Target closes site of rescheduled union election

If, like me, you've tended to shop at Target because they're "not as bad as Walmart," you are in for a rude awakening, at least when it comes to the issue of workers' rights.

So, what happened in Wisconsin?

Thanks to Occupy Philadelphia for the link to this thoughtful analysis of the failure of progressives and union activists in Wisconsin to recall the union-busting Republican Gov. Scott Walker. A small silver lining to this cloud: Democrats appear to have regained control of the Wisconsin State Senate in the same election.

Supporting workers and saving the planet.

Hat tip to Progressive Breakfast for serving up this eloquent post by former AFL-CIO officer Joe Uehlein at Common Dreams.org.

The broad public interest that ordinary Americans truly seek is sustainability. Even those who are misled into believing that government budget deficits are the greatest threat to our future are motivated by a concern to put that future on a sustainable basis.

Our greed-driven society is economically unsustainable – witness the renewed catastrophe of the global economy. It is socially unsustainable – witness the destruction of the middle class and the polarization of rich and poor worldwide. And it is environmentally unsustainable – witness the melting of the Arctic, the rise in sea levels, and the unprecedented increase in extreme weather events caused by our failure to halt climate change.

Sustainability includes but goes beyond the environment to encompass social and economic sustainability as well. This is often summed up in the “triple bottom line” that calls on corporations to be accountable not only for their environmental performance, but for their economic and social performance as well.

To have a future itself, organized labor needs to reorient itself around the objective of providing a sustainable future for all working people and the world we inhabit. That means putting millions of people to work creating a sustainable economy, society, and environment.

Uehlein describes the personal history that led him to understand the connection between the environment and the well-being of workers in an earlier post at Common Dreams. This earlier post is also an excellent introduction to the issues involved in the effort to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline.

Targeting Justice for Workers

Thanks to the Facebook page of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, I've learned that workers at Target Stores in the New York City area are trying to form a union. The UFCW provides several links to sources of information about this effort.

First, here's an article in the New York Times. Second, here is a post on Gawker. Finally, here is coverage of a controversy over CBS refusing to rent the union billboard space in Times Square to spread their message.

The Times reports that major issues for the workers are low pay and schedules that offer very few hours of work each week. Employees at a Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y. said that they rely on Medicaid and food stamps in order to support their families.

Predictably, a Target vice president told the Times that the company has “great benefits, flexible scheduling and great career opportunities for workers in all stages of life,”and that bringing in a union would wreck this lovely state of affairs.

Writing at Truthout, Mark Provost gives an eloquent explanation of why this argument doesn't hold water. Provost wasn't writing about Target specifically, but his argument certainly applies to the situation of the Target workers:

In the boardrooms of corporate America, profits aren't everything - they are the only thing. A JPMorgan research report concludes that the current corporate profit recovery is more dependent on falling unit-labor costs than during any previous expansion. At some level, corporate executives are aware that they are lowering workers' living standards, but their decisions are neither coordinated nor intentionally harmful. Call it the "paradox of profitability." Executives are acting in their own and their shareholders' best interest: maximizing profit margins in the face of weak demand by extensive layoffs and pay cuts. But what has been good for every company's income statement has been a disaster for working families and their communities.

I agree with Provost almost entirely. Corporate executives must be in really deep denial about what they're doing to their workers, or they wouldn't be able to live with themselves. But the bosses are going to hurt themselves in the long run if they keep shafting their employees. Workers who are badly paid and badly treated are workers who find it harder and harder to give a damn about doing a good job.

We can't count on corporations to have enough enlightened self-interest to know this. Workers need to be able to look out for their own needs. Individual workers do not have the power to defend themselves against corporate employers. This is why workers need the organized power of unions. When workers have what they need to provide a decent life for themselves and their loved ones, everyone benefits.

Unions help counter corporate power

Ellen Dannin persuasively demonstrates the need for workers to have unions in this post on Truthout. Dannin points out that

Today, we are reliving the dynamics of unchecked corporate power that led to the Great Depression. The Great Recession could not have been a surprise to anyone who was paying attention to the erosion of pay and working conditions and to the steady increase in poverty and unemployment.

We make a grave mistake when we blame unions for doing their job - for being a counterbalance to corporate power. Unions have a legal obligation to be the disloyal opposition. When there is no check on the steady growth of corporate power, we lose the balance and equality necessary to democracy. In fact, unions promote citizenship in the workplace and in their communities. Unions give workers rights of due process and equal protection in their workplaces.

The whole post is well worth reading.

The down side to DADT repeal

This post on Truthout just brightened my morning. Blogger Jess Guh gives a cogent analysis of the drawbacks of  the recent repeal of the US military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy for gay, lesbian, and bisexual service members. As Guh observes, "yet another oppressed minority group has been pulled into being exploited by the American military-industrial complex."

Guh asks whether she is the "only queer person in the country that is sad about the repeal of 'Don't Ask Don't Tell'?" I would like to assure her that she is not. Whether she knows it or not, Guh's principled criticism of the US military is not something new. Once upon a time, there was a radical lesbian feminist movement that worked to make the world very, very different.

Like most stories that begin "once upon a time," this one is an oversimplification. For one thing, that movement isn't really gone. (That's a blog post for another time.) For another thing, it wasn't just one movement, it was at least 30 of them. We argued about sexuality, about the best way to get rid of racism, about whether to work with male allies, about dozens of other things. But we were clear that we wanted the world to change in fundamental ways. We didn't just want a piece of the pie, we wanted a whole new recipe. We wanted to get rid of patriarchy, capitalism, US imperialism, and to create an egalitarian world. (I pause after writing that sentence. My Facebook friends--some of whom don't know me very well--are going to see this post. Okay friends, if you didn't know about my radical past, I suppose it's time you found out.)

Sometime during the early 1990s, something shifted. As I recall, it started with the first Gulf War, which, if nothing else, was a great propaganda victory for then-President George H.W. Bush. Or maybe the change was inspired a rash of anti-gay ballot measures in places like Colorado and Oregon. All of a sudden, it seemed that instead of working for radical change, everyone wanted to join the army and get married. In such dangerous and rightward drifting times, I suppose it was a natural response for many activists to try not to appear too subversive to the established order.

But the established order has some fundamental problems of injustice and unfairness, and now new generations of activists are discovering this. As Jess Guh writes:

The American military's track record of inclusion is poor by even the lowest of standards. Black Americans were first allowed to serve in the military during the Revolutionary War, when Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, promised freedom to any runaway slave that fought for the British army. George Washington, needing more soldiers, followed suit. I'll let you guess how many of them actually received their promised freedom. Due to fears of giving Black folks weapons and racist doubts that they were mentally capable of being good soldiers, they were not even allowed to officially serve and enlist until 1862 during the Civil War, despite having fought courageously since the revolutionary war. During WWI, US military leaders decided they would rather use black units for suicide missions where they would likely die, instead of sending their white counterparts. For their valiant efforts, no awards or citations would be given to those soldiers of color until 1996, nearly 80 years later.

This philosophy of contempt and "we'll let you serve, but only on our terms" is not limited to race. Women, even those who meet the physical ability requirements, are officially banned from ground combat. But once again, when bodies are needed, the military conveniently changes its mind. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it's been well known that due to manpower shortages,women have been serving in front-line positions identical to those of men, yet there has been no budge in the official policy. And lest you even entertain the notion that the ban represents some sort of arcane but well-intended form of chivalry, consider that a 2003 survey of female veterans found that 30 percent reported being raped while in the military (women serving in Iraq were reportedly being hospitalized for and even dying of dehydration because they would avoid drinking water in order not to have to make runs to the lavatory alone at night). That's not even counting cases of sexual assault and harassment. In 2007, only 181 out of 2,212 reported sexual assaults were referred to courts martial. The equivalent arrest rate for these charges among civilians is five times that.

It's well worth your while to read Guh's entire post, and then to visit her blog.

Time to stop History from repeating himself

Nearly 100 years ago, 146 garment workers, mostly women, burned to death at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Workers could not escape because the fire escape doors to this sweatshop were locked. This catastrophe inspired a memorable speech by labor activist Rose Schneiderman.and served as a symbol of the dangers and indignities suffered by workers. According to Wikipedia, the fire also galvanized the International Ladies Garment Workers Union which,

(w)orking with local Tammany Hall officials such as Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, and progressive reformers such as Frances Perkins, the future Secretary of Labor in the Roosevelt administration, who had witnessed the fire from the street below, pushed for comprehensive safety and workers’ compensation laws. The ILGWU leadership formed bonds with those reformers and politicians that would continue for another forty years, through the New Deal and beyond. As a result of the fire, the American Society of Safety Engineers was founded soon after in New York City, October 14, 1911.

Although unions have been under attack and workers' rights and protections have eroded during the right-wing backlash of the last 30 years, I'd like to think that a catastrophe such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire would not occur again. I'd like to think that this fire would be replayed only as a historical exhibit, as part of a work of literature such as Beyond the Pale, by Elana Dykewomon or as the occasion for a commemorative event.

But no. Events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire are still taking place today. We know that US manufacturing jobs have been moved to places where workers have even fewer protections than we do in the United States. The results are predictable. According to this post on change.org, those of us who are busily purchasing fashionable clothing as holiday gifts do not know that

the young, destitute women in Bangladesh who produce those clothes in almost slave-like conditions aren’t feeling the holiday spirit after more than two dozen of them were burned to death last week.

28 workers were killed when a massive blaze broke out in an unsafe, multi-story sweatshop known as the "That's It Sportswear" factory in the Ashulia industrial park just north the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka. With a number of the exits blocked, most of the victims were burned to death, some trampled to death, some killed by suffocation and others jumped from the flames to their death. Several dozen more suffered severe burns.

According to post author Benjamin Joffe-Walt, the factory, owned by the Ha-Meem group, supplies clothing to more than a dozen US clothing companies and retail stores. The December 14 fire was the latest in "a series of deadly incidents in clothing factories in Bangladesh." For instance, a similar incident in February took the lives of 21 workers. Joffee-Walt also reports that:

Last week's fire also came just days after deadly protests over clothing manufacturers' failure to implement a required 80 percent increase in the minimum wage to 3,000 taka a month (about $42). That's right folks, the workers who were burned alive while making $25 T-Shirts were likely being paid some $24 a month, less than $1 a day.

To sign an online petition calling on US clothing companies and retailers to demand better conditions for the workers, follow this link. More suggestions for activism can be found here. One Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was too many. We don't need any more.

AFL-CIO president speaks on economic revitalization

Here's an interesting post from the AFL-CIO NOW BLOG, reporting union president Richard Trumka's speech at Netroots Nation.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

(J)ust as corporations have taken advantage of immigrants, they have skirted, exploited and violated labor laws that empower workers to form a union and bargain for a better life. The good jobs of the past were good jobs because workers organized and fought for fair wages and benefits. Without labor law reform corporations will continue to take advantage of workers and no matter how much we invest in our economy, how much we increase our productivity, our wages will remain stagnant and we will continue to fall behind.

And I agree with Trumka's conclusion about the need for cooperation between union activists and other progressive movements. Workers' rights are human rights.

Why I won't shop at Whole Foods when they open in Oklahoma City

Some natural foods lovers in OKC are celebrating the news that Whole Foods plans to open a store in Oklahoma City some time in the next year. While the future location of this store was not announced, supporters of downtown revitalization have long hoped Whole Foods, or a similar chain, would place a store downtown.

I'm not joining the celebration. Despite their progressive image, Whole Foods has a history of of union busting, detailed in this post over at Mother Jones.

According to The Rag Blog down in Austin, Texas, Whole Foods' customers are "attracted not only to its brightly lit array of pristine fruits and vegetables, organically farmed meats, and delectable (yet healthy) recipes, but also to the notion that the mere act of shopping at Whole Foods is helping to change the world." In support of this image, Whole Foods has taken such steps as supporting the Fair Trade movement to encourage better pay and environmentally safe working conditions for farmers in poor countries, and working to improve the living conditions of farm animals.

The company, and its CEO, John Mackey, would like us that it has the same kind of benevolent concern for its workers. The reality seems to be different. The Rag reports that

Preventing Whole Foods workers from unionizing has always been at the top of Mackey’s agenda, and the company has been successful thus far at crushing every attempt. Perhaps the company’s most notorious attack on workers’ right to unionize occurred in Madison, Wisconsin in 2002. Even after a majority of workers voted for the union, Whole Foods spent the next year canceling and stalling negotiation sessions -- knowing that after a year, they could legally engineer a vote to decertify the union. Mission accomplished.

At the mere mention of the word “union," Whole Foods still turns ferocious. Even when United Farm Workers activists turned up outside a Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas, where Mackey is based, the company called the police and had them arrested for the “crime” of passing out informational literature on their current grape boycott. And as Mother Jones recently reported, “An internal Whole Foods document listing ‘six strategic goals for Whole Foods Market to achieve by 201... includes a goal to remain ‘100% union-free.’”

Another one of Mackey's goals has been to hold down the cost of employee healthcare. The Rag Blog says that

Using a carrot and very large stick, Mackey managed to “convince” Whole Foods workers across the country to vote in 2004 to dramatically downgrade their own healthcare benefits by switching to a so-called “consumer-driven” health plan –- corporate double-speak for the high deductible/low coverage savings account plans preferred by profit-driven enterprises. As Mackey advised other executives in [a] 2004 speech, “[I]f you want to set up a consumer-driven health plan, I strongly urge you not to put it as one option in a cafeteria plan, but to make it the only option.”

Maybe this explains Mackey's hostility to President Obama's health care reform proposals. Not long ago, Mackey authored a controversial opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal attacking health care reform. In reaction to that column, a Facebook group and a web site have sprung up urging supporters of health care reform and workers' rights to boycott Whole Foods. Activists point out that Mackey certainly has a right to express his opinions in writing, but the rest of us have the right not to support his reactionary ideas with our hard-earned dollars.

Downtown Oklahoma City would certainly benefit from having a grocery store -- but not this one. As for myself, if I want to shop with a union-busting mega-chain, Wal-Mart has much better prices.

Guess what?

Right-wing Republicans are bellyaching that if the Employee Free Choice Act passes, "union thugs" will interfere with the right for workers to choose not to join a union.

But the Center for Economic Policy Research has a new report that demonstrates that if you try to help form a union in your workplace, your employer is likely to try to fire your ass.

I am shocked. Truly shocked. Maybe the Employee Free Choice Act really is necessary to protect the right to form unions?

The $6400 question

Hilda Solis is Barack Obama's choice to be secretary of labor, and perhaps her nomination is in trouble because her husband's auto repair business had to pay $6400 in back taxes. Or, according to this article posted on Common Dreams, perhaps Republicans are trying to defeat her because of her support for labor unions.

Chicago sit-in ends in victory of sorts

A six-day sit-in by laid off workers at Republic Windows and Doors has won severance pay and benefits, according to chicagotribune.com, but not a deal to re-open the plant.

The 240 workers who had occupied the factory since its abrupt closing Dec. 5 voted unanimously Wednesday night to accept a deal to pay them severance, vacation time, and temporary health care benefits. The $1.75 million agreement was negotiated over three days with the workers' union, Republic owners and lender Bank of America.

Union negotiators were unable to obtain a commitment from the parties to reopen the Goose Island plant, said United Electrical Workers organizer Mark Meinster. So the union has decided to forge ahead to find someone new to run the plant, he said, using some of the money donated from around the world during the sit-in.

An interesting analysis of the strike and its results can be found at socialistworker.org.

Updates on the Chicago sit-in

According to thenation.com:

President-elect Barack Obama gave encouragement Sunday to the members of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America Local 1110 members who have occupied the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago to demand fair treatment from a company that shut down operations after the Bank of America denied the firm operating credit.

AlterNet has cross-posted Ian Welsh's Firedoglake analysis on the genesis of the shutdown at Republic Door and Window in Chicago: How Fumbling the Bailout Led to the Chicago Sit In

Angry Black Bitch also has an interesting analysis of the situation.

Standing up by sitting down

A hat tip to Common Dreams for posting this article from thenation.com about the sitdown strike in Chicago by workers at Republic Windows and Doors Republic shut down on Friday after Bank of America -- which has received $25 billion in bailout assistance from U.S. taxpayers -- refused to extend operating credit to them.

Nation commentator John Nichols points out that Barack Obama can only create a new New Deal if there is grassroots activism to push him in that direction. The Chicago action reminds him of similar actions taken by workers in the 1930s that helped FDR create the original New Deal.

Here's the link I found at thenation.com for updates about the strike from the United Electrical Workers. Here's the link I found at the UE site to send a message to hold Bank of America accountable for their misbehavior.

Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers

The Center for Economic and Policy Research has published a report showing that

unionization raises the wages of the typical woman worker by 11.2 percent compared to their non-union peers. The study goes on to show that unionization also increases the likelihood that a woman worker will have health insurance and a pension. The report also notes that union membership results in health care and pension gains on par with the gains of a college education.

A link to the full report (in PDF format) is here.

Three views of a Detroit bailout

Automobile manufacturing has been crucial to the US economy. Yet, auto companies have made gas guzzling cars and other mistakes. As the auto industry struggles, is a bailout justified? And what kind of a bailout, if there is one?

One interesting perspective comes from AngryBlackBitch. She decries the greed and stupidity of automakers, but points out how much damage the failure of the auto industry would do to ordinary folks.

Another intriguing viewpoint comes from Michael Moore, interviewed on The Takeaway. Moore suggests that the conditions for government aid should include a requirement that the companies start making trains and other mass transit vehicles.

Finally, I usually like what Dean Baker says about economic issues, and he has an interesting analysis of this one.

We Need Labor's Leadership In This Crisis

Jonathan Tasini over on Working Life has written an excellent brief commentary on the current financial crisis.

Tasini is calling for an immediate meeting of every labor leader in the country. As minimum preconditions for a public bailout of Wall Street, he insists on

1. A repeal of the Bush tax cuts

2. Public ownership of the mortgage bundlers Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac

3. A "serious public, independent investigation," carried out by labor and other organizations, of how the political system, with the help of both parties, allowed the crisis to happen.

He also reprints Dean Baker's "Principles to Guide the Bailout."

Controversy over SEIU organizaing strategy

This analysis over at t r u t h o u t is a fascinating discussion about the conflict activists face between "practical politics" and achieving the goals that you really want to achieve. Given the importance of the Service Employees International Union in organizing health care workers:

The stakes are very high for everyone. An organized healthcare industry in alliance with consumers could create the strength to win a single-payer health system benefiting every person in this country.