing to give up their job protections for a year. The hype died down when the contours of Rhee’s "red and green" plan came out in summer 2008. Parker and Rhee convened meetings with teachers, hoping for a quick approval—but WTU members looked a little deeper, and didn’t like what they saw.

Contract talks stalled, but Rhee’s slash-and-burn agenda didn’t. She resurrected an obscure district law to put hundreds of teachers (including outspoken critics) on 90-day evaluation plans, which led to an untold number of terminations. Last fall, she used the district’s emergency powers to pursue a “reduction in force.” She fired 266 more teachers in a move that drew the ire of students—who walked out of several schools in protest—and a rebuke from City Council President Vincent Gray, who brought her before the council to explain the firings.

Gray has become a more vocal critic of Rhee as he launches a challenge to her ally Fenty in this year’s mayoral race. On the national scene, Rhee gets only good press and is still championed as a fearless reformer by Obama and the corporate education reform punditry. But closer to home, among the teachers who must vote the proposal up or down, Rhee’s heavy-handed treatment puts the tentative agreement on shaky ground.

PRIVATE MONEY, PUBLIC SCHOOLS

After swapping counterproposals and bringing in former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke as mediator, Rhee and Parker’s newest iteration is not quite as “bold” as the schools chief had once hoped. But it still contains the same essence of her initial proposal.

There’s merit pay, but teachers won’t have to give up tenure, as such, to receive it. They will, however, be evaluated in order qualify for the merit pay program, on criteria that the tentative deal leaves for further negotiation. Teachers on the merit pay plan that face a job loss due to school program cuts or closings, would relinquish hiring options available to those who opt out of the merit pay program.

Non-merit pay teachers who lose their position are given choices if they can’t immediately find a new placement: a $25,000 buyout, early retirement (for teachers with 20 years of service), or another year to find work—before facing separation. But, importantly, teachers with low “performance” evaluations wouldn’t be afforded these options.

The actual decision to hire a teacher at a particular school would depend on a principal’s consent. And in making the placements, principals would now prioritize teacher "performance," as determined by Rhee’s new evaluation system, over years of experience. WTU President Parker touts a side agreement that would form a working group to review details of the evaluation system—which by law, teachers can’t negotiate over. Teachers haven’t yet had access to those side agreements before the vote.

Across-the-board raises of 20 percent over five years (retroactive to 2007) and the merit pay system are to be funded to the tune of $65 million in private money from the anti-union Walton and Broad Foundations—and others. The unprecedented move to let private donors underwrite merit pay is Rhee’s attempt to show that D.C. schools are serious about upping test scores and tying teacher evaluations to them—a key criterion for winning federal money in the Race to the Top competition.

Rhee is a good investment for the foundations’ corporate-style overhaul of education, which seeks to bust the unions, dismantle schools, and turn them over to private charter operators. And this deal could protect her job. Council President Gray’s mayoral bid is also a challenge to Rhee’s education plans. But all indications are that the foundation money would leave with her, forcing the new mayor to scramble to meet the financial obligations set up by this week’s deal—or concede that private forces will call the shots for public schools.

Gray tried not to turn up his nose at the private support, but warned in a public statement that “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and that the Council will have to determine “what strings are attached” to the grants. Parker and Rhee acknowledge the money is only committed through the life of the contract, after which, they say, teacher pay, merit or otherwise, will rely on public funding again.

Rhee retains a host of “plan b” powers that allow her to fire teachers, cut costs, and punish dissent—though Parker and Weingarten tout new “checks and balances” on her firing power in the would-be contract. Teachers are poring over the full contract, released today, before a ratification vote that will likely be a referendum on May’s union election.

Hotel Workers Keep Westin Boycott Going

2010-04-03T15:15:00.000-04:00

After six months of rocky contract talks, hotel workers have launched a boycott of the Westin hotel in downtown Providence to protest the company’s deep unilateral wage and benefit cuts, as well as work speedups. The rain-or-shine pickets, on for two weeks now, got going right as the hotel hosted an influx of guests for the NCAA basketball tournament in late March—a big tourist boon for the city.

While hotel workers have teamed up with Rhode Island Jobs with Justice and area unions, the boycott call is reaching out-of-towners too. Dozens of members of IATSE, AFTRA, and Teamsters—from the cast and crew filming a pilot for ABC—moved out of the Westin last week.

The boycott is the latest attempt to fight off a wave of attacks from the Westin's managing Procaccianti Group: threats to replace workers with subcontracted labor (a la the "Hyatt 100" in Boston) and retaliatory firings of worker activists. The last straw came in March when the Westin broke off talks, slashed wages by 20 percent, tripled (and in some plans quadrulpled) health care premiums, while cutting sick days and vacation.

The trouble started as soon as the contract talks opened in October. Westin’s subcontracting threats came right on the heels of the fall firings of 100 Hyatt workers at three non-union hotels in Boston. As the “Hyatt 100” launched a boycott in Beantown and joined a citywide “March for Jobs” that brought 1,000 people through the streets of downtown Boston, Providence activists resolved to keep the subcontracting scourge from spreading.

They rallied City Council support for a "worker retention ordinance." The law requires hotels connected to the publicly-subsidized downtown Convention Center—including the Westin—to retain current employees and pay them prevailing wages and benefits for six months if the company subcontracts work or changes hands completely.

Despite the workers’ victory, the Westin went on the offensive, firing three workers in November for joining informational pickets outside the hotel on their work breaks. The union brought a successful complaint to the NLRB on behalf of the workers, and four months later celebrated their reinstatement—marching behind the three on their first day back to work.

The community is still behind the workers after they voted, 138 to 2, to call a boycott and consider a strike. A large crowd gathered outside the Westin to launch the latest phase of the contract campaign. The news of the company’s deep cuts brought out city councilmen, CLC officials, and leaders from AFSCME and the building trades—who all vowed to keep their members out of the Westin until management rescinds the cuts and bargained in good faith.

After a series of rousing speeches from hotel workers and supporters, City Councilman John Lombardi threw his support behind the boycott—even if it meant foregoing his regular trips to the hotel gym, where he’s a member.

Francis Engler, organizer with UNITE HERE Local 217, responded, to cheers: "You can get some exercise walking with us, councilman!"

Westin Hotel workers call for a boycott of the Providence Westin Hotel from RIFuture.org on Vimeo.

Support hotel workers boycotting the Westin.

More Chicago Charter School Teachers Aspire to a Union

2010-03-25T15:14:00.000-04:00

Teachers at four charter schools on Chicago’s northwest side went public last week with their organizing campaign, marching into their buildings to present principals with cards. The schools, run by ASPIRA Inc., are the latest campaign by the fledgling charter organizing project called the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff—a collaboration of the Teachers (AFT) union, its Illinois affiliate, and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Two-thirds of the 100 teachers on four campuses—one middle school and three high schools—filed the cards with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. Recent changes to state law allow charter teachers to organize using card check. In the same piece of legislation, lawmakers expanded the cap on charter schools to curry favor with native son Arne Duncan, now the Education Secretary, whose federal Race to the Top contest will dole out stimulus dollars to states that allow more of the publicly funded, independently run charters. Illinois is pushing hard for the money, and is in the running for the first set of grants.

The law focused charter expansion in Chicago along a model developed by its schools’ former “CEO” Duncan. Vowing to close or convert eight schools after targeting nearly two dozen last year, the city has opened the door to charters as part of its 2004 plan to open "100 new schools" by this year. But the PR sheen of these "labs of innovation" has begun to fade as charter attempts (with more "flexible," non-union teachers) to improve education—and raise test scores—has returned unconvincing results.

Teachers at Chicago International Charter Schools—the largest charter operator in the city—unionized and signed their first contract in late 2009 after teachers got fed up with a lack of supplies, a lack of job security, and a mandate to fill class time with standardized test prep. The organizing drive stretched out for months as the school’s board of directors, which includes a union-busting lawyer, insisted it had contracted operations to a private entity and was therefore not subject to the 2009 card check law. They tried to flip teacher organizers against the union and eventually pushed for an NLRB election, which the union won anyway.

Organizers say there are no such legal complications at Aspira, which operates all four schools. Teachers gave schools CEO Jose Rodriguez the weekend to think over the union effort. City and state lawmakers called Rodriguez to support teachers and encourage him not to challenge the drive. On Tuesday, teachers supported the union at an emergency meeting of Aspira’s board.

An organizer on the campaign says teachers want more transparency from administrators on the school's spending and on teacher evaluation procedures. He says the drive aims to create a more collaborative school environment, not an “us versus them” dynamic.

Although Aspira—founded by a community group with decades-old roots in Chicago’s Puerto Rican community—is not exactly an investment-fund outfit, it’s had its fair share of controversy in recent years. In 2008, teachers and parents spoke out against a variety of scandals: a former principal was accused of changing grades, approving strip searches on students, and firing whistleblower teachers.

According to Chicago-based Substance News, parents at Aspira’s Mirta Ramirez High formed a parent-teacher organization in 2007 to pressure Rodriguez after four years of sending their kids to a "temporary" school location that was not up to code. The school finally moved into an existing elementary school.

With a clear majority of cards on the table, teachers anticipate victory at the labor board, but Aspira could still try to challenge the drive. Whichever route the school CEO takes, he’ll have to take into account a corps of mobilized teachers.

Can Public Education Be Saved?

2010-03-18T15:25:00.000-04:00

Walkouts, student strikes, and marches shook every level of California’s embattled public education system March 4. And the action paused only briefly as activists savored short-term victories and set about planning the next wave of challenges to lawmakers and administrators.

University of California (UC) students at Berkeley blocked campus gates and Santa Cruz students shut down their campus for the day. In the afternoon, college students joined forces with K-12 students and teachers in Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, and Los Angeles.

Rallies in each city numbered in the thousands—a gathering sponsored by the San Francisco Labor Council drew 20,000 people to the Civic Center. Hundreds of marchers took their protests onto the freeways, stopping traffic for nearly an hour in Oakland. UC Davis students marched through two police lines before baton-swinging cops turned them away at an on-ramp.

The call for action against crippling state budget cuts—$17 billion in two years to California’s education fund—was taken up on all 10 UC campuses, at each of the 23 Cal State campuses, and at dozens of community colleges. The turnout was as unprecedented as the crisis. “It just brought out a positive energy from so many new spaces,” said Claudette Begin, a clerical worker at Berkeley. Actions spread to 32 states.

After an October conference drew 800 people to Berkeley, regional committees organized and formed demands, which varied from place to place. In Oakland, the list was broad: fully funded, free public education, pre-school through higher ed; an end to the federal No Child Left Behind Act and the Race to the Top competition; restoration of all public sector cuts and expansion of public services; full citizenship rights for immigrants and an end to ICE raids; a halt to foreclosures, to name a few.

PRESSURE COOKING

Organizers now face a test of stamina in battles against a federal restructuring of K-12 schools, still-looming state budget cuts, and corporate campus management.

Thousands of K-12 teachers rallied after school in downtown Los Angeles, gearing up for a fight against 2,800 pending layoffs. Class sizes have already exploded after last year’s cut to the teaching force.

In Oakland and San Francisco schools, students and teachers walked out of class during a morning “disaster drill” called jointly by unions and school districts.

Campus unions have organized with students for months. The Technical Employees at UC (UPTE-CWA) called two one-day strikes last year that meshed with large student mobilizations against fee hikes. No campus unions struck on March 4, but the UC clerical workers (CUE)—working without a contract—encouraged members to take the day off. Service workers (AFSCME) joined marches statewide.

UPTE gained a tentative agreement just before March 4. If approved on March 19, it would resolve the standoff over furloughs, accepting the days off but securing sizable raises over the next three years. The deal also caps health care premiums and defines UC’s pension contributions.

“This is a direct product of our months-long pressure campaign targeting UC administrator greed,” said UPTE President Jelger Kalmijn. “Now we have to bring the fight to the state government.”

MACHETES READY

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators are readying their machetes as another $20 billion budget deficit approaches this year. The state’s inability, or unwillingness, to raise revenues brought a 20 percent funding cut to higher education last year.

Student fees have spiked—by 182 percent since 2002 in the Cal State system. Programs and classes have been abolished, while lecturers and campus unions still fight over layoffs.

Berkeley professor George Lakoff is sponsoring a long-shot ballot initiative to overturn the requirement that the legislature pass budgets or any new taxes by a two-thirds majority. The California Faculty Association, representing teachers in the CSU system, is pushing a bill that would garner $2 billion for higher ed by taxing oil companies. California is the only oil-producing state with no oil extraction tax.

Meanwhile, activists won’t let UC administrators off the hook. While pulling down fat salaries, school officials are contracting out campus services and pursuing private donors to stay afloat—looking for corporate solutions to a public concern.

When UC President Mark Yudof proclaimed support for the March 4 protests, in an attempt to deflect blame to state government, students called the regents out for funding campus expansion, including a multi-million-dollar renovation of Berkeley’s football stadium.

Months of student building takeovers and experiments in democratic organizing have been animated by their call for free public education and to democratize the appointed regents. Students also want transparency in UC’s spending, salaries, and investments, a call that prompted a state senator to initiate an audit of the UC budget.

RACIAL JUSTICE

The crisis of priorities—and resulting student fee hikes—is exacerbating long-standing problems of access to higher education for students of color. Black and Latino students are vastly underrepresented at UC campuses: 1 percent of UCLA’s 26,000 undergrads, for example, are Black. The state’s ban on affirmative action in 1996 spurred a drop in Black and Latino enrollment at UC.

The fight for racial justice became a major element of March 4 activities. At UC San Diego, whose freshman class is 1 percent Black, administrators tried to tamp down anger over a racist fraternity party. Hundreds of students demanded “real action” after walking out of a university-sponsored teach-in on race relations.

The madness continued: a noose was discovered in a school library and a KKK-style hood was found on a campus statue. The Black Student Union and allies celebrated on March 4 when administrators met their deadline and their list of 19 demands.

The students say institutional policies have marginalized people of color on campus, creating the conditions for racism and ignorance to fester.

“More fees, more cuts to programs that serve underrepresented communities—it’s all serving the re-segregation of the university,” said Eric Gardner, a member of the student-worker coalition that organized for March 4 at UCLA.

GETTING ATTENTION

In Sacramento, Schwarzenegger seemed to be trying to appease: his January budget proposal would set aside more for higher education and make fewer cuts to schools than last year. But to free up cash, he proposed privatizing the state’s vast prison system.

“Some people are saying, ‘look, he’s paying attention,’” said Berkeley grad student Eli Friedman. “But his funding guarantee doesn’t include K-12 schools—they’re trying to divide and conquer.”

As the next budget negotiation approaches, California’s right wing remains in an anti-tax frenzy. A group of Republican legislators have taken an oath never to raise taxes, all but ensuring more cuts—a situation that has drawn little more than a shrug from President Obama.

The student and worker mobilization is hammering both parties for their refusal to get their priorities straight. “The Republicans are a party of ‘no,’ and Democrats can’t figure out how to stabilize things without a transfer of wealth” from the rich to working people—a move they’re reluctant to make, says Oakland teacher Jack Gerson.

Organizers know more cuts could be on the way. CUE activist Begin remains wary of the summertime lull when administrators can slash and burn at emptied campuses.

But activists’ unprecedented mobilization across campus, union, and generational lines is providing fuel for the long haul.

“I had gotten very pessimistic over time, but I’m not now,” says Gerson, a veteran of the ’60s. “We’re starting to see a mass movement, and this is just the beginning.”

Charter Schools Iced, Los Angeles Teachers Win Bids To Run New Schools

2010-02-24T15:11:00.000-05:00

Charter school companies in Los Angeles were licking their chops last summer when the school board gave outside managers a chance to operate 36 schools next year.

After yesterday’s packed board meeting where officials voted to award 29 of those schools to teacher-led groups supported by United Teachers Los Angeles, the charters are licking their wounds.

What looked like another bonanza for charter operators in Los Angeles—which already has the most charter schools in the country—turned into an opening for teachers to build power with parents.

Yesterday’s competition is just the first round of what promises to be a titanic fight between the charter operators and union-backed coalitions in Los Angeles as 250 district schools will be opened to outside bids in the next several years.

LA’s school board started the bidding this summer on 12 low-performing "focus" schools as well as 18 brand-new campuses, which will house 24 schools. Proposals flooded in from 85 groups, including charter management companies, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s school franchise, and the union.

Gillian Russom, a teacher at Roosevelt High School and a UTLA activist, built alliances with parents at her school to submit a proposal for the still-in-construction Esteban Torres High School—where some of her students will go next year to relieve overcrowding at Roosevelt. With neighborhood walks, community forums, and proposal writing sessions, teachers and parents tailored their own reforms.

"We had something positive to organize around in addition to defending from charters," Russom says. "We showed the community that teachers have a vision for these schools, too."

Some of the plans developed by teachers and parents were formed along the lines of pre-existing alternative school models in the district.

At the new Torres High, plans by teachers and parents to start up five subject-based pilot schools beat out two charter giants: Green Dot and the Alliance for College-Ready Schools.

"The biggest charter companies in this city got iced," Russom says.

The pilot model—imported from Boston schools—is debated within union ranks. While they allow teachers some autonomy from district mandates over curriculum, they also open union contracts to alteration around hours and work duties—changes decided on by each school's governing board of teachers.

Teachers, staff, students, and parents at affected schools voted on proposals February 9, returning overwhelming support for teacher-led applications—a strong rebuke of charter bids. In an election administered by the League of Women Voters, 87 percent of parents voted for teacher-led proposals across the city. High school students voted, too, with strong majorities in favor of teacher-led plans. Not one charter plan won parent, teacher, or student votes—leading UTLA to claim an early victory.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines and a panel of reviewers sent their recommendations for each school to the school board before yesterday’s decisive meeting. Cortines backed many teacher-led proposals, but ignored some community votes in favor of charters.

Board Member Yolie Flores, who had introduced the "Schools Choice" resolution over the summer, downplayed the votes. Charter bidders hoped the community polls would remain only "advisory" when the board issued final decisions February 23.

Teachers, union activists, and charter supporters packed the hours-long meeting for their final lobbying effort.

Many suspected that the board would snub the parent votes, overrule the superintendent’s endorsement of most teacher plans, and assign many of the schools to charter operators. Instead, they overturned three of the superintendent’s charter nominations. The board also reversed Cortines’s recommendation to split two new campuses into schools run by union and charter plans. The Mayor’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools took control of three schools, and four new schools went to charter companies.

The parent votes proved too compelling to ignore.

"They sold this whole process in the name of ‘parent choice,'" Russom says. "Once people saw 87 percent parent support for our plans, it was harder for charters to claim that they worked on behalf of parents."

Yesterday’s decision follows another recent blow to charter backers: a study from the UCLA Civil Rights Project showing intensified segregation at charters, further wearing at charter school claims to equity and racial justice.

Despite the victory, teachers remain focused. Yesterday’s decision is only the beginning of a years-long process during which hundreds of district schools will be opened up to bids. UTLA is challenging the entire “choice” process in court, claiming that publicly funded schools built to relieve overcrowding cannot be given away to (non-union) charter schools without a binding teacher vote.

The state’s budget catastrophe looms large, too. Drawing on strengthened ties to parents and students, teachers are gearing up for a statewide Day of Action March 4—and a march to Sacramento beginning the next day—to fight off crippling budget cuts threatening thousands of classroom layoffs.

"We’re not out of the woods yet," Russom says.

DC Teachers Could See Shakeup in Union's Spring Election

2010-02-13T12:49:00.000-05:00

An outspoken critic of D.C. schools Superintendent Michelle Rhee has entered the race to lead the Washington Teachers Union (WTU). Nathan Saunders, the union’s current vice-president, says the May election is a chance for teachers to take a different direction in contract talks with Rhee, which have dragged on for three years.

Rhee’s original contract proposal to swap teachers’ job security for promises of merit pay has been effectively killed by rank-and-file opposition. Saunders has been fiercely against the plan, and has also turned his critique toward President George Parker. “Rhee and company are not the type of people you need to be timid with,” he says. Parker, who will face off against his veep in the election, has repeatedly dismissed Saunders’ critiques as driven by political ambitions. Saunders says the discontent has now gone far beyond him.

The contract standstill prompted national AFT President Randi Weingarten to intervene in talks last winter. The AFT/WTU counterproposal born from the intervention fizzled, and the union and district called in an outside mediator.

In the meantime, Rhee has worked around the contract talks, seizing a “Plan B,” to place hundreds of teachers on 90-day termination watch. Then, last summer, she cited budget shortfalls as the pretext for firing hundreds more. The move became especially controversial after she turned around and hired hundreds of new teachers months later.

The “reduction in force” did not go unnoticed. DC police arrived at schools during class time to escort teachers and counselors from the buildings, prompting students—upset at the departure of some of their most beloved instructors—to walk out in protest. Students got the attention of City Council, which called Rhee to testify over the dismissals. The union led an unsuccessful legal challenge to the firings.

The AFT, and newly-anointed AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, entered the fray, calling hundreds to a rally against the layoffs in early October.

LONG-TERM ACTIVIST

Even before Rhee hit town with a teacher-bashing vengeance, Saunders was working on his gadfly credentials. The union was rocked by a corruption scandal that sent former WTU President Barbara Bullock to jail for stealing $5 million from the local between 1994 and 2002. Saunders filed a lawsuit against the AFT for its complicity in Bullock’s embezzlement. He says the case set a precedent by making national unions legally accountable to rank-and-file members of local unions. The national AFT settled out of court, and paid $1 million to the local.

Following the AFT’s trusteeship, Saunders ran with Parker and took office in 2005. The “new Local 6” would fracture over strategy. The union’s rolls had already been decimated by years of non-union charter school invasion, and nearly each year brought a new superintendent determined to save the system. Nearly two years before Obama rode to victory on the hope of change, Rhee arrived in D.C. on much the same promise. Media profiles (and later Obama himself) endorsed her youthful energy and relished her quotable, tough-talking vision for reform.

Many teachers, including Saunders, charge union negotiators, led by Parker, with taking a “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” approach to contract talks. Saunders, who boasts a wall of diplomas from the National Labor College and Harvard’s Trade Union Program and elsewhere, remained outspoken when members were called to meetings in the summer of 2008 where Rhee and Parker presented details of a nearly-completed contract. That fall, the union rift went public. Saunders pursued a recall effort and later sued the union for conspiracy.

Parker has been criticized (and censured by the union’s executive board) for a lack of transparency in 36 months of talks. Saunders is running on a promise to alter the bargaining process to include rank-and-file teacher activists. Models of parent-teacher organizing, such as those in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, says Saunders, are “the future of the labor movement,” and essential to reining in Rhee—even over basic questions like snow days. This week the district initially called a two-hour delay on a day that witnessed record snowfall in D.C. Parents flooded the district with calls. “They were on the phone saying ‘the snow out there is taller than the average third grader,’” Saunders said. School was canceled.

Teachers will need that support in facing continued attacks from Rhee—whose most recent loose-cannon moment came when she implied that last summer’s fired teachers were guilty of sexual misconduct and corporal punishment. Parker called for an apology—Saunders wants her to resign.

It’s clear to a growing number of teachers and community members that Rhee’s agenda in the last three years has not met AFT President Weingarten’s repeated standard for acceptable reform—neither fair for teachers nor good for students. Now, a perennial critic of both the union chief and the schools chief is putting together a slate, opening community forums to shape a platform, and harnessing a growing frustration over the attack on public education in the District.

(Join Nathan and DC teacher activists at the Labor Notes Conference for strategy sessions on K-12 public education fights, rank-and-file contract campaigns, and running for office. Register today for the April 23-25 event in Detroit.)

Worker Center Reports on Restaurant Industry: Bad Jobs—and Lots of Them

2010-02-10T15:09:00.000-05:00

It’s apparent now more than ever why restaurant workers are urgently organizing. While members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center roll on with workplace justice campaigns in several cities, affiliates of the national worker center released reports this week from Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Maine, and Detroit highlighting the low lights of one the largest and fastest-growing private sector employers in the country.

Among the findings released yesterday by ROC-Michigan: The median wage for restaurant jobs in Metro Detroit is just $8.32 an hour, less than half of the average wage for all workers in the area.

In Detroit, 200 people gathered to hear from a sampling of the city’s more responsible employers, industry experts, and its restaurant workers. The study of the city and its suburbs, where 134,000 people work in restaurants and constitute about 8 percent of the private sector workforce, gathers the stories of hundreds of workers into a not-unexpected narrative of low wages, poor working conditions, racial discrimination in hiring, and harassment on the job.

In the heartland of economic collapse, 7.6 percent of Metro Detroit jobs have been lost since July 2009, reports ROC, but restaurant jobs have grown steadily since 2000. They’ve dropped slightly in the last two years. ROC-Michigan has gone after the lowest of the “low-road” employers at Andiamo Fine Italian Dining in Dearborn for months, filing a lawsuit over wage theft and racial and gender discrimination.

ROC’s study clarifies that Andiamo is sadly not alone in abusing the restaurant workforce—or in adhering to well-defined barriers of race, class, and geography in the Metro Detroit area.

Higher paying restaurant jobs are in the whiter suburbs, and 82 percent of those jobs are held by white employees. The report quotes Awet, a Black Eritrean woman who immigrated to Detroit from Italy in 1998. When the six-year veteran server applied to an Italian restaurant in the suburbs, the management told her there were no applications. A white friend of hers applied for the same job on the same day, and was hired on the spot. “I asked two of my other friends, one white and one Black, to go and apply, and the same thing happened,” she reports. “The white friend got hired, and the Black friend did not.”

Segregation exists inside restaurants themselves. Among Latino restaurant workers, 69 percent fill “back of the house” jobs in the kitchen. Seventy-nine percent of white restaurant workers and 67 percent of Asian workers work the “front of the house”—server or host jobs. The breakdown for Black and Middle Eastern workers is closer to 50-50.

Some results from ROC-Michigan’s study, Behind the Kitchen Door: Inequality and Opportunity in Metro Detroit’s Growing Restaurant Industry:

* In Metro Detroit, 80 percent of restaurant workers are paid less than $10 an hour.
* Overtime is paid to just 51 percent of all restaurant workers.
* Only 13 percent of the workers surveyed reported making a living wage.
* Thirty-nine percent of workers surveyed said they did not have legal status to work in the US.
* Only 5 percent get paid sick days—leading 60 percent of employees to work while sick.
* Employers don’t provide health insurance to 81 percent of workers.

The study also cheers for the few restaurants in the area that pay their workers well, have safe working environments, and provide benefits—noting that such establishments achieve profitability by maintaining a safe, stable workplace where disruptive turnover isn’t as likely. Their task is made harder by the slew of bad actors around them. Still, ROC members are not relying on the boss to save them. A worker-run cooperative, both restaurant and worker training center, is slated to open in Detroit this summer.

Restaurant Workers Launch Multi-City Campaign to Transform Low-Wage Industry

2010-02-06T19:57:00.000-05:00

Published in the February, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

The restaurant industry is one of the largest and fastest growing private employers in the country. But just as swinging doors often separate patrons from the kitchen, the working lives of 13.5 million restaurant workers—a largely non-union workforce—remain out of sight.

In four cities, cooks, dishwashers, servers, hosts, and busers are organizing workplace justice campaigns with the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC), bringing their aspirations to overhaul a low-wage, high-discrimination industry out onto the streets.

ROC got its start when workers at New York’s “Windows on the World” restaurant in the World Trade Center lost 73 of their co-workers—and their jobs—on 9/11. The worker advocacy group began organizing, training workers, and conducting research and policy work, and now has 3,200 members and its own restaurant.

Through coordinated legal and direct action campaigns, ROC-NY has notched several wins garnering millions in wage and hour claims, as well as legal settlements with restaurants that mimic collective bargaining agreements. ROC formed a national organization in 2008—ROC United—and chapters in seven cities formed soon after.

While ROC is not a union, its organizing work could be a path to unionization. UNITE HERE Local 100, New York’s food service local, has struggled to build density among the fragmented but growing ranks of restaurant workers. Only a small fraction of the city’s restaurant workers are Local 100 members. But the local was instrumental in helping set up ROC.

Union card or not, ROC members have found winning collective strategies capable of raising the bar.

HOW DO I LOOK IN THIS MESS?

“One of the things every restaurant cares about more than anything else is their image,” says Jose Oliva, ROC national policy coordinator. “It’s their most valuable asset.”

Workers in ROC build direct action campaigns with community support to go after bad actors in the industry. Workplace campaigns are live in Detroit, New Orleans, Chicago, and Portland, Maine.

Workers at Andiamo Dearborn, an Italian restaurant with 11 other locations in the Detroit area, filed a federal lawsuit January 12 after months of weekly picket lines on the sidewalk outside. Seventy-five supporters from student, faith, and labor groups—including the head of the Detroit Metro AFL-CIO—converged in front of the restaurant as ROC announced it was pursuing claims of upwards of $125,000 for eight workers who allege a raft of wage violations, gender and national origin discrimination, and retaliation.

Servers and busers in the complaint, which includes one current employee (the others quit or were fired) said they weren’t paid the state minimum wage, even after tips. Others say the company illegally deducted wages for uniforms and equipment, and refused overtime pay after 70-hour work weeks.

Workers also complain of discrimination within the restaurant, claiming that Andiamo gives promotions to lesser qualified white and male employees. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say the restaurant’s head chef routinely made disparaging remarks about “wetbacks” without facing discipline. One female worker alleges that management refused to punish a male employee after she complained of sexual harassment.

The week following one particularly raucous sidewalk protest, one worker-leader, Bertha Piña, was fired. ROC filed a retaliation complaint with the NLRB, and Piña, a mother of five, was reinstated days later—but got few hours.

When she returned to work, Piña said, Andiamo’s CEO pulled her aside for a tongue-lashing. “He wanted to know why we don’t care about his reputation,” she said. “I asked him why he doesn’t care about our lives.” Piña has been demoted to dishwasher, one day a week.

ROC-Michigan is keeping the pressure on during the lawsuit, scheduling weekly protests. ROC-Maine and six workers at Portland’s Front Room restaurant also filed suit in early 2010, claiming that what’s happened in Detroit is no anomaly.

PAYDAY DELAY

When paychecks from Chicago’s Mexican fine-dining tapas restaurant Ole Ole! began bouncing two months ago, workers showed up at the ROC office. “One server’s missing $20,000 over the course of three years,” said Veronica Avila, ROC-Chicago coordinator.

The campaign took off when other kitchen staff complained of getting paid whenever the owner felt like it. When checks came through, Avila says, they’d be hundreds of dollars light. ROC says six employees of the restaurant’s predominantly Latino workforce are short $200,000 total.

Owner Regina Tavone, who has admitted to owing at least $80,000 to four workers, stalled repeatedly on ROC’s demands for a meeting, and the group picketed on January 6, promising not to go away.

In New Orleans, another crowd has joined the tourist mobs along the city’s bustling Bourbon Street. Five former employees have drawn support from ROC-NOLA in a lawsuit and public campaign against restaurateur Jobert Salem. Next to his bar, the Old Absinthe House, Salem owns two restaurants in one building—Tony Moran’s and Jean Lafitte Bistro.

Workers say management gives them two employee ID numbers, one for each restaurant. When they get close to overtime pay on one ID, their hours get logged on the other. ROC member Van Joseph says he was paid $100 for 60 hours’ work in Salem’s catering business.

Protests have continued despite Salem’s deployment of security from the bar to bat away cameras and intimidate outspoken workers. According to Darren Browder, ROC-NOLA co-coordinator, workers have been roughed up and tasered. One reports being assaulted after being fired and asking for his last paycheck. Fifteen out of 50 former employees at Tony Moran’s told ROC they were physically assaulted by the bar’s enforcers.

Following a large November protest, Browder says Moran’s management came to the table—but mostly to suss out what kind of evidence ROC had. The lawsuit and public campaign continue.

PUTTING NUMBERS ON IT

ROC backs up the claims of workers at individual restaurants with citywide studies. While the organization seeks to build relationships with restaurant owners that treat workers well, two major studies by ROC-NY show that most employers, unsurprisingly, take the low road in a low-wage industry.

In 2005, half of New York restaurant workers made less than $9 an hour, and 90 percent had no health coverage through their employers. Average salaries were $25,000 less than the average private sector job in 2000—and the gap has only grown.

ROC-NY’s 2009 study on hiring discrimination put the numbers behind a common conception that people of color are trapped in “back of the house” jobs. The study sent dozens of job applicants from a spectrum of racial and ethnic backgrounds into nearly 200 city restaurants, revealing that high-priced establishments offered jobs to white applicants twice as often, and chose them more frequently for high-visibility jobs like host and server.

Meanwhile, restaurant workers in New York made their own high road. Colors, ROC-NY’s union restaurant in Manhattan, gives each worker an equal share of ownership. A general manager and chef hire and fire, but are accountable to a board of directors elected by workers—who have a living wage, health care, and training programs through ROC. The idea is spreading. In Detroit, restaurant workers are moving on plans to open their own establishment inside an old, rarely used downtown club.

ROC United’s Oliva says the group’s multi-pronged strategy aims at raising standards across the growing service sector.

“Before people were unionized in the auto industry, it was dragging down the rest of manufacturing,” Oliva says. “Restaurants set the standards for the service industry. We’re trying to create a culture of organizing there, to make restaurant jobs stable jobs.”

Evan Rohar and Enku Ide contributed to this story.

Growing Labor Support for Palestine Faces Stiff Opposition in the U.S.

2010-01-25T22:17:00.000-05:00

Union members who want to organize U.S. labor support for war-torn Palestine often compare their cause to the battle against apartheid in the 1980s. They point to striking similarities between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the former South African system: In Israel, Arab citizens face legalized segregation in housing and employment. In the occupied West Bank, separate and unequal conditions are even more overt.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in growing settlements connected by “Israeli-only” roads. Palestinians are left in disconnected towns, stalled at hundreds of military checkpoints, and hemmed in by an Israeli-built wall that grabs more land.

And just as in South Africa, dozens of U.S. companies are involved. Industrial zones allow corporations familiar to U.S. union activists to import low-wage guest workers from Palestine and overseas.

“Palestinians are being exploited by the same entities that are exploiting U.S. workers,” says Sharon Wallace, a teacher from Kentucky who has organized two U.S. tours of Palestinian labor activists and who just returned from a pro-Palestine march in Egypt (see box).

She and a small but growing band of U.S. unionists—some of whom are Jewish—are fighting to educate fellow members and mobilize their unions behind a global call to pressure Israel with a boycott, divestment, and sanctions.

They face substantial barriers to winning union support: Activists say leaders of U.S. unions still seem enamored with the myth that Israel is a pro-labor government. In an October speech at the Jewish Labor Committee, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka opposed international efforts to boycott Israel, suggesting that opposition to Israeli policy was anti-Semitism in disguise.

Those attitudes are reinforced by an organized pro-Israel lobby and a receptive U.S. government that sends Israel billions a year in military and other aid.

But when Israeli warplanes bombarded Gaza in late 2008, killing 1,500 civilians and destroying the country’s infrastructure, union activists joined protests all over the country. Several union councils, including the California Federation of Teachers, called for an end to the bombardment. On the East Coast, SEIU1199 delegates condemned the violence in Gaza and sent $5,000 to bolster medical relief efforts there.

Today in Gaza, Palestinians—45 percent of whom are unemployed—are still digging out from the rubble. Because of Israel’s blockade, they are unable to move in and out of the country or control their airspace, ports, or borders.

“Families aren’t getting paid, and don’t have jobs. So much of their resistance is just about survival,” Wallace said.

Labor activists are trying to expand isolated protests into a full-fledged campaign.

Garnering support from “a larger small group inside labor than before,” says activist Michael Letwin, Labor for Palestine recently issued a letter to Trumka calling for a boycott of Israeli goods and applauding South African unions for turning away Israeli ships from their ports during the Gaza war.

The union anti-war group U.S. Labor Against the War plans to dispatch a fact-finding mission to Israel and Palestine at the end of the year. And American unionists were among those attempting to bring solidarity and aid to Palestine in December.

USLAW staffer Michael Eisenscher notes that when the group started agitating against the Iraq war in 2003, “opposition was not a majority opinion.”

YOU’RE PAYING FOR IT

U.S. workers are connected to Israel’s occupation of Palestine because, for one thing, they’re paying for it. The U.S. is the largest donor to Israel, giving $26 billion in military aid over the past 10 years, according to the Congressional Research Service.

U.S. labor is in the mix as well: 279 labor bodies, including locals, labor councils, and the AFL-CIO itself, fill their pension portfolios with state of Israel bonds—to the tune of $5 billion. The federation owns no other country’s bonds, says Stan Heller, a longtime high school teacher in Connecticut.

Heller is heading up a labor campaign to “Dump Israel Bonds,” underway in New Haven. The labor council there has called on the state AFL-CIO to sell its $60,000 in bonds. Heller says the national Teachers union (AFT) recently sent him a letter proudly informing him of the union’s large investment in the state of Israel.

But globally, union opinion is openly critical of Israeli policy. The Congress of South African Trade Unions initiated the Cairo Declaration in January, signed by unions around the world, including the United Kingdom’s major union federation, Ireland’s largest public sector union, and labor bodies in France, Canada, Australia, Norway, and Scotland.

The document calls for an international tour of South African and Palestinian trade unionists to emphasize the parallels to the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It also echoes the Palestinian labor movement’s call for an international campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the Israeli government.

BREAKING THE TABOO

Monadel Herzallah is an activist with the Arab American Union Council; he moved from Palestine to the U.S. in 1978. Alongside patient education of American workers, he feels an urgency to support Palestinians who are resisting occupation amid a humanitarian crisis.

Herzallah’s extended family lives in Gaza. His 20-year-old cousin was killed in Israel’s bombing last December. “The level of crime being done by Israel makes it essential for the labor movement to take courageous steps to break the taboo that exists when it comes to Palestine,” he says.

Organizing from the Bay Area with labor and community activists, Herzallah sent funds to the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza, whose headquarters was destroyed by Israeli bombs. His network of Arab American unionists has plans to train, educate, and provide equipment to Palestinian unionists, to develop more than a cosmetic solidarity with them.

Herzallah believes the outrage over conditions in Gaza is opening up space for labor activists to organize against the occupation. And, he points out, the U.S. government’s giant military aid to Israel is part of the lavish war spending that’s draining funds needed in the states and drawing growing criticism from U.S. unionists.

Steward's Corner: Txt & Tweet 2 Org & Inform

2010-01-04T16:12:00.000-05:00

From the January, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

By Paul Abowd

Online social media tools like Twitter are often dismissed as time-wasters for the procrastinator in all of us. But they’re also being harnessed for greater causes. You can use Twitter and text messaging to keep members educated and mobilize them for action.

Twitter is a “micro-blogging” website that allows you to post frequent, short messages, using your computer or cell phone, to be read by people who’ve signed up to get your entries via their own computer or cell phone. Text messages are nearly the same, but are sent to specific people by cell phone. Here are examples from four campaigns.

TWITTER ARMY

The Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) formed in 2008 to push the Chicago Teachers Union to oppose school closings and fight for its members. According to Kenzo Shibata, the union had an “immense communications capacity which lay dormant.”

As the city prepared to close yet more schools last winter, CORE deployed a “Twitter army” to monitor major goings-on in the Chicago education world.

At twitter.com/coreteachers, the group began sending live “tweets” from the union’s monthly House of Delegates meetings. The gatherings are sparsely attended by non-delegates, but now everyone can keep tabs on how their dues are spent.

The Twitter brigade also descends on monthly Board of Education meetings, which are held during the work day. Shibata says CORE sends “quick bursts of analysis” to teachers, who read up during their lunch breaks.

When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan spoke to a pro-privatization group, CORE activists picketed outside and reported via Twitter that they had been threatened with arrest for trying to enter. A flood of teachers responded with solidarity messages, and others asked for directions to the protest.

TEXT TO WIN

In summer 2008 Teamsters at Sotheby’s, the art auction house in New York, won their best contract in a decade. The campaign was helped along by a text-message phone tree, which members set up to connect the workforce of 50.

Rank-and-filer Julian Tysh says the shop’s organizing committee set up the network after discovering that workers young and old were punching out texts on their cell phones. “We started using it for impromptu meetings: hurry up and meet outside, the bargaining committee is going to give you an update. We’d meet on the street in front of the building or on the loading dock.” Seventy to 80 percent showed up.

When the campaign began to escalate, says Tysh, designated texters might send messages asking workers to wear a union shirt the next day and gather at the time clock 20 minutes early.

TEXTS ON THE DOCKS

Texting brought together far-flung longshore activists in a yearlong contract campaign stretching across dozens of ports from Maine to Texas.

The Longshore Workers Coalition, a reform group inside the East Coast Longshoremen’s (ILA) union, used texting to reach hundreds of new recruits, quickly disseminate bargaining updates about concessions union leaders had accepted in secret meetings, and organize a contract rejection that sent the deal back for improvement.

Texting is an organizer’s new best friend, says Marsha Niemeijer, LWC staffer. Receiving messages gives a recruit an identification with the organization. From there an organizer can use the connection to have a conversation and build a deeper relationship.

“Besides an information tool, it’s an action tool,” Niemeijer said, noting that she tailored texts to specific ports or groups of activists, inviting members to distribute flyers and join rallies.

In a union culture where members get little information and meetings are poorly attended, the LWC’s texts became must-have items at contract time. In Norfolk, Virginia, signs went up on the local’s wall with the number to subscribe. One Baltimore member called the message system “our CNN.”

About 90 percent of the LWC membership is on the text list now, up from 60 percent before the campaign.

How much is too much? At its peak, the LWC blasted out three messages a day, several days a week. Niemeijer says she can count the number of negative reactions on one hand. “It’s not a replacement for the human connection,” Niemeijer said, “but it adds a level of excitement, and members feel good about being in the know.”

FROM PHONE TO NET

In Southern California, a digital storytelling and community journalism project built by students and low-wage workers gives recent immigrants without computers a connection to the digital world by using low-cost new media.

The project developed software that allows workers to use their phones to capture and publish pictures, videos, and stories about their jobs, families, and activism. The “Mobile Voices” program, or “Vozmob,” exists primarily for day laborers and domestic workers, said Sasha Costanza, a board member.

Workers are now editing their own videos and sharing their knowledge at worker-to-worker trainings throughout LA. The software for uploading stories to the web can be downloaded free here, and works on any basic cell phone. Workers send their dispatches by phone to an email address, which directly uploads the messages to Vozmob’s blog.

A project of the LA-based Instituto de Educacion Popular del Sur de California, and the University of Southern California, Vozmob has been used by workers to cover a community health conference, job centers and day laborers’ issues, and student organizing against tuition hikes.

At the November national Domestic Workers Alliance conference in the Bay Area, a Vozmob member who blogs as “Madelou” trained other domestic workers how to use the technology. Madelou took pictures of the spirited march for domestic workers’ rights and sent updates throughout the conference to the Vozmob blog.

Constanza says workers are also using this technology to document their workplace problems on the net with pictures, text, and audio—a great way to catalog evidence for grievances.

Campus Unions, Students Defy Attack on Higher Education in California

2009-12-21T20:27:00.000-05:00

From the January, 2010 issue of Labor Notes.

by Paul Abowd and Kate Maich

Annual fees at the University of California in 1979 were $685. Thirty years later, the University of California regents, who oversee 10 campuses throughout the state, raised fees by 32 percent—in the face of opposition by a growing coalition of students, faculty, and campus workers. UC’s appointed regents set undergraduate fees at $10,302 for next fall.

Schools throughout the state’s three-tiered public education system—including hundreds of state schools and junior colleges—are seeing fee hikes and program cuts. Technical, clerical, and service workers, facing layoffs and cuts at the bargaining table, have entered the fray.

No state spends more on prisons than California, while nearly every state spends more per capita on education. It wasn’t always this way. An unprecedented coalition of students and workers is responding to the attacks on affordable higher education with large-scale democratic organizing—including marches, teach-ins, strikes, and building occupations—to which police have responded fiercely.

There are no illusions about the size of the task at hand, but organizers on various campuses are linking up their organizing with an understanding that a long-term movement is needed—and has begun.

“There has never been a coalition like this on campus,” says Claudette Begin, whose clerical workers union, the Coalition of University Employees, called a two-day strike together with technical workers (UPTE) at UC Berkeley and UCLA.

At Berkeley, the seven days between the last class and the first exam is referred to as “dead week.” It made a lively comeback this December when students, workers, and community members “liberated” Wheeler Hall, a major classroom building, during a 24-7 open occupation that lasted four days.

Students reclaimed the space for meeting and study, holding lectures and teach-ins on the budget crisis, distributing literature on the fee hikes, and dancing. At the end of each night, students diligently mopped the lobby floor.

The takeover wasn’t easily accomplished. Police videotaped protesters and threatened arrests of those who peaceably remained inside on the first night. On Friday, they made good on their threats with a pre-dawn raid. Sixty-six occupiers awoke to the sound of handcuffs, and were spirited away to a jail 40 miles outside the city.

INCLUSIVE ORGANIZING

The tedium of democratic organizing has rolled on for months. Frequent two- to three-hour open meetings of the general assembly, student-worker action team, and graduate student organizing committee have drawn hundreds.

Students and workers voted for three days of action to coincide with the regents meeting in late November, where the tuition hike would be decided. Students called a three-day strike at Berkeley coinciding with the clerical and technical workers’ walkouts.

On November 20, students barricaded themselves inside the second floor of Wheeler Hall, and communicated their demands by bullhorn to thousands of supporters gathered outside: rehire laid off service workers, make the budget transparent, and reverse the fee hikes.

UPTE members set up pickets to protest what they call the university’s “illegal bargaining tactics,” and called a rally.

UC called in several police departments, which were unable to break barricades for several hours as students held the doors and called, unsuccessfully, for negotiations. “They kept yelling through the doors, ‘prepare for the beat-down,’” said UC grad student Zach Levenson.

Police eventually arrested 40, but faculty and students negotiated their release. The cuffs came off and the students emerged after dusk before a cheering crowd.

Throughout the day, students linked arms in tussles with cops, while others sat down in the street to block police trucks entering campus.

Service workers with AFSCME Local 3299 have supported student organizing against fee hikes. They blocked a back entrance to the building, one of several actions aimed at reversing layoffs—44 have lost their jobs at Berkeley. “How do you have a 32 percent fee hike and then cut services on campus?” asked President Lakesha Harrison.

The nonviolent actions were returned with force—police shot one student with a rubber bullet, and another had her finger smashed by a police club, requiring reconstructive surgery.

ORGANIZING EVERYWHERE

Students at UC Davis and Santa Cruz also led several occupations during the week of the regents meeting, which was held at UCLA. The administrators were greeted in Los Angeles by thousands of protesters. Students and campus workers established a tent city outside the meeting—which took place behind a police line. As at Berkeley, UPTE workers walked out.

Eric Gardner, a member of the Coalition of University Employees, spent the day running between an assembly outside the regents meeting and another that formed outside Campbell Hall, where dozens of students had locked themselves in. “After they voted for the tuition hikes, the anger was palpable,” he says. “People more or less spontaneously blocked the regents from leaving.”

For three hours, activists sat down in front of a garage where a van full of fee-hikers was trying to escape. The police attacked with pepper spray.

Though their demands were not met, Gardner says the culture has already changed. “Campus has been quiet for years,” he said. “We did this to show we can take over this place.”

WORSE AT CAL STATE

The California State University system of 23 schools relies more heavily on state funding than does the UC system, which draws only about 20 percent of its budget from the state. Summertime budget cuts turned into department cuts, teacher layoffs, and fee hikes at CSU.

San Francisco State University’s sizable working class population is dropping out in droves, unable to weather new fees or find classes they need.

Undergrad Ryan Sturges, an organizer with Student Unity & Power, says the hikes (he paid $300 more this semester) are helping construct a multi-million-dollar recreation center aimed at attracting a wealthier “clientele.”

Sturges and 300 students marched into the administration building in late November as part of an open occupation. Two weeks later, 20 students locked down the SFSU business building for a day. Police broke through student pickets outside and, with guns drawn, arrested them.

The statewide resistance has brought questions of class, race, and privilege to the fore as the new fees will make public education unreachable for many residents.

Huge public events don’t mean that the movement has been a huge success, however. Protests have left some students alienated and many on the sidelines. The fees hikes remain, as do the UC regents, an undemocratic, appointed body with little concern for the workers and students most affected.

Despite President Yudof’s claims that financial aid will rise, there won’t be enough to offset hikes, which will disproportionately affect working class students and students of color. Already, only 3.5 percent of students at Berkeley are African American.

But setbacks are a crucial part of movement building. They lay the groundwork for organizing that can really work, even while the list of demands grows and the clock ticks.

Organizers are crafting a different list of priorities for the school. “We don’t want to just return to the way the university was in, say, 2007,” says Berkeley’s Levenson.

The list includes lower pay for the highest-salaried administrators, re-emphasize outreach to communities of color, halt construction projects funded by fee hikes, make school governance structures more democratic, and “de-privatize” as Levenson says. With 80 percent of UC funding not generated by the state, he says, the university is at the whim of private funders.

The fight against privatization of a public good—education—isn’t happening only in California. It is tied to a series of strikes, rallies, walkouts, and occupations taking place in schools across the U.S. and in Austria, Germany, and Greece. The highs and lows are shared in solidarity with a much larger movement.

Meanwhile, organizers are casting a wider net, fomenting an ambitious March 4 student and worker strike throughout the state’s education system that will bring together K-12 and higher education activists.

Tired of Teacher-Bashing, Union Educators Grow Their Own Schools

2009-11-30T13:16:00.000-05:00

From the December, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.
www.labornotes.org/2009/12/tired-teacher-bashing-union-educators-grow-their-own-schools

Attacked daily as the biggest roadblock to improving public education, union teachers have their work cut out for them, both in the classroom and in the court of public opinion.

They responded this fall, opening their own schools in two cities.

“Teachers have been getting the most blame and the most responsibility and the least amount of decision-making power,” says Lori Nazareno, who leads a new teacher-run school in Denver.

Teachers in Boston have their own school, too, and educators in Los Angeles are pushing for community-centered models—all while a hurricane of teacher-bashing is pushed ahead by school privatizers, the press, and Obama administration policy.

TEACHERS RULE

Three grades of the Boston Teachers Union School opened up two months ago. The young school, which will expand to K-8 by 2012, is part of the city’s controversial pilot school program dating from 1994.

The BTU, the school district, and the mayor initiated pilot schools in order to head off the rise of privately managed, publicly funded charter schools, which Massachusetts had approved earlier that year.

But the schools have been a point of contention ever since. A years-long battle between union and district ended in 2006 when the union won more paid hours for teachers, and in turn agreed to approve seven more pilot schools—including a union-run school.

Before it was all over, though, the union had taken a beating in the local press. “They kept calling me an ogre standing in the way of progress,” says Richard Stutman, BTU president.

The union now must prove that teachers can run a successful school—and one where work rules and quality education aren’t cast in opposition.

The school follows in the pilot school traditions of a longer school day and a less-scripted curriculum. But unlike its fellow pilots, the BTU hires solely from inside the district and enrolls students randomly from its section of the city. The school also pays teachers for working the longer day—a point of pride for the union.

The major difference at the BTU school is the lack of a principal. Teacher-leaders run the show, making all long-term decisions by consensus. “Anything that doesn’t have to be done today will be decided by a collective,” says Stutman.

As for the union contract, teachers are in the bargaining unit and work under nearly the same contract, but have a different relationship to it. After all, they’re the boss—to a degree.

Standardized tests remain the rubric for success, as they do throughout the education system. Stutman says the testing regime is easily manipulated by the city’s charters—which tout higher scores than district high schools but cherry-pick students and have what he calls “high eviction rates.”

Elementary charter schools, which can’t select their students, show no improvement in scores over district schools.

Stutman says that because teachers have more creative control, the new school will rate highly by any measure. But as its students enter grades that take state-administered standardized tests, the curriculum will inevitably bend toward test prep.

While Boston’s teacher-leaders aren’t yet burning bubble sheets, the development of teacher-run institutions itself signals a seismic shift.

SMOOTH START IN THE ROCKIES

Union teachers are at the helm at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy. Members of the Classroom Teachers Association (a National Education Association affiliate) jumped at the chance to run their own school when the city began taking proposals for new educational models three years ago.

After 19 years of teaching in Miami, Lori Nazareno moved to Denver and became the lead teacher at MSLA, an elementary school with 130 students, grades K-2.

The school’s 12 teachers sit on decision-making committees that develop curriculum, professional development plans, and a vision of the school’s culture. The two lead teachers still teach two hours a day. “We designed it, we put this together, and we’re running it,” says Nazareno. “Everybody gets that it’s our responsibility.”

The school draws students by lottery from a working-class neighborhood on Denver’s southwest side, composed largely of first-generation Mexican, Somali, and Korean families. Sixty percent of its students are English-language learners, and up to 90 percent receive reduced-fee lunches.

Though they’ve maintained the district’s curriculum for math, science, and literacy, MSLA teachers take different approaches to teaching. For example, every Friday students undertake “serv-ice learning” projects that promote engagement with the community and teach skills through programs on renewable energy, hunger, and homelessness.

Teachers work under the local contract, but they waived provisions outlining a principal’s powers. At MSLA, educators assess each other.

And they’ve already shown that schools in less affluent neighborhoods can attract good teachers with the promise of more ownership. The school fielded around 30 applications for each position, and is already receiving dozens more for next year, when the academy adds a grade.

LA SCHOOLS IN THE BALANCE

In Los Angeles, the school board accepted bids in November for the management of 36 schools. The schools include 12 existing sites deemed low-performing as well as 24 new ones set to open in the next year to relieve overcrowding.

Charter companies are in a frenzy to snap up the sites, but the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is organizing with teachers and parents to keep them at bay.

UTLA gathered teachers and parents (and administrators) of the low-performing schools at union headquarters. There they wrote proposals for how they would transform their schools.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines will evaluate the proposals, consider teacher and parent votes at schools (and student votes at high schools), and make a recommendation to the school board in January.

However, final decisions will be made in February by the charter-friendly school board that approved the school-bidding idea in the first place.

The process will repeat for the next several years, as 300 LA schools come in for some form of shake-up.

Teams of union reps are trying to seize that opening to develop proposals with each school’s community. Though there’s no talk of a UTLA-run school yet, the union is pushing for greater autonomy for teachers and parents.

The union already has collaborated with the district on a variety of “alternative” schools that allow greater local control over a school’s curriculum, budget, and staffing.

“Parents are getting active, and it’s not just the union talking to parents, it’s parents organizing with each other,” says Ingrid Villeda, a UTLA rep working on proposals. Teams of parents are going door to door to build support for a community-centered model.

OBAMA CRACKS THE WHIP

While teacher-run schools make strides in autonomy, creativity, and collective decision-making, they haven’t yet found a way to determine their own measures of success—a struggle that will continue during President Obama’s tenure.

The U.S. Department of Education released final rules in November for the contest over $4.5 billion in federal education aid. The money rewards states and districts that tie teacher evaluations and pay to student performance on standardized tests.

While Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently toned down his teacher-bashing, the White House’s rules are no friendlier. Obama’s “Race to the Top” program requires districts to close low-performing schools, many of which will reopen after firing and replacing the entire teaching staff.

UNITE HERE Keep Rising Against Big Hotels

2009-10-28T21:55:00.000-04:00

From the November, 2009 Issue of Labor Notes. www.paulabowd.blogspot.com

As dozens of contracts with hotel giants Hyatt, Hilton, Marriott, and Starwood expired in three cities in late summer, UNITE HERE launched another round of battles over health care, pay, and working conditions. The union’s nationally coordinated contract campaign—known as Hotel Workers Rising—centers on building “bargain to organize” deals in its Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles hubs that will allow it to expand while raising contract standards.

The union scored bargaining and organizing victories in 2006 after fighting to line up contract expiration dates for 60,000 workers in six cities.

This year’s showdown finds hotel workers, and their union, at a moment of truth. The hotel giants are making unprecedented attempts to cut health benefits and up workloads in the recession, while the union is opening new organizing fronts that highlight stark contrasts between union and non-union working conditions.

The campaign this year has been hampered, though, by the March split in UNITE HERE, as its former laundry and textile division left and joined the Service Employees (SEIU). The resulting convulsion of raiding and counter-raiding has forced UNITE HERE to siphon staff from Hotel Workers Rising, most recently to battle over cafeteria workers in Philadelphia. (Update: UNITE HERE's Local 634 won a recent NLRB election 2 to 1, despite being outmatched by a heavy SEIU staff invasion.

BOSTON’S HYATT 100

This year’s target, Hyatt hotels, hasn’t done much to bolster its public image lately: in late August it replaced 98 housekeepers at three non-union Hyatts in Boston with workers hired through a subcontractor at half the pay.

The company wasn’t banking on non-union workers resisting nor on their getting the support of UNITE HERE Local 26. Nearly all the workers met with the union, which strongly backed their fight. Within weeks of the firings, UNITE HERE had held protests nationwide in front of Hyatt hotels, demanding the “Hyatt 100’s” reinstatement.

The company scrambled, offering workers health care through the end of the year and one-year jobs with a temp agency at their former wages.

Workers rejected the offer, saying they didn’t want to replace other workers just as they’d been replaced. Instead, they joined 1,000 demonstrators who gathered in a Jobs with Justice-sponsored, bagpipe-led “march for jobs” October 1 that culminated outside the downtown Hyatt.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick called a statewide boycott of Hyatt, echoed by Boston’s city council and heeded by the city’s cab drivers’ union and dozens of others who switched their reservations in protest.

NATIONAL TOUR

While Local 26 targeted organizations that had events booked with Hyatt, Boston workers hit the road. The nationwide tour of six cities where the union is organizing began at a rally in Long Beach, where housekeeper Corpornia Belis wept recounting her abrupt dismissal after 25 years of service.

“My shoulders, my back, my knees stayed in that hotel,” she said. “And what did they give me? A garbage bag so that I could empty out my locker.”

The tour dovetails with contract fights in Chicago and San Francisco, where the union staged civil disobedience actions as a first escalation over dozens of contracts in the two cities.

Hotel business is off during the recession, but companies are hardly in line for a bailout. The industry has garnered $200 billion in profits in a decade. Hyatt is squealing about a $36 million loss in early 2009, but raked in $1.3 billion over the last four years. Starwood, Marriott, and Intercontinental are all still making money while asking workers to pony up.

NOT AFRAID IN CHICAGO

Boston workers arrived in Chicago, where Local 1 is fighting over 30 hotel contracts. “Me-too” rules dictate that the city’s smaller hotels, also with open contracts, follow the agreements hammered out by the major chains.

Hours after Chicago filled several police buses, San Francisco’s Local 2 followed in kind. At two downtown hotels, 1,700 showed up for an action that has sparked a series of smaller pickets.

After rallying outside the Grand Hyatt, Lorna Villanueva and dozens of her co-workers pushed further, taking over the lobby before getting locked up. Ninety-two were arrested, including Villanueva, a 36-year veteran room inspector—who chalked up her fifth protest arrest. This time, she says, the action was to protect future workers from the companies’ two-tier proposals. “We don’t leave anybody behind,” she said.

Talks over a citywide contract continue, with a 14-hotel multi-employer group covering 9,000 workers. One goal of the campaign is to win organizing rights at three city hotels, where drives are at a tipping point.

Hotels are putting the squeeze on. Ringo Mak, a veteran room service attendant, says the Hilton raised prices for the service so high that customers won’t use it—and then cut the department staff in half. “Everyone in the hotel besides the CEO is hurting,” he said.

Mak’s picking up extra hours serving in the hotel restaurant, and, for now, can maintain his family’s medical coverage even with reduced hours. Hilton wants to freeze its pension contributions and eliminate retiree health care.

Villanueva says frontline managers are playing nice while company negotiators lay down a hard line—a strategy that members recall from their 2004 strike and lockout, when a general manager brought breakfast to the picket lines. “Nobody touched the coffee or the donuts,” says Villanueva. “We buy our own food.”

Members continue their increased contributions to the strike fund, as they have for months. “The hotel lost a lot of money in the last contract fight,” says Mak. “I hope they learn their lesson.”

EXPANSION PLANS

UNITE HERE has achieved 90 percent density in New York and San Francisco through deals ensuring card check at newly built hotels. The union is also devoting resources to several “breakthrough markets” with low union density: Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, and San Antonio, and those with none: Long Beach and Indianapolis.

The Boston workers made a stop in San Antonio, where a tumultuous organizing drive has stretched out over a year. Worker-leaders who haven’t been fired are getting assigned higher workloads than co-workers. If company intimidation weren’t enough, SEIU showed up to disrupt the drive.

UNITE HERE presented cards from a majority of workers last spring, but SEIU organizers flew in, claiming to be the real bargaining representative—despite having no contact with the worker committee. Hyatt happily obliged SEIU’s request for closed-door meetings, which drew worker protests inside the hotel.

Eventually the NLRB called an election with both unions and “no union” on the ballot. SEIU pulled its staff out before the election, and in July UNITE HERE called off the vote.

Back to square one, Hyatt workers are pressuring the city council to support unionization at the hotel, which was constructed with city incentives on city land. They’re also hoping the nationwide campaign will tip their drive over the top.

While local committees build muscle and multiply, the International is trying to swing organizing deals with the chains. The union reached agreements in 2006 with Starwood and Hilton (where it has the highest density), laying out a broad framework for new organizing rights. This year’s target, Hyatt, is not amenable to such talks.

UNITE HERE researchers say that upwards of 80 percent of hotel workers are still without a union, but 14,000 have joined in 35 metropolitan areas in the last five years—a 14.5 percent gain.

The union is challenged on three fronts: battling global corporations in a recession, keeping a rival union at bay, and creating a culture where hotel workers are at the fore of a democratic union.

Though a loyal membership has repeatedly shown its willingness to confront management, some of the union’s former organizers are raising concerns about the degree of rank-and-file involvement in decisions shaping local campaigns.

In a public letter, a group of ex-organizers at San Francisco hotels challenged UNITE HERE to make good on its professed “bottom-up” strategy, decreasing staff’s role and opening more space for worker control as contracts expire in several major cities next year.

Teacher Reformers Prepare for Battle over Public Education

2009-10-13T20:44:00.000-04:00

http://paulabowd.blogspot.com/

When President Obama laid out his plan to reshape public education this summer, he wasn’t subtle with his symbolism: he was introduced by an eighth-grader from a charter school. Soon after, teacher activists from LA, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., met in Los Angeles. The reformers shared strategies to build union caucuses with parents that shape an alternative to the federal education plan as it takes form in each city.

The president’s “Race to the Top” fund, championed by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, promises billions in federal dollars to cash-strapped states. But there will be “winners and losers,” Obama says.

The unprecedented payout takes a bead on the teachers unions: money will flow to districts that alter pay and seniority provisions in union contracts and states that roll out the carpet for (mostly non-union) charter schools.

The reformers will meet again in October for a workshop on gearing up their unions to fight. They’ll organize forums and joint press releases in each city before the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Seattle next year—where they will bring a vision of education reform that puts educators, not “education management organizations,” in the driver’s seat.

LOS ANGELES: FRONT LINE FOR CHARTERS

Nonprofit and private charter school operators stand to make big gains from the federal incentive package. Several states have already amended their laws to expand charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed.

The Los Angeles Unified School District took a big step in that direction in August. Charter operators and other groups will get a crack at running 250 city schools—including 50 brand new, taxpayer-funded buildings.

“They got just what they didn’t have: real estate,” says Alex Caputo-Pearl, a United Teachers Los Angeles board member.

Since 2005, a reform coalition has run UTLA, bolstered by growing rank-and-file engagement in various caucuses, including the Progressive Educators for Action, which helped propel the current leadership into power.

The union has fought hard against layoffs, charters, and cuts to funding and health care benefits—and also internally, over union strategy. Teachers from several LA caucuses joined the July sessions, including some who launched hunger strikes against layoffs and criticized union leaders’ cancellation of a planned one-day strike in May. Some caucus members say the union’s effort to stem the charter tide was too little, too late.

All agree that UTLA’s focus needs to center on charters—and fast. Proposals for the first round of new schools are due by November, giving charter operators with ready-made proposal templates a distinct advantage.

UTLA Vice President Joshua Pechthalt says the union is moving on a multi-faceted plan as bidding season opens, including possible legal challenges to the motion, which does not honor district rules ensuring teachers and parents a deciding vote on any charter conversion. Instead, the school superintendent will recommend bidders to the school board.

UTLA contract language ensures teachers will be union in any new school built to relieve overcrowding, but it’s still unclear whether the board plans to respect that.

LA has the most charters in the nation, and adding hundreds more threatens to erode enrollment in public schools (which affects their funding) as well as union strength.

The union is focused on organizing charters, following a victory this spring at Accelerated Charter, where teachers approached UTLA about joining up.

Union leaders are also working with teachers at schools targeted for conversion, and plan to put in their own bids for union-run schools (the Boston AFT local just opened its first this year).

Pechthalt says the teacher-led vision “is not rocket science.” It entails democratic control over budgets and curriculum that teachers, parents, and administrators can tailor to the school site. Past attempts to publicize such plans in the face of rampant teacher-bashing in the media, however, have been difficult.

“We have to improve on that,” says Pechthalt, “so that after a few months people can say, ‘I agree with the teachers’ vision for schools.’”

CHICAGO: ACTIVISTS ‘EVERYWHERE’

In a gentrifying Latino neighborhood in Chicago, Kristine Mayle learned firsthand about the “renaissance” Obama’s Department of Education wants to bring to the rest of the nation.

The district shut down the award-winning De La Cruz middle school where she worked until last year, citing low enrollment and the need for major renovations—only to lease the building to the charter operator United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) a year later for $1.

Community organizations and parents from a feeder elementary school led hearings, and fought to extend De La Cruz’s life. But the district, which had already authorized UNO schools in the area, was intent on the operator, despite its promise not to reopen the building for charter use.

“On the last day of school, the board sent workers to fix our basement floor—which had been leaking for years,” Mayle says.
UNO has a reputation for cherry-picking students—Mayle says UNO students were routinely kicked back to her school. And the operator hires very few special education teachers, failing to maintain De La Cruz’s legacy as a highly touted special ed provider.

BORN IN CHICAGO

Duncan’s national initiative was born in Chicago, where charters continue to expand under a privatization plan he brokered as schools chief in 2004.

The Chicago Teachers Union has lost 6,000 members and 70 neighborhood schools have closed since 2001, making a new law that expands charter schools in the city especially foreboding.
“There really was no pushback from the CTU at the onset of this program, and now we have to play catch-up,” said Kenzo Shibata of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE).

“We've been fighting this from the beginning,” said CTU chief of staff John Ostenburg, noting the union’s yearly actions against closings, and its stalled push in the statehouse for a moratorium on Duncan’s plan.

The AFT-affiliated CTU negotiated card check rights at new charters, and the local recently organized several campuses of the state’s largest operator.

Several CORE members were at the LA meeting. Originally formed in spring 2008 to push the CTU to stand up to the city’s school restructuring plan, the youthful caucus grew quickly, becoming a viable challenger to CTU’s incumbents in next May’s election.

CORE’s website offers news and grievance forms, and features its candidates for pension trustee, who promise to forestall plans to slash the teachers’ fund. Members are active on Chicago-area news and blog comment sections, an attempt to counter teacher-bashing. And Shibata says a “Twitter army” posts live reports from school board meetings and teacher actions. “We’re everywhere,” he says.

Over the winter, teachers worked with the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a collection of community organizations and parent groups, turning out more than a thousand people to protest 22 slated school closures.

“The CTU finally joined the protest, and then released a flyer to delegates saying they organized it,” says Shibata. “Either way, we got them out, and won a big victory.” The board decided not to close six schools.

NEW YORK: TWO FLOORS, TWO TIERS

Charters are knocking on the door at dozens of New York schools too, regardless of reputation. Public School 123, for example, now shares a building with Harlem Success Academy, after the city’s Department of Education (DOE) forced the elementary school (good test scores and all) to relinquish its third floor to the charter operator.

Over the summer, HSA hired contractors to dismantle classrooms while district dollars paid for renovations—of HSA’s floor only. Parents and teachers gathered outside, chanting, “Paint the whole school!”

When classes began in September, teachers and parents protested again after finding the school in disarray: movers had piled teachers’ equipment into unmarked boxes to make way for HSA. A special education class was moved to a dusty basement, and other classes were pushed into the library.

HSA hums a floor above the chaos.

“The charters just tell the city they need more space,” says Brian Jones, a teacher activist, “and the DOE is doing back-flips to make it happen.”

The charter companies focus on New York’s largely Black neighborhoods. “You don’t see charter conversions happening on the Upper East Side,” Jones says. They are exploiting a legacy of racial tension that has festered within the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) since 1968, when the union went on strike to protest attempts by African-American communities to take more control over school management and curriculum.

A handful of reform groups continue to chip away at the UFT’s ruling Unity caucus, in power for four decades. Sally Lee of Teachers Unite, which organizes workshops on the union and workplace rights, says decades of Unity caucus rule have made the union either an enigma or a stigma for new teachers—who see themselves more as individual activists in their classrooms.

“We can only address this system by collectively organizing,” says Lee, whose organization primes new teachers to run for chapter chair. “And guess what? We already have this powerful teacher organization to do it.”

Lee and other New York teachers shared cautionary tales at the LA meeting about AFT President Randi Weingarten. As president of the New York local, she negotiated a 2005 contract that included merit pay and the oddly-named “mutual consent,” which allows principals to ignore seniority when filling open teaching positions.

As charters grow from inside public schools, they hire non-union teachers, increasing the ranks of displaced veteran teachers. When the contract opens in October, city leaders will push hard to fire teachers who can’t land a job after a year.
D.C. AND DETROIT: SECRET TALKS

The takeover has been achieved quietly in Detroit and D.C., where around half of school kids in each city are now enrolled in charters.

Under the emergency control of a state-appointed manager, Detroit opened 29 fewer schools this fall and put many high schools under control of private management groups.

The next target is the teachers’ contract. Proposed 10 percent wage cuts, elimination of step increases, and increased fines for work stoppages from $250 to $7,500 per day drew thousands of Detroit teachers to protest in late August. Talk of a strike circulated.

The union leadership agreed instead to extend contract talks until the end of October—a delay that’s become familiar for teachers in D.C. A small, outspoken group of teachers and union officials there has challenged the threat of a concessionary contract for two years.

Vice President Nathan Saunders and Trustee Candi Peterson have criticized President George Parker (and Weingarten, who joined the D.C. talks over the winter) for keeping teachers out of the loop and failing to mobilize rank-and-file pressure against schools chief Michelle Rhee. The teacher activists drew Parker’s ire this fall for publicizing details of a draft contract, which included plans for large buyouts of veteran teachers and a “mutual consent” provision like New York’s.

Union leaders at the LA meeting shared strategies for caucus building with Saunders, who is gearing up for an election run in 2010. Upon return, the D.C. duo pre-empted Rhee’s announcement of coming layoffs, calling the community to join rank-and-file educators at a protest in front of district offices.

Wherever the Secretary of Education has sold his “reforms,” large chunks of public money have disappeared into private hands—and local unions find themselves under siege. Weingarten has maintained her signature openness to it all, as long as reforms remain fair for teachers and good for students. The National Education Association, by contrast, came right out and said it: Obama’s plan for more charters, more reliance on test scores, and more union concessions, does neither.

Duncan has stumped for his plan coast to coast. Teacher reformers, now equipped with a fledgling network of activists, aren’t waiting any longer to go national themselves.

"You Lie!"

2009-09-10T22:51:00.000-04:00

Last night's "you lie!" outburst is pretty weak tea compared to this (which is also far more entertaining):

All the time and energy spent decrying Joe Wilson's "bad manners" makes clear that our mainstream political discourse is not only deadened by protocol, but also more concerned with maintaining an appearance of "civility" than with maintaining a civilization.

Instead of spending a day considering the merits of including 12 million "illegal" immigrants in a universal health care plan, the media's too eager to focus on some loud-mouthed congressman from South Carolina, whose politics are undoubtedly more offensive than his lack of decorum.

More than a few Democrats are to blame for not displaying Wilson's gusto while Bush stood at the same podium, spinning tales about enriched uranium.

Food Service Workers Buck Secret Organizing Deals

2009-09-03T22:49:00.000-04:00

From the September, 2009 issue of Labor Notes

A delegation of U.S. food service workers flew to the Paris headquarters of their employer Sodexo last winter, delivering petitions against the company’s anti-union practices. They also took to the streets, joining French food service workers in the general strike rippling through the country. For one of the Americans, a member of Service Workers United, the act of solidarity abroad would have been a breach of contract back home.

UNITE HERE and the Service Employees (SEIU) had formed the joint union called Service Workers United, or SWU, in 2005. In secret talks with multinational food service giants Sodexo, Compass, and Aramark, the new union traded a lot—including workers’ right to strike—for contracts in a low-wage, hard-to-organize industry dominated by the “Big 3.” Aramark dropped out of the talks, but made a separate pact later that year.

To seal the unprecedented deals, contract standards were settled before the first worker signed a card. Workers faced termination if they slowed down or picketed. Conflicts over terms of the agreement would go before a national labor-management committee instead.

The companies, which have contracts to run cafeterias and concessions in schools, stadiums, and corporate offices, reserved the right to choose where the union would organize, and how many total members could join.

Sodexo capped organizing at 11,000 workers and Compass at 20,000 through 2008. Despite that, federal filings show that the union had just 6,000 members last year.

The Big 3 scattered approved organizing sites across the country and forced the union to pull the plug on other drives. The union could reject a site management selected, but it would still count against the quota. The companies also established separate expiration dates for each shop, atomizing members’ bargaining power.

Four years later, the deals with management have collapsed, UNITE HERE and SEIU are embroiled in conflict, and restless food service workers aren’t waiting for distant leaders to come to their rescue.

BOILERPLATE CONTRACTS

As lead negotiator in the 2005 talks, then-UNITE HERE president Bruce Raynor fashioned a national “boilerplate” contract for all SWU members. The new union, christened UNITE HERE Local 2552, set up in the International’s Manhattan headquarters. The office opened a “Workers’ Resource Center,” an 800 number workers were to call for step two grievances. The “national local” assigned each worksite a representative from the nearest UNITE HERE or SEIU local to work with stewards and bargain contracts.

Since details went public last year, the SWU deal has been used to both exalt and disparage organizing-by-partnership models. “We’re dealing with companies that don’t make decisions in our community; they make decisions in their central offices,” said Raynor, in a union video. “And the union has got to have the scope and power to match up with that company.”

Jim Dupont, a former SWU negotiator and now head of UNITE HERE’s Laundry and Food Service division, says SWU’s terms curtailed workers’ ability to fight the boss. “SEIU’s definition of partnership is you do what the company wants,” he says. “Our definition is, you’re treated as an equal.”

After the 2005 deal was struck, hundreds of workers like Daqwell Carrasquillo got called into meetings with their employers where SWU organizers asked them to sign union cards. Now a steward at Blue Cross Blue Shield’s cafeteria outside New York City, Carrasquillo said workers eagerly agreed, and days later had a first contract modeled on the national template. It included job security and seniority language, wage increases, health care, and pensions.

It was an improvement from the non-union days, but well below the standards of other unionized food service workers.

At Chicago’s UNITE HERE Local 1, food service contracts are “very much a work in progress,” according to organizers. Their stronger contracts peg starting pay at $13 an hour. A hundred SWU members at a DePaul University cafeteria, meanwhile, start at $9.25. Under the 2005 deal, companies agreed to pay members at least 50 cents above minimum wage.

Before SWU was formed, UNITE HERE Local 100 represented about half of Aramark food service workers in New York City. President Bill Granfield viewed SWU with cautious optimism. “We didn’t expect SWU members to fall in and hit our standards right away, but we were going to get a bunch more people in,” he said.

The crown jewel of Local 100 contracts, full family health coverage, is a far cry from what their fellow members at SWU have achieved. New York’s SWU members, with salaries around $20,000, pay monthly contributions of up to $400 for family plans.

Four years later, standards nationwide haven’t risen, and the merits of SWU are under fire from members. Carrasquillo and his co-workers haven’t had a raise since 2007, and when they violated the SWU agreement by leafleting outside work for better terms, the company called police.

Now in talks over a second contract, Carrasquillo says the company won’t budge. “Sodexo is cocky,” he says. “They come right out and tell us SWU already agreed to boilerplate contracts, and we can’t change it. But I never voted on anything.”

BREAKDOWN

Granfield says his local planned to break out of the template agreements but SWU leaders haven’t supported his bid. “The local negotiations have been totally limited by the framework at the top,” he says. “We wanted to make strides in second contracts, but that was not SWU’s program. That’s when we started getting angry.”

UNITE HERE’s conventional contracts with Aramark were expiring in late 2007, right as the union and company bargained a new national agreement for SWU. SEIU joined UNITE HERE in a nationwide campaign: strikes erupted in Granfield’s New York local, as well as at UNITE HERE shops in Vancouver, Ontario, and Boston, adding leverage to the SWU talks. SEIU pushed new organizing drives against the company.

Soon after, in summer 2008, Raynor struck an organizing deal with Aramark that UNITE HERE leaders criticize. Dupont says he was kept out of the room while Raynor allowed the company to maintain control over new organizing, forcing SEIU to interrupt an Aramark drive in Houston.

Raynor’s Aramark deal—which later fell apart—added fuel to burning divisions within the union that blew up in March, when he pulled 100,000 members out of UNITE HERE and into an affiliation with SEIU.

But the feuders remained attached at the hip by their joint union, and haven’t accepted a mediator’s proposal to settle food service jurisdiction geographically.

SWU’s leadership is now a part of UNITE HERE only in name. Its two appointed leaders, one from SEIU and one from UNITE HERE, both supported the March exodus. They’ve been reassigning servicing of SWU members to SEIU locals, strengthening the Service Employees’ presence in the industry. Currently, UNITE HERE claims 60,000 food service members nationwide—SEIU has far fewer.

There’s emerging anger in the ranks about SWU. After Carrasquillo filed five grievances through SWU’s call center that weren’t resolved, he picked up the phone again, joining national conference calls with other SWU members two years ago. At UNITE HERE’s June convention he presented a petition signed by 1,000 members demanding a SWU bill of rights. The call for local control, elected leaders, and an end to backroom deals passed, but has no binding effect.

PARTNERING UP

SWU leaders say no national deals currently exist (Compass and Sodexo have failed to give permission for new units), and that the UNITE HERE split has disrupted attempts to resume talks with the Big 3 over new card check arrangements.

They echo SEIU’s call for a settlement so companies can no longer use the rift as an excuse to keep dues in escrow, stall contract talks, and block new organizing. UNITE HERE leaders have sued over the split, willing to pursue a protracted legal process.
“If it takes a long time stop the growth of this corporate unionism, then so be it,” says Dupont.

Raynor calls SWU the most successful private sector organizing project labor’s seen in years—and a model for the future. SWU President Kurt Edelman says the union is mobilizing members (dozens just met in D.C. to lobby for a child nutrition bill) while organizing new ones. Acknowledging lagging contract standards, he hastens to add: “They’re better than what people would get without a union.”

UNITE HERE blasts that idea, pointing to its approach to hotel chains, where a coordinated campaign of strikes and mobilization won new card checks—and contracts that didn’t drag down industry standards.

Four years ago, UNITE HERE and SEIU were on the same page. They left the AFL-CIO, signing partnerships with food-service CEOs soon after. SWU, Dupont says, actually sprang from Wilhelm’s idea to combine the two unions’ efforts at common, institutional workplaces.

But what to do once the deal was signed divided the unions. UNITE HERE leaders saw SWU as a temporary project and claim the two unions had agreed to phase it out. Raynor and Stern want to preserve SWU and the employer-approved approach that gave it legs. Now, UNITE HERE intends to make sure that SWU doesn’t expand.

“We’re not going to let them enter this jurisdiction and be the company’s favorite cheap alternative,” Dupont says. “They want to be the Wal-Mart of unions.”

Chicago Charter Teachers Score First Win

2009-07-27T11:57:00.000-04:00

From the August, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.
http://labornotes.org/node/2346

It’s an oxymoron no longer: charter schools are unionizing.

Pioneering teachers and staff sealed an overdue victory in June at three Chicago International Charter Schools, the state’s largest charter operator.

Although the schools run primarily on public dollars—and Illinois allows public sector employees to unionize by card check—management rejected cards signed by 75 percent of employees in April. The charter operator argued that its unelected board of directors was not “responsible to public officials or to the general electorate.” CICS forced a Labor Board vote, battling for two months until workers voted 73-49 to unionize anyway.

When he championed charters as labs of educational innovation, former American Federation of Teachers(AFT) President Al Shanker thought they’d be organized. Two decades later, nearly all charter operators—despite varied teaching methods and missions—agree on one thing: teachers should be non-union.

Teacher unions now acknowledge charters have become a fact of life, and few would argue against organizing their teachers. But debate rages over how, and whether, to manage charters’ spread.

The AFT says charters work when they’re teacher-driven schools that share innovations with district schools, when the public can exercise oversight, and when teachers can join unions.

The schools have not succeeded by these measures but continue to expand, especially in urban districts. So that’s where the AFT is concentrating attention, picking up wins in Florida, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles.

Instead of fighting tooth and nail to undermine charters, which have steadily chipped away at union ranks and siphoned off public dollars from traditional schools, the union has committed itself, even if belatedly, to organizing their tens of thousands of teachers.

They’ve got their work cut out for them: only around 80 of 4,600 charters are organized nationwide.

EDUCATE, ORGANIZE

In Chicago, teachers began to see their vulnerability to the boss’s whims as a flaw in the school’s educational model. At Northtown High School, workers called meetings when the school’s former CEO—who had no background in education—announced instructors would teach an additional class but be paid the same.

And instead of summer school, teachers would instruct failing students during night school. “If we didn’t like it, they basically told us ‘there’s the door,’” said Emily Mueller, a Spanish teacher.

Teacher turnover was high: “at will” employees were quickly booted, and other teachers simply left, overworked, underpaid, and kept at arm’s length from many curriculum decisions. The founding core of teachers dwindled. At Ellison High, only six of 20 teachers returned to the classroom last year.

To squelch the organizing drive, CICS used both stick and carrot. Two members of the school’s board, lawyers at a Chicago firm specializing in “union avoidance efforts” for groups “whose business is education,” came in with another anti-union consultant to fight the drive.

CICS made nice, too, hiring a new CEO who reversed the class load increase and reinstituted summer school, but opposed the union, calling it a threat to school autonomy—presumably his.

Most teachers had set their sights beyond immediate management regardless. “This drive was about creating a culture in our school where teachers will stick around for years, and have a formal voice in our school no matter what CEO comes along,” Mueller said.

In talks beginning this summer, teachers seek higher wages (entry salaries are several thousand dollars lower than district teachers’) and due process (but not the formal tenure system that exists in district schools), hoping that both help retain committed teachers.

They also want more control over curriculum, but making fundamental changes could be tough. Teachers at CICS are told to prep students on specific parts of standardized tests, which comes at the expense of basic educational needs—like supplies for other classes.

“I was told I’m not a social science teacher, I’m a reading teacher,” says Ellison teacher Jennifer Gilley. “It’s ironic because I taught three classes and only one of them came with a book.”

A TEACHER IS A TEACHER

The Chicago Teachers Union, AFT Local 1, has a conflicted relationship with the charters. Union reps were on hand last spring when charter teachers presented cards to their CEO, and CICS teachers received a warm reception from CTU delegates for breaking into non-union territory.

But a reform grouping within the CTU, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), is raising a ruckus.

“If you’re organizing the charters without taking a position on defending existing schools against charter proliferation and expansion, that’s a failed strategy,” says Jackson Potter of CORE.

CORE is targeting Secretary of education Arne Duncan, whose nationwide tour sailed through Chicago in June. He’s offering urban districts additional federal money if they give the mayor executive control over schools, extract concessions from teacher unions, and allow charters to expand.

The strategy is straight from Duncan’s tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where he hatched a plan that has closed nearly 70 neighborhood schools and established charters in their wake, promising to raise student achievement.

Five years later, a Stanford University study shows a majority of charter schools performing worse than or comparable to traditional public schools on standardized tests. Some in the AFT are calling for a moratorium on charters.

With strong parent and student involvement, CORE rallied to save six district schools from the gallows last winter. But other schools close, and charters keep opening in them—erasing the elected decision-making committees of students, teachers, and parents at each site.

A University of Chicago study—which Duncan’s corporate backers allegedly tried to suppress—shows the city’s charters under-serving special education students and English-language learners. And because of limits on enrollment, many kids are left without neighborhood school.

Though charter and district teachers refuse to succumb to divide and conquer tactics, CORE says existing union strategies are making divisions difficult to avoid.

WHERE TO FIGHT?

Just as teachers won at CICS, the Illinois Federation of Teachers negotiated a state law allowing 45 additional charters to set up in the city. Though they constitute only 3 percent of publicly funded schools nationwide, charters are 10 percent in Chicago, a share that will now rise again. IFT inserted provisions that beef up oversight of charters and allow charter teachers to organize under the state’s card-check provision for public employees.

The AFT’s organizing pitch is finding a growing audience among charter teachers, says Hugo Hernandez, an AFT staffer. The way to affect charters’ impact on education, he argues, is to bring them into the union. “If they would open the doors, we could find out what’s happening in these schools,” he said. “And to do that, we’re organizing.”

CORE wants the union to defend neighborhood schools and slow charter growth, but with the bludgeoning of teacher unions in the media, AFT is reluctant to fight Duncan’s strategy, which also has the blessing of the Obama White House.

Meanwhile, Chicago teachers—who’ve seen a 6,000-member drop in a decade—are bracing for another wave of non-union charters crashing into neighborhoods. “Perhaps they’re bargaining from a position of weakness,” Potter said of union leadership. “But that weakness is going to mean the end of us all before too long.”

Dancing with Death: "Waltz with Bashir"

2009-07-02T12:14:00.000-04:00

My review from the July/August, 2009 Issue of Against the Current.
Watch the film here:

(“Vals im Bashir” in Hebrew)
an animated documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman, 2008.

IT TOOK ARI Folman 25 years to make “Waltz With Bashir,” his animated film about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. First, he had to remember the war.

[For our own readers who don’t remember: The Israeli government under Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon under the pretext of driving the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) away from the Israel-Lebanon border. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) seized control of the entire country up to Beirut, culminating in a horrific slaughter of Palestinian refugees by Israel’s rightwing (“Phalangist”) Lebanese allies and a bloody 20-year Israeli occupation of the south of the country — ed.]

Folman was 19 during his stint with the IDF in Beirut, stationed a few hundred yards from the massacres of hundreds (some claim thousands) of Palestinians in the city’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. In the film’s opening scene a graying Folman listens to his war comrade Boaz tell of a recurring nightmare: the 26 guard dogs he killed during the invasion hound his sleep.

Folman, for his part, says he recalls almost nothing about the war: “It’s not in my system,” he tells Boaz.

At the advice of a therapist friend (Folman underwent analysis while making the film), he seeks out friends who saw combat. Their stories become flashbacks that fill the animated documentary, as Folman, hounded by a troubling lack of memory, tries to piece together his own role in Ariel Sharon’s butchering of Beirut.

We're tempted to ask: Why did it take so long to remember? But on top of the widely experienced suppression of war trauma, Folman's forgetting is helped along by a willful amnesia that's inseparable from Israel's national story. Denying a catastrophe is required to celebrate independence. Founding mother Golda Meir maintained that Palestinians “did not exist.” Charitably, the Israeli officialdom “neither confirms nor denies” the existence of its nuclear arsenal.

Folman hasn’t forgotten alone. He places himself in the film to confront this denial, opening questions about his past before the Israeli public.

White phosphorous rained on Gaza while the film picked up awards worldwide. As it wrapped up its tour of the States, Israeli soldiers testified to war crimes during the early 2009 bombardment.

But “Waltz” doesn’t actively connect Folman’s narrative to a legacy of Israeli theft and brutality. Instead, it could offer those who share his guilt a deep sigh of release from the isolated incident, when Israel waltzed briefly with the Phalange as they passed through the IDF’s green light into the refugee camps.

Folman has maintained in interviews that the Lebanon war was wrong because it was not a “survival war,” like 1948 or 1967 — the land grabs defended as existential struggles. From this perspective comes “Waltz,” an antiwar — not anti-colonial — film. He illustrates the hellishness of this particular episode in the Israeli colonial project, but avoids the colonial dynamics of the violence, refusing to turn a critical glance toward Zionism itself.

Instead we’re thrown into Lebanon, 1982, without mention that the invasion marked the beginning of a long occupation of the South — and the eventual ascent of its criminal architect to Israel's top post.

The Animation Technique

Animation depicts the shakiness of memory and dreams, but also allows Forman some buffer from a reality he’s uncomfortable with. His combination of cartoon and documentary (drawing on interviews with war veterans) allows him to produce what is ultimately a highly interpretive film.

Just as the stories begin to construct a narrative of the real war, the animation pulls that foundation out from under us. With Folman as our guide, we’re pushed to accept his ambiguous relationship with the past, always threatening the question: Did any of this really happen?

Folman’s visits with army buddies reveal a common thread: they were all freaked out teenagers arriving in Lebanon. One young soldier arrived on shore, guns blazing out of trigger-rattling fear. He riddles a Mercedes with bullets, and then discovers a family inside.

Facing fire immediately from an unseen enemy, Folman and his crew return round after round into the infinite Arab void. “We’re shooting everywhere, at everything, until nightfall,” he says. The bullets from IDF guns are usually retaliatory. They kill a boy in the woods, but only after he appears with a gun twice his size, aiming straight for the Israelis.

The soldiers, gunned out and glad to be alive, get some R&R to cranked early eighties punk hits — drinking, smoking and playing on someone else’s beach. It’s impossible not to feel their fear, but equally difficult to find within the film any broader context for why they’ve been put in that situation to begin with. We rarely see, and hear even less from the “enemy,” remaining tied to the memories of Israeli veterans instead.

“Waltz” flirts with glorification of violence, as each empty shell falls to a beat. The movie’s “title track” scene features Frenkel, a former IDF soldier, now a shiny-skulled karate master. In a memory-recalled Beirut gun battle, he decides he can do better with his friend’s weapon. A Bach concerto shines through as Frenkel wrestles the gun away, and jumps into the street, firing mad martial brilliance, choreographing a graceful dodge and dance.

As the camera floats out above the street scene, Folman narrates. “He cursed the shooters. Like he wanted to stay there forever.” From a giant mural, Lebanon’s Christian President Bashir Gemayel — who had just been assassinated by rival factions — oversees the waltz, and it is beautiful.

[Bashir Gemayel, essentially installed in power by Israeli bayonets, showed an independent streak shortly before he was killed in circumstances that were never explained. His militia, consumed with revenge lust, were allowed by the Israeli Army to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian camps that had been evacuated by PLO fighters after an American-brokered pledge that the civilians would be protected. This context is not explained in the film, although some older Israeli viewers will understand it — ed.]

The Massacre

We can't discern from the film alone if Lebanon in 1982 was an isolated, nightmarish episode or a defining example of sustained military and colonial policy. Forman lets the viewer decide, opting for a more personal objective — to explore his own complicity in the massacres. A string of such flashbacks triggers Folman's own recollection of firing flares from a rooftop, lighting the nighttime sky for a Lebanese raid on the refugee camps.

The following morning, an Israeli officer arrives on the scene and prevents the Phalange from another round of revenge killings. “Stop the shooting!” he yells into a bullhorn. The scene is, again, open to interpretation: The IDF commanders are finally portrayed as the sole rational voice — their “mistake” was looking the other way too long. Or, despite the IDF’s supposed peripheral involvement in the massacre, the officer's command proves who was really calling the shots. Or for the more optimistic, it could be Folman's final argument that complicity is perpetration, while he exhorts Israelis (and Americans) to cut the supply lines.

But the film does not operate outward; instead the final flashback zooms inward, right at Folman's face as he surveys the aftermath of the massacre. Then, in a stunning transition, the animation drops away, and we’re left with the first real footage; piles of the dead, and the hysterical cries of Arab women. No doubt here: This did happen.

Still, the women’s words don’t carry subtitles, a fitting close to an ambiguous film. Folman acknowledges the gravity of the crime, while preventing us from hearing anything more than rage from its victims.

ATC 141, July/August 2009

D.C. Teachers Resist Attacks on Tenure

2009-05-27T21:47:00.000-04:00

From June, 2009 issue of Labor Notes.

Teachers and D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee haven’t agreed on much during 18 months of contract talks with the Washington Teachers Union (AFT), but there’s consensus on one point: any agreement will affect schools far beyond the capital.

Rhee’s proposal for record merit pay bonuses, combined with attacks on tenure, has landed her on the national stage, where she’s drawn praise from President Obama. The view from the classroom is less glowing.

“She’s got two years of teaching experience, and she’s telling the world how to save public education,” said Nancy Martell-Stephenson, a veteran teacher at Murch Elementary School.

The union is split, wracked with conflict over how to negotiate with a school chief keen on firing older teachers and bringing in younger replacements.

Union president George Parker has come under fire from the union’s executive board. Board members censured Parker last winter for lack of transparency in negotiations, and called on their own education policy icon, American Federation of Teachers national president Randi Weingarten.

She set an ambiguous tone upon arriving in D.C. this winter, proclaiming the AFT’s openness to nearly any reform of public schools—as long as it’s “good for children and fair for teachers.”

With AFT funding and counsel, the WTU rolled out a counterproposal in February offering more fanfare than facts. Parker and AFT staff gave a select group of teachers less than an hour to examine the thick proposal before putting it on Rhee’s desk.

“They rushed me through it,” said Candi Peterson, a building rep at Garfield Elementary. “It made me feel like, ‘what are you hiding here?’”

SCHMOKE AND MIRRORS

Rhee didn’t budge. The two sides recently called in an independent mediator, former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke.

Schmoke piloted several school privatization programs in the 1990s. His “Enterprise School” model created local decision-making boards, but included a “neighborhood representative” from private businesses. Three hundred companies signed on, in order to take advantage of relaxed rules for contracting school services without district oversight. In 1992 Schmoke placed nine public schools under the control of a private management firm.

The company slashed art, music, and physical education teachers, as well as special education classes, prompting a union outcry. Schmoke ended the program when student achievement failed to rise as promised. Toward the end of his tenure, he gave the state partial control over the city’s schools in exchange for a $250 million subsidy.

WORST PRACTICES

As mediation begins in D.C., tenure remains the deal-breaker.

Not just job security but academic freedom is at stake in the struggle over tenure, say teachers like Arthur Goldstein, a veteran ESL teacher in New York City. He has challenged administrators in the hallway and in the press, and said his principal screamed at him for talking to media. “He would have fired me if he could have,” Goldstein said.

Union activists say Weingarten is pushing “best practices” from other cities to resolve the D.C. deadlock. One of these comes from New York City and is called, oddly, “mutual consent.” It allows principals the power to disregard years of service when hiring for vacant teaching slots.

As president of New York’s teachers union, Weingarten negotiated a 2005 deal that introduced the rule, which has created a large pool of unemployed veteran teachers in New York. They still receive pay and benefits.

Their ranks have grown while principals fill vacancies with less experienced, lower-paid teachers. D.C. teachers who saw the local’s latest counterproposal say Weingarten has included “mutual consent” as a compromise to Rhee’s attack on job security. The chancellor’s five-year plan for the district proposes mass buyouts while calling on principals to identify underperforming teachers for dismissal.

Such a provision would undermine protections in the current contract that give preference for open positions to teachers with more experience.

Rhee, meanwhile, continues to work around the union. She’s used an obscure district law to place hundreds of teachers on 90-day evaluation plans—setting them up for dismissal by year’s end.

Some of Rhee’s most vocal opponents, like Jeff Canady, are on the chopping block. With 18 years of experience, Canady says his students’ high test scores (and his endorsements from city newspapers during a run for the school board) have not saved him from the 90-day plan.

Canady claims that administrators are now fudging his evaluations. “I’m a high-value target,” he said.

The plan sets up observations by school administrators for teachers who have “unsatisfactory” ratings on at least a third of their evaluation criteria. Canady has 90 school days to work with administrators to improve. Parker says teachers on the plans are not being given proper support, and the union will challenge dismissals on that basis.

But Canady says Parker is helping the district purge dissent within the union at a critical moment in negotiations. District officials denied Vice President Nathan Saunders his leave of absence to continue union work when Parker failed to sign forms, before relenting days later. Saunders, an outspoken critic of Parker, may challenge him for union president next year.

WHAT’S THE MERIT?

Rhee is dangling a privately funded merit pay plan with unprecedented bonuses in front of teachers, to get them to surrender tenure. District officials have raised concerns that they would not be able to fund Rhee’s enormous bonus offers (teachers could make up to $131,000 a year) if private donors pulled their support down the line.

The WTU supports school-wide and individual merit pay programs, but calls for an evaluation system that uses “performance scorecards” based in part on reviews from other teachers. Rhee wants to focus on test scores as the primary measure of student achievement. She’s forming her criteria for evaluation alongside ongoing talks, and has convened a series of meetings with teachers to get their feedback.

Weingarten’s knack for partnership with administrators has had some effect. Rhee has backed away from outright teacher-bashing, and rescinded a threat to pursue emergency legislation that would have freed her from contract obligations.

But the district’s buyout-and-firings plan remains intact. Rhee seeks to expand a “pipeline” for young teachers into the district, with the promise of big money. The plan also would close under-enrolled or low-performing schools and convert others to privately run “education management organizations,” a page taken from mediator Schmoke’s playbook.

Saunders says Weingarten and Parker have not mobilized members for aggressive action, choosing instead a radio ad campaign, leafleting at subway stops, and yard signs to garner public support for the union.

While talks inch along, Rhee continues to place teachers in jeopardy, betting on the support of the city government and media, which have largely bought her story that the union stands in the way of a groundbreaking plan.

“There is not one shred of evidence out there that shows what Rhee and the district are doing is effective,” says Canady. “But the district doesn’t need a contract, because Rhee’s got an award-winning fable.”

Del Ray Crib in the Hood

2009-04-26T21:35:00.001-04:00

On the way back from Toledo today, I got off 75 North a little early. I ended up in Del Ray.

Workers United Finds Membership Divided

2009-04-23T22:26:00.000-04:00

From the May, 2009 issue of Labor Notes
by Daniel Denvir and Paul Abowd

The 15 regional boards that seceded from UNITE HERE in March to create a new union in partnership with the Service Employees have not exactly made a clean break.

Allies of former UNITE President Bruce Raynor formed Workers United at a March 21 convention in Philadelphia, but not everyone in the city—much less the country—is on board.

Lynne Fox, president of the regional (or joint) board and a vice president of the new union, claims all 9,000 members in Philadelphia became part of Workers United. To prove member support, Fox and joint board staff are holding secret-ballot elections in dozens of shops, giving workers a choice: stay with UNITE HERE, or join the new partnership with SEIU. The premise for the breakaway campaign is member discontent. Still, several stay-or-go votes came weeks after the union’s founding, raising questions about its democratic bona fides.

“They’re acting more like a boss than a union,” said Doris Smith, president of a Philadelphia local representing public school food service workers which has opposed the breakaway union.

Regina James, a cafeteria worker, disagrees. She says UNITE leaders brought steward trainings and the local prospered when the joint board put the HERE local under trusteeship four years ago.

“UNITE HERE wants control of our local, and they’ll go back to using and abusing us again,” she added.

Most members don’t seem much involved. The joint board held a disaffiliation vote in mid-April, attracting 75 votes from 2,400 cafeteria workers. James says the 61-14 result proves workers want out of UNITE HERE.

But Workers United is bogged down with legal challenges and a member revolt within some shops. Hotel workers in the city say that a secret ballot vote to gauge workers’ support was tampered with, a claim the joint board rejects. “UNITE HERE won’t accept the election when it doesn’t go their way,” said Fox.

Workers United claims 150,000 members support the breakaway from the 450,000-strong International, headed by both Raynor and HERE leader John Wilhelm since their unions merged in 2004.

Civil war broke out when UNITE supporters realized that Raynor lacked the votes to remain in power at UNITE HERE’s upcoming convention. Leaders of the regional boards sued for divorce and headed for the door, attempting to take real estate and the Amalgamated Bank—which UNITE brought into the merger. Wilhelm says these assets became the International’s property after the two unions joined forces.

SEIU swooped in, offering to collect limited dues from Workers United members in exchange for organizing and legal support—essentially subsidizing the split. The two unions say they will organize among hotel and gaming workers in key HERE strongholds Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and elsewhere.

Wilhelm has filed suit against the secession attempt, a proceeding that will last for months.

WHO DO YOU LOVE?

Meanwhile, a battle for members’ hearts and minds continues. Workers United staff has launched a nationwide campaign using petitions and elections to prove popular support for the split. In New York and Pittsburgh, joint board officials claim overwhelming victories in large hotel locals.

But the breakaway attempt has encountered resistance in Philadelphia, where even joint board leaders were divided on whether or not to split.

The president of Philadelphia’s hotel workers union supports Workers United, citing a more stable financial future with SEIU, but members at the Radisson Hotel have bucked the new union. Corean Holloway, the local vice president, works in laundry at the Radisson, and says workers’ April 1 vote to stay with UNITE HERE was tampered with. The joint board claimed a 42-12 victory, but more than 30 workers at the hotel have since signed affidavits saying they voted to stay with UNITE HERE—a charge Fox calls a “baldfaced lie.”

Holloway says joint board staff told her to warn co-workers they would lose their union contract, pay dues increases, and face layoffs if they didn’t support the new union.

When Workers United officials postponed a scheduled vote at Philadelphia’s Hyatt hotel, workers supporting UNITE HERE gathered dozens of cards in lieu of an election. “People don’t want their dues funding the people trying to break up their union,” said Jamie Hamod, a steward and server.

Aaron Seiz, a host and bargaining committee member, says 112 out of 152 Hyatt workers had already signed a petition to remain with UNITE HERE. Fox doesn’t recognize those petitions, calling instead for a secret-ballot election. UNITE HERE says the elections have no legal bearing.

‘SLAP IN THE FACE’

Valerie Halls, a barista in the Hyatt lobby, calls the Workers United actions a “slap in the face, just two months after winning our contract.” Hyatt employees won a 16-month contract battle in February, while joint board officials were making plans to leave.

Before the split, workers received now-infamous purple flyers urging them to support the new union. After Workers United formed, Halls and others received robocalls and house visits from the union.

The joint board had pulled two of her co-workers off the job months ago. No one knew why until they appeared on house visits targeting workers less involved in the local.

The split from UNITE HERE has been all about speed. Raynor, with SEIU assistance, focused attacks on Wilhelm’s organizing methods, claiming they produced results too slowly. Their secession campaign was lightning quick. In a matter of weeks, Workers United had pinned its gray logo to the wall of a Philadelphia hotel ballroom, as the June UNITE HERE convention loomed.

In the stampede to leave, Philadelphia workers say the democratic process has been trampled, and many resent being consulted about the fate of their union, after the fact.

“This was decided over a month ago by Lynne Fox, before we were ever asked,” Hamod said.

Service Employees Union Joins Move to Break Up UNITE HERE

2009-03-25T10:16:00.000-04:00

From www.labornotes.org

The months-long tug of war within UNITE HERE continued in March when UNITE-controlled regional councils voted to leave the union. UNITE leaders embraced a partnership with the Service Employees (SEIU), and signaled they would form a new union, Workers United, to compete for members in HERE’s hotel and gaming jurisdictions—while snatching as many members as possible on the way out.

HERE leaders failed to stop the regional board votes in court, which they say are unrepresentative and violate the union’s constitution. At a mid-March executive board meeting, HERE allies vowed to recover ownership of the boards’ property and funds, and moved to slap lawsuits on officials who used union funds in the secession attempt. UNITE and HERE merged in 2004, but their clashes over control of resources and organizing strategy are reaching a fever pitch.

The votes to secede were cast by around 1,000 delegates nationwide, who are elected in some regional boards and handpicked in others. In Philadelphia, 14 of the 21 voting delegates were paid staff. At the Pennsylvania-wide meeting, however, hundreds of elected delegates voted unanimously to leave UNITE HERE.

The regional boards, called “joint boards,” scheduled a late-March convention in Philadelphia for Workers United, where the color scheme is sure to be some shade of purple.

SEIU President Andy Stern offered UNITE HERE a place within the Service Employees union in late January. HERE declined, but International President Bruce Raynor, UNITE’s pre-merger leader, pursued talks.

“We see this as having the big brother on the football team,” said a UNITE-side staffer.

The secessionist campaign—aimed at discrediting HERE leaders and the merger itself—was launched with help from Steve Rosenthal, a consultant with ties to SEIU. It included robo calls and mailings soliciting disgruntled members, and a website alleging lavish spending among HERE leaders.

Raynor cited organizing failures as the cause of the breakup. His allies compose a distinct minority on the executive board and among the union’s 460,000 members. He is expected to lose control of the union at its convention in June, prompting dozens of UNITE-aligned International vice presidents to resign in support of Workers United.

Citing Stern’s meddling in UNITE HERE affairs, HERE allies responded by preparing a breakaway from the Change to Win federation, and approving talks to rejoin the AFL-CIO.

BIG PURPLE

Soon after the secession votes, SEIU organizers joined UNITE leaders in shops, aiming to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures from both members and staff to prove support for the joint board secession.

Members found mailers at their homes in early March, informing them to “look for organizers in the purple UNITE HERE shirts carrying petitions.” The petitions are a tactical ploy, not a decertification attempt.

To further strengthen the referendum, the Pennsylvania joint board is holding secret-ballot elections in every local, where members will choose whether to join Workers United. The New York/New Jersey joint board is holding similar votes for 2,000 members in its hotel division.

UNITE secessionists want to prove support in traditional HERE strongholds, which HERE promises to defend.

“We’re trying to make this union as internally strong and bulletproof as possible to fend off any member-grabbing,” says Jeff McCaffrey, president of Detroit Local 24’s gaming division.

John Wilhelm, who headed the pre-merger HERE, had sought to preserve unity even as it evaporated.

DON’T LEAVE ME HERE

HERE leaders want to extend what they see as the merger’s strategic advantages. As UNITE targets like laundry supplier Cintas grow their operations in hotels and casinos, HERE says the union should build from union strongholds and mount coordinated attacks on the corporations’ consolidating supply chains.

In a report defending the 2004 marriage, HERE leaders pointed to unprecedented contract gains.

“Over 3,000 laundry workers in Las Vegas now have free family health insurance—something that was unattainable for them prior to the merger,” said the report.

HERE argues that lengthy organizing campaigns (with heavy staff oversight) are often necessary to create strong worker committees in hotels. They prioritize contract standards over swift membership growth, and argue that the union must cultivate member-leaders who will build, maintain, and expand the union.

Wilhelm’s allies criticize earlier deals that SEIU and UNITE struck with service-sector employers that let the corporations choose organizing sites and created low-wage tiers at unionized companies. They predict several long-term organizing drives will produce 27,000 new members in casinos in coming years.

Joint board leaders, in response, criticize HERE for not pulling the trigger soon enough, and wasting money in the process. Results don’t arrive overnight, counters HERE. “Raynor’s claim to fame is a 17-year struggle to organize at [southern textile giant] J.P. Stevens,” said Pilar Weiss, spokeswoman at Las Vegas Local 226.

(TEMPORARY) RETREAT

While the union split in two, joint board officials filled in some trench lines at the local level, for now. UNITE forces gave up their takeover of Detroit’s Local 24, a 7,900-strong local made up primarily of HERE shops. The rationale was practical: Local 24’s leaders would have fought the creation of the new union.

Local 24 officers regained access to their offices, as well as the Motor City Casino, where the company had locked out union representatives while the factions squabbled. Elected local leaders also took back exclusive rights at the bargaining table.

The union’s crisis couldn’t come at a worse time for members at Detroit’s Riverside Hotel, where workers have been paid behind schedule for months. When workers have received checks, they’ve often bounced. “I don’t come to my job to do charity work,” said Carrie Shipman, a housekeeper at the hotel. Hundreds of protesters from a nearby labor convention flooded the lobby in February to confront management.

In all this, workers say their union representatives have been difficult to find.

WHY A NEW UNION?

“HERE never had a sound vision or functional plan for organizing in their core industry,” says joint board staffer Pete DeMay, who was dispatched to Detroit. He sees Workers United’s speedier, stripped-down organizing bringing in non-union casinos in the region, expanding a base among casino dealers, and building density in Chicago hotels, where DeMay says about half of the city’s hotel workers lack a union.

HERE officials say UNITE’s new partnership with SEIU is illegal, and reversible through the union’s democratic process—or in court.

Other union leaders are aghast that the bitter fight could drag through the courts. With public support for the Employee Free Choice Act in the balance, presidents of the Steelworkers and Autoworkers pleaded for the union to end the merger and seek “reasonable alternatives” to open warfare. The UAW also announced plans to work with SEIU in the gaming industry.

“We’re not relinquishing that jurisdiction,” said DeMay. “You can call it raiding if you want—call it what you want to call it.”

Ernest Lemond resigned as president of Local 24’s airport division to support Workers United. “People should have the right to vote for the union they choose, and if they want to come to a new union, let them,” he said.

Call in the Big Guns

2009-03-13T21:32:00.000-04:00

One of the country's more progressive unions, UNITE HERE is splitting into its component parts five years after merging. UNITE's former president, Bruce Raynor brought big money but a dying industry. HERE--organizing in hotels and casinos, was in need of cashflow, but had big potential for growth. Both sides have set up web sites, HERE to defend the merger, and UNITE to explain why it needs to end.

Raynor expected Wilhelm to retire by the time the union's convention arrived in summer 2009-- or find a place in the AFL-CIO leadership--after which UNITE would assume control over the whole union. Wilhelm remains however, now with a majority of members from his industries, and a majority on the decision-making executive board. HERE is poised to take control of the union. Raynor cozied up to Andy Stern, president of the nation's "fastest growing" union of service employees, who offered UNITE-side leaders a partnership. Civil war has broken out at the exact wrong time for labor--EFCA entered congress just days ago.

Politico's Ben Smith has followed the story of both unions, which are expending enormous staff time and energy fighting for control of the union--precisely because they envision an organizing windfall when, or if, EFCA passes. Wilhelm wants to keep the union together, maintaining access to the UNITE-owned Amalgamated Bank--with $5 billion in assets--for his time intensive hotel organizing campaigns, which attempt to cultivate strong worker leaders. Raynor changed the governance structure of the bank to ice out HERE leaders, and has since encouraged a secession from the merger, claiming HERE doesn't organize members quickly enough. His allies voted to form a new union, and are trying to gather member support and move into hotel and casino organizing. HERE wants to break from Change to Win, and rejoin the AFL-CIO, but the AFL recently lent its support to Stern's new organizing initiative in gaming, a key HERE jurisdiction.

UNITE is now drawing on their lethal weapon, too--an old friend of Bruce Raynor's, to make the case for a split from HERE.

Ann Arbor Palestine Film Festival

2009-03-10T19:38:00.000-04:00

Waltz with Bashir is on my list without doubt, but first: This week's Ann Arbor Palestine Film Festival looks pretty amazing. The whole thing opens tomorrow March 11, at the Michigan Theater. I'm looking forward to Hardball, a 2006 documentary by Suha Arraf:

"Sakhnin is a small Arab town inside Israel where life is far from normal. Despite hardships, Sakhnin, like the rest of the world, is mad about football and has produced an edgy, hungry football team that managed, against all odds, to win Israel's national cup in 2004. As the drama of the new football season unfolds, Hardball reveals why the underdog team has attracted such a devoted and fervent following among thousands of Arab fans across the country."

And Saturday night, a must see by Jackie Salloum:

Opening Night tomorrow, buy tickets here.
Organizer Hena Ashraf will be blogging it.

Charter Schools: Oil and Water?

2009-03-10T00:20:00.000-04:00

from the March 2009, Labor Notes (print)

Ann Crowley had always opposed charter schools, but sick of decades of managerial incompetence in Detroit’s traditional schools, she changed her mind. She even called for charters to be housed in union headquarters during her campaign to lead the Detroit Federation of Teachers this winter. The middle school instructor thinks veteran teachers like her could do charters the right way: by opening a community-owned, unionized school within the remains of a crumbling school district.

Her slate lost badly, but has kept the idea alive, finding a model in Los Angeles-based Green Dot Schools, a growing unionized charter organization. She also found the center of a contentious debate. Everyone agrees that public schools need help, but teachers and union members disagree over how to engage the charter school movement and its largely unorganized workforce—or whether to do so at all.

In Los Angeles, Green Dot has grown to 18 schools over the last decade—and expanded to the Bronx this year, with the blessing of New York’s United Federation of Teachers president (and national AFT president) Randi Weingarten. Green Dot touts its open access, small classes, and schools no larger than 525 students. Along with mandatory parent-volunteer hours, the schools stay open later, which means more time with students and a longer work day for teachers.

They emphasize local control for teachers and principals in hiring and curriculum decisions, also making them responsible for a school’s budget. Green Dot teachers laud professional development programs which, they say, have helped raise test scores and graduation rates. The schools are in demand. At Green Dot’s founding site, in LA’s Inglewood community, 685 students applied for 175 spots in this year’s freshman class. Students, recruited first from the neighborhoods where the school sits, must fill out a short application and an essay expressing interest. Then they are entered into a lottery.

Los Angeles teachers say that this approach doesn’t ensure universal access, though, because it passively screens out foster children and English language learners. “If they were to try to be truly public with the lottery system, they would make sure that every student’s name in
that attendance area was entered into the lottery, and not just the kids whose parents came to some meeting some night,” said Alex Caputo-Pearl, a teacher at Crenshaw High School in
south Los Angeles.

WHAT KIND OF JOBS?
Green Dot schools look different than the district. The schools are mostly staffed by young teachers, and teacher turnover is high. At Locke High School in the Watts neighborhood of LA, teachers petitioned the school board to break the school into eight smaller charters two years ago. Green Dot came in, fired 80 teachers, and made everyone re-apply for positions.

Despite attempts by the AFT/NEA affiliate United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) to keep the school in the district, Locke teachers sided with Green Dot, and joined instead the Asociacion de Maestros Unidos. AMU, which is part of the NEA-affiliated California Teachers Association, was created in 2000 to be the union at Green Dot.

The AMU contract has a just-cause provision instead of the district’s tenure system, a longer teacher workday, and a no-strike clause. District die-hards charge that AMU is a company union, but AMU’s collaborative approach, maintained by monthly meetings between union and
company, has still produced battles with management. After agreeing to re-open the contract, AMU is fighting Green Dot’s attempt to create a probationary period during which teachers could be fired at will in their first two years.

AMU president Abigail Garcia said the union wouldn’t budge, noting that at least 50 percent of AMU teachers are in their first or second year. AMU has also questioned the school’s commitment to school site autonomy. “At times, we feel like Green Dot’s idea of ‘teacher-led’ schools is just to ask teachers to provide input before making final decisions,” Garcia said.

“Teacher-led” schools are a mirage, other teacher union activists say, considering Green Dot’s corporatized management. Founded by Democratic Party booster Steve Barr, Green Dot has an unelected management team led by a CEO who is a financial consultant with no teaching background. Michael Fiorillo, a New York teacher and union reform leader, said that corporate management entrenched itself in education through skillful marketing. Among its aims? To make teaching no longer a career.

“The idealism and the eagerness of teachers to improve the lives of their students is manipulated,” he said. “They’re not going to have tenure or seniority, and eventually they won’t have a union.”

CHARTING A UNION
Despite teacher misgivings, charters are taking off. The LA school district, has offered unused space within 40 public schools to charter start- ups. In response, UTLA has reconvened a task force on charter schools and is organizing forums with charter teachers, beginning with those already unionized. Teachers at Accelerated Charter just gathered cards from 80 percent of the workforce in a bid to be the first independent charter school in LA to join the 48,000-strong UTLA. In January, teachers at a charter in Brooklyn signed cards for representation. Now they’re fighting a fierce anti-union campaign in which administrators are trying to recruit students to undermine the teacher drive.

“People in corporate education are wetting their pants at the prospect of these charters organizing,” Fiorillo said. And union infighting may be on the wane. Despite their disagreements, UTLA and AMU joined in a January march, turning out 15,000 to protest California’s fresh cuts to public education.

MAKING A NEW DETROIT
Charters in Detroit, enrolling 50,000 students, have had mixed results. Among the 12 charter schools authorized by the district, some are failing, and some were never opened in the first place, leading to allegations of misappropriated funds. As 70,000 students have left the district in the last decade—and a $400 million deficit rings up this year—the situation looks increasingly bleak. The school board has fired the superintendent and agreed to state oversight this winter. Expectations are low: state overseers earlier this decade splurged on bloated, no-bid private contracts for food service and school renovation.

Crowley, the Detroit charter convert, says schools have not improved since teachers walked out for over two weeks in 2006 to protest dire conditions. Teachers’ pay rose slightly, but many buildings remain undersupplied and sometimes hazardous.

About 200 groups have applied to open new charters in Detroit, but Crowley wants to beat them to it and run her school with experienced teachers. “We can do it on our own if they let us,” she said. It’s unclear whether the Green Dot model would work for the veteran teachers in Detroit, as the organization prefers to hire new teachers to keep costs low. And, as such franchises grow, Fiorillo believes they will become increasingly driven by profit, managed by non-educators, and antagonistic to the union that Garcia and other teachers in Los Angeles are fighting to maintain.

Still, the frustration of years in an inadequate system is leading Crowley to look for ways that teachers can build their own institutions—to retain a culture of collective bargaining and control, which is trickling into charter school break rooms nationwide.

Rifts Deepen at UNITE HERE

2009-02-21T12:34:00.000-05:00

From March 2009, Labor Notes.

UNITE HERE had a lot to resolve at the three-day meeting of its General Executive Board in February—namely, the fate of the union.

Two presidents, UNITE’s Bruce Raynor and HERE’s John Wilhelm, forged an alliance in 2004, but as the union’s first convention approaches, the relationship has dissolved into out-and-out civil war.

Raynor first attempted to shore up support in a union where HERE members predominate by dispatching supporters to take over HERE-led locals in Detroit and Phoenix in recent months.

The executive board, dominated by HERE, responded by expanding its control over the union and voting to put three UNITE-led regional boards in the Northeast under trusteeship—a move they later retracted. Raynor and UNITE leaders then sued to separate the unions.

Factors in the complicated rift include power, money, ego, and disagreements over organizing strategies.

MERGER A ‘DISMAL FAILURE’

A week before the February 9-11 board meeting in Washington, D.C., Service Employees President Andy Stern invited UNITE HERE leaders to find a new home in SEIU. Wilhelm politely declined, but UNITE organizers say Raynor had already reached a deal with Stern before arriving in D.C.

On the meeting’s first day, Raynor and 23 vice presidents brought a resolution to dissolve the merger, deeming the 2004 tie-up a “dismal failure.” The board voted down the move by 62 percent.

Wilhelm said he would not give up on the merger and stressed the need to follow the union’s democratic procedures for resolving disputes.

Nearly all votes on resolutions were along party lines. Because of HERE’s large majorities on the union’s two most important decision-making bodies, both sides believe HERE leaders will unseat Raynor if the merger survives until the union’s June convention.

When the dissolution resolution fizzled, Raynor allies quickly turned to the courthouse. Leaders of 14 regional joint boards, a holdover structure from the former UNITE, sued for separation from the union in U.S. District Court in New York. It was the second lawsuit from Raynor’s camp, which had sued January 22 to halt HERE leaders on the union’s executive committee from exercising control over budget, staffing, and trusteeship matters.

The suit claims the terms of the merger allow joint boards to disaffiliate unilaterally, taking their money and members with them. UNITE owns the Amalgamated Bank, which has $5 billion in assets, and holds valuable New York property. Four years ago, it agreed to underwrite the organizing campaigns of HERE, which was larger but nearly bankrupt. Since 2005, the union has poured $61 million into hotel and gaming organizing.

Raynor accuses Wilhelm of failing to deliver membership growth equal to the investment—and seeking further “control of the union and UNITE’s assets…so he can then redirect them to the failed programs of a few of his favorite locals.”

WHICH WAY TO ORGANIZE?

Both sides agree on the need to grow the union, but their strategies differ. Wilhelm has recently criticized SEIU’s growth at all costs model, which Raynor has embraced. He worked with Stern to complete secret agreements with Sodexho, Compass, and Aramark, exposed in May 2008, that permitted SEIU and UNITE HERE to jointly organize housekeeping, laundry, and food service workers without company interference—so long as the unions limited organizing to specific sites and dropped others where campaigns were under way. The agreements also limited the total number of workers allowed to organize and waived workers’ right to strike.

“Such agreements should not be made at the expense of the very standards that are at the core of the union’s purpose,” Wilhelm said. “The union cannot expect to grow by making itself less relevant and beneficial to its members. Such a course would ultimately destroy the union.”

Wilhelm put forth a series of proposed changes to the union’s governance structure that would decentralize power away from the International presidents and ensure more power for the executive board, more autonomy for locals in negotiations and enforcement of contracts, and more local control of union funds.

Tensions between staffers have grown. UNITE-side organizers, through their staff union, have a grievance in arbitration against HERE’s choice of training methods. UNITE staff say organizers are asked to share traumatic events from their past with co-workers in team-building exercises; and object to gathering and sharing similar information about workers during organizing drives.

RIFT HITS MEMBERS

Members report that the jockeying for control of locals and resources has dented the union’s presence at work sites.

“Our union dues are paying for both sides, which are pitting member against member. And they’re spending our money with no resolution in sight,” said Ernest Lemond, president of Local 24’s Airport Division in Detroit.

UNITE leaders removed HERE veteran Joe Daugherty from his position as Michigan state director in January. At the executive board meeting, several ousted Local 24 leaders presented petitions to disaffiliate their local from the UNITE-dominated regional board, amid protests from other Detroit members.

The board voted to permit the disaffiliation and give the local more control over its dues. UNITE leaders abstained. While Joint Board officials stay put in Detroit, the case is poised for resolution in the courts. In the meantime, Local 24 remains out of sorts.

Jeff McCaffrey, who heads Local 24’s gaming division and tends bar at Detroit’s MGM Grand Casino, says the local has had to fight with the new UNITE-affiliated state director at the negotiating table over control of bargaining.

“Both sides are saying they’re the legitimate bargaining representative,” Lemond said. “Some of the companies have put union dues in escrow and have chosen not to deal with either side—they’re using this to their advantage.”

All eyes are on Chicago, where the June convention may be the next venue for UNITE HERE divorce court. After UNITE delegates walked out of the November convention for Canadian affiliates, preventing a quorum, the union’s Public Review Board asked the Department of Labor to ensure that the democratic process remains intact at the convention.

But UNITE HERE may not make it that far.

“This breakup is inevitable,” Lemond said. “They’re going to go their separate ways. It’s just how they do it.”

UNITE organizers say they’ve been informing members in their shops that a new marriage, one with SEIU—now poised to enter hotel organizing—is on the horizon.

Rail Rumors? Dukakis Sez Listen Up!

2009-02-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

Several light rail projects were gaining steam in Detroit around this time last year, but have mostly become urban legend. Now they could get a jolt.

I'm told someday we'll have increased service along the Ann Arbor-Detroit corridor, with a new stop at an undisclosed location near the Detroit Metro Airport. The muzak doesn't inspire confidence:

Folks have been working on making real some version of a plan for light rail running up Woodward--one privately funded loop from Grand Circus Park to New Center, and a federally-funded extension of that line to 8 mile or 11 mile. But again with the muzak...

The more ambitious foresee expansion of light rail (and/or express buses) up some of the D's famed spokes--Michigan, Grand River, Jefferson or Gratiot--which would bring to fruition the original lost plans for the People Mover, which stalled before connecting its downtown loop to anything, well, outside of downtown.

Last March I spoke with Mike Paradise for this story about Detroit mass transit. Always envisioning utopias, the technology coordinator at Cranbrook Academy suggested that the Big 3 get in at the ground level, converting their manufacturing infrastructure, and putting the now squeezed UAW ranks back to work. He envisioned that each company could build competing protoype lines: Ford, from its HQ in Dearborn down Michigan Ave., GM from its 12 Mile and Mound Technical Center down Gratiot, and Chrysler from Auburn Hills into the city. There are undoubtedly fewer scoffing at these ambitions nowadays.

View Larger Map

Perhaps moved to action after an undoubtedly janky Amtrak whistle stop tour, Obama and his people pushed to add $8 billion last minute to last week's federal stimulus bill for the expansion of high-speed rail in corridors that the Federal Rail Association has recommended for upgrades since 2002. The money would go to updating existing rail infrastructure, for example between Chicago and Detroit, to allow higher speed trains like the Northeast Corridor Acela--the American standard that tops off at 150 mph.

Better than nothing, the $8b still doesn't come with a coherent nationwide plan to begin the shift from auto dependency, nor grapple with incorrigible sprawl. SEMCOG (the people behind the AA-Detroit plan and others) still predicts that most of its outlays in the next 20 years will go toward repairing existing roads in the region, a task that will take several billion on its own. Mayor Cockrel is now asking for $3.2b from the big stimulus bill to fund projects, including light rail, in Detroit.

The U.S. is not exactly ahead of the curve here, though California is promoting (with posterboy Michael Dukakis!) the construction of high speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles that is comparable to systems in Europe and elsewhere that reach 200-300 mph. I have a sneaking suspicion the plan could be fated like '88. I'm waiting for the clincher; Dukakis in the promotional cockpit of his own rickety monorail, with over-sized accessories, hitting the afterburner.

UNITE WHERE? SEIU Offers a Hand as UNITE HERE Power Struggle Goes Public

2009-02-12T20:19:00.000-05:00

web exclusive from Labor Notes

The civil war in the upper reaches of UNITE HERE took a nasty turn January 22, when UNITE veteran and International President Bruce Raynor filed suit against fellow officers in U.S. District Court in New York.

Both sides of the union are jockeying for control ahead of the union’s first election since UNITE and HERE merged in 2004. The fight is drawing the attention of Service Employees (SEIU) President Andy Stern, who offered his own solution.

The lawsuit is part of Raynor’s attempt to shore up support in a union where HERE members predominate. At the time of the merger, UNITE had lost many of its members in a dying domestic textile industry, but brought cash through its union-run Amalgamated Bank, with assets near $5 billion. HERE brought a potential for growth in the hotel, restaurant, and gaming industries. The HERE side of the union has grown more quickly, organizing about 70,000 workers in the last six years, while UNITE ranks have stagnated.

The merger included a power-sharing agreement between Raynor and HERE President John Wilhelm, who took the title of hospitality president.

But the General Executive Board, composed of dozens of vice presidents, is dominated by HERE allies. Raynor accuses Wilhelm of abusing majorities on that board and a smaller decision-making body to resolve disagreements between the two presidents. According to the complaint, “The express language of the Constitution, all Union precedent, and the basic understanding of the parties to the merger are all to the contrary.”

Raynor’s suit seeks to reverse decisions made at a December 17-18 meeting of the executive committee, where Wilhelm’s allies voted to put two UNITE-led joint boards in the Northeast under trusteeship and appointed HERE allies to oversee them. HERE also sought administrative and budget changes whose greatest impact fell on UNITE-heavy departments. Outnumbered UNITE leaders abstained in protest.

Noel Beasley, head of the union’s Midwest Regional Board, joined the suit three weeks after sending in staffers to oust HERE veteran Joe Daugherty from his position as Michigan state director.

The disputed executive committee meeting shifted an important power, formerly held jointly by Raynor and Wilhelm, to the committee. The HERE-dominated grouping now has the power to review and approve any “growth agreements” with employers. The move is seen as a response to deals crafted by Raynor and SEIU. In 2005, they signed agreements with Sodexho and Compass, two transnational companies that provide laundry, housekeeping, and food services.

The secret agreements, exposed in May 2008, allowed the two unions to organize certain locations without company interference, but drew criticism because the pacts allowed the companies to limit organizing to specific sites, forcing the unions to drop others where campaigns were under way. They also limited the total number of workers allowed to organize and waived workers’ right to strike.

The deals fueled a long-standing division within UNITE HERE over organizing strategies.

STERN PROPOSAL

On January 30, SEIU President Andy Stern offered Raynor and Wilhelm a way out by inviting them in. “After four years, we believe it is time as well as necessary for our movement, for both unions to reconsider their future—including a merger into SEIU as UNITE HERE or ending their merger and returning to their previous status and merging into SEIU as separate organizations,” Stern said.

A February 4 letter signed by Wilhelm and his majority on the executive committee—all defendants in Raynor’s late-January lawsuit—thanked Stern politely for his interest in building a stronger labor movement but asked him to wait till after UNITE HERE’s February 10 executive board meeting. (That meeting had been scheduled for Las Vegas, an HERE stronghold; Raynor moved it to Washington, D.C., citing security threats.) Raynor did not sign the response to Stern, raising questions about his next move as HERE leaders appear poised to take over the top spot in the union this summer.

Pre-Convention Battle: Detroit UNITE HERE Local Seized

2009-02-11T19:13:00.001-05:00

Detroit’s UNITE HERE Local 24 was padlocked in January after the union’s regional board took over the local’s office and removed the appointed state director. The takeover was the opening salvo in a leadership struggle developing ahead of the national union’s June convention.

Officials of the Chicago Midwest Regional Joint Board say ejecting Michigan State Director Joe Daugherty was a necessary response to member complaints about the local’s failure to process grievances. Local 24’s 7,900 members in the Detroit area make up about 80 percent of the Michigan membership.

Many of Local 24’s sidelined leaders—including Daugherty—were elected to local positions December 11 and aimed to disaffiliate from the Joint Board, which maintains control over the local’s hefty dues flow. They say they were shut down because of this effort.

The Joint Board removed Daugherty, who is also an international vice president, claiming his criticisms of the board amounted to insubordination. Daugherty, who was appointed in 1999 to head up organizing in the city’s casinos, had arrived in Michigan fresh off HERE’s victorious six-year strike at Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

In that campaign, he earned the nickname “St. Joe”—and fame in HERE circles—for not missing a day on the picket line during the lengthy strike.

After learning he was fired, Daugherty staked out an overnight watch inside the union’s office. He said staffers from Chicago and Canada, flown in by the Joint Board for the takeover, kept him from placing phone calls and blared recordings of UNITE HERE President Bruce Raynor’s speeches at full volume.

Local 24 members and staff had angrily mobilized at the office and confronted the Joint Board staffers. Police evacuated the office the next day and chained the door at the request of the building manager.

Board leaders posted welcome signs for the new state director, Clayola Brown of New York.

UNEASY MARRIAGE

UNITE HERE was born in 2004 of a merger of textile and laundry workers (UNITE) and hospitality workers (HERE). The marriage, at times uneasy, prompted pre-existing UNITE regional boards to offer affiliation to HERE locals. The Chicago Midwest board now includes 50,000 members in hundreds of UNITE and HERE locals in 11 states.
Local 24, the Joint Board’s largest affiliate, joined the umbrella organization three years ago, seeking greater institutional support for organizing projects at casinos, sports arenas, and the Detroit airport.

Len Lazich, a bartender at MGM Grand casino and chief steward, said the board made it impossible for Local 24 to conduct business, steadily siphoning resources from Detroit over the years. Lazich said the local sends the board more than $4 million a year, adding that since the affiliation, local staff has been cut by 60 percent.

Mickey Seawood, a steward who works in environmental services at the MGM Grand casino, said members felt the Joint Board broke its promises to bolster organizing.

“They never delivered,” she said.

DERELICTION OF DUTY

Brown counters that Local 24 leaders had failed to process hundreds of grievances, some more than a year old. Officers, some elected just a month ago, are asking for documentation.

“They’re talking about all these hundreds of complaints, but no one has copies of them,” said Jackie Kaifesh, vice president of the local’s airport division.

Doris Boone-Hanna, who answers phones at the Marriott, says she has paperwork. In just the last year she said she has filed seven grievances. Boone-Hanna led an unsuccessful decertification campaign in 1989.

Among her 15 co-workers, Boone-Hanna says there are 18 grievances dating back to June that haven’t been handled yet. She says that under Daugherty’s watch, the local held unfair elections, paid stewards unevenly based on allegiance, and failed to notify members that their health co-pays had doubled.

Boone-Hanna blames Daugherty for not enforcing contract language on seniority. “I went home one night and I was No. 3 in seniority, and when I came back the next morning, I was No. 5,” she said. “I’ve been here 29 years, and I’m still on the midnight shift.”

TRUSTEED IN 2003

In late 2003, Local 24 underwent the union’s standard treatment for troubled locals: It was placed in trusteeship after an investigation revealed financial mismanagement. Leaders were purged and the trusteeship ended in 2004.

Daugherty’s ouster, however, was not preceded by formal investigations. Brown maintains that the Joint Board may remove an appointed leader at will. Although Daugherty and the other officials maintain their elected offices in Local 24, the Joint Board has circulated letters advising employers to deal with the board directly. Local 24 claims the letters illegally strip the local of its authority.

Brown said the only hiccup in the takeover process was Local 24’s belligerent response. She said members and staff were disruptive and violent in a failed attempt to reclaim the office.

“Normally it does work quite smoothly,” she said. “I’ve been with the union 39 years, and I’ve never seen this kind of reaction.”
Brown’s administration is meeting with disgruntled members such as Boone-Hanna. Meanwhile, Local 24’s deposed leaders have set up headquarters across the street from the padlocked office. They are collecting signatures to disaffiliate from the Joint Board. The UNITE-HERE merger agreement stipulates that locals can leave joint boards by presenting member petitions to the International.

In the month following the takeover, around 4,000 members have signed petitions for disaffiliation, Lazich said. International vice presidents will resolve the affiliation and takeover disputes February 10 at the union’s executive board meeting in Washington, D.C.

One For the Good Guys

2009-01-29T00:35:00.000-05:00

Workers won big in December at Smithfield hog plant, the largest in the world--and right in the belly of the right-to-work beast.
Here's my story on the 16-year fight, and looking to the contract battle ahead. From the February 2009 issue of In These Times, online today.

For background on how the union won, see Jane Slaughter's coverage in Labor Notes.

Financial Crisis Shouldered by City Workers

2008-12-22T23:23:00.000-05:00

From the January, 2009 issue of Labor Notes

Last summer’s meeting of the National Conference of Mayors foresaw grim days for American cities — and that was before finance markets folded up in the fall. Now urban governments confront budget deficits that stem from falling tax revenues and the ongoing credit crunch.

More than a quarter of American cities hemorrhaged jobs in 2008. Mayors now propose to add to the jobless by firing yet more city workers. Wall Street’s collapse has opened a $4 billion hole in New York’s $60 billion balance sheet over the next two years—and support from state and federal coffers is less than forthcoming.

Chicago is trying to cover a $470 million gap in its $3 billion budget, a gap that has grown by $50 million since mid-August. Mayor Richard Daley initially proposed layoffs of more than 900 city workers. After negotiations with city unions, terminations were reduced by 145, salvaging electrical workers and inspectors’ jobs.

Even so, the city faces a shortfall in the hundreds of millions in the next budget year. All services except fire and police will be shut down for six days around the holidays. A challenge from the Laborers union produced buyout offers for senior workers. In exchange, remaining city workers will take an unpaid furlough day.

CUTS FOR THE LOWEST PAID

AFSCME fought the furloughs and is taking legal action. “This amounts to a pay cut for some of the lowest-paid city employees, a cut that they don’t deserve and can’t afford,” said Anders Lindall of District Council 31. While some of Daley’s cuts hit novelties like Segway-riding fire inspectors, basic services will suffer, with around 300 fewer workers picking up garbage and with less overtime for snow plow service and street repair. Reductions in health department workers will add to overcrowding at clinics.

Carty Finkbeiner, mayor of Toledo, Ohio, modeled cost-saving measures on Chicago’s, planning a temporary layoff of city workers to help cover a $10 million deficit. Three city unions, including AFSCME Local 7, sued to prevent the shutdown, calling it a breach of contract terms. The city agreed to reduce the number of unpaid furloughs, leaving 242 workers with a day’s pay cut.

Mayor Michael Nutter went on TV to tell Philadelphia residents to “plan for the worst” as he laid out an extensive austerity program to cover a $108 million deficit. The city wants to ignore contractual promises and freeze wages for 18,000 workers for three years, giving hikes only to police and firefighters.

“Not having increases in health care, wages, or pensions over the next few years is unrealistic,” said Cathy Scott, District Council 47 president. About 220 city workers were to be laid off and 600 open positions eliminated, but two AFSCME councils pushed to have vacant positions filled by those slated for firing. Still, dozens of part-time seasonal jobs will be cut, and non-union city workers face five unpaid furlough days.

Though Nutter postponed personal income tax cuts for eight years and took a 10 percent pay cut, glaring inequities remain: business tax cuts, tax abatements for real estate developers, and a hands-off approach to collecting outstanding taxes from corporations, some of which do business with the city, leave hundreds of millions of dollars unclaimed. “People do not believe there is a shared sacrifice,” Scott says, “and that’s when they say ‘no, we’re not going to take it.’”

MOTOR CITY WOES

Detroit has approximately 15,000 municipal workers after more than 5,000 layoffs in the last eight years. The city could face more than 1,000 more this year. Interim Mayor Ken Cockrel, Jr. inherits a $200 million deficit. City unions have fought to maintain their ranks, halting the privatization of custodial services but losing arbitration this fall over subcontracting to non-profits of city-green jobs, such as tree-planting work.

With a Big 3 collapse looming, the financial squeeze has spread to Detroit’s suburbs, too. Wayne County is trying to decrease retired workers’ health benefits, a move that faced resistance from AFSCME District Council 25. The union won arbitration and temporarily halted the county’s plans. “Whatever they retired with is a vested right, and they have the right to enforce it,” said attorney Bruce Miller.

Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Atlanta are lobbying for a piece of the $700 billion bank bailout to maintain pensions and repair infrastructure. A Detroit city council resolution asked for $10 billion for a city bailout.

“Why just let corporate America have it?” asked AFSCME Local 207 Vice President Andre Batie in Detroit. “They’re gonna have fun with that money, but we could use some of it in the cities.”

New Teacher Programs Chip Away at Job Stability

2008-11-24T14:10:00.000-05:00

From December, 2008 Labor Notes

Graduation rates were climbing to all-time highs in New York City’s alternative schools, where John Powers taught last year, before the Department of Education’s consultants arrived.

Citing under-performance, the city closed schools, and chopped some into smaller units, giving them new names. A new nameplate, however, forced the school’s teaching staff to reapply for their jobs.

“They only have to hire back into that building 50 percent of the people that worked there,” Powers said. “Simultaneously, principals are given their own budgets and it becomes a financial obligation to hire younger teachers—cheaper labor.”

The city found that pipeline of fresh-faced, inexpensive help in the New Teacher Project.

The program has chapters in several cities, placing college graduates (and others seeking a career change) in “high needs” schools after a six-week summer training. For two years, they receive funding for graduate study, take evening classes necessary for teaching certification, and teach.

Applicants for the NTP in New York have risen from 2,100 to 20,000 per year over the last seven years. This fall, 1,800 teachers entered classrooms through the program. A full 11 percent of all the city’s teachers come through the NTP.

RESERVE TEACHERS

Claiming that an investment in “human capital” will close the gap in test scores between white children and students of color, the city is shuttering or restructuring low-performing schools—and using the NTP to chip away at the stability of teaching jobs.

The 2005 contract signed by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the American Federation of Teachers local in New York, has added to the instability. The contract ended “bumping rights” for tenured teachers who lose jobs. Instead of automatic placement in a new job based on experience, teachers with more than three years in the classroom now enter an “Absent Teacher Reserve” with pay and benefits until they can find employment—contingent on a principal’s consent.

Rising numbers of non-tenured teachers, entering through the NTP’s teaching fellows (and a similar program, Teach for America), make it difficult for experienced, higher-paid instructors to find work.

NTP’s chairman now is pressing to fix a timetable after which reserve teachers should face termination, a demand echoed by schools chief Joel Klein. He wants to fire teachers after 18 months on the reserve rolls. For the moment, UFT’s no-layoff clause protects the 1,400 tenured teachers who are seeking their own classroom.

“We’re creating a situation where your most talented and experienced will be fired,” said Powers.

INSECURITY FOR ALL

The new labor flexibility in schools whipsaws younger workers against older ones—and produces a workforce beholden to principals.

Three months into the school year, Andy Mandel is still subbing at a Harlem junior high. He hasn’t found the full-time job he sought by joining the NTP’s teaching fellows this summer.

When applying, Mandel and others signed a form requiring them to find their own classroom by December or lose their fellowship, funding, provisional license and all. Mandel says the form violates the state’s protection of union rights and the contract’s ban on at-will firings.

But the union, he says, isn’t focused on the needs of young teachers. The Department of Education has fired teaching fellows under this agreement three years straight. “They didn’t notice until we brought it to their attention,” Mandel said.

In his first months, Mandel has taught every grade and every subject but gym. “One of the fellows is filling in for the dean. He’s been working the in-school suspension room,” he says. “Another fellow has administered eye exams, and we volunteer to move desks around and carry boxes of books. It works out well for our principal.”

Lacking sufficient training, overworked teachers flood in and out of the system, with little ability to organize and few job protections when they speak up. “You’re not going to stick your neck out as much in a situation where the principal can just send you packing,” said Dianne, a math teacher in Brooklyn and union delegate who is thinking of her own neck.

CHAOS IN THE CLASSROOM

An urban instructor’s career once stretched 20 years or more, said Bill Balderston, a teachers union board member in Oakland, where the New Teacher Project also places teachers. “Now it’s very rare to have people for more than three years,” he said.

Michael Mebane experiences that instability first-hand at his Brooklyn middle school. “I have been subbing four classes a day at a very difficult school,” he said, “and teaching one special-ed computer class, which I’m not certified to teach.”

Under pressure from teachers upset about the classroom chaos, the union filed a grievance on behalf of New York fellows who face early termination.

Their December deadline nearing, new teachers tried to expedite a lengthy grievance process by protesting at the Department of Education in early November. Klein’s office turned them away.

As Labor Notes went to press, the union reached a tentative agreement with the education department. The city maintains the principal’s consent rule, but gives subsidies to schools to hire reserve teachers full time, covering the pay difference between a reserve and a new teacher.

Still, schools will have the option to hire reserve teachers provisionally and return them to the pool of waiting teachers at year’s end.

Members of the Independent Community of Educators, a UFT reform grouping, won a resolution last month calling for a rally November 24. Despite the new agreement, the protest is on to demand a hiring freeze until reserve teachers and teaching fellows are placed in classrooms. And rumors continue to fly that the DOE will axe teachers young and old as the city scrambles to close a $4 billion deficit in the next 18 months.

“Our no-layoff clause can be rescinded only if the city declares a fiscal emergency,” Powers said.

Labor Notes on the Auto Bailout

2008-11-15T19:28:00.000-05:00

Hear Mark Brenner of Labor Notes on Democracy Now! this week. Brenner made the radio rounds discussing the next chunk of corporate welfare cheese coming to those too big to fail.

The auto bailout can't be another decadent giveaway for executive spa days. It can't just be tied to production shifts toward green cars either--Brenner argued on Portland public radio--but must also address the more fundamental structural flaws that have created the financial crisis: a credit-crunched, debt-driven consumer economy (with a sprawling, crumbling, and ultimately unsustainable infrastructure) in which services are too expensive not to put on layaway.

The cash infusion for GM must shore up the safety net through which (not only) auto workers have continued to fall as de-industrialization and de-unionization have torn it apart. The corporate attack has been facilitated by governments willing to wage economic war on their own citizens. And the Big 3's concessionary march, Brenner argues, has too-often brought the UAW leadership into "lock step" for 30 years.

It remains to be seen if the energy unleashed by Obama's victory will translate into a broader social movement that pushes for the livelihood of a working majority. And it's early--the man hasn't even taken office yet. But as Clinton-folk slither back around the White House, it's increasingly clear which (large) segment of Obama's grand "post-partisan" coalition--rife with antagonistic interests--he's inclined to betray. The shape of the auto bailout (if and when it comes) and government rescue efforts surely coming down the pike, will say a lot about the shape of change (or continuity) Obama has in mind.

Financial Crisis Socks California

2008-10-25T17:21:00.000-04:00

From November, 2008 Labor Notes

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved $7 billion in cuts in October to help fill a $15.2 billion crater in California’s budget, leveling a broad attack on unions and working people as the world’s tenth-largest economy teeters.

Unemployment in California rose to 7.7 percent in August, its highest in a decade. Many of the new jobless are temporary state workers, 10,000 of whom were laid off this summer. “Working in the public sector is increasingly an emotionally difficult place to work,” said Dave Hart, president of the California State Employees Association, representing over 140,000 state workers. “You’re now at the whim of politics.”

Service Employees Local 1000 has won contract language protecting some temporary workers who work full-time hours. Those without permanent status, including retirees doing part-time work, were laid off. “A lot of these retirees had dwindling pensions, and were coming back to work to make ends meet,” said Cathy Hackett, an SEIU bargaining representative.

The deep cuts have put at least one state agency in a good position to bargain for exemptions. “The people in the unemployment insurance office are putting in overtime,” Hackett said. “They cannot keep up with the claims.”

CAN’T FIND ANOTHER WAY

Public sector unions defeated the governor’s attempt to lower state workers’ pay to the federal minimum wage pending a budget agreement over the summer. Now they’re challenging the state’s threat to do the same in January, when California will face another budget gap.

Tax revenues plummeted as consumers have cut back spending. Just weeks after signing a budget full of stop-gap borrowing schemes, the governor called an October emergency meeting to address a newly developing $1 billion deficit in expected tax revenue for the year.

The California Federation of Teachers says much of the budget hole could be fixed by reinstating vehicle registration fees and raising income tax rates 2 percent for just the top earners—those making over $300,000 a year.

California’s constitution makes it one of three states where a two-thirds majority is required in the legislature to raise taxes, but only a simple majority to cut them.

“The wealthy have been huge beneficiaries of regressive tax policies, while we have gone from No. 1 to No. 48 in funding public education,” said Kent Wong at UCLA’s Center for Labor Research and Education. The University of California’s labor program, with a $6 million budget, was the only research program cut from the budget.

At the University of California, service workers in AFSCME Local 3299, who held a five-day strike this summer, continue their bargaining struggle after the school refused demands to boost poverty wages. Nearly all the custodians, groundskeepers, and bus drivers that work for UC are eligible for some form of public assistance.

Bargaining just got harder, as the new budget slashes higher education funding. “The school blames budget cuts whether or not it’s the case,” said President Lakesha Harrison. “We know they spend frivolously, and our demands stay the same.”

Still, hospital workers represented by Local 3299 won increases to $14.50 an hour in a five-year contract announced October 20.

The governor terminated a proposal—pushed by Local 3299 in the legislature—to divert $15 million from administrators’ salaries to fund pay increases for low-wage workers.

Base funding for K-12 schools and community colleges fell by $3.3 billion. In Los Angeles, the budget crisis is one more hurdle for teachers at impasse in contract negotiations with the school district. The teachers union, threatened with a 3.5 percent pay cut, is planning larger job actions than the one-hour walkout it held in July.

Thin state budgets make local governments—and contract mediators—even less receptive to worker demands.

In response, eight unions of L.A. workers, including the teachers, are presenting a unified front, despite some historical rifts, to bargain health benefits with the school district.

NO MORE BORROWING

California state college employees are feeling the squeeze. The system received $215 million less than expected right when student enrollment is spiking.

“We have health centers with a line outside each morning, there are new buildings without maintenance staff, and things are deteriorating,” said Pat Gantt, president of the California State University Employees Union.

County health care programs for low-wage workers lost $42 million. Cuts to the state-mandated ombudsman program mean crippling layoffs for those who oversee state-funded but privately owned nursing homes. “These are people who find the neglect and abuse in long-term care facilities,” said Michael Connors of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform. “They are eyes and ears for the community.”

California has taken short-term loans to cover costs during periods of weak tax revenue in the past. The global credit crisis makes this a less feasible way out. Union leaders say anger is growing among members who see that financial institutions will survive the crisis while public services take major hits.

“The opposition to the $700 billion bailout was a good indication that people smelled the rat,” said AFT Vice President Joshua Pechthalt. “We are moving into a period when they are going to be open to new ways of solving this.”

Sharpest Job Loss Since March 2003

2008-10-06T17:11:00.000-04:00

by Dean Baker
The economy lost jobs for the ninth consecutive month in September, with the pace accelerating to 159,000 jobs. This was the largest one-month fall since March of 2003 when the economy lost 212,000 jobs. The unemployment rate held steady at 6.1 percent, even though the employment population ratio (EPOP) inched down to 62.0 percent. These data, together with other recent reports, leave little doubt that the economy is in a recession.

Virtually all the news in the household survey was negative. The EPOP fell to 62.0 percent which is equal to the low point from the last downturn reached in September of 2003. Unemployment for men rose by 0.5 percentage points to 6.1 percent. The unemployment rate for black men jumped 1.6 percentage points to 11.9 percent, the highest rate since February of 1994.

By education level, the least educated workers are feeling the worst effects of the recession. Unemployment among workers without high school degrees is at 9.6 percent, more than 2.5 percentage points above the lows hit in 2007. Unemployment for high school graduates is 6.3 percent, more than 2.0 percentage points above the lows hit last year.

The number of workers involuntarily working part-time jumped by another 300,000 in September and now stands more than 2 million above its low point in 2006. The U-6 index, which is a broad measure of labor market slack including underemployed and discouraged workers, hit 11.0 percent, the highest level since April of 1994.

One noteworthy item in this report is that the EPOP for white women exceeded the EPOP for black women for the first time ever, 57.8 percent compared to 57.7 percent. Historically black women have always had considerably higher labor force participation rates, since fewer could afford not to work. While the participation rates of black women are still higher than for white women (63.6 percent compared to 60.3 percent), because the unemployment rate for black women is much higher (9.3 percent versus 4.2 percent), white women now enjoy a slightly higher EPOP.

The establishment survey shows an equally bleak picture. The private sector lost 168,000 jobs in September. The Bureau of Labor Statistics also released preliminary benchmark revisions to the survey, which show that between March of 2007 and March 2008, there were 81,000 fewer private sector jobs than originally reported. Including this revision, the economy has created just 3,061,000 private sector jobs since President Bush took office. By comparison, it created 2,600,000 jobs annually during the Clinton administration.

Job loss was sharpest in manufacturing, where employment fell by 51,000 in September, and is now down by 442,000 from its year ago level. Since its peak in March of 1998, manufacturing has shed 4,257,000 jobs, losing 24.1 percent of employment in the sector. The auto sector has been especially hard hit. It has lost 140,000 jobs over the last year and 441,000 jobs since peaking in February of 2000. This drop is equal to 36.2 percent of employment in the industry.

Construction lost 35,000 jobs in September, while retail trade lost 40,100. Car dealers accounted for 8,600 of these jobs. Trucking shed 12,300 jobs, pushing employment down by 4.6 percent from year ago levels. Financial services lost 17,000 jobs and employment services shed 28,900. Employment growth in health care and state and local government, the two main sources of strength in recent months, has also faded. These sectors added 16,600 and 2,900 jobs, respectively.

The report also shows hours dropping, consistent with the growth in part-time employment reported in the household survey. The index of aggregate weekly hours fell by 0.5 percent last month and is now down by 1.3 percent from its year ago level. Wages grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate over the last quarter, almost the same as the 3.4 percent rate over the last year.

This report should remove any lingering doubts that the economy is in a recession. The rate of job loss is accelerating and the unemployment rate is virtually certain to cross 7.0 percent early in 2009.

Detroiters on Obama

2008-09-30T13:27:00.000-04:00

In trying to get a sense for how Detroiters feel about this election, I spoke to Ron Scott, a long time journalist-activist-documentarian in the city. Scott was a co-founder of the Black Panthers chapter here, and he hosted the American Black Journal (see video archive, including '78 interview with Bobby Seale). Now he blogs at Detroit News online, and is a leader of the Detroit Coalition Against Police Bruality.

I've been asking: how does Obama's message of hope and change resonate with you?
Mr. Scott assumed it was a loaded question, referring me to some folks at the ACLU who might give a cheerier assessment of the campaign.

"I never hoped he would deliver a damn thing or that he was the second coming of christ. This is the first time in a long time people presume that there's a progressive strategy without confirming it. I don't hope. I'd rather know."

On the Obama mobilization in Detroit, Scott acknowledged that Barack is organizing in a different way that reaches new voters. But, according to Scott, he's not involving Black and working class youth as organizers, so as to create and sustain organizing networks that will last beyond the election season.

"It's comparable to Evo Morales in Bolivia. It would be like if he got the sons and daughters of the patricians to organize with him around land reform."

Scott's critique, though, bordered on critical support-an attempt to put demands behind the bloc of youth voters and black voters in the city, who are assumed stalwart supporters. Without a more coherent "urban agenda" Scott says the campaign isn't doing enough to address the problems in Detroit.

"I don't want to hear about the war on Iraq if he's not gonna talk about the war we got on Mack."

L.A. Port Truckers Closer to Shedding Dirty Past

2008-09-26T12:02:00.000-04:00

From October 2008, Labor Notes

A labor-environmental coalition in Los Angeles including several Teamsters locals inched closer to making the city’s giant port less destructive for its neighbors’ lungs—and its workers’ rights.

A federal judge refused to grant the American Trucking Associations’ (ATA) request on September 8 to suspend a plan that would ban heavily polluting older trucks. It would also compel trucking companies to hire their workers as employees, not independent contractors, opening up the possibility for organizing them.

In the works for years, the plan will go into effect October 1. According to the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), a member of the coalition, there will be an immediate 50 percent reduction in truck pollution at the adjacent L.A. and Long Beach ports.

DIFFICULT HISTORY
Since federal deregulation of the industry in 1980, industry restructuring led port truckers to work as independent contractors, who are not allowed to form unions. More than 90 percent of the workforce was organized during the 1970s, a number turned on its head since then, said Gary Smith, an organizer with Teamsters Local 952 in Orange, California.

Southern California’s port truckers have seen organizing drives before. In 1996, Communications Workers Local 9400 led an innovative campaign at the booming ports, where the number of truckers had doubled in a decade. Local 9400 called rolling strikes, and had 4,000 truckers sign union cards. They sidestepped the independent-contractor barrier by arranging to contract with a new company that pledged to hire workers and recognize the union.

The ports were hostile, and iced the company out. The plan crumbled when owner Don Allen failed to fund his corporate transformation, leaving disaffected workers back at square one. In recent years, immigrant truckers have led wildcat strikes over fuel prices and work conditions.

Area Teamsters locals have also rallied in California ports for years. “A lot of locals are interested because down the line we want to organize,” Smith said. “This is a huge paradigm shift away from the misclassification.”

The Teamsters have been talking to port truckers since the late ‘90s, but Smith says the campaign didn’t take off until Change to Win got behind the port plan.Trucking companies are intent on shutting down labor’s side-door organizing strategy.

“The Teamster solution is to fuse their interests with the environmental groups’ interest in lower pollution,” said Michael Belzer, a trucking industry specialist and professor at Detroit’s Wayne State University. “The employers remember the Teamsters being the guys in control and now they are not ready to relinquish control.”

The ATA is appealing the plan to the federal Ninth Circuit Court, which could rule on the case in months. Several trucking companies in the ATA have abandoned the legal fight and signed agreements that tie access to the ports with compliance to new pollution and employment rules. Other companies have begun buying new trucks and hiring drivers.

The port plan proposes to phase out older trucks over three years, and fine companies using them. A bill in California’s legislature—threatened by the governor’s veto—would impose per-container fees on cargo ships to fund the green fleet.

CARRYING THE LOAD
If the state bill doesn’t force shippers to share the costs of upgrading the truck fleet, trucking companies will bear much of the cost. But in Long Beach it’s a different story. The same requirements for newer, cleaner trucks apply there, but companies won’t be required to grant their truckers “employee” status.

This puts the economic burden for the upgrades on a largely immigrant trucker workforce, who make about $30,000 a year. In late August, truckers protested Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster at a Clean Ports event, calling for cleaner trucks, but not at their expense.

The Long Beach plan offers a subsidy that would offer new $100,000 vehicles for a third of the price. It’s not affordable for most independent truckers, who pay for their own fuel and maintenance, and drive nearly 90 percent of 17,000 trucks that service the ports.
“What’s most likely to happen is that drivers have to default on their lease payments,” said Max Palma, who’s been hauling in L.A. for 16 years.

LAANE activists think that Long Beach’s port will be forced to come around. Because companies that signed up in Los Angeles will haul from Long Beach, too, there will be a de-facto transformation at both ports.

HESITANT STEPS
The ports plan still must vault other hurdles. Though they backed the plan, the federal courts questioned whether a local initiative can overrule federal deregulation laws. And the Federal Maritime Commission, an independent regulatory agency, has threatened to delay it.

The ports plan erodes legal barriers that have shut out unions for decades. But Teamsters activists in Southern California say they’re not sure a organizing strategy driven by lawsuits and deal-making can involve truckers and harness the rank-and-file energy of 1996 and the recent wildcats.

Organizing workers disaffected by past failures will be a tough task. “There are people resisting it, they don’t even want to hear the name of the union,” Palma said, adding, “I think they are misinformed. We will manage and we will succeed—and make a union.”

Something Truly Different About Someone Who Sounds So Much the Same

2008-09-10T00:24:00.000-04:00

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. He takes the words right from the heads of a legion of ambivalent progressives trying to reconcile their attraction to/revulsion with Obama's candidacy:
...
"All of this saccharine talk of "change" is so transparently a mechanical come-on that if it were anybody but Barack Obama uttering the word, you'd want to throw up at the very sound of it. And yet, as I watch Obama deliver the same hackneyed act I've seen hundreds of times before, I feel against my will that I am actually watching something different at work."
...
"When those other guys took this act on the campaign trail, it was obvious they were just reading lines in a bad script. But maybe it sounds different coming from Obama because he actually means what he says, as weird as that would be. The American Dream, after all, is dying. We do need something new. That much is painfully obvious.

What's confusing about Obama is that he's so successful at projecting an air of genuineness and honesty, even as he navigates the veritable Mount Everest of fakery and onerous bullshit that is our modern electoral system. And the reason it's confusing is that we've grown so used to presidential candidates who fall short of the images they present in public, we don't even know anymore what a man worth the office would look like. Is this him? Or is this just a guy with a gift for concealing the ugliness of the system he represents?"

Curb Your Enthusiasm for Obama

2008-09-04T00:53:00.000-04:00

By Chris Hedges from Truthdig

Barack Obama’s health care plan coddles the corporations that profit from the misery and illnesses of tens of millions of Americans. The plan is naive, at best, and probably disingenuous when it insists that we can coax these corporations, which are listed on the stock exchange and exist to maximize profit, to transform themselves into social service agencies that will provide adequate health care for all Americans. I wish we lived in such a rosy world. I know, and I suspect Obama knows, that we do not.

“Obama offers a false hope,” said Dr. John Geyman, the former chair of family medicine at the University of Washington and author of “Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It.” “We cannot build on or tweak the present system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the private insurance industry itself. It is not as efficient as a publicly financed system. It fragments risk pools, skimming off the healthier part of the population and leaving the rest uninsured or underinsured. Its administrative and overhead costs are five to eight times higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients. A family of four now pays about $12,000 a year just in premiums, which have gone up by 87 percent from 2000 to 2006. The insurance industry is pricing itself out of the market for an ever larger part of the population. The industry resists regulation. It is unsustainable by present trends.”

We face a health crisis. The Democratic and Republican parties, awash in campaign contributions from the beasts they should be slaying on our behalf, have no interest in addressing it. A report in the journal Health Affairs estimates that, if the system is left unchanged, one of every five dollars spent by Americans in 2017 will go to health coverage. Half of all bankruptcies in America are because families are unable to pay their medical bills. There are some 46 million Americans without coverage and tens of millions more with inadequate policies that severely limit what kinds of procedures and treatments they can receive.

“There are at least 25 million Americans who are underinsured,” said Dr. Geyman. “Whatever coverage they have does not come close to covering the actual cost of a major illness or accident.”

Obama, like John McCain, did not support HR 676, the single-payer legislation. The corporations that run our for-profit health care industry, which would be shut down if the bill was enacted, have vigorously fought it through campaign contributions and armies of lobbyists. A study by Harvard Medical School found that national health insurance would save the country $350 billion a year. But Medicare does not make campaign contributions. The private health care industries do. They have lavished money on Obama. He received $708,000 from medical and insurance interests between 2001 and 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And Michelle Obama is a vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, a position that paid her $316,962 annually.

“The private health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry completely and totally oppose national health insurance,” said Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, one of the founders of Physicians for a National Health Program. “The private health insurance companies would go out of business. The pharmaceutical companies are afraid that a national health program will, as in Canada, be able to negotiate lower drug prices. Canadians pay 40 percent less for their drugs. We see this on a smaller scale in the United States, where the Department of Defense is able to negotiate pharmaceutical prices that are 40 percent lower.”

Sen. Obama argues that we can improve the system by expanding government oversight. The government, he says, should require doctors and hospitals to prove they provide quality care. His plan links payment with reported quality. This would mean that health care providers would have to hire even larger staffs to collect and report this data to the government. There would be a $10-billion federal investment in health care information technology over five years under the Obama plan, in essence turning record keeping from paper to electronic data.

Obama’s plan, said Dr. Don McCanne, who writes on health care issues, would actually make health plans “more expensive, which compounds the problem.”

Obama says he would require insurance companies to use more income from premiums for patient care.

“There isn’t an enforcement mechanism,” Geyman said bluntly. “Most states have been unable to control rates or set a cap on rates.”

Obama’s plan would also not cover all Americans. Unlike in Canada, citizens would not be enrolled in a plan automatically. Americans would have to go looking for one they could afford. And if they could not find one they would remain uninsured. Dr. Woolhandler, who is also a professor at Harvard Medical School, estimates that “tens of millions” of Americans would remain uninsured under Obama’s plan. These numbers would swell as employers, who provide plans for 59 percent of those who are employed, continue to reduce coverage.

“The only way everyone will get insurance is with national health insurance,” she said from Boston in a phone interview. “There is nothing in the Obama plan that will change the bitter reality that working-class families face when their breadwinner gets sick. People with catastrophic illnesses usually lose their jobs and lose their insurance. They often cannot afford the high premiums for the insurance they can get when they are unable to work. Most families that file for bankruptcy because of medical costs had insurance before they got sick. They either lost the insurance because they lost their jobs or faced gaps in coverage that meant they could not afford medical care.”

Obama has borrowed John Kerry’s idea to have the government absorb certain severe costs, although again the details are not spelled out. Insurers, he says, would no longer be able to discriminate based on preexisting conditions. All children would have health coverage. He would, he says, expand Medicare and Medicare-like coverage to protect the very young and the elderly. This is laudable, if he can make it happen. But the fundamental problem is a health industry run for profit. Our health system costs nearly twice as much as national programs in countries such as Switzerland. The overhead for traditional Medicare is 3 percent, and the overhead for the investment-owned companies is 26.5 percent. A staggering 31 percent of our health care expenditures is spent on administrative costs. Look what we get in return.

We on the left, those who should be out there fighting for universal health care and total and immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, sit like lap dogs on the short leashes of our Democratic (read corporate) masters. We yap now and then, but we have forgotten how to snarl and bite. We have been domesticated. And until we punish the two main parties the way big corporations do, by withdrawing support and funding when our issues are ignored, we will remain irrelevant and impotent. I detest Bill O’Reilly, but he is right on one thing—we liberals are a spineless lot.

Labor unions don’t negotiate with corporations on the basis of good will. They negotiate carrying the threat of a strike. What power do we have as long as we cave on every issue we stand for, from opposition to the death penalty to battling back against the military-industrial complex?

It is not about liking or not liking Obama. It is not about race or class or gender. It is not about growing up poor or a member of the working class. There is no shortage of greasy politicians who, once in power, sold out their own. Look at Bill Clinton. It is about fighting back. It is about confronting a system that belittles us, what we stand for and what is best for the majority of Americans. We need to throw our support behind alternative candidates who champion what we care about, whether Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader. Bob Barr’s health care plan, like John McCain’s, is even worse than Obama’s tepid proposal. We need to begin to actively and militantly defy the corporate state, and this means stepping outside of the two-party system. Universal health insurance is one issue. There are others. Nothing we care about will change until we do.

The Democrats, who promise to end the war in Iraq, create jobs and provide universal health care, ignore these promises once election cycles are over. And we never make them pay. They gave us NAFTA, the destruction of welfare and increased military spending, and we gave them our vote. This is the party that took back Congress in 2006 on an anti-war platform and then increased troop levels and funding for the Iraq war. This is a party that talks about the crushing weight of debt carried by Americans and then refuses to cap predatory interest rates as high as 30 percent imposed by credit card companies. This is a party that promises to protect our constitutional rights and then passes the FISA bill to protect the telecommunications companies. The list goes on. These politicians, including Obama, must begin to feel heat. They must learn that there is a cost to be paid for working on behalf of corporations and disempowering citizens.

D.C. Teachers Divided on Merit Pay Plan

2008-08-27T09:50:00.000-04:00

September, 2008 issue of Labor Notes

The Washington Teachers Union is on a collision course with D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee over her plan to kill job security for teachers in exchange for merit pay—up to $20,000 a year in bonuses—and higher salaries.

D.C. is home to the second-highest number of charter schools in the country and a slowly declining school-age population. Mayor Adrian Fenty, who took control of the school system last year, believes the plan will get rid of bad teachers, motivate the rest, up student achievement, and raise the profile of a district that has lost 22,000 students and 1,500 teachers in 10 years.

But merit pay has been taboo in teachers unions because it pits teachers against each other, and because awards are often tied to students’ scores on the dreaded standardized tests. Teachers say the tests, loved by administrators looking for quick ways to measure student progress, are not only an unreliable gauge of learning but also a route to deadly dull classrooms.

In many districts, teachers already receive performance pay for attaining board certification, mentoring, or teaching in low-performing schools. Since the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law, however, standardized tests have become the key measure of teacher performance and student achievement.

During 10 months of negotiations, Rhee’s proposals have created fault lines both within the union leadership and among its members. “This will attract teachers for the wrong reason,” said a veteran teacher and member of the WTU executive board. “Are they going to come for the pay or to make a difference for students?”

“I don’t consider this merit pay, because everyone would get a base pay raise,” said President George Parker. “This is incentive pay, which is a bonus for performance.”

When contract talks stalled in mid-July, Parker was criticized for convening meetings where the chancellor pitched her two-tier scheme to the local’s 4,200 teachers.

SEEING GREEN

Rhee is proposing that current teachers choose one of two tracks, Red or Green. Both include $5,000 “transition” stipends for two years, and better benefits.

Red track teachers would get a 31 percent raise over five years. Green teachers would get a smaller raise, but they’d be eligible for merit pay—as much as $20,000 a year if they met performance standards.

Many teachers left the meetings seeing green. “I’m looking at a 73 percent raise in one year,” said first-grade teacher Steve Oberly. “If we did this program for five years, I would have a retirement nest egg.”

To get on the merit-based pay plan, Oberly, a ten-year veteran, would undergo a year of probation, after which he could be dismissed for under-performance. Though fired teachers can appeal to an elected body of teachers and administrators, the school principal has the final say. Teachers say favoritism would rule the day.

“This could lead to mass terminations,” said Candi Peterson, a WTU trustee and building representative. “And they could get rid of a position, when they really want to get rid of a person.”

All new teachers would join the Green tier as at-will, probationary employees for four years. Over that period, they would see a 20 percent raise and up their total salary from $50,000 to $75,000—if they survived.

Teachers who chose the Red program and got fired would receive a salaried one-year leave or, for teachers with 20 years’ experience, an early retirement package. Green teachers would get nothing.

The union would be giving up job security across the board, as both plans do away with seniority for the hiring, firing, or placement of teachers. “There is no such thing as a safe tier,” said Peterson.

WTU’s parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, recently elected Randi Weingarten to the union’s top spot. As head of the New York City teachers union, Weingarten negotiated merit pay last fall, and her elevation signals AFT’s openness to such pay plans.

As early as 2002, the AFT endorsed what it calls “professional compensation,” but highlighted the pitfalls: “questionable or difficult-to-understand assessment procedures” and “teacher morale problems stemming from the creation of unfair competition.”

Opponents say D.C.’s merit plan contains the same dangers.

“They’re going to ask teachers to vote on this plan before determining how we’re going to be evaluated for performance pay,” Peterson said.

Solvency has been the biggest issue for merit schemes. “Numerous plans have begun in the last 40 years but they flat run out of money,” said Rob Weil, of AFT’s Educational Issues Department. “They’re often programs that we love, but when they require new money, they lose their luster.”

Rhee claims her pay plan has private backing from the Gates Foundation, among others, but only for five years. When this money runs out, she promises to free up resources by streamlining bureaucracy and ending the outsourcing of special education.

Her 20-year early-retirement plan, however, relies on a squeezed district budget. The city already rejected proposals for a 25-year plan last year.

LEADERSHIP SPLITS

The contract talks have exacerbated the rift between Parker and WTU’s Vice President, Nathan Saunders. After Parker barred him from speaking on behalf of the union, Saunders sued Parker, members of the executive board, and Rhee, charging them with conspiracy.

Saunders’ litigious streak has served the union well. A 2002 suit he filed uncovered a $5 million embezzlement scandal that sent then-WTU president Barbara Bullock to jail for nine years.

Now, Saunders and others are filing an unfair labor practice charge against Parker and Rhee after revelations that two nonprofits close to Rhee hired several teachers for $1,000 a week to lobby their colleagues to accept merit pay.

Despite internal divisions, the WTU is opposing any proposal that attacks tenure, a legal right shared by all D.C. employees. Tenure rights ensure due process and recognition of years of service in staffing decisions.

Meanwhile, Rhee has closed 23 schools in the last year, leaving 600 teachers awaiting re-assignment just weeks before school begins. According to Peterson, 78 instructors were fired in June. “Even though we have due process under the old contract, we’ve had people illegally terminated,” she said. “Imagine what it would be like with a weaker contract.”

New teachers can’t be hired, nor can negotiations move forward, until teachers are placed. Rhee’s push for a mid-July vote before the AFT national convention fizzled, heightening scrutiny of her proposals, and making an agreement unlikely before school begins in late August.

Black and White

2008-08-24T19:36:00.000-04:00

1937 sit-down at the Fisher Body plant; Detroit, MI

Aerial View of Detroit; 1930

Wayne State has digitized portions of the Detroit News Collection dating from the late 19th century. More recently, they've added about 400 newsreels from the 1920's to their Virtual Motor City archive. A few favorites: unharnessed steelworkers putting up the Penobscot; and some bonnie lassies at Bob-Lo's Scottish fest. Better than your grand ma ma's scrapbook.

Barns for Obama

2008-08-20T20:53:00.000-04:00

In June I received an email from "Obama for America". Barack had an important video announcement-news that he wanted me to hear first-about foregoing public funding (if it's broken, continue to break it!).

In the coming months, I (and millions more) have received several "personalized" messages from Barack telling me "this campaign is in your hands like no other time before." A recent one, entitled “Backstage," informed me that ten regular folks will be fist-bumping with Barack at the DNC.

Ten days ago, David Plouffe was proud to say I could hear Barack's choice for VP via text message: "Barack wants you to be the first to know who will join him in leading our movement for change."

Finding that out won't be difficult, in fact it was all over the news this morning (how do you best “make up” for being young and black?)

This overzealous, high-tech populism warrants our suspicion and betrays insecurity within Obama’s war room about accusations of elitism (look at all them Barns for Obama!). But few things are more elitist than making a novelty of the “regular” American.

We're offered a glowing blue form of access by email, twitter, and facebook, that doesn't alter the inaccessible corporate electioneering machine that keeps Obama centrist when not vague.

No faux-populism would be complete without inspiring faux-music. I couldn’t make it much past two and a half minutes.

Beep Beep Yeah

2008-08-10T22:55:00.000-04:00

Take your shoes off.

Cultivate a point guard’s court vision. See your path a half-mile ahead (and behind), look for brake lights, disappearing lanes, detours, exits, and police. Position yourself accordingly.

Seek open space, take measured risks and seize openings.
Ex: The far-right lane is a vastly underused channel. The conventional “pass on the left rule” loses weight when you are in the center lane.

Traffic slowdowns aren't always bad. Turn the air off and open the window. Make phone calls. Fix your underwear or a snack.

When in traffic, resist the un-original temptation to jump in the lane that seems to be moving. Cars ahead of you are hastily doing the same thing, meanwhile freeing up the one you're in.

When you happen upon a jam due to lane closure, use the free lane to drive as far as possible before merging. But don't get caught at the end waiting to get in. The "No butts, no cuts, no coconuts" still holds currency.

Many off ramps are right next to on ramps. If you find yourself in traffic and near an exit, you can get off and then right back on, often bypassing some of the congestion. This has worked and backfired.

Cars are karaoke capsules. You’ll also be surprised at the range of dance moves available to the driver.

You can often attain your desired speed in the “slow lane” while letting the left-laners shoulder the risk.

Train yourself to recognize police forms: bumper guards, excessive reflective material, orb-spotlights, rooftop sirens, and buzz cuts, but also oddly spare cars like all-black or all-white unmarked Crown Vics).

Foster good will with the cars around you. Let people in and out of lanes when possible. The courtesy wave can be used as a sign of gratitude, but also a tool for initiating a bold move.

Maintain momentum and smoothness like a downhill skier. To this end, use the brakes as little as possible.

Steak and Shake's shoestring fries are worth the stop. Burger King will consistently disappoint.

In a tight spot, you might find yourself wondering, "What would Hasselhoff do?" Lean towards the 80's Hoff, and away from the post-Bay Watch Hassle.

On Hold

2008-07-31T19:20:00.000-04:00

I dutifully dialed in five minutes ahead of yesterday's conference call with John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO's recently endorsed presidential candidate, Barack Obama. The muzak was terrible, failing even to effectively stylize a familiar tune. Every two minutes a calm, computer-like woman came on to thank us for joining her in patience.

“We are still waiting for Senator Obama to join us…please continue to hold."
I held for over 30 minutes. I know Barack is very busy these days, but I couldn't get past the feeling of recurring abandonment. (Clinton's NAFTA, and welfare "reform". And the failed '06 Congressional rush to end the war.) Working people once again kept in the waiting room, their co-pay registered, their political support taken for granted. But labor leaders still kissing ass and making appointments.

At 3:47, Obama arrived for a speech that was too short to contain anything more than platitudes. Broadly, he would champion the cause of working people, and restore the middle class dream with universal health care, and fair(er?) trade deals. Seven minutes later he was gone, the stench of lip service in the air, diffused only by the sycophantic applause from Sweeney's crowded DC boardroom.

The transparent display was insulting, leading me to wonder, (less and less):
Is Obama not only not working in the interest of working people but against them? (either we are in for a disappointment or Goldman Sachs).

Or; Are the Democrats well-intentioned, aiming to help working class people, but consistently wrong in their strategy? This is what they would have us believe. ("we were fed misinformation!" on Iraq) Or this hedge by Hillary, on NAFTA.

Obama signed off with the consistently empty; "god bless you, god bless america," and hung up. There was a pause for about ten seconds, then more muzak.

The computer woman returned: "The conference call is not concluded. Senator Obama’s line has been lost, and we are trying to re-establish." Negotiations commenced behind the scenes.

Two minutes of muzak. Then: "The call is over. You may now disconnect."
I waited for a few seconds just in case. Then a piercing beep came over the line and I hung up quickly.

University of California Service Workers Lead Five Day Strike

2008-07-29T14:15:00.000-04:00

In August 2008 print edition of Labor Notes

After months of fruitless negotiations with the University of California, AFSCME Local 3299 members escalated their contract fight with a five-day strike in mid-July. Demanding a living wage of $15 an hour, custodians, groundskeepers, and bus drivers rallied at UC campuses and five medical centers from Sacramento to San Diego. They oppose a contract without guaranteed pay raises for most workers and bumps to $12 an hour for only a few.

Of the 8,500 service workers, about 8,200 are eligible for food stamps and other public assistance. The same jobs at UC state and community colleges pay 25 percent more.

The local also represents 11,000 patient care workers at university medical centers, who likewise have yet to agree on a contract. Though the patient care workers have been offered a raise of 26 percent over five years, it won’t help the service workers who lead the strike.

DON’T CROSS THE LINE

Medical centers threatened to revoke licenses from patient care workers who honored the picket lines outside hospitals. Still, entire departments stopped work for a day or two in support. Seven hundred strikers from both units rallied at UC Davis on day four to demand better pay and seniority.

“Service workers have no step system for pay,” said Secretary Treasurer Gail Price. “New people make the same as someone working here for 20 years.”

The action, which caused delays to bus routes, cafeteria service, and garbage collection, went on despite a court-ordered temporary restraining order. Workers in building trades unions refused to cross picket lines, temporarily halting campus construction projects.

Accused of leading an illegal strike that endangered patients, Local 3299 officials said they gave sufficient notice to employers about the stoppage. The strikers are challenging the injunction in court, accusing administrators of using illegal forms of intimidation.

“The university first argued this would cripple our medical centers,” said Kathryn Lybarger, a gardener at Berkeley, who sits on the bargaining committee. “After the strike they said it didn’t affect them at all.”

In a July 15 letter to the school president, 34 state legislators decried reports that “managers are advising picketers they will lose their jobs short of immediately returning to work.” If workers have exhausted mediation and negotiations, California law allows workers in higher education to strike once their contract has expired.

The university blames its belt-tightening on the state’s budget gap, but only 8.6% of the union’s members receive their wages from state funds. While UC claimed to have its hands tied, new president Mark Yudof was hired this spring into an $828,000 position. On day five, the strike culminated outside his Oakland office. Workers are infuriated by the meager offer of poverty wages. A year of bargaining, however, has hardened their resolve. “A lot of people are saying ‘let’s strike again,’” said Lybarger.

Labor Board Becomes Government’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’

2008-07-28T14:23:00.000-04:00

In August 2008 Print Edition of Labor Notes and Monthly Review

Returning to school after winter break, Austin Garrido found that ULoop, an online marketplace for college students, had cut his hourly pay. Elsewhere on the University of California-Polytechnic’s campus in Pomona, his co-worker Sarah Doolittle also discovered a light paycheck.

Unhappy about $8 an hour and shrunken bonuses from the Craigslist-type outfit, the two posted their grievances at Uloop’s online message board for workers. “It’s the only way for employees on different campuses to communicate with each other,” Garrido said.

They started a thread that raised the prospect of unionizing, but management was reading, too. ULoop removed the post five minutes later, and 20 minutes after that the company fired Garrido and Doolittle over the phone.

Their new manager, hired to oversee the wage cuts, cited under-performance, but it was clear that Garrido and Doolittle were singled out for their online organizing via the message board. “They didn’t have a stated usage policy,” said Garrido. “There were a number of non-work-related posts on there.”

Claiming violations of their right to self-organize, the two filed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint, seeking back pay and their jobs.

Much to their surprise, the grievance quickly rose to the NLRB's Office of Advice in Washington, D.C, where it entered into a contentious national debate over workers’ rights to online communication.

ON GUARD

Just before Garrido and Doolittle's complaint against ULoop, the Labor Board had laid out its first major ruling on electronic communications, in December 2007.

The controversial 3 to 2 Register-Guard decision stemmed from an incident in 2001, when management at the Eugene, Oregon, newspaper disciplined a copy editor, the Communications Workers (CWA) local president, for sending three union-related messages to the workforce on the company email system.

The Board majority said that the newspaper’s property rights allowed it to decide how the email system would be used—and that employees have no right to use the company email for “concerted activity.”

As long as the ban on concerted activity is not wholesale, the three argued, employers are not compelled to facilitate the most convenient method for worker communication about union matters.

CWA argued that the company’s policy banning “non-work” emails was illegal because it effectively banned union talk. On top of that, the company was selectively enforcing the policy by allowing solicitations about birthday parties and charity donations while punishing union use.

The Board majority broke NLRB precedent and gave employers the right to decide what types of “non-work” communication they wanted to allow.

THE RIGHT TO TALK UNION

The two dissenting members cited precedents dating to 1945 that said the employer’s property rights must yield to the rights of employees to self-organize and take action on the job.

Arguments for employer restrictions don’t hold up in the digital age, says West Virginia University law professor Anne Lofaso. “The Board talks about telephones and bulletin boards as having cost or space concerns,” she said. “Neither of these concerns apply to email."

Because electronic communications are the primary tool for workers to maintain connection in virtual and remote workplaces, Lofaso called the Board decision disingenuous. “Everyone knows that people rely on email at work, so why did the majority decide to ignore that?” she asked. “Because it weakens their case.”

The two dissenters called the decision hopelessly out of touch with workplace realities, and accused the majority of making the NLRB the “Rip Van Winkle of administrative agencies.”

UNENFORCEABLE?

The Register-Guard decision appears devastating for workers' rights, but its effect will depend on how or whether it is enforced.

In Eugene, CWA Local 37194 President Randi Bjornstad noted that the new company policy against mass emails bars the union from sending the types of message that led to the original conflict.

Still, Bjornstad says that union-related emails remain common, without reprisals from the paper.

“Through our entire bargaining process, we have sent emails back and forth to company reps and to each other,” she said. “It has been a rather nebulous kind of ruling in terms of how it has been put into practice.”

Meanwhile, the Register-Guard case is in the Washington, D.C., appeals court, where CWA is challenging the new employer powers to single out union speech for punishment.

In the wake of Register-Guard, the Los Angeles office of the NLRB saw test case written all over the ULoop complaint. However, the Mountain View, California, company is inching toward a settlement, in order to avoid litigation.

The Register-Guard precedent continues to restrict workers’ rights to electronic communications, but Lofaso is confident that the ULoop case exposes its fragility. “Even a McCain-appointed NLRB could overturn this ruling,” she said.

Dark Shades of Green

2008-07-16T12:51:00.000-04:00

On the origins of Toyota's Prius in this month's In These Times.

I'll Remember Remembering You Fondly

2008-07-10T21:38:00.000-04:00

I saw a Ford Escort parked at Michigan and Trumbull with a magnetic "security" sign on its roof last week. Tiger Stadium will be falling soon, demolition began June 30. I went back to see the stadium today, now with a gaping hole in the left field wall. All the backhoes and bulldozers seemed like a whole lot of wasted energy, precisely because it's fallen into disuse since '99.

I'm not exactly kicking myself for failing to get a pocket full of dirt from the infield, and I've never grappled in the stands for a home run ball. I don't even much enjoy baseball.

But as I walked over the pedestrian bridge and back to my car, I felt an uncontrollable reverence, near mourning, for the passing of a great Detroit ruin. I hear it all the time in reference to assorted buildings that have long since lost their initial purpose: "knock it down," and in reference to the city itself "just flatten the thing."

There's a value, sometimes tragic, to these relics when they gain new life by conversion. But they also serve a purpose by merely sitting dormant. Nostalgia fills many yawning voids throughout the city. Why should we destroy the markers of bygone greatness? Detroit, the old man on the examining table, proud and naked, exhibits its estrangement from vitality like no other.

I wish the marble floors of Michigan Central Station still clapped with traffic. But I'd prefer a slow crumbling to the wrecking ball. After all, there's no shortage of space around here.

Most fans have memories of games with Pops, but I mostly remember craning from the backseat to catch a glimpse of the orange Tiger growling through the big blue D on our drive along 75 to the east side. The stadium hovered close to the highway, like a white aluminum battleship merging into traffic.

I had no choice but to cheer for the Tigers after their prime, despite an auspicious beginning. The week after I was born, they won the '84 series. I watched and waited through the nineties for it to happen again, but the Tigers brought up the rear for the bulk of my youth, showing an uncanny knack for failure.

So I set about memorizing the happy days and the entertaining 1984 roster as if it were my own Detroit squad. At the helm, Sparky Anderson, directing an all-star cast including Kirk Gibson, Trammell, Chet Lemon, "Sweet Lou" Whitaker, and Rusty Kuntz.

I only went inside once when I was nine (I took my glove to catch foul balls more often at Toledo's Ned Skeldon stadium, former home of the scrappy AAA-feeder Mud Hens). My aunt Shelly took me and my cousins for "run the bases" night in Detroit, where everyone under four foot five got to trot around the diamond, basking in their moment under the big lights. I slid into home, it was great. Let the kids in again.

2008-07-08T00:56:00.000-04:00

Thirty-year-old Palestinian Hossam Dwayat turned his Caterpillar bulldozer into a lethal weapon last week in West Jerusalem, killing three Israelis and injuring many more. It's not easy (in America) to contextualize this terrifying act without being accused of excusing it. I certainly don’t support the forms of resistance that kill innocents. It is impossible, though, to separate Dwayat’s attack from his daily experience under colonial rule.

Dwayat left his family in East Jerusalem, where 250,000 Palestinians have lived with military occupation since 1967. Juan Cole points out that most of the international coverage of the July 2 attacks omitted a key detail: Dwayat was working construction on the major thoroughfare of Jaffa Road, building a causeway for Israel’s light rail system.

If completed, the light rail line would join the western part of the city with Pisgat Ze'ev, the largest settlement in “Greater Jerusalem,” a euphemism for the city plus its illegal settlements (often softened to Israeli “neighborhoods”) on the West Bank. These colonies are connected by exclusive roads for Jewish Israelis, and tap into Palestinian aquifers. They are also the breeding ground for a violently anti-Arab culture. The line is one more attempt to normalize the settlements and integrate them into an expansive Israeli capitol while the "peace process" drags on.
It is not difficult to imagine Dwayat going mad with the realization that he had become an agent of his own colonization, literally laying the tracks for the Israeli colonial project.

Late for School in Los Angeles

2008-07-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

Appearing in print edition of July 2008 issue of Labor Notes

Forty thousand Los Angeles teachers delayed the start of classes for one hour on June 6 to protest threatened cuts to education funding. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed cutbacks are part of an attempt to close an estimated $17 billion statewide budget gap. The reductions would create a $560 million shortfall in the next two years within Los Angeles schools, the state’s largest district. Cuts to education across the state could well top $4 billion in total.

The teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles, said the funding drop would equal an 8 percent pay cut for all district employees. Despite a no-strike clause in their contract and a loss of pay, more than three-quarters of UTLA members joined the hour-long “late-in” outside their schools. “It is fair to say this may have been the largest job action for teachers ever in California,” said UTLA Vice President Joshua Pechthalt. “It was definitely the right thing to do given the statewide response to the budget cuts.”

The turnout was built with community support. Across the district, members of California’s largest teacher local held weekly meetings with chapter chairs and parents’ councils. Robin Potash teaches at Wadsworth Elementary, where parent-teacher solidarity has grown for several years, and especially since April, when they fought a charter school’s attempt to use Wadsworth classroom space. When June 6 arrived, more than 15,000 parents, students, and community members closed ranks with the teachers.

“This was really a statement from parents and the community that we will protect public education,” Potash said. The Los Angeles school board went to court to prevent the widely publicized protest, but failed. Superintendent David Brewer dispatched recorded calls to 48,000 teachers and 700,000 parents the night before the action, accusing UTLA leaders of jeopardizing student safety.

Union president A.J. Duffy argues that the proposed cuts go beyond just schools. “There could be cuts to aid to the blind and disabled, food programs for low-income kids, and health clinics,” he said.

At the state level, the California Teachers Association (the state’s NEA affiliate) launched a “Cuts Hurt” spring bus tour and a “Day of the Teacher” action in May, which brought out thousands of teachers against the governor’s crippling proposals.

“We’re offering a broader strategy, fighting not just for public education but for all social services,” said Pechthalt.

The California Federation of Teachers (the AFT affiliate) has joined in the challenge with a progressive tax campaign which calls for boosting income taxes for those who make more than $400,000 a year. The 1.7 percent bump would create $5 billion in new revenue.

Duffy also points to a potential $1.3 billion windfall from taxing oil production. “We are the only state in the country, the only governmental entity in the world, that does not tax oil companies for taking oil out of the ground,” Duffy said.

UTLA has also had to fight just to get its members paid. The union filed a lawsuit last June against the school board over a faulty payroll system, another factor in teachers’ mounting
frustration that peaked with the late-in.

STATEWIDE STRIKE?

UTLA teachers are considering another one-hour work stoppage in the fall in conjunction with the CTA.“The idea of a statewide teachers strike needs to be on the table,” said Pechthalt.

While pushing their big-picture strategy, UTLA teachers continue a protracted contract fight. After winning a 6 percent pay raise in early 2007, the latest round of contract talks produced an offer with no salary increase. Despite reports of a $700 million budget surplus last year, the school board has stonewalled teachers in negotiations for nine months.

After the June 6 action, the school board’s revised budget proposal removed the threat of teacher layoffs. But the board also unilaterally imposed furlough days for teachers, while capping health care spending without accounting for rising costs.

Teachers across California expect a long fight. “Students didn’t create this budget
crisis,” said CTA president David Sanchez. “And their education shouldn’t be ransomed to solve it.”

Bye George

2008-06-24T20:15:00.000-04:00

I missed much of George Carlin’s early career, so first came to his comedy by the time he was a dirty old man- a wise, wise-ass grandpa. At the end, Carlin appeared in all black, a belligerent mime. After forced trips to church in high school, I made him (a recovering Catholic too) my personal anti-catechist.

Whether his target was religion, class hierarchy, empire, over-consumption, language use and censorship, bankers, sexual custom, or the general failings of human nature, Carlin told polite society and euphemized conventional wisdom to fuck off. He was a master of wordplay, lewd sound effects, and a pacing physical comedy that drove it home.

And he was versatile: (He raised a generation as the out of place narrator for the pre-school hit show "Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends," which could only have been part of some community service stint for swearing in front of a class of Kindergarteners.)

Carlin’s bullshit detector was devastating, but he used simple means of inquiry to dissect authority and ideology. And drawing simple questions about “the way things worked” all the way out to their illogical end, he was able to lay bare the absurdity of so many bankrupt American mythologies.

Carlin on "the greatest bullshit story ever told":

On "the american dream:"

Here's what they're calling Carlin's last interview (in Psychology Today). Originally slated for a back page, they published it nearly in full on the web.

Ralph Nader Takes on the Big Market

2008-06-19T22:58:00.000-04:00

Ralph Nader is the tireless advocate for fairness, but also an uncanny prophet. He was on Democracy Now today decrying Obama as "a corporate candidate from A to Z." However reviled by the Democratic Party, which wants to rope reluctant progressive left votes into their coalition without earning them, Nader continues his crusade (see interview in the WSJ) against a corporate establishment that wants to convince us of its inevitability.

This time, Nader's delving into the world of sports, turning a critical eye towards NBA corruption stemming from favoritism given to "big market" teams that can draw larger viewership, sell more tickets, and bring in more revenue for the league. And all politics aside, he's got a pretty mean set shot from 4 feet.

Nader was out front on the latest scandal surrounding unsavory officiating and alleged game fixing by the league. He wrote a letter to NBA commissioner Daniel Stern in 2002, after sitting in the stands at game 6 of that year's Western Conference conference finals. The prime-time darling LA Lakers came back to beat the Sacramento Kings, a scrappy small market team featuring a post-40 year old Vlade Divac at center (not stellar for ratings).

Now former NBA referee Tim Donaghy, who was discovered last summer to have gambled on games he officiated, is verifying Nader's allegations of foul-play, claiming that "company men" wanted to lengthen the series, and had referees do all in their power to give the Lakers a chance to come back. The league has dismissed his claims, arguing that Donaghy has little credibility given his own misdeeds.

But watch the tape below for pretty clear evidence of foul play. After scoring 27 from free throws in the final quarter, the Lakers prevailed, ended up winning the series, and moving onto the NBA Finals, where they added another ring to the illustrious, highly commercialized "Showtime" legacy.

Wayne State Part Time Faculty Victorious

2008-06-07T19:37:00.000-04:00

The Union of Part-Time Faculty (affiliated with the AFT) at Wayne State won their first tentative contract agreement this spring after years of organizing and months of negotiations. School administrations have relied more heavily on adjuncts in cost-saving efforts, and part-timers now compose a majority of the teaching workforce in higher ed nationwide- a workforce largely without union representation, benefits, or job security.

Their victory follows in the tradition of strong teachers' contracts at University of Michigan schools in Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint among lecturers and graduate students. The part-time faculty, who often teach at several schools in any given semester, are gaining steam in the area, including Henry Ford Community Coll ege which formed a bargaining unit on May 7th.

Faculty members at Wayne vote this first week of June on the contract, and ballots come in for a count on the 9th.

See Joe Berry's book "Reclaiming the Ivory Tower" a one of a kind, concise history of the rise of adjuncts, and an organizing strategy guide.