Tag Archives: labor

Posted on by

I’d say Kerry’s speech is comparable to Edwards’: it hiet each of the major points it needed to, with some good moments that were memorable in the short-term but seem un-likely to get re-aired on on C-SPAN at future conventions, and some low points too.

I’d say he did a largely effective job of talking sympathetically in about his own life in a way which personalized him while tying him to a national narrative and avoiding appearing self-aggrandizing or apologetic. His explicit gendering of his parents was irritating. His unapologetic ownership of the accomplishments of 60’s movements was gratifying. His refusal to mention gay liberation, or the gay community, was not.

It was good to hear the word “poverty,” but disappointing not to hear more about it, and particularly not to see Kerry’s support for raising the minimum wage and recognizing card count neutrality agreements touted as centerpieces of his economic plan. I did think he set forth his stance on the Bush tax cuts with admirable frankness and simplicity, and in a way which doesn’t leave the Republicans much room to maneuver.

I remain pleasantly surprised to see Kerry talking about spending more money on Head Start instead of the prison system, a welcome departure from Clinton’s strategy of apeing Republican rhetoric on crime. The fact that the line has the entire staff of The New Republic apoplectic is a good sign. Calling the “family values” crowd on not valuing families is well-deserved and long overdue. Reaching out to those who self-identify as people of faith is all well and good, but you don’t need to announce that you’re doing it. The Lincoln quote is one of the great ones in American politics, and put here to great use.

All that said, it’s an exciting night.

Posted on by

Well, it’s no surprise to those of us who’ve seen him in person that when it comes to rhetorical delivery, John Sweeney is no John Wilhelm. He hit the right notes though, even if not in any particularly innovative ways. Glad to see that, as when he addresses the AFL-CIO, he was flanked by workers and his argument was supported by their narratives. Would’ve helped to hear from them directly. But Sweeney did his job in setting out the course that a Kerry administration, banking on the support of union- and union-backed organizing to get into office, should follow once there.

Posted on by

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka just laid out the case against Bush’s “suicidal” trade policy and argued effectively (if uncreatively) that “American workers deserve better, you deserve better, and America deserves better.” Trade policy – given the contrasts and contradictions between his record, his rhetoric, his advisors’ rhetoric and records, public opinion, elite opinion, and such – may be the biggest question mark hanging over a Kerry administration; as Ramesh Ponnuru (just flip the words “optimistic” and “pessimistic”) observes:

We keep getting mixed signals about how seriously to take the Democrats’ protectionist rhetoric. The most optimistic spin is that the corporate-tax plan, whether or not it’s a good idea, is a fairly modest way to pander to protectionist sentiment. I doubt Kerry is really going to do much with that promised review of existing trade agreements. On the pessimistic side: Even Bill Clinton plumped for more trade “enforcement actions” on Monday night (as Kerry also has); the Democrats want no new trade agreements without conditions that make it very hard to envision the agreements being reached; and Kerry’s objection to Bush’s steel tariffs is not that he imposed them but that he later rescinded them.

Matthew Yglesias shares one of many anecdotes which should make Ponnuru (and Yglesias, for that matter) optimistic and the rest of us more pessimistic:

On hand was Rand Beers, Kerry’s top national security adviser (and his likely National Security Adviser), Ambassador Richard Holbrooke (Kerry’s likely Secretary of State), former Secretary of Defense William Perry, former Senator Gary Hart, and — most interestingly — Laura Tyson, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors and currently one of three economists “consulted on nearly every [economic] policy decision” the Kerry campaign makes…Tyson acknowledged that her remarks were somewhat at odds with much of what Kerry’s said on the campaign trail. “When people say, ‘well, listen to what the Kerry campaign has said about trade in some of the primaries, we are concerned that Senator Kerry will move the US away from trade integration,'” she said, she tells them to “think about the issue of national campaigns in the US” and to “recognize that what might be said in one primary … is not an indicator of the future.”

Tyson further argued that Kerry would be able to liberalize trade more than Bush has, because Kerry would support policies that help compensate the inevitable losers in globalization — a step that will allegedly drain the swamp of anti-trade sentiment. Lest it be thought that Tyson’s commitment to the multilateral process and to continued trade integration leaves plenty of wriggle room to keep the process but add, say, environmental standards into the mix, she explicitly disavowed this option during a later exchange. Adding environmental issues to the WTO’s brief might bog it down and impede progress on further integration. “I want to assure you that a Kerry-Edwards administration will continue in the great American tradition of leading the way on global economic integration,” she concluded.

A rightward tack during the general election following on the heels of a shift to the left during the primaries isn’t necessarily anything to write home about — that’s how all Democratic presidential campaigns work. The dynamics of the trade issue, however, are somewhat different, because the left view on trade is actually more popular than the centrist alternative in many of this year’s key swing states. Accordingly, the higher-profile public speeches in the Fleet Center have continued to sound skeptical themes, while the free-trade message has been delivered to elite audiences at low-profile events. There are no sure things in politics, and Kerry might change course yet again while in office; as a senator, though, he was (as John Edward tried to point out against him during the primary campaign) a consistent supporter of new trade agreements, so there’s every reason to believe that the Democrats’ centrist wing has already won the first major policy fight of the Kerry era.

Another area where labor had better be prepared to play hardball with the Democrats.

Posted on by

There’s much to dislike about the institution of tipping in this country. It transfers the responsibility for compensating employees from employers to customers, substantively removes wages from the realm of negotiation, pits employees against each other, encourages acceptance of demeaning and inappropriate behavior towards employees, and provides cover for employers to pay employees below minimum wage. That said, in a perverse variation of the collective action problem, an individual’s choice not to tip, or to tip conservatively, simply punishes the victims all over again without shifting the responsibility for compensation back to the employer. So what can we do? Well, we can start by supporting legal actions like these in Connecticut:

In the suit, filed three weeks ago in New Britain Superior Court, she charges the restaurant did not pay her or other wait staff the minimum wage for time spent performing non-service duties, thereby violating the state’s minimum wage act…”I think people aren’t aware of provisions of the law,” said Daniel S. Blinn, the attorney representing Galberth. “Restaurants have commonly taken advantage of staff by requiring them to do jobs that qualify for minimum wage and staff put up with it,” said Blinn, who has sent letters to dozens of waiters and waitresses in the state notifying them of the possible minimum wage violations. “Either they are afraid to challenge the employer or aren’t aware that they should be receiving minimum wages for the work.” Under the state act, restaurants are allowed to pay 29 percent less than the minimum wage to those who customarily receive gratuities…According to the law, employees such as waiters and waitresses are supposed to receive regular minimum hour wages of $7.10 when they perform duties outside of those associated with waiting on customers. When they do general tasks, such as setting up before a restaurant opens, cleaning after it closes, doing odd jobs such as washing dishes, cleaning bathrooms or mopping floors, the employer is to pay them minimum wage…

Complaints have begun piling up because of a flurry of publicity over some recent complaints against Brinker International, the parent company of such chains as Macaroni Grill, On the Border and Chili’s, and a separate class action suit against the Outback restaurants chain. “I filed after they called me a liar after I showed them how much of my time I was spending on the side work,” said Michael Peruta, a Rocky Hill resident who is part of a class action suit against Outback restaurants. Peruta said he spent more than half of his time as a waiter in the Newington store cleaning tables that were not in his assigned area, sweeping floors and stocking food, all tasks that he believes qualify for the minimum hourly wage.

…Websites on the issue have begun popping up, including one by Rocky Hill resident Rhonda Dupuis, who successfully sued Brinker while she was employed as a waitress by Chili’s. Dupuis documented her work activities from late 2002 to July 2003, records she says proved that she was not properly paid for side work she was forced to do at “tip credit” scale. The increase in complaints has prompted state Sen. Edith Prague to consider new legislation to try to stop violations and get a more active response from the state labor department. “I think it is outrageous that restaurants, especially these big chains, would do this,” said Prague, a Democrat from Columbia, who is meeting with Dupuis this week. “I would suggest legislation that makes it very clear that they can only use the `tip credit’ formula for waiting tables, and nothing else,” Prague said. “I think it’s a shame we have to do this at all, although I’m not surprised at anything anymore.

Posted on by

Thanks for the shout out from Sean Siperstein on the Brown College Dems (cleverly-titled) blog, where he offers trenchant thoughts on the meaning of today’s NLRB decision on his campus:

Not only is this a widespread overturning of precedent and part of a larger trend, but it also ensures that the results of a referendum held among those Brown grad students eligible to unionize will remain permanently sealed and ultimately meaningless (the NLRB ruled previously that all non-science Brown TAs would be eligible, but held up the results being revealed until the current overall appeal was decided). At the time of that referendum, the Brown Democrats were part of a coalition of student groups which campaigned for undergrads to sign a “neutrality card” stating that this was a matter to be decided and debated among grad students themselves (and indeed, active organizations for and against unionization had formed in their ranks), and that undergraduate students and clubs, the administration, the Corporation and alumni ought to all recognize that principle, stay out of the debate, and let the vote proceed without further obfuscation. The effort was highly fruitful in terms of getting student signatures– perhaps the most effective thing that the Dems did during my freshman year– even if (as expected) the administration largely ignored its plea and actively pressured against/tried to prevent unionization, and I’d definitely like to think that this decision that ultimately defeats it will give us all pause to think and at the least serve as an exemplar of the direct impact of the Bush administration’s across-the-board conservatism.

Interesting that Sean sees graduate employees’ right to organize on his campus as an issue which could ignite students to get more involved in electoral politics; if anything, I think those of us organizing around the issue at Yale are struggling to mobilize students to bring the perspectives they believe in or fight for in national politics – on workers’ rights, women’s rights, free speech and such – to bear in confronting the conflict over unionization on our campus.  Among the differences which affect the climate, as Sean observes, is a radically different face on a similar administration agenda – I’ve never heard of Ruth Simmons doing or saying anything that would lead NYU’s administration to observe that she would “rather burn the university to the ground” than recognize graduate students’ right to organize.

Posted on by

Looks like Errol is (not surprisingly, given the number of debates the two of us have had previously over this issue) celebrating the NLRB decision stripping graduate student workers of legal recognition of their right to organize. Errol contends that this represents “Finally a common sense decision by the NLRB.” I’d say common sense explains the motivation behind this decision – as part of a broader Bush agenda of chipping away workers’ rights through court decisions, executive orders, and legislation, and as one with tremendous cache with certain University Presidents, including some with significant influence – but that that’s about the only relationship common sense and this decision have. There are a lot of points to be made in this argument; for now I’ll stick to responding to those Errol brings up directly.

It’s always been especially telling to me that the graduate student unions have all changed the name of what they do to being “graduate employees” in order to fight this battle. What does that say to me? Well it says that there is a PR game and that most people don’t actually see them as employees at all, so it’s necessary to confront them with the idea. “See I am an employee, because my wannabe union has the word employee in it.” That sort of thing.

This is a cheap and, I’d say, pretty misleading argument. The people subject to this decision are students at the Universities in question and employees of these universities. Sometimes they call themselves graduate employees because those two words communicate that they are both graduate students and employees. Hence GET-UP, Graduate Employees Together, U-Penn. Yale’s parallel union is called GESO, Graduate Employee Student Organization (Light and Truth alleged last year that the fact is was called GESO rather than GSEO showed its members were lazy students. I’ll like to hear them pronounce GSEO). I’m not sure what Errol means when he says that they “changed the name of what they do,” although he certainly makes it sound sinister. What they’ve done, rightfully, is come up with various phrases which allude to the multiple identities they take on simultaneously in the academy. I’d guess it’s the confluence of those identities, not their reflection in names, which Errol and others have a problem with:

That being said, it is obvious that graduate students do work, and probably much of it. Why doesn’t that make them employees of the university and not students? The only thing that separates the two is the possibility of the award of a professional degree. All the other people who recieve payment from the university who are employees are not being paid in their capacity as degree candidates, and it seems to me someone being paid in their capacity as a degree candidate should be considered a student. The payment that the university extends to it’s graduate students for their work is more akin to the financial aid of an undergraduate being paid in work study than it is to a teacher in secondary education.

To insist that GESO members are not “employees and not students” is to take down a straw man argument – GESO members have never contended not to be students. What they are is employees and students. The receipt of educational certification from an employer doesn’t make them as singular a phenomenon as Errol seems to suggest. Apprentices organized some of the first unions in this country so as to better secure the conditions and compensation they deserved for the significant work they were doing while training under their employers. Stipends and benefits for graduate student teaching assistants and researchers are not comparable (except in that both are too low…) to financial aids grants for undergraduates because, while the university’s award of financial aid is hopefully grounded in an understanding that education at the university is strengthened by the presence of a more diverse student body, undergraduates are not being compensated for the provision of a service to the school. Just ask the IRS, which recognizes the former, and not the latter, as salaries. Meanwhile, it’s Yale’s administration, not GESO, which has for the past months engaged in covert and strategic renaming, couching the teaching and research requirements for graduate employees in new language as academic requirements in anticipation of a new NRLB ruling. The fact of the matter is that graduate students are doing over 30% of the work of teaching at our august university, and that they are replacing paid faculty in doing so.

The [generalized] University’s obligation to all its students to provide an atmosphere conducive to learning is perhaps it’s highest one and that being said, it matters very much to that atmosphere if a graduate students’ family doesn’t have an affordable health care plan, or enough money to eat well balanced meals. The University should take care of these needs, and, if the best way to assure that it is in tune with the needs of its students is to recognize them as a group rather than a collection of individuals, I certainly believe that the University should do that. The University should also be perceptive to the outcries of its students that they want to be represented collectively because it’s in the best interest of both the students and families involved and the University to do so. However, that group, those families, that collectivity, are not, and shouldn’t ever be considered a union.

No organization (certainly not the Graduate Student Assembly) has acheived as much for Yale’s graduate students as GESO, whose organizing drive has won the concessions on stipend increases, childcare, international visa reform lobbying and a score of other issues which then become repackaged by Yale’s administration as further evidence of why Yale’s graduate students don’t need a union. That’s because no other type of body has demonstrated the same capacity to leverage pressure, represent constituents, and effect change. But we needn’t just look at Yale. Graduate student unions across and beyond this country have won landmark agreements with universities protecting the institutional support, resources, and freedoms whose procurement by graduate student employees, as Errol says, are vital to the health of the university for all its members. Why shouldn’t graduate employees pursue collective representation through unionization?

It doesn’t do justice to the struggles of everyday working people by calling it so, but most of all, it doesn’t represent the truth of the situation.

But it does represent the truth of the situation, which is that these unions’ members are workers with a right to organize protected by the Wagner Act and the Declaration of Universal Human Rights. They receive payment for the work they do for an employer, and unlike most undergraduates, the majority of them depend on the funds they receive from the university to support themselves and often dependants (this proportion rises as the benefits provided by the university rise, and as this proportion rises, so does the diversity of the graduate employees). The construction of a group called “everyday working people” as the proper constituents of a union, and of a distinction between that group and the workers in question – be they teachers, writers, waiters, nurses, or graduate employees – is not new, and neither is the struggle of every group of workers to demonstrate and defend their right to organize. These struggles absolutely have different contours, and different stakes. But they remain parallel struggles, and while a good number of Yale undergraduates believe that the question of whether Mary Reynolds, GESO Chair and American Studies Teaching Assistant, has the same right to a union that Bobby Proto, Local 35 President and pipefitter does, is a question of whether Mary’s is more or less oppressed than Bobby, my experience is that many fewer members of Local 35 and Local 34 (Yale’s service and maintenance and clerical and technical unions, respectively) see it that way. My experience is that many more members of Locals 34 and 35 see their stake in GESO’s right to organize as similar to Local 35’s stake in Local 34’s right to organize back in 1984, when conventional wisdom was that “pink collar unions” were a contradiction in terms which would destroy the collegiality and intellectual vigor of the university. What doesn’t do justice to their struggle for the right to organize is not GESO’s campaign for the same right, but rather Yale’s campaign, with the unfortunate assistance of the Bush administration and the NLRB, to deny it.

Posted on by

In a shameful, if unsurprising, assault on the right of all workers to organize, the Bush National Labor Relations Board overturns the historic and unanimous NYU decision recognizing graduate students’ right to organize with a 3-2 decision buying into the Levin-Simmons-Bollinger-Rodin line that graduate students employees, whose low-wage work makes the university function, are not employees with workers’ rights.  This is of course, what they used to say about public employees, about teachers, and about all workers before that.  None of which stopped those workers from courageously organizing anymore than this decision will be able to halt the national movement for graduate student unionization.  As the dissenting judges wrote:

…the majority’s reasons, at bottom, amount to the claim that graduate student collective bargaining is simply incompatible with the nature and mission of the university. This revelation will surely come as a surprise on many campuses -not least at New York University, a first rate institution where graduate students now work under a collective bargaining agreement reached in the wake of the decision that is overruled here…Today’s decision is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality.

Shame on the Bush administration for another callous and backwards slap in the face of all workers, and shame on the Yale administration for its years of lobbying for this result.

Posted on by

Some prison guard unions have come under criticism, sometimes deserved, for narrowly pursuing their members’ short-term interests in a manner which put them at odds with broader social change movements. That’s what I’d call a craft union approach, and there’s a reason that craft unions never left the kind of impact on this country that the trade union movement – through broad-based organizing – has. Here’s a Madison prison guard local providing a powerful example of the potential of organizing with a broader social vision:

At a meeting recently with four correctional officers, the union’s strategy was laid out in a presentation that will serve as the bargaining unit’s negotiating road map…Far from the “nuts and bolts” wages and benefits, the correctional officers said they will attempt to identify budget problems, how they affect their jobs and why those problems are not the making of the rank-and-file officers. These problems, they say, should not be cited when the state makes what they claim are inadequate economic offers. The officers referred to 1997 Wisconsin Act 283, the state’s Truth in Sentencing Law, that provides for extended supervision and increased penalties for various offenses. The officers claim Wisconsin’s Truth in Sentencing Law was created from model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council. They say ALEC is a politically conservative organization which held seminars on criminal justice issues such as Truth in Sentencing. The officers say the seminars were sponsored by private sector businesses with an interest in corrections. They named Corrections Corporation of America, a prison-building company that houses Wisconsin inmates out of state, as having ties to ALEC.

…During the presentation, the correctional officers indicated that Truth in Sentencing had contributed greatly to the state’s overcrowding problems. They claimed that the law’s author, then Rep. Scott Walker, patterned Wisconsin’s law after the ALEC model, which was developed by a task force led by private sector firms such as CCA…The point of all this, officers said, is that the prison population explosion was caused in large part by a new law mandating lengthy sentences, and that law was influenced by private companies which directly benefit from greater prison populations. In fact, the officers pointed out, more than 3,000 Wisconsin inmates were incarcerated in out-of-state CCA facilities. Overcrowding is not to be taken lightly, the officers said. It’s a contributing factor to prison riots and other lesser incidents which greatly threaten the safety of employees and inmates alike. A so called “tough on crime” approach is not always productive, the officers said. “Wisconsin correctional institutions are becoming increasingly hostile due to inmate take-a-ways and inmate idleness,” they said. “These actions, by and large, have been enacted by legislators eager to be ‘tough on crime’ with little understanding of the potential ramifications in the correctional setting.”

Posted on by

New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson has officially removed his name from consideration for Vice-President. This seems to be a largely symbolic move at this point, since Richardson’s name, which was being thrown around a great deal six months ago, had gone more or less unmentioned for a while based (according to Washington types and some friends in New Mexico politics) in large part on a reputation for maritial infidelity. Richardson’s fall from the short list strikes me as an unfortunate development; while some of his politics (particularly fiscally) were somewhat more conservative than I’d like, he’s a tremendously popular Latino executive from the South with a reputation for a strident populist progressivism and a savvy and pragmatic political instinct. So given that John Lewis didn’t seem to be on the table this time around, I would likely have taken him over Gephardt or Edwards.

The latest chatter seems to be that a Vice-Presidential announcement (read: leak, followed by later announcement) will come in the middle of this coming week. If, as many have suggested, it comes down to Gephardt or Edwards, my vote’s for Edwards. While both men campaigned to the left of Kerry on trade and arguably on jobs, Edwards was immeasurably more effective in articulating and demanding a vision for working America. While both men, like Kerry, voted for Bush’s War, Gephardt as Minority Leader is personally responsible for orchestrating the party’s shameful surrender on the issue. It was perhaps the defining moment of Gephardt’s sad tenure of compromise to the Republican party as a Democratic leader; at risk of sounding trite, Gephardt gives off the impression of a fading star, Edwards a rising one.

In this race, as in the Presidential primary, everyone seems convinced that Gephardt is labor’s candidate except for those actually involved in the labor movement, perhaps in part because (near) everyone outside of the labor movement visualizes it as the Teamsters. But absent a real progressive, Edwards is my pick, is SEIU’s pick, and hopefully will be Kerry’s as well.

Posted on by

Steven Greenhouse reports on the success of HERE Local 226 in organizing a largely minority and immigrant culinary workforce and fighting in solidarity to seize middle class status:

In most other cities, these workers live near the poverty line. But thanks in large part to the Culinary, in Las Vegas these workers often own homes and have Rolls-Royce health coverage, a solid pension plan and three weeks of vacation a year. The Culinary’s extraordinary success at delivering for its 48,000 members beckons newcomers from far and wide. By many measures, the Culinary is the nation’s most successful union local; its membership has nearly tripled from 18,000 in the late 1980’s, even as the rest of the labor movement has shrunk. The Culinary is such a force that one in 10 people here is covered by its health plan, and more than 90 percent of the hotel workers on the Strip belong to the union. The union is also unusual because it is a rainbow coalition, 65 percent nonwhite and 70 percent female. It includes immigrants from Central America, refugees from the Balkan wars and blacks from the Deep South.

The Culinary’s success cannot be separated from the industry’s wealth. With the profits rolling in, the casinos have decided to be relatively magnanimous to their workers to ensure labor peace and a happy work force. “When you’re in the service business, the first contact our guests have is with the guest-room attendants or the food and beverage servers, and if that person’s unhappy, that comes across to the guests very quickly,” said J. Terrence Lanni, chairman of the MGM Mirage, which owns the MGM Grand, the world’s largest hotel, with 5,000 rooms and 8,200 employees. “These are people who are generally happy. Is it perfect? No. But it’s as good as I’ve seen anywhere.”

Under the Culinary’s master contract, waiters are guaranteed $10.14 an hour before tips, the highest rate in the nation. In Las Vegas, unionized hotel housekeepers generally earn $11.95 an hour, 50 percent more than in nonunion Reno. The Culinary contract guarantees workers 40 hours’ pay each week, meaning housekeepers earn at least $478 a week, while in other cities housekeepers often work 30 hours and earn just $240. The Culinary’s workers pay no premiums for health care, and they often pay just $10 for a dentist’s visit, while nonunion workers often pay upwards of $150. “Our wages are higher, the medical benefits are great, and we have a guaranteed 40-hour week,” said Marianne Singer, a waitress at the unionized MGM Grand. “Thanks to all that, I have a beautiful 2,000-square-foot home with a three-car garage.”

…”In Las Vegas, more so than any place in the country, the hospitality industry and the union have realized it is not mere rhetoric to say, ‘We’re all in this together,’ ” said John W. Wilhelm, president of the Culinary’s parent union, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union.

The article identifies some of the key strategies which will define twenty-first century unionism: Mobilizing resources for a tremendously threatening corporate campaign when necessary to pressure management, working cooperatively to marshall human and political resources when possible for goals shared with management, aggressively pursuing card-check neutrality, and most fundamentally, focusing on organizing and empowering formerly disenfranchised workers to achieve tangible results.

And in another article, Greenhouse profiles one of those workers:

Ms. Diaz arrived illegally, but she eventually obtained a green card and citizenship through her father, who had been granted amnesty. For years, he had worked at a carwash in Los Angeles. Today, her whole family – parents, two sisters and five brothers – lives in Los Angeles. Once in Las Vegas, Ms. Diaz took a series of nonunion housekeeping jobs that she did not love, at a Best Western hotel, at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino, and finally at the luxurious Venetian. “In the hotels, the hardest job is housekeeping,” Ms. Diaz said. “It’s really hard when you come, and you don’t know the language. You want to be somebody, but it’s very hard.”

Two years ago, Ms. Diaz learned from the wife of one of her husband’s co-workers that there were unionized restaurant openings at the Luxor. Weary of making hotel beds and cleaning bathrooms, she landed a job busing tables at La Salsa. It paid $9.24 an hour, plus about $4 an hour in tips. The health plan was so good that she paid no premiums and made only modest co-payments. But Ms. Diaz had greater ambitions. After she passed the Culinary Training Academy course, she was immediately promoted to waitress. Now she is responsible for a half-dozen tables in the ocher-colored restaurant, which has the music of a Mexican crooner piped in. She greets customers with her big smile and tentative English, often recommending her favorite dish, the fajita salad.

As her status at La Salsa has risen, so has her pay. Las Vegas’s unionized busboys and waiters make the same base salary – $10.14 an hour, the highest rate in the nation. (By comparison, most waiters in New York City make $3.30 an hour before tips.) But waiters make much more from tips than busboys, who must be content with the often-meager amounts that waiters share with them.

Posted on by

Over at Blogs for Bush, they’re reifying myths about the willful docility of Latinos and gushing about the joy of exploiting them:

the more Hispanics the better – or would you rather have us get a flood of Euro-trash, socialistic weenies emigrating here to demand welfare?…While the race-hustlers of the Democratic Party have been playing a pied-piper tune for Hispanic Americans, trying to get them in on the useless resentments and feelings of entitlement they have laid out for other American minorities, the plain, hard fact that Hispanic Americans are enthusiastic volunteers for the American dream has made them a tough nut for the Democrats to crack. Its got to be kept in mind that these Hispanics are either the immigrants themselves of the sons and grandsons of immigrants who came here to work and prosper…

And then there are the comments:

As an employer of a legal Alien and at times his brother who is illegal I can tell you they do work at the bar that I could never get the bartenders to do.

If these people really believed in empowering Latino workers and valuing their work, they’d be calling for the robust defense of their right to organize for respect and dignity on the job. But then they wouldn’t be blogging for Bush, would they?

Posted on by

Wal-Mart Watch: SEIU’s Fight for the Future Blog, maintained by President Andy Stern, has engaged an admirable and urgent project: an extended discussion across the web and beyond on the challenge Wal-Mart and Wal-Martization pose to good jobs, and the strategies and coalitions neccesary to fight them. Over spring break, I had the pleasure of a very-late-night multi-hour discussion about what such a strategy would look like with some amazing organizers from different parts of the country. I’m hoping to contribute something soon; should you, fair reader, wish to do so, e-mail your thoughts, or a link to them, to blog@seiu.org. Meanwhile, some highlights from Andy’s posts this week:

Monday:

Some people think we should follow the “Wal-Mart only” strategy — Wal-Mart is making the global business rules, and so changing their business practices changes everything. But others say we have to tackle more than just Wal-Mart. Why?

1) Wal-Mart is the trendsetter, affecting how other corporations do business. Tomorrow, we’re going to hear from a worker about how Intel’s been following in Wal-Mart’s footsteps. So we need to start telling and spotlighting the wrong behavior of more companies and send a message we won’t take Wal-Mart as an excuse anymore.

2) The “Wal-Mart plus” strategy proposal says that Wal-Mart is the toughest nut to crack. Campaigns need victories along the way — victories that don’t just stop a company but actually change its and others’ behavior. If we only take on Wal-Mart, it’s hard to see how we’ll sustain our enthusiasm to keep going.

The “Wal-Mart only” strategy says that the world’s largest corporation is making the global business rules, and changing their business practices changes everything.

Tuesday:

Wal-Mart, Target, and other corporations now use subcontractors for janitorial services. And just like global outsourcing, they squeeze these subcontractors to bid lower and lower to get the subcontracted work. To stay competitive, honest subcontractors are often forced to drop their wages and benefits to poverty levels. Dishonest contractors don?t let minimum wage or overtime law stand in the way. When these subcontractors get caught, Wal-Mart and other rogue corporations pass the buck…

Our first strategy in this campaign is challenging corporations to adopt the Justice at Work Principles for responsible subcontracting. By signing the principles, companies agree that they and their subcontractors will provide decent wages, health and retirement coverage, and working conditions. They also pledge to respect workers? right to form unions to win a voice on the job. To ensure these commitments are carried out, companies will give independent organizations the authority to interview workers and audit payroll records.
Wednesday:

With a little self-organizing, if we figure it out right, we could help folks crank up the activism as mutual fund shareholders, big time. We can challenge Wall Street right at the heart of their business ? supposedly working in the interest of shareholders. We can force the giant banks and financial service companies that run mutual funds to take a long-term view of the companies they invest in, to reward companies that treat workers well, and to punish those, like Wal-Mart, that cut wages and benefits to the bone.

Today:

…why don’t more workers fight back in court? Partly because workers fear that filing a lawsuit could get them fired. But the other problem — the one we can help solve right now — is that it takes a lot of work to find a lawyer who will take these kinds of cases.

So, SEIU wants to help. Working with law firms and legal centers, we’ll develop a state-by-state strategy for helping workers get in touch with lawyers when their rights have been violated. What do you think about a nationwide Wal-Mart Justice at Work legal network of volunteer and paid lawyers…

Lawsuits aren’t a long-term solution. Ultimately, workers need a direct voice on the job through a union so they can defend themselves every day. But as a first step on that road, we can help workers use the legal system to ensure that corporations treat them with at least the minimal respect they are due under the law.

Also, check-out previous editions of the LWB Wal-Mart Watch here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.