Image: From AFL-CIO

The 45,000 striking Verizon workers, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the Electrical Workers (IBEW), will return to work Tuesday under the existing contract as bargaining resumes.

The CWA and IBEW announced:

We have reached agreement with Verizon on how bargaining will proceed and how it will be restructured. The major issues remain to be discussed, but overall, issues now are focused and narrowed.

We appreciate the unity of our members and the support of so many in the greater community. Now we will focus on bargaining fairly and moving forward.

Verizon, which amassed more than $20 billion in profits in recent years and paid its top five executives more than $258 million in the past four years, forced workers in Northeast states into a strike by demanding $1 billion in concessions. Seen as an attack on middle-class jobs and workers, the move prompted massive shows of support by working families across the country.

This post originally appeared in AFI-CIO Blog on August 20, 2011

About the Author: Donna Jablonski is the AFL-CIO’s deputy director of public affairs for publications, Web and broadcast. Prior to joining the AFL-CIO in 1997, she served as publications director at the nonprofit Children’s Defense Fund for 12 years. She began her career as a newspaper reporter in Southwest Florida, and since have written, edited and managed production of advocacy materials— including newsletters, books, brochures, booklets, fliers, calendars, websites, posters and direct response mail and e-mail—to support economic and social justice campaigns. In June 2001, she received a B.A. in Labor Studies from the National Labor College. Most important: she’s the very proud mom of a spectacular daughter.

The U.S. Postal Service’s plans to cut more than 220,000 jobs—that’s right, nearly a quarter million—and break a collective bargaining agreement has its employee unions up in arms.

The financially-strapped U.S. Postal Service revealed last week that by 2015 it plans to trim its workforce by nearly one-third, close 300 processing facilities and institute its own health and retirement system to replace existing federal programs, according to several reports. About 100,000 of the jobs are expected to be eliminated through attrition.

The proposal, which requires congressional approval, has drawn concern from unions and labor observers for its potential to further erode the middle class. And it’s renewed fears that other employers will soon follow with their own cost-cutting measures.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat—nor collective bargaining contracts?—will stay the USPS from the swift completion of its appointed rounds. (William Thomas Cain/GETTY IMAGES)

The decision comes after the USPS has suffered continuous declines in recent years due to drops in mail volume, advertising, an increase toward online communication and private competitors like FedEx and UPS. The postal service makes most of its revenue through postage fees and receives little support from taxpayers.

As a result, the agency posted $8 billion in losses last year and $20 billion in the past four. Moreover, the postal service expects to be insolvent by next month when the fiscal year ends.

The USPS has already implemented a number of cost-cutting moves, including plans to reduce their current career workforce of 583,908. More than 110,000 jobs have been eliminated in the last four years and the AP reports that currently 7,500 administrative staff jobs are also in the process of being removed. In June, the agency stopped funding pension contributions, which it says are over-funded. Almost 3,700 post offices across the country, mostly in rural areas, could be eliminated. Saturday service may also cease.

The agency also plans to reduce labor expenses. Last week, the Washington Post obtained “white papers” (PDF link) written by the USPS that seek to withdraw its employees from the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, essentially because they view as it as too costly and want greater employee contributions.

The postal service also wants legislative changes that would allow collective bargaining agreements to be broken in order to implement layoffs. USPS workers represented by the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) with more than six years experience are protected. The National Association of Letter Carriers’s (NALC) contract also has a clause restricting layoffs.

There’s plenty of disagreement about whether Congress’ decision to nullify a labor contract would be unprecedented, and whether it’s merely a reflection of the current employment climate or a ploy to get an anemic legislature to find a solution. A USPS  spokesman has said that “everything is on the table.”

Bill Fletcher of the American Federation of Government Employees union tells the Washington Post: “When you break a contract, basically what you’re saying is that we have left the era of good-faith bargaining and negotiation and entered into employer unilateralism.”

University of California at Berkeley labor professor Harley Shaiken told Bloomberg News that the job cuts would be “politically damaging” to the Obama administration. He adds: “It would make the federal government the largest contract breaker in the country.”

The APWU, the NALC and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association have opposed the post office proposals and viewed it as an attack on their bargaining rights. The unions say that labor costs aren’t the source of the USPS’s budget crisis.

The labor groups instead point to a congressional mandate from 2006 known as the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act. The measure requires the postal service to pay for the healthcare benefits of future retirees for the next 75 years, all within a 10-year period at the rate of $5.5 billion annually. It is the only federal agency with such a requirement. The payments started in 2007 and unions cite the pre-funding plan as the reason why the postal office has declared its inability to pay the future healthcare costs by September.

NALC President Fredric V. Roland wrote in an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun that the postal service would have been profitable during the downturn and losses would have been minimized if it weren’t for the pre-funding mandate.

The unions, however, are not asking to remove the legislative requirement but are instead pressing legislators to support a bill that would allow payments to be made using funds from a pension surplus. H.R. 1351, introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), would address the budget crisis, maintain bargaining rights and avoid further cuts, the APWU and NCLA said.

“This responsible business move, with zero taxpayer involvement, would leave pensions and retiree health benefits fully funded well into the future while putting the USPS budget back on sound financial footing,” Roland said.

Meanwhile, a job that had been a staple for the middle-class mobility is being threatened, echoing similar reverberations in the private sector where Verizon workers are currently on strike. The USPS is scheduled to begin negotiations with the letter carriers union this week and the smaller National Postal Mail Handlers Union next week.

*This blog originally appeared in Working in These Times on August 17, 2001.

About the Author: Akito Yoshikane is a freelance writer and reporter for Kyodo News. He regularly contributes to the In These Times blog covering labor and workplace issues. He lives in New York City.

Credit: Joe Kekeris

UPDATE: Tomorrow morning, Aug. 8, thousands of striking workers will join mass picket lines and rallies at more than 100 Verizon work locations across New York and New Jersey to push the highly profitable company to back off its sweeping demands. The list of picket lines and rallies is here: http://district1.cwa-union.org/news/entry/verizon_workers_fight_for_middle_class_jobs_-_join_the_picket_line

And in the Washington, D.C., area, you can show your support for striking workers at a mobilization rally Monday at noon at the Chesapeake Complex, 13100 Columbia Pike Silver Spring.

More than 45,000 workers from New England to Virginia went on strike just after midnight today at Verizon Communications. Since bargaining began July 22, Verizon has refused to move from a long list of concession demands. As the contract expired, Verizon, a $100 billion dollar company, was still was looking for $1 billion in concessions from 45,000 workers and families. That’s about $20,000 in givebacks for every family.nearly 100 concessionary proposals remained on the table.

This despite Verizon’s 2011 annualized revenues of $108 billion and net profits of $6 billion. At the same time, Verizon Wireless just paid its parent compny, Vodaphone, a $10 billion dividend. Meanwile, Verizon’s four top executives received $258 mllion over the past four years.

The workers, members of the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the Electrical Workers (IBEW), say they are striking until Verizon “stops its Wisconsin-style tactics and start bargaining seriously.”

Read updates at www.cwa-union.org/verizon

Verizon already has outsourced some 25,000 jobs. It’s trying to destroy middle-class jobs and the middle-class standard of living that workers have gained over the past 50 years.

Follow the events on Twitter with the hashtag #verizonstrike and direct tweets to @VZLaborfacts.

This blog originally appeared in alf-cio Now Blog on August 7, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Tula Connell got her first union card while she worked her way through college as a banquet bartender for the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee (represented by a hotel and restaurant local union—the names of the national unions were different then than they are now). With a background in journalism—covering bull roping in Texas and school boards in Virginia—she started working in the labor movement in 1991. Beginning as a writer for SEIU (and OPEIU member), she now blogs under the title of AFL-CIO managing editor.

CHICAGO—The Hyatt hotel chain turned up the heat on striking and picketing workers—literally—here Thursday, as 10 hanging heat lamps normally used in winter were turned on workers picketing outside the downtown Park Hyatt. This occurred on one of the year’s hottest days—with a heat index well above 100 degrees and the temperature over 80 degrees, with high humidity even early in the morning—part of a lethal nationwide heat wave.

CBS reported:

Combined with the outdoor air temperature, Linda Long says it was hotter than the Hyatt kitchen she’s worked in for eleven years. “They put the heat lamps on us, like we were nothing,” Long said. “If the heat didn’t kill us, the heat lamps would.”

Workers at Hyatts in nine cities nationwide were holding a one-day strike and picket to draw attention to contract negotiations, which have been stalled for 22 months, and what workers and union leaders call atrocious treatment of housekeepers, including sub-par wages, subcontracting out of work, and the speed at which housekeepers are expected to clean rooms.

The Chicago Tribune quoted a 42-year-old bellman about the heat lamps. He said only bellmen, engineers and select other employees can turn the lamps on, and it could not have been an accident.

This is one of the hottest days of the summer. Work at that door every single day and only in winter time do those need to be turned on. Somebody did it on purpose. It’s ridiculous.

Hyatt workers also held a one-day strike and picket last month, as Candice Bernd reported for Working In These Times:

After months of bargaining, Unite Here Local 1 has won a 3-year contractual agreement with Hilton and Starwood hotel companies this year. While Hyatt has indicated support for a contract that would match some of the settlements of Hilton and Starwood for union employees, the company continues to refuse a fair bargaining process for workers at nonunion hotels, remaining the last of the three largest hotel chains to do so. Another sticking point for Hyatt is the subcontracting out of new work.

The chain is owned by the influential Pritzker family. Chicago blogger Michael Klonsky (an occasional In These Times contributor) writes:

Heiress Penny Sue Pritzker chairs Obama’s national campaign finance committee. She is also big player in Democratic Party politics as well as in the world of anti-union, corporate school reform and was recently appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to a seat on the Chicago school board.

In a statement Hyatt said the heat lamps went on by accident and were turned off about an hour later after they were notified. Workers said they suspected that’s because media had been alerted. Klonsky reported the heat lamps seemed to energize the picketers, who chanted “You can’t smoke us out.”

This seemingly inhuman and probably illegal response seemed to have had just the opposite effect. Picketers began chanting, “Hyatt can’t take the heat, but we can!” The lamps were left on until word got out and media began to show up.

The day of action Thursday came three weeks after a report by rabbis that described the Hyatt working conditions as “not kosher” and hundreds of religious leaders picketed with workers at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago. The UNITE HERE unionwebsite says: “Hyatt Hotel Housekeepers suffer abuse. Our injury rates are high, our wages are low, and our immigrant sisters are exploited and cheated by Hyatt’s housekeeping subcontractors.”

The Chicago Tribune reported the company’s official response to Thursday’s picket:

In cities from Chicago to Waikiki and here at Park Hyatt, we have offered union leaders contract proposals that match wage and benefit packages identical to what Unite Here has accepted from other hotel companies. Yet, union leaders have rejected every one of these proposals.

This Blog originally appeared In These Times on July 22, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Kari Lydersen is an In These Times contributing editor, is a Chicago-based journalist whose works has appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Reader and The Progressive, among other publications. Her most recent book is Revolt on Goose Island. In 2011, she was awarded a Studs Terkel Community Media Award for her work. She can be reached at kari.lydersen@gmail.com.

The editorial staff at the nonprofit news website The Bay Citizen voted to affiliate with the Pacific Media Workers Guild, Local 39521 of The Newspaper Guild-CWA (TNG-CWA). This is the first start-up news website to form a union.

In a letter to the website’s CEO Lisa Frazier before the vote, the editorial staff wrote:

We believe The Bay Citizen, as one of the pioneering exponents of new civic journalism, should also be a leading example in the area of workplace democracy.

The workers had the support of union journalists at The New York Times and KGO radio, which have agreements to obtain local news content from The Bay Citizen.

TNG-CWA President Bernie Lunzer said the result marks an historic advance for media workers in an industry that is struggling to find new ways to stay competitive in the online era.

The future of quality journalism depends on reporters and editors shaping the vision of innovative new media organizations. By voting to be represented by the Guild, employees at The Bay Citizen have given themselves this voice.

The Bay Citizen was founded in 2010 as a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to fact-based, independent reporting on civic and community issues in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its journalists cover Bay Area civic and cultural news topics. The site also partners widely with independent media organizations and produces the Bay Area pages of the The New York Times.

This article originally appeared on the AFL-CIO blog on July 20, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: James Parks’ first encounter with unions was at Gannett’s newspaper in Cincinnati when his colleagues in the newsroom tried to organize a unit of The Newspaper Guild. He saw firsthand how companies pull out all the stops to prevent workers from forming a union. He is a journalist by trade, and worked for newspapers in five different states before joining the AFL-CIO staff in 1990. He also has been a seminary student, drug counselor, community organizer, event planner, adjunct college professor and county bureaucrat. His proudest career moment, though, was when he served, along with other union members and staff, as an official observer for South Africa’s first multiracial elections.

Industry’s growing wireless sector is mostly nonunion—and companies want to keep it that way

The telecommunications company Verizon is seeking concessions from its unionized members in order to shave labor costs and shift more resources to its wireless service.

The Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) represent more than 45,000 employees in the northeastern United States. The unions are currently in negotiations over a new Verizon contract in lieu of a three-year deal that will expire on August 6, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

The negotiations come as telecommunications companies are focusing on expanding wireless technology, an area that has relatively fewer unionized workers than the landline sector. In turn, unions are now looking to expand their presence in the wireless field while fending off concessions in traditional communication services.

Thirty percent of Verizon’s 200,000 employees are unionized, most of whom work in wireline jobs. The company has proposed a plan that would freeze pensions, increase employee healthcare contributions, amend job security and pay provisions for its unionized workers. Verizon says increased competition and declining revenue from the wireline services is the reason for the cuts: wireless revenue from last year increased by 5.1 percent, while its wireline revenue decreased 2.9 percent to $41.2 billion. Verizon Communications Inc. profited $2.5 billion last year.

Unions view the proposal as aggressive. “This is not a company coming to its union employees seeking ways to work together to face the challenges of the future. Their proposals seek to destroy our future,” wrote the CWA on itswebsite. Bob Master, political director for the Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 1, called the contract an “attack on the middle class,” according to New Jersey newspaper The Record.

Workers are planning a July 30 rally at the Verizon’s headquarters in New York City. A walkout also seems possible if an agreement isn’t reached. A July 19 bargaining update posted on the website of IBEW Local 2222 says negotiations with Verizon are ongoing, but also wrote “locals should continue conducting their strike votes.”

Verizon is not the only communications company dealing with labor. With ashrinking workforce in traditional telecom, unions are hoping to organize in the wireless sector.

On Tuesday, a group of technicians in Connecticut became the first unionized T-Mobile employees in the United States after voting to join the CWA-TU. A spokesperson for the union confirmed the workers are employed in the wireless division.

The vote comes after the U.S. management had tried to stifle unionization, the union said, even though the company’s German-based parent, Deutsche Telekom, allows its workers employed in the home country to freely organize.

AT&T acquired T-Mobile recently. The move was supported bysome unions, but drew dismay from consumer groups. And although AT&T and Deutsche Telekom have a strong union presence, it’s not clear if there will be any layoffs due to the merger that is not yet finalized.

As companies compete to update their mobile technology, organized labor, as they have done with T-Mobile, are looking to unionize the growing wireless sector. But U.S-based telecommunication companies seem ambivalent.

A Verizon spokesperson quoted by the Wall Street Journal did not seem receptive. Sprint has been historically nonunion, but the market has changed in the traditional sector. Jobs have declined, costs have been reduced and productivity has increased. As a result, unions will be looking to minimize the wireless-wireline division through more organizing.

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on July 20, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Akito Yoshikane is a freelance writer and reporter for Kyodo News. He regularly contributes to the In These Times blog covering labor and workplace issues. He lives in New York City.

United Steelworkers and Mexico’s Los Mineros union could develop a unification proposal as soon as this August

In Mexico, few independent union exist that are not effectively controlled by the Mexican government. According to United Steelworkers International Affairs Director Ben Davis, fewer than 1 percent of Mexico’s unions are truly independent unions. As a result of the lack of independent unions in Mexico, Mexican workers have had a very hard time advocating for higher wages. Further, those unions that are independent in Mexico—like the National Union of Mine, Metal, Steel and Related Workers of the Mexican Republic, aka Los Mineros—have faced severe oppression at the hands of government-affiliated unions.

In 2006, Los Mineros President Napoleon Gomez Urrutia was forced to flee to Canada after the Mexican government charged him with what union officials characterize as trumped-up charges of embezzlement. A federal Mexican court has dismissed the charges against Gomez Urrutia, but the charges against him remain pending at the state level. Supporters of the exiled labor leader says that he was only charged with crimes after he demanded an investigation of 2006 mine explosion that killed 65 workers at the Pasta de Conchos. Gomez Urrutia has been running the 180,000-member Los Mineros union out of the Steelworkers’ District 3 offices in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Despite the charges against Gomez Urrutia and his forced exile, his continued relevance was demonstrated late last week when officials for the Mexican operations of steel corporation ArcelorMittal traveled to Toronto to negotiate with the exiled Mexican labor leader. The trip was made possible in part through the assistance of the United Steelworkers (USW), who may merge with Los Mineros later this year.

Last month, In These Times Contributing Editor Kari Lydersen profiled how the unique cross-border solidarity emerged between USW and Los Mineros. In 2005, steelworkers went out on strike at an Asarco owned copper mining and smelting mill in Arizona in 2005. Many Mineros members who work at the Grupo Mexico company, which owns Asarco, went out on strike and performed other solidarity actions in support of striking miners in Arizona.

As a result of that strike, a solidarity agreement was formed between those two unions in 2005. In 2010, USW and Los Mineros formed a joint commission to look at merging their two unions. According to United Steelworkers Public Affairs Director Gary Hubbard, the joint commission is working toward a  unification proposal for discussion at the Steelworkers’ convention in August in Las Vegas.

As Kari Lydersen noted, “If the merger occurs, the new USW-Mineros union would represent more than 1 million workers—the USW has 850,000 members, while the Mineros has 180,000.”

If the USW/Los Mineros merger passes, as many expect it will, it would be the first between a Mexican-based union, an American affiliate of a union and a Canadian affiliate of a union—marking a new phase of cross-border solidarity. The merger has the potential to reshape labor markets in both countries.

“We are directly affected everyday by the low-wage competition from Mexico. The reason that competition is low-wage is because Mexican government keeps wages low by busting unions,” says USW International Affairs Director Ben Davis. “It’s a matter of survival for us to have democratic unions that support workers’ rights and raise wages. It’s really about closing the gap the right way by bringing Mexican wages up, not our wages down, through strengthening alliances between workers who quite often have the same employers.”

Correction: The original version of this article stated that members of both USW and Los Mineros would vote on a unification proposal if it were part of USW’s August convention. In fact, only USW members can vote on proposals presented at the convention.

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on July 15, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who has worked for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the Campaign for America’s Future, and the Obama-Biden campaign. Based in Washington D.C., he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, and writes frequently for In These Times as well as Alternet, The Nation, The Atlantic and The American Prospect.

Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile USA, boasts in its annual report on corporate responsibility that it is committed to the global labor standards established by the International Labor Organization (ILO), a branch of the United Nations.  Except, it appears, when it comes to T-Mobile workers in the United States.

International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) President Sharan Burrow says Deutsche Telekom—of which the German government is the dominant shareholder—is

actively and deliberately violating these very rights in its overseas operations.

T-Mobile workers throughout the U.S. are fighting to join a union—the Communications Workers of America (CWA)— but the company has hired union-busting attorneys and is conducting a classic anti-union campaign with mandatory captive audience meetings, delaying tactics and other intimidation measures, says UNI Global Union General Secretary Philip Jennings. UNI represents workers in telecoms unions around the world.

If these workers were in Germany, they would have become members of the union automatically but T-Mobile USA management has launched a brutal intimidation campaign to keep the union out of the workplace and to scare the workers out of fighting for their rights.

UNI, the ITUC and other global labor groups are mobilizing their support for T-Mobile workers by urging Deutsche Telekom to rein-in T-Mobile’s anti-worker tactics and pressing the German government to exert its influence.

In a video released last week (see above), Jennings makes a direct appeal to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He notes that just recently, Merkel was the main speaker at the 100th Convention of ILO where she spoke out strongly for workers’ rights, collective bargaining and the right to organize. Says Jennings:

I’m simply addressing this appeal to you to recognize the rights of these ordinary Americans to have a union.

According to Burrow:

Deutsche Telekom has chosen to support outright violation of international freedom of association standards by its US subsidiary.  We expect better from such a significant global player.

If the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is approved, the T-Mobile’s 20,000 workers will have the right to join a union without intimidation because of a neutrality agreement between with AT&T and CWA.

This article originally appeared on the AFL-CIO blog on July 7, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mike Hall is a former West Virginia newspaper reporter, staff writer for the United Mine Workers Journal and managing editor of the Seafarers Log. He came to the AFL- CIO in 1989 and has written for several federation publications, focusing on legislation and politics, especially grassroots mobilization and workplace safety. When his collar was still blue, he carried union cards from the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, American Flint Glass Workers and Teamsters for jobs in a chemical plant, a mining equipment manufacturing plant and a warehouse. He has also worked as roadie for a small-time country-rock band, sold his blood plasma and played an occasional game of poker to help pay the rent.

Rite Aid workers from seven states last week rallied against management’s plan to make employees pay more for their healthcare and to show support for a 15-week “unfair labor practice” strike by Rite Aid employees at seven stores in Cleveland, Ohio. With strong support by the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, United Students Against Sweatshops and the Harrisburg-area labor movement, the spirited rally took place immediately before the company’s annual shareholder meeting on June 23, 2011.

After the rally (video below), about 15 Rite Aid workers and union reps attended the shareholder meeting to voice their concerns directly to Rite Aid’s Board of Directors and top executives. Inside the meeting, I presented a shareholder proposal opposing management’s policy of paying the tax liabilities on its golden parachute deals with senior executives.

Christina Frymier, a striking Rite Aid worker from Cleveland, was the first to address CEO John Standley and the board of directors during the question and answer period. “I’m on strike because Rite Aid is trying to make our healthcare so expensive that nobody will be able to afford it. Rite Aid does most of its business with customers who are very much like me.” She continued:

When I talk to customers and tell them what Rite Aid is doing, they are angry, upset. They take their prescriptions and their business to CVS and other pharmacies. If the people who shop at Rite Aid’s 4,700 stores learn that management is trying to deny health care to its employees, Rite Aid’s reputation will be harmed. Do you really want to allow your management to continue on a path that will hurt Rite Aid’s business nationwide?

Frymier was followed by UFCW Local 1776 member Donna Weber, a 16-year veteran at Rite Aid’s Tobyhanna, Pa., store. Weber, a pharmacy technician, described how the company has cut staffing to dangerously low levels.

Weber compared the executive’s huge salaries and benefits – including free use of the corporation’s jet for their personal use – to the reality she faces in the store. “Many days I’m working on the phone with insurance companies to resolve a customer’s prescription problem while other customers are waiting to be checked out,” Weber said. “These jobs take a lot of concentration.  It seems that if we can afford these high executive salaries and a free jet plane we should be able to adequately staff our stores.”

Referring to ongoing negotiations for a new contract, Weber said, “We shouldn’t have to choose between health care or food for our families.”

Weber was followed by Local 1776 President Wendell W. Young, IV, who described how 3,000 Local 1776 Rite Aid members in Pennsylvania have worked for nearly three years under the terms of an extended contract because the company is insisting that workers assume an impossibly high portion of the cost of their health care benefits.

“We are calling on Rite Aid to bargain in good faith to reach agreements on new contracts,” said Young, who called the company’s behavior, “wrong at a time when the loyal men and women of Rite Aid have worked so hard to help the company weather this economic down turn and contributed to its growth throughout the past four decades.”

“The solidarity rally and action at the shareholders meeting in Harrisburg sent a message to the Board of Directors and top managers that shifting the burden of healthcare benefits to Rite Aid workers—and taxpayers—won’t solve their financial problems or make the company profitable,” said UFCW Local 880’s director of collective bargaining Carl Ivka, who is leading the strike at seven Rite Aid stores in Ohio.

Rite Aid workers from the International Longshore & Warehouse Union, SEIU 1199, Teamsters and UFCW have attended three previous shareholder meetings.

Rite Aid workers’ union summit

The day before the annual meeting, Rite Aid union leaders met for a national summit to share information and develop common strategies for dealing with the company’s plan to shift health insurance costs to workers and taxpayers.

The meeting was attended by Rite Aid leaders from the 1199 SEIU, International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU), RWDSU, UFCW Local 21, UFCW Local 880, UFCW Local 1360, UFCW Local 1776, and the UFCW International. Also on hand were supporters from United Students Against Sweatshops, Jobs with Justice, Change to Win and the AFL-CIO’s Center for Strategic Research.

In conjunction with the summit meeting, two leading workers’ rights groups released an “Investor Alert” on the mismanagement and corporate greed that has led to Rite Aid’s poor performance. The report is available from Jobs with Justice at  and United Students Against Sweatshops.

Summit participants also celebrated the first contract victory by Rite Aid workers, who formed their union with ILWU Local 26 at the Lancaster, California Distribution Center more than five years ago. ILWU Organizing Director Peter Olney reported on the struggle by the workers to win their collective bargaining rights and a first contract.

“Winning our first union contract required a comprehensive campaign with customers and the community on the outside and strong leadership and rank and file action on the inside. Working together, we overcame vicious anti-union attacks and more than a year of surface bargaining by Rite Aid management.  It took an incredible amount of perseverance, determination and creativity to win, but thanks to the support from everyone in this room and many more locals that couldn’t be here, we did it.”

Pictures from the summit meeting and the march and rally at the shareholders meeting are viewable on Flickr here.

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on June 30, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Rand Wilson is communications coordinator at the AFL-CIO Organizing Dept.’s Center for Strategic Research. He has worked as a union organizer and labor communicator in the United States since the 1980s. For more information about Wilson, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand_Wilson

Federal action comes almost exactly one year after USW members were locked-out of Illinois plant by international company

When union workers were locked out over a year ago at the Honeywell uranium facility in Metropolis, Ill., they warned that the unskilled scabs being brought into the plant would cause accidents at the uranium enrichment facility due to their lack of experience. Despite these warnings, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission certified the workers as being qualified to operate the plant, and it has continued to operate.

Since then, a very loud explosion has been caused at the plant last August, a small amount of lethally toxic UF6 was released last September, and a very large release of the toxic HF gas occurred in late December that set off alarms and troubled local community members. Locked-out union workers, members of United Steelworkers Local 7-699, claimed that the scab replacement workers running the plant were unqualified and should not be allowed to run it.

They cited an NRC report from last November, which showed that Honeywell cheated on initial safety qualification reports for its workers. The NRC claimed that after the cheating on the tests was discovered all workers were retested and passed after being retested.

USW Local 7-669 members put up mock tombstones around the Honeywell uranium enrichment facility in Illinois to demonstrate the damage done by the lockout.

But a new citation against Honeywell from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) bolsters their claim that the Honeywell uranium facility is being run unsafely. Last Wednesday, OSHA cited Honeywell with 17 separate “serious violations” that could have resulted in death or serious harm and fined Honeywell $119,000 for the accidental release of HF gas in December.

The federal agency defines a “serious violation” as occurring “when there is substantial probability that death or serious physical harm could result from a hazard about which the employer knew or should have known.” According to OSHA the 17 serious violations they were cited for included:

Violations include allowing cylinders to be exposed to physical damage; having inaccurate field verifications on tanks and values; using equipment that was not in compliance with recognized and generally accepted good engineering practices; failing to have clear written operating instructions for processes such as unloading hydrogen fluoride into storage tanks and switching storage tanks; failing to address human factors in relation to remote operating valves on the hydrogen fluoride storage tanks; failing to document and resolve issues addressed by the process hazard analysis team; failing to establish written procedures to maintain the integrity of process equipment; failing to implement written emergency operating procedures for emptying hydrogen fluoride tanks; failing to perform appropriate checks and inspections to ensure equipment was properly installed; and failing to establish and implement written procedures to manage changes to process chemicals, equipment and procedures.

The company also was cited for a deficient incident report that did not include factors contributing to the vapor release and the recommendation resulting from the internal investigation.

The violations that OSHA cited Honeywell for at the uranium plant has troubled many in the local community, who worry that a release of toxic gas could kill nearby residents. Speaking at a rally marking the one-year anniversary of workers being locked-out from the Honeywell uranium facility, Metropolis, Ill., Mayor Billy McDaniel, said he was so worried about the safety conditions that “There are times when I have trouble sleeping at night.”

The company has 15 business days from receipt of its citations and penalties to comply, request a meeting with OSHA, or contest the citation in front of an independent OSHA Review Commission. Honeywell Spokesman Peter Dapel did not return phone calls requesting comment from the company.

Union workers say the new safety violations cited by OSHA are even more evidence that Honeywell needs to settle the lockout. “The OSHA violations further validate what we’ve said all along. The members of this local union are the guardians of safety in the plant, and left to themselves, Honeywell will not ensure a true culture of safety first,” says union spokesman John Paul Smith.

This blog originally appeared in These Working Times on June 28, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Mike Elk is a third-generation union organizer who has worked for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, the Campaign for America’s Future, and the Obama-Biden campaign. Based in Washington D.C., he has appeared as a commentator on CNN, Fox News, and NPR, and writes frequently for In These Times as well as Alternet, The Nation, The Atlantic and The American Prospect.