In the midst of yet another snow covered day this winter and trying to think of things to do? Why not take a few minutes of your time to help maintain our standards of living, our jobs as we know them and our rights to collective bargaining by taking just a few minutes of your time to read below and TAKE ACTION. THEN, after you have made a difference in your future and the futures of the working families throughout Philadelphia and all of Pennsylvania, go have fun in the snow or stay inside and enjoy some hot chocolate knowing that you said “NO” To Right To Work in PA!

From the PA. AFL-CIO

In 2013, union members in Pennsylvania stood together to defeat some of the most direct attacks we have ever faced. Repeated efforts to privatize public services, destroy retirement security, and gut prevailing wage laws were held back.

Now, in an election year with everything at stake, huge money interests from outside of Pennsylvania are putting everything they have into making our Commonwealth the next “Right to Work” state. Their aim is clear, to bankrupt unions so that there will no longer be any organized opposition to the blatant attacks on working families that they plan.

Go To: http://act.aflcio.org/c/236/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=7734 and E-Mail Your State Legislators Now! Tell Them NO WAY On HB 1507!

House Bill 1507 is what ALEC and the Koch brothers call a “Paycheck Protection” bill. They have already been targeting direct mail into the state to spread lies in support of this bill, claiming that taxpayers are paying for union dues collection for public employees, and that teachers and state workers are forced to contribute to political and legislative activism.

The facts are clear, even though you won’t hear them in the commercials that the Koch brothers are financing. Automatic payroll deduction of dues is not mandated by any law, rather it is bargained for during contract negotiations. This deduction does not cost taxpayers money. Unions already agreed to reimburse the state for costs associated with deductions of PAC funds, but according to the State of Pennsylvania, there is no measurable cost to be reimbursed.

While the reasons that the other side gives for pushing this legislation are dishonest, their true goal is obvious. It’s simple. This legislation would force unions to spend resources to collect union dues, and make it nearly impossible to collect the fair share fees that non-members must pay to cover their union representation. At the end of the day that means unions will be weakened, and have less ability to advocate for employees in the workplace and in the legislature. This would open the flood gates for a wide range of anti-worker legislation that would be sure to follow.

There is no doubt that the passage of HB 1507 would mean that Pennsylvania would become the next right to work state. Don’t be silent on this issue. We expect this bill to move very quickly, with significant resources flooding into Pennsylvania to back this latest attack on the middle class.

AGAIN, Go To: http://act.aflcio.org/c/236/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=7734 and E-Mail Your State Legislators Now! Tell Them NO WAY On HB 1507!

Source: http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=3357

By Randy LoBasso

– Almost two years ago, the Pennsylvania state Legislature passed a party-lined bill which created a Voter ID requirement during Pennsylvania elections. This morning, a judge ruled that law is illegal.

The ruling is neither the first nor the last, and sets the stage for perhaps a final fight in the seemingly never-ending saga.

“Voting laws are designed to assure a free and fair election; the Voter ID Law does not further this goal,” Commonwealth Court Judge Bernard McGinley wrote in his 103-page decision.

McGinley’s ruling comes both before the state has had the chance to see the strict law in action (it had been on hold through the 2012 and 2013 elections) and after the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act ruling, which struck down the part of the 1965 law which was keeping several southern states from enforcing their Voter ID laws.

The ruling is “as wonderful a present as I could have imagined,” Vic Walczak of the ACLU of Pennsylvania said on a conference call with reporters Friday morning. Today is his birthday.

What McGinley consistently found is if the law were put into effect, there would be hundreds of thousands of voters without compliant ID due to the difficulty of obtaining one.

Additionally, the Commonwealth was unable to find a single instance of the sort of voter fraud that Republican legislators claimed was happening without Voter ID in place. “When you look at it that way, the only crime that is being perpetrated on the people of Pennsylvania is by the people who support this Voter ID law,” added Walczak.

Pennsylvania Democrats from near and far have hailed the decision as a victory.

“The Corbett Administration has been defending a flawed and punitive law that restricts access to the polls. It is designed to suppress votes. We have already wasted millions of tax dollars on this law, including $1 million for a misleading ad campaign. These are funds that could have been used to educate our children and create jobs,” said State Sen. Vincent Hughes (D-Phila).

Democratic chairman Jim Burns said the decision is “a big step forward for making sure our elections are fair and a testament to the thousands of Pennsylvanians who worked hard to make sure everyone’s vote would be counted.”

But is that all she wrote? She will continue to write. Both sides of the trial McGinley oversaw last year, which lasted 12 days, vowed an appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and that will happen—even though those on the ACLU’s press call earlier today essentially deemed a waste of taxpayer funds.

“The Commonwealth has already spent millions of dollars on what the court today called a misinformation campaign, and legal expenses for this case,” said Ben Geffen, of the Public Interest Law Center. “If the Commonwealth has a surplus of funds available, perhaps they can devote it to voter registration efforts or to better funding of public schools instead of continuing to litigate against voters’ rights to participate in elections.”

Source: http://blogs.philadelphiaweekly.com/phillynow/2014/01/17/pa-voter-id-law-struck-down-now-what/

By Annie-Rose Strasser

– Rather than simply celebrating the accomplishments of his life on Martin Luther King, Jr. day, this year ThinkProgress wants to take a look back at the unfinished parts of King’s legacy. While the civil rights leader changed the conversation around race and justice in the U.S., many of his goals never came to fruition.

Here’s a look at four of the things King demanded but never saw completed:

1. A living wage. One of the demands protesters listed for the March on Washington was a minimum wage. “Anything less than $2.00 an hour,” King and his compatriots argued, fails to “give all Americans a decent standard of living.” In 2014 dollars, a $2 an hour wage would work out to about $15.27. But minimum wage is actually much, much lower — less than half of that — today. Forty-two percent of those earning minimum wage are people of color.

2. Desegregation. King hoped to see the end not just of legal segregation in the South, but also of the de facto segregation that existed in Northern businesses, housing, and schools. He even toured Chicago advocating for the end of this kind of segregation, saying civil rights leaders needed to “eradicate a vicious system which seeks to further colonize thousands of Negroes within a slum environment.’’ But today, public schools are more segregated than they were 40 years ago. The unemployment rate for black Americans has remained above 10 percent for most of the last half a century, and black workers earn on average $22,000 less a year than their white counterparts. Black homebuyers are shown significantly fewer homes than their white counterparts when shopping for a house. Ethnic identity is still the key factor in where people reside.

3. Fair voting. King campaigned extensively for legislation like the Voting Rights Act. And he lived to see it passed. But legislators, largely Republicans, have been working to roll back the rights protected under the VRA since its inception. Those efforts have become even more acute recently. More than half the states introduced restrictive voting legislation in 2013 alone, according to a review by the Brennan Center, at a total of 92 separate bills in 33 states. The Supreme Court also struck down a major portion of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, allowing states previously subject to the VRA to put voting laws on the books without federal oversight. Now a group of members of congress — including Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), who incidentally established the first official Martin Luther King Day — is working to undo the damage of that decision.

4. Unfettered unionization. King spoke out specifically about anti-union “Right to Work” laws. “[W]e must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work,’” he said in 1961. “Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us.” Over 50 years later, right to work laws are still on the books. In fact, Michigan passed its own right to work law in 2012. But King’s assessment was right: No matter their unionized status, workers in “right to work” states today earn $1,500 less a year than their counterparts, and are less likely to receive other benefits like health care and pensions.

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/home/2014/01/20/3175341/mlk-goals-unmet/

By CBC Chair Marcia L. Fudge

– In 1968, Dr. King spent his last birthday working on the Poor People’s Campaign to bring attention to the need for economic justice in America. If he were alive today, I wonder how he would feel about the state of our country and of our world.

“I believe Dr. King would applaud the progress we have made toward racial and social equity, but he would strongly caution us about the shrinking equality of opportunity currently plaguing our world. He would question our nation’s persistently high unemployment rate, particularly for African Americans. He would ask why Congress couldn’t agree on extending unemployment insurance to the long-term unemployed – the people who need it the most. Dr. King would ask why millions of Americans continue to live in poverty and seek work while corporations post billions in record profits. He would call for individuals to be paid wages that would prevent them from falling below the poverty line.

“Today, our nation honors the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an individual whose work was guided by his dream for an unprejudiced and equitable society. If he were alive today, Dr. King would certainly be proud of who we are, but he would say that we must commit to move forward together as one nation, we must not rest on our progress, there is still much work to be done.”

Source: http://cbc.fudge.house.gov/press-releases/cbc-chair-marcia-l-fudges-statement-in-honor-of-martin-luther-king-jr-day/

Walmart workers and organizers prove ‘clicktivism’ can evolve into offline activism.

BY Sarah Jaffe

– The basic tools of labor organizing haven’t changed in hundreds of years. There’s no substitute for face-to-face conversations about working conditions and what can be done to change them. Organizers still make home visits, and workers still talk to one another in the break room or the parking lot.

But in the new wave of low-wage worker organizing that has swept the country in the past two years, some labor groups have begun to use the Internet to facilitate the kinds of personal conversations that lead to workplace action. As unions, community organizations, workers centers and even “netroots” groups like MoveOn.org pour resources into organizing a massive, diffuse fast-food and retail workforce that had often been written off as unorganizable, the web has provided a cheap, effective tool to reach low-wage workers in ways that are both personal and lasting. In particular, the United Food and Commercial Workers-backed groups OUR Walmart and Making Change at Walmart have enthusiastically experimented with web tools in their recent efforts to make a difference at the nation’s biggest retailer.

As Jamie Way, an online organizer with Making Change at Walmart, puts it, “We’re never going to match [Walmart] in terms of resources, we’re never going to have an organizer or a community supporter on the ground in every one of their [more than] 4,000 Walmarts.” To combat this, the campaign has created online spaces for organizers to reach workers and for communities to support local efforts. And those online connections can, in turn, drive offline actions.

Of the estimated 1,500 Walmart protests that occurred across the country on Black Friday last year, many were planned online, organized either directly by OUR Walmart or using its templates and tools. Much of that turnout came from the kind of efforts that have become commonplace in recent years—creating Facebook event pages, for example, or posting links to event websites on Twitter.

But some of the campaign’s efforts are decidedly more innovative.

During the lead-up to this past year’s Black Friday actions, OUR Walmart unveiled AssociateVoices, a website where Walmart workers could post their stories about their experiences on the job and request a protest at their particular store, even if they themselves were not ready to go on strike. “The idea was to illustrate this silent majority that exists at these stores,” Way says.

“Walmart’s constant refrain has been that it’s a very small number of disgruntled associates and community- and labor-backed groups that are [speaking out]. AssociateVoices was intentionally designed to show that these complaints are not just made up, these are very real things that happen at Walmart,” says Raymond Suelzer, the web developer for Making Change at Walmart and the architect of AssociateVoices.

“For those of us who last worked retail 20-plus years ago (or more—or never!), reading the discussion boards is an eye-opener,” writes Kati Sipp, a longtime union organizer and creator of the future-of-labor blog HackTheUnion.org, in an email to In These Times.

Worker complaints on AssociateVoices do often get very specific. One worker in Billings, Montana suggested that management should “Quit listening to a computer to tell you how to run a store,” and “Fix the razor sharp door handles around the store”; in Virginia, a worker identifying herself as Tori writes that when she was pregnant, her manager refused to grant schedule changes that would allow her to care for her children. But there are also common threads that run throughout—the standard refrains of not enough hours and insufficient pay, and everywhere calls for respect.

AssociateVoices is just OUR Walmart’s latest effort to connect Walmart workers with each other online, however. According to Suelzer, the group has been using social media to that end for the last three years or so. Facebook’s targeted advertising allows OUR Walmart to run ads directed at the thousands of users who list Walmart as their employer. Those ads send workers to OUR Walmart’s page, where they are then able to connect with other Walmart associates. And then, Suelzer says, these conversations around workplace issues go offline.

“We’ve seen that when workers talk to one another it doesn’t just stay on the Facebook page,” Suelzer says. “Those relationships become real, in that they’re talking offsite. Most of our online work is worker-to-worker. We have a couple of organizers who oversee and provide feedback to workers, but so much of it really is a substantial number of online leaders who are really taking initiative and reaching out to other workers.”

That’s exactly how Lucas Handy discovered OUR Walmart. An overnight customer service manager at the Walmart in Fort Dodge, Iowa, he was complaining about his job on Facebook when he saw an ad for the organization pop up on his sidebar. Intrigued, he clicked and found himself talking with Angela Wilson, an organizer from Florida, who invited him to an OUR Walmart summit for workers in her state. Walmart had warned the workers to avoid OUR Walmart—that they’d risk being fired if they got involved with the organization—but Handy took the risk and went to the meeting.

When he returned, he remained a silent member, participating online but not taking action in his store, for a while, until another manager’s homophobic slur became the last straw. “That was the icing on the cake, that made me step up and speak out,” he says. He went through the steps that his store had laid out to report the abusive behavior, but instead of that manager facing consequences, he says, Handy himself was demoted to a position as a pharmacy technician. “I lost my pay, I lost hours, I lost healthcare, I lost everything,” he says. “The day I was supposed to start [at the] pharmacy was the day I went on strike, on a two-week strike.”.

Shortly after he went on strike and then took a trip to Netroots Nation to speak about his part in the Walmart campaign, Handy was fired—the reason Walmart gave, he says, was that he’d misled management about the time he took off to attend the conference. But he still volunteers as the LGBT liaison for OUR Walmart, maintaining a closed Facebook group for LGBT Walmart workers to discuss their issues in a safe space and reaching out to other Walmart workers in other Facebook groups to which he belongs. “People are more comfortable online than they are person-to-person because of the technology we have nowadays, and so I find it more comfortable talking to somebody down in Texas or Florida that’s having issues,” he says. “Management is probably not around them and other associates are probably not around them either, so the confidentiality between me and somebody else is there.”

Facebook isn’t the only place to reach workers, Suelzer notes—because the social media giant is becoming less popular with people younger than 25, the campaign has had to do some “experimenting” on sites like Twitter and Instagram, which don’t necessarily lend themselves to personal conversation in the same way Facebook has. And Handy sees lots of potential in getting on other sites—even MySpace, which, he notes, is making a bit of a comeback.

Workers who have seen OUR Walmart organizing, particularly around Black Friday, on Facebook and Twitter, have been motivated to join the strikes, some without even talking to organizers first. In 2012, OUR Walmart put out a “strike kit” before Black Friday, and this past fall, building on those efforts, made an effort to have more organizers available to workers who might want to take action.

Part of the reason online organizing has been slow to take off in the broader labor movement is because of the “digital divide”—the division between those who have convenient access to the Internet and those who don’t. But Jamie Way points out that this gap isn’t as big as is often thought by people who don’t work in her field. “The real difference tends to be how [different people] access [the Web] and where they access it. A ton of the OUR Walmart activity online is from mobile devices.” A Pew Research Center [PDF] study from 2012 backs her up, noting that 88 percent of adults have a cell phone and 62 percent of adults in households that make $30,000 a year or less report using the Internet.

“It’s a mistake to think workers aren’t there,” says Way. “You just have to think a little bit more about where certain conversations are had and what devices are used to have them.”

Often organizing done via text message has been one-sided—a campaign can send a text blast but the ability of recipients to respond has been limited. Way seeks as many ways as possible to allow workers to provide feedback. To that end, the AssociateVoices site allows workers to text in responses to the site as well.
Getting activists out of armchairs

On the other side of the campaign, the community mobilization and solidarity effort by non-Walmart workers organized by Making Change at Walmart, the online strategy is different. Twitter, a medium that lends itself more to broadcasting than to personal connections, has been more useful in this respect. It works especially well when a relevant topic “trends” on the site, or to drive supporters to offline actions.

“Initially a lot of the stuff we were doing online was fairly traditional,” says Way of these community mobilization efforts.

Indeed, online petitions and mobilizing supporters to share things on social media have become standards of “netroots” work, and labor has jumped on the bandwagon. But this type of action has run into criticism for encouraging “clicktivism” and discouraging real-world participation—the ultimate goal of labor organizing.

So when Black Friday 2012 rolled around, the campaign sought new ways to take the online energy out into the streets.

Here, the ubiquity of Walmart worked against the company. People who wanted to be supportive by protesting the retailer often had a target right in their neighborhood. Just as OUR Walmart had a strike kit for workers, Making Change partnered with online organizing group Corporate Action Network to put out a “protest in a box,” with basic guidelines and signs people could print out. They tried to draw on movements like Occupy and the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, allowing participants to design their own action while maintaining common elements.

“There’s always, in my mind, this tension between how much support you provide and how much space for co-creativity you allow so that you’re not stifling groups,” Way says. “I wanted to leave things very organic initially—I didn’t want to give very much guidance to the people who would come and volunteer to do these actions.”

But after the first Black Friday, the organization found that many people actually wanted more support and direction. “For some people it wasn’t the exciting experience it could’ve been if they had a little more preparation,” Way says.

One problem was that when protesters hit a store where OUR Walmart did not have active members, the response from the workers was not always positive. Though Making Change at Walmart tries to make it clear that they are a solidarity campaign, not an attack on Walmart, she points out that there is definitely potential for people to hold actions that are alienating to workers rather than motivating. Actions in the store, for example, where people load shopping carts and leave them around or try to pay with small change, wind up making the workers’ day harder rather than leaving them feeling supported. (Though, she notes, she’s been impressed overall by the restraint and concern for workers that community activists have shown.)

This year, to prevent problems like that, the campaign made a team of organizers available online and via a toll-free phone number to provide trainings for people interested in holding an action. These kinds of “online to offline” tactics help bridge the gap without requiring organizers in every town.

On this Black Friday, the organizers also used the Twitter tool Thunderclap, which coordinates a large number of people to tweet the same thing at the same time, to help drive traffic to BlackFridayProtests.org site—a site created by the campaign where, in turn, users would be directed to a protest nearby.“Walmart organized their own Thunderclap, [to promote themselves] ours had like 3 million reach and theirs had like 300,000 so we were pretty proud of that,” Suelzer notes.
Walmart takes notice

As the OUR Walmart/Making Change at Walmart campaign has heated up online, Way notes, Walmart has taken its countermeasures online as well. In addition to trying to legally shut down OUR Walmart websites by claiming copyright infringement, the company launched a site, OurWalmartFactCheck.com, to refute the organization’s claims.

She also points out that the company has gotten “more aggressive” on Twitter—a recent argument between the company’s WalmartNewsroom Twitter account and celebrity Ashton Kutcher illustrates the way Walmart has stepped in to be more proactive about its image.

“They’re smart, they’re adapting. They see that online organizing is important for how people are able to challenge them, and so they’re responding to that, trying to do their own version of grassroots organizing.” However, she says, “I don’t think it’s been super effective for them yet,” Way says. “It’s a sign that the workers are really being effective and that they have the company’s attention, no matter how much the company tries to deny it and act like this is some insignificant thing.”

It’s important to Suelzer and the organization not just to dispel Walmart’s claims, though, but to be more effective at creating lasting change. To achieve that, he says, organizers must have two-way conversations with workers, ultimately letting workers shape the campaign. Though Way jokes that both Making Change at Walmart and Our Walmart have run into plenty of failure, the flexibility of the Internet allows them to quickly learn from their mistakes and try something new.

“Five or six years ago, the ability to reach that many workers wouldn’t have been possible,” Suelzer says. “I think that combined with the shift in thinking around inequality and economic justice, the social media and the technology has definitely put us in a unique moment that is allowing us to do things that many people would not have thought would be possible.”

Source: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16116/how_walmart_organizers_turned_the_internet_into_a_shop_floor/