My Take

what be this mates?

"1 - Having failed to unionize 
any Wal-Marts,
 American labor unions
 have helped form a new and unusual type 
of workers' association 
to press Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
 to improve its wages 
and working conditions" 

 
 
 
"With its first beachhead 
in Central Florida,
 the two-month-old group 
is already battling Wal-Mart,
 the nation's largest corporation, 
over what it says 
is the company's practice
 of reducing the hours 
that many employees work, 
often from 40 a week to 34,
 30 or even fewer, 
jeopardizing some workers' health benefits."



"The association says it has nearly 
200 current and former Wal-Mart workers
 and is growing by 30 workers a week
. Members pay dues of $5 a month. 
In Florida, its membership includes
 workers from 30 stores 
in the Tampa, Orlando and St. Petersburg areas,
 and it is also seeking 
to enlist Wal-Mart employees in Texas" 

"The group's sponsors include 
the United Food and Commercial Workers Union
, the Service Employees International Union,
 and Acorn,
 an advocacy group for low-income people."

" It has also received support
 from the Marguerite Casey Foundation,
 which helps low-income families,
 and the Nathan Cummings Foundation,
 which promotes social justice."

"We are building something 
that's never been seen; 
it's neither fish nor fowl," said Wade Rathke,
 a top Acorn official
who is the chief organizer
 for the association"




"The group is urging 
the State of Florida 
to grant unemployment benefits 
to workers whose hours 
have been cut back by Wal-Mart.
 It is arguing that workers 
who quit Wal-Mart 
because the reduced hours
 meant they were not earning enough 
to live on deserve jobless benefits
. It also wants supplemental
 jobless benefits for workers 
with reduced hours who remain at Wal-Mart" 

 

"The association says Wal-Mart 
is betraying the desire 
of its founder, Sam Walton, 
to maintain a family-friendly company" 

"The Marguerite Casey Foundation
 has granted $250,000
 to an Acorn-backed project 
that is in turn giving
much of that money to the new association" 


"The association is the latest attempt
 by labor and community groups 
to squeeze at Wal-Mart's pressure points.
 In the past month,
 the food and commercial workers
 have led an effort, 
joined by the nation's two big teachers unions
 urging consumers 
not to purchase school supplies
 at Wal-Mart. 
Another group, Wal-Mart Watch, 
plans to announce a week 
of demonstrations and meetings nationwide 
in November to criticize 
Wal-Mart's wages and benefits"

"Labor leaders say they support 
the nonunion Wal-Mart Workers Association
 because with the company fighting aggressively
 against unionization,
 they recognize that it will be extremely hard
 to unionize any Wal-Marts"

"This dovetails nicely with what we're doing," 
said William McDonough, organizing director
 of the food and commercial workers 
Our role is to help Wal-Mart workers
    get a voice on the job." 



"The new association 
is not urging shoppers
 to boycott Wal-Mart"

-------------------------------------

sprouts of the new 

the
   key 

          keep punching 
 
 

orgin' " el " dixie chicken choppers

This summer Mr. Hansen's union joined the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union in breaking away from the A.F.L.-C.I.O., with those three unions promising to devote far more energy to recruiting workers than the rest of organized labor has. Two organizing drives aimed at poultry workers - one in this old factory town and the other in Russellville, Ala. - are among the early battles in this effort to reinvigorate labor.

As part of their new push, the insurgent unions say they will seek to build deep community support among local houses of worship, political leaders and immigrant groups. They also plan to lend organizers to one other's drives, something the food and commercial workers could use because it has few Spanish-speaking organizers in areas like Morristown, where the Hispanic population is soaring. 

The 700 poultry workers here, most of them Mexicans, might seem ripe for organizing, but labor's efforts at resurgence face daunting obstacles. Companies often fight back tooth and nail, and many immigrants who are initially sympathetic to unions ultimately shy away, fearing that their employers might grow angry and fire them or have them deported.

"It's been extraordinarily difficult to organize factory workers - and that includes poultry workers - in the South," said Daniel Cornfield, a labor expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "There's plenty of employer resistance in this neck of the woods. And then there's another problem - there's an unfamiliarity between unions and immigrants, far more so in the South than on the coasts. Unions here don't know much about the culture of immigrant workers, and then many immigrant workers are unfamiliar with U.S. labor unions."

But Ms. Lopez was the exception, knowing a good deal about American unions. The daughter of a migrant worker, she saw how the United Farm Workers helped her father when he harvested vegetables in Arizona.

Last April she quit Koch Foods because she was pregnant and the managers rejected her request to be transferred to a less rigorous position. Her job as a wing cutter was so arduous that she feared it would jeopardize her pregnancy. 

Like many other workers, she disliked the 42-chickens-a-minute line speed. That pace means that many workers make 18,000 cuts during their eight-hour shifts as they prepare breasts, wings, tenders and cutlets for restaurants and consumers. 

"What I didn't like is they would yell at us and tell us we're good for nothing and we didn't know how to work, and sometimes they wouldn't even let us leave to go home when we were sick," Ms. Lopez said as she nursed her month-old son. "We need to convince people to join the union, that they shouldn't be afraid because the union is the only way to make things better and stop them from mistreating at us." 

Officials with Koch Foods declined requests to be interviewed. But at proceedings that the Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration held in response to Ms. Lopez's bathroom complaint, Koch representatives said their supervisors were attentive to workers' concerns and gave adequate bathroom breaks.



In northwest Alabama, 280 miles to the west, workers at the Gold Kist plant in Russellville voice similar complaints about line speed, wages and bathroom breaks. But many Gold Kist employees also complain about how injuries are handled. Most of the plant's 1,500 workers are Hispanic, but there are also many blacks and whites.

One day last December, Delores Smith slipped on a greasy metal plate. Ms. Smith, who prepares boxes to hold processed chickens, crashed to the floor and was in agony, certain that she had broken her right ankle. 

She said Gold Kist's nurse did not even look at her ankle and told her that she must have sprained some ligaments and should take ibuprofen and go home. After a supervisor took her to her car, Ms. Smith looked at her ankle and saw pieces of bone protruding through her sock. When her son took her to the emergency room, X-rays showed that her ankle was broken in three places.

Ms. Smith still limps slightly, but now she has another health crisis. Her job involves removing folded-up boxes that workers upstairs send to her via a chute. Those boxes often tumble out, and one day in July the boxes knocked her eyeglasses to the floor, breaking the frames.

Looking comical in her taped-together glasses, Ms. Smith said: "They sent me home for the day, saying it was my fault. I also got a write-up. My glasses can't even be fixed."

At first, Gold Kist refused to pay for new glasses, which she said would cost $378. With her base wage of $8.40 an hour, that would exceed her weekly pay. Workers who do not arrive late or miss a day for a whole week receive a 75-cent-an-hour bonus.

The company, she said, has now offered to pay $38 toward the glasses. She hopes to get some more from workers' compensation.

Ms. Smith said she and the two other workers in her unit often could not go to the bathroom for hours at a time because the pace was so demanding and there was nobody to replace them.

"They don't respect us at all," she said. "That's why I'm praying for a union."

Yurken Pozo, who quit in early August, said Gold Kist was campaigning hard against unionization.

"They gathered the workers together and kept telling us: 'We don't need a union. The union will only take your money. The union doesn't help anybody,' " Mr. Pozo said.

Wayne Lord, Gold Kist's vice president for corporate relations, said the company's policy was to provide workers with needed bathroom breaks. He voiced surprise about Ms. Smith's health care complaints, saying Gold Kist had a telephone line that employees could call anonymously to report problems about bathroom breaks or medical treatment.

Gold Kist has long told employees why it thinks unions are unnecessary, Mr. Lord said. That practice helped persuade the Russellville workers to vote down a union twice in the 1990's.

"We believe our wages are competitive," Mr. Lord said. "We strive everyday to do the right thing by our employees."

The union is collecting signatures from workers and may soon ask for recognition from the company or for a unionization vote.

Back in Morristown, the Koch poultry workers are so united behind a union and have generated so much community support that they persuaded Koch to pledge not to mount an anti-union campaign. Several workers spoke at churches, and ministers, congregants and community groups wrote letters to the company backing unionization. The workers at Koch's kill plant and deboning plant are expected to approve unionization in mid-September.

"What Koch did is an important precedent," said Anita Grabowski, coordinator of the Poultry Workers Justice Project, a nonprofit group based in Austin, Tex. "This new model of community unionism is a way to help rebuild the labor movement, even in a hostile climate."

thats the ticket

 a big tute
  double barrel bravo   
for
 SF
   HOTEL local prez

mike casey 

thrown in a paddy wagon  
  for doin a righteous thing ....

================================

"Most Bay Area residents 
may have celebrated Labor
Day with prodigious quantities
 of beer and
barbecue,
 but some marked it the old-fashioned way
-- by getting arrested"

"Sixty-one union members 
and sympathizers staged a
sit-down at the Grand Hyatt Hotel
 at Union Square
in San Francisco 
to call attention to a yearlong
dispute with 14 hotels 
over new labor contracts"

"They were arrested, 
charged with misdemeanors 
for
interfering with a place of business,
 and released."

"As police fitted them 
with plastic handcuffs,
several hundred pickets 
marched on Stockton Street,
chanting union songs and slogans"

"Mike Casey,
 the president of Local Two 
of UNITE
HERE!, the union representing
 Bay Area HOTEL
employees in the conflict,
 was one of those
arrested."




"I think they're starting 
to realize that there's
no stopping time,
 that we're going 
to get to a 2006
expiration one way 
or the other
 so they might as
well get a little labor peace
    out of the deal,"
                 Casey said.

"The 2006 expiration date 
would match the cycle 
of
hotel contracts 
in New York, Chicago, Toronto,
Monterey and other cities,
 and significantly
enhance the local union's 
clout with national
chains."








=============================================

blackstone on proles

 in my philistine meanderings 
came across 
this fine 18th century view :

" the true reason
of requiring any qualification
with regard to property in voters
is to exclude
such persons as are in so mean
                a situation
as to be esteemed to have no will of their own "
         William Blackstone


=======================================

	Posted by herb jr. jr. at 07:25 AM
		| Comments (0)