12/31 – Today’s Featured Guests on Today In PhillyLabor Radio are John J. Dougherty, Business Manager, IBEW Local 98, Sam Pond, Pond Lehocky and Wayne Burton, PA. Association of Retired Americans
Featured Topic – Top Guests of 2014 and Labor’s Top Stories of 2014
Tune in to WWDB 860 AM (or Online at http://wwdbam.com/streamer/), Wednesday 12/31 at Noon to See What All The Talk Is About!
BY Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President
– Earlier this month, in the sparsely populated Kentucky county that’s home to Bowling Green, officials voted to convert the place into a right-to-work (for less) sinkhole.
The county officials did it at the bidding of big corporations. They certainly didn’t do it for their Warren County constituents because employees in right-to-work (for less) states get smaller paychecks than those in states that support the right to unionize. They did it at the demand of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Heritage Foundation, both of which are corporate owned and operated.
They did it despite the fact that there’s no evidence they have any legal authority to create an anti-union bastion on the county level, which means they’ve subjected the residents of Warren County to substantial costs for a legal battle that Warren is likely to lose.
Moving right-to-work (for less) from the state to the county level is the latest tactic in the relentless campaign by CEOs and corporations to reverse gains made by workers in the 1930s New Deal. With laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress slightly moved toward workers the lopsided balance of power that heavily favors corporations. Over the next several decades, the middle class thrived and income inequality decreased substantially. Now, however, income inequality is back up to the point where it was in the robber baron days because CEOs and corporations have stuck their fat thumbs back on the scale.
The FLSA created the 40-hour work week by mandating time-and-a-half pay beginning at the 41st hour worked. Before the law, managers could force employees to labor 50, 60 even 70 hours a week at no extra pay. During the Great Depression, bosses could fire those who dared complain and easily replace them. Corporations had all the power. FLSA gave a little of that muscle to workers by enabling them to demand extra pay for extra work. As a bonus, FLSA encouraged businesses to hire rather than pay overtime, which increased employment.
The NLRA provided workers with a pathway to unionize. It established standards for employees to form a union at a workplace and for employers to recognize that union as the collective bargaining agent for the workers. Before the NLRA, Pinkertons, police and national guardsmen all too frequently killed striking workers. After the NLRA, unions multiplied, and collective bargaining achieved better wages, benefits and pensions for workers.
But from the day these laws passed, corporations and lackey groups like ALEC and the Heritage Foundation fought to reverse them. They wanted all power and wealth to remain with the one percent.
They invented right-to-work (for less) laws to do that. When a majority of workers at a factory vote to be represented by a union, federal law requires the union to work for all of them, to negotiate agreements that cover all of them, to file grievances for any worker wronged by management. That costs money. And that’s what union dues pay for.
What right-to-work (for less) laws say is that workers who receive these benefits don’t have to pay for them. Federal law requires unions to continue representing workers who are freeloaders. Unions may even have to pay to hire lawyers to represent freeloaders in grievances. That handicaps the union and strengthens the corporation.
And it’s a big part of the reason that employees in right-to-work (for less) states earn less. They lack bargaining power.
In the case of Kentucky, ALEC, the Heritage Foundation and other anti-worker groups resorted to seeking anti-worker legislation from counties when they failed in November to secure a Republican majority in the House of Representatives to provide it on the state level. They’re pushing this new scheme even though federal law gives right-to-work (for less) legislative authority to states and territories, but not to counties.
The anti-worker groups formed a new organization to help persuade counties to pass the laws. It’s called Protect My Check. Its purpose is to defend the compensation of CEOs. Right-to-work (for less) legislation means fewer dollars in workers’ paychecks and more in CEOs’, so clearly the role Protect My Check is to pad CEO pay.
Similarly, CEOs are grabbing for themselves the overtime pay that workers once received. Workers are laboring more and more hours, and fewer and fewer of them are getting paid overtime. That’s because the level at which federal law requires overtime pay hasn’t kept pace with inflation. It’s $23,660 a year. An employer who claims fry cooks are supervisors and sets salaries at one dollar more – $23,661 – doesn’t have to pay time and a half for 10, 20, even 30 hours worked above 40.
In 1975, Republican Gerald Ford raised the threshold significantly to account for inflation, making 65 percent of salaried workers eligible for overtime pay. Now, only 12 percent qualify. Studies by the Economic Policy Institute have shown that if the threshold had kept pace with inflation since then, it would be $50,440 a year – more than twice the current level.
In the meantime, corporate demands for overtime work have increased. A Gallup poll of workers in August found 60 percent laboring more than 45 hours a week. Sixteen percent said they worked more than 60 hours.
Last spring, President Obama proposed raising the wage under which corporations would have to pay overtime. Immediately, anti-worker groups protested. Daniel Mitchell, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, said, for example, “If they push through something to make a certain class of workers more expensive, something will happen to adjust.” He suggested that would be pay cuts or layoffs.
A certain class of workers has grown extraordinarily more expensive. That is CEOs. The pay for the top 1 percent rose 31.4 percent in the three years from 2009 to 2012, according to research by Emmanuel Saez, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Income for the bottom 99 percent of workers was stagnant, rising only 0.4 percent.
Cato’s Mitchell is right. A certain class of workers is more expensive, and the thing that happened is that 99 percent of workers are suffering for it.
President Obama is trying to rebalance this gross inequality by raising the overtime threshold. But to more permanently tip the scales closer toward equality for workers, he should take measures to support workers’ right to form unions and collectively bargain for a fair share of the profits derived from the sweat of their brows.
Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17483/right_to_work_benefits_ceos_not_workers
To the Philadelphia Area Union Community,
As we enjoy this Holiday season, let us be thankful for the things we have, to those who have forged the way to make them possible and for the will and determination to continue to fight so that future generations may also enjoy them.
As is the union way, let us also continue to give back to those less fortunate so that they too may live a life of dignity and pride!
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
In Solidarity,
From Everyone at PhillyLabor.com and
Today In PhillyLabor Radio
BY David Moberg
– The law is catching up with Ronald McDonald.
On Friday, the National Labor Relations Board issued 13 complaints involving 78 charges by workers that McDonald’s USA, LLC, and many of its franchisees broke the law by interfering with collective efforts to organize and improve working conditions.
The complaints will now go to trial before administrative law judges , who could, for the first time, find McDonald’s guilty of violating workers’ right to organize. Until now, McDonald’s has shielded itself from liability by claiming that it’s not an actual employer. Franchisors argue that although they provide the brand name, products, techniques and other operational necessities, they leave franchisees the discretion to operate as sole employer, responsible for all labor costs, risks and obligations.
What’s so significant about the NLRB’s complaints is that the board defines McDonald’s as a joint employer with its franchisees—and thus sharing responsibility.
That marks a huge victory for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU ), which for two years has funded and helped organize a campaign by fast-food and other retail workers to win $15 an hour and the right to unionize—a movement often known as the Fight for 15, though it has different names in different cities. SEIU helped workers file 291 charges that McDonald’s and franchisees retaliated against workers for participating in Fight for 15 strikes and protests. On Friday the board announced it had found merit in 86 charges that McDonald’s had discriminated against workers engaged in collective action by disciplining them, reducing their hours, discharging them unfairly, threatening them, placing them under surveillance and interrogating them. NLRB investigators resolved a few of the case this fall, filed complaints about 78 of the meritorious charges, and are still looking into 71 more.
It was long unclear whether the SEIU’s investment in Fight for 15 would allow it to formally unionize the sector, whose division into thousands of franchises made organizing a Herculean task. As the New York Times’ Steven Greenhouse wrote in July, when the NLRB general counsel first indicated that it was moving in the direction of declaring McDonald’s a joint employer, the definition “open[s] the door for the SEIU to try to unionize not just three or five McDonald’s at a time, but dozens and perhaps hundreds.”
In total, the joint employer definition could ease the way to unionization for more than 8 million workers in the franchise workforce.
Kendall Fells, organizing director of Fast Food Forward, the New York City branch of the Fight for 15 movement , says that the NLRB decision “underscores what most everyone recognizes as common sense: McDonald’s is the employer and responsible for what goes on at its restaurants. McDonald’s exerts such extreme control over franchises that to all extents, McDonald’s is the boss.” McDonald’s squeezes the franchisee so much that in order to make a modest profit and abide by corporate rules for employees, the franchisee must go to extreme lengths to hold down wages.
The result, says Fells, are wages so low that taxpayers effectively subsidize McDonald’s with at least $7 billion a year in public assistance for its workers. McDonald’s and franchise industry representatives have responded to Friday’s legal complaints by saying that the NLRB position on joint employers will destroy the industry. It’s likely McDonald’s will appeal the decision.
But Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel of the National Employment Law Project, a research and advocacy project on workers’ rights, says that the franchise relationship is no different from any other contract. “Like any contract, the franchisor needs to pay attention to whether the other party is abiding by the law, and it’s obviously important for the franchisor to feel the pressure that they’re responsible. This standard has been in place for decades, but except for minor cases, this is the first time it’s been applied in the franchising context.” If other companies must ensure that their contractual partners are abiding by the law, why can’t McDonald’s?
Catherine Fisk, professor of law at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, notes that there are limits to the impact of the NLRB determination that McDonald’s is a joint employer. The NLRB enforces the National Labor Relations Act, which primarily protects the rights of workers to organize and act collectively; its definitions do not apply to enforcement of wage and hour laws, occupational safety and health, state labor laws and other federal employment laws.
However, the right to collective action is the first and most basic labor right, which allows workers to take power into their own hands to hold employers accountable, and there are hopeful signs that the NLRB may further expand the definition of joint employer. In a case involving the waste disposal company Browning-Ferris Industries and a subcontractor , the NLRB is considering moving back to a broader, more inclusive definition of “joint employer” that prevailed until 1984 , when an NLRB with a majority made up of Ronald Reagan’s appointments significantly narrowed the definition . The earlier definition made a company a joint employer, for example, if it exercised or had potential to exercise indirect control of conditions of employment, or if “industrial realities” required it to be included for meaningful collective bargaining . The NLRB could go even further and open up the status of “joint employer” to be determined by something like “the totality of circumstances.”
This kind of expansion could affect millions more workers in other “fissured workplaces ,” a term coined by economist and now U.S. Department of Labor official David Weil to describe arrangements where big corporations like McDonald’s “have it all”—exercising control over wages and working conditions while evading responsibility. Other “fissured” relationships included the misclassification of workers as independent contractors and the use of subcontractors to manage workers.
For example, the day before the NLRB announced its actions against McDonald’s, the Warehouse Worker Resource Center announced that workers at the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach had filed a class action law suit against California Cartage Company, two identified staffing agencies and any others involved for stealing millions of dollars from over 500 warehouse workers . Cal Cartage is the deep-pocketed firm that pretends not to be the employer of the workers in its warehouses, who are hired and managed by staffing agencies, just as it pretends that the roughly 1,000 port truck drivers who work exclusively for Cal Cartage are not employees but “independent contractors,” ineligible for many of the protections and benefits of employees (like workers’ compensation or Social Security). The suit maintains that Cal Cartage engages in many of the typical ways of shorting workers’ pay, such as requiring people to report for work even when they were not likely to be needed, requiring people to participate in training without pay, or automatically rounding down time of work to be paid .
Most seriously, the warehouse is located on city land, meaning employees must be paid rates set by the Los Angeles Living Wage Ordinance ($12.28 per hour without health benefits, or $11.03 per hour with health benefits equivalent to at least $1.25 per hour). Each worker is also entitled to 12 paid days off. Cal Cartage workers reportedly received none of these legally required pay and benefits. If the lawsuit had been brought against only the staffing agencies, however, it is less likely that these marginal companies would have been able to pay the back wages and disgorged profits, as the lawsuit now demands of all joint employers, including Cal Cartage.
One warehouse worker plaintiff in the suit explains to In These Times through a translator that he often faces a choice at the end of the month: Which bills do I pay? Do I skip bills and hope that costs will go down next month, or take out a high interest loan and bet that I will make enough to pay it off? Now, if he begins to receive the legally required living wage, plus compensation for the years of underpayment,, he hopes that he can simply pay his bills each month. It doesn’t seem like much to ask.
What else would he like at work? Respect, he said. That may take more time, and a union, and more. But the NLRB setting the precedent of “joint employer” in the case of McDonald’s and potentially broadening it with the case of Browning-Ferris could be important steps towards closing loopholes that employers have used to weaken and impoverish millions of workers.
Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17484/how_the_nlrbs_mcdonalds_decision_could_heal_the_fissured_workplaceand_help
BY Kevin Solari
– On December 17, adjunct faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia completed their card count and applied to the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board for union status. They are seeking to organize with the United Academics of Philadelphia (UAP), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) local for adjunct faculty, and the Temple Association of University Officials, the AFT union for Temple’s full-time faculty.
The university employs approximately 1,100 adjunct instructors. The UAP required signatures from 60 percent of the faculty to apply for authorization.
Elizabeth Spencer, a creative writing instructor at Temple University, said in a statement that the win would benefit both teachers and students: “Being able to negotiate over meaningful job security and knowing whether I’ll be able to return to Temple next semester will improve the educational experience for my students.”
Teaching as an adjunct can be a chaotic experience. Instructors often work at multiple campuses, have classes added or cancelled at the last minute and are almost always uncertain whether or not they will even be teaching the following semester. In addition to the positions’ constant uncertainty, most adjuncts lack decent wages or benefits. Yet this workforce makes up a large percentage of faculty across the country and, at some institutions, is responsible for teaching as much as 60 percent of courses.
As a result, adjuncts in recent years have been working together in a concerted effort to organize. The AFT and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) have been experimenting with a new strategy of organizing citywide, not just individual campuses. UAP, for instance, has not only members from Temple, but from the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore, Community College of Philadelphia, and St. Joseph’s.
SEIU’s program, Adjunct Action, has succeeded in securing representation for adjuncts at schools in Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Boston. At Northeastern University in Boston, the instructors won against a university that hired the notorious union busting law firm of Jackson Lewis. And on December 16, the National Labor Relation Board issued a decision that would allow adjunct faculty at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma, Washington, to join SEIU local 925. As difficult as public universities have been to organize, private schools have been even more resistant.
These successes are beginning to produce the kind of stability adjuncts are looking for. When Tufts University negotiated with its adjunct faculty this fall, the agreement gave adjunct faculty stable one-year contracts, and with more experience they can become eligible for two and three-year contracts. It also increased pay by 40 percent and revamps the evaluation process to focus on improvement, not punishment.
At Temple, Spencer looked forward to having that same stability. “By negotiating a fair contract with Temple, I know I’m working toward providing stability for my family.”
Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17479/temples_adjunct_faculty_to_join_thousands_of_others_in_citywide_union
