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

On the day Apple celebrated 10 years since opening its first Apple Store, employee Cory Moll announced a campaign to unionize the company’s 30,000-plus retail employees. Moll sent an e-mail to reporters declaring that “the people of Apple are coming together to “‘work different.’” “The core issues definitely involve compensation, pay, benefits,” Moll said.

A Reuters reporter echoed the response of many journalists in calling the union drive “unusual given Apple’s reputation for fierce employee loyalty.” But interviews with workers in three states help explain how and why some of Apple’s employees want to change the company. (All three employees interviewed for this article requested and were provided anonymity based on their fear of retaliation.)

A Bay Area employee described what happened last year when he and about a dozen co-workers realized employees with years of service were being paid less than new hires doing the same work. Agitated about the situation but concerned about retaliation, the workers committed to a plan: during the approaching round of annual one-on-one meetings between workers and managers, they would each ask about pay disparities.

Supposedly happy and loyal Apple employees help sell things at the Covent Garden Apple Store in London on May 23, 2011.

Those workers who did ask received a consistent response: “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple.” Instead, managers said, the chance to work at Apple “should be looked at as an experience.” “You can’t live off of experience,” said the worker interviewed. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Apple has outpaced Tiffany & Co. jewelers in retail sales per square foot.

Employees said that Apple keeps its healthcare costs down by defining even employees working 40 hours a week as part-time if they can’t guarantee open availability (availability to be scheduled to work anytime the store is open). The three workers interviewed said that most employees at each of their stores either work second jobs or go to school, making open availability impossible.

These workers are instead offered Apple’s “part-time” health insurance plan, which costs them much more and the company much less. The Bay Area worker, who works 32 to 40 hours a week, is currently going without medication for a serious health condition because he can’t afford the $120 to $150 a month for the “part time” plan. “$120 a month is what I live on after rent and bills,” he said. All three employees said that the majority of their co-workers were classified as part time.

A Maryland worker said that Apple’s understaffing can make the workload “overwhelming” during high traffic periods and leaves him “singled out” by frustrated customers. He said it “adds tension and makes it a lot more difficult to be effective” as both employees and customers become increasingly stressed.

A New York State worker said that “our demand has outgrown our staffing tremendously,” and that he is yelled at by customers at least once a week. He said the contrast between the lengths Apple goes to satisfy customers and its inflexibility in the face of employees’ needs is “demoralizing.”

The same worker said he has ideas for how to make his store run more effectively, but has no avenue to get them taken seriously given Apple’s “very top-down corporate culture.” In the past year, management made “a very big overhaul” of workers’ schedules and responsibilities at his store. For his co-workers, it meant “less time doing the things they like to do both at work and outside of work”: less time for repairs and more time on the floor; less consistent schedules and more times working a night shift followed by a morning shift hours later.

The change “wreaked havoc” on his personal life and “strained” his relationship with his girlfriend. He calls the new system “a drain emotionally and physically” and resents that he had no voice in it. Though he’s undecided about unionization, he said if it happened, “the biggest benefit” would be “just having a say in these situations.”

All three workers interviewed saw organizing the stores as a daunting task.  The Bay Area worker said he is eager to get involved but most of his co-workers fear punishment for “even talking about a union.” He said that Apple goes out of its way to make employees feel “extremely expendable.” “For a company that has been founded on the ideas of ‘think different’ and innovation,” he said, “their labor practices are anything but.”

The Maryland employee said that although he wants a union, his first reaction on hearing about Moll’s e-mail was, “That guy is going to get fired.” He said after he was hired, a trainer told him “casually” that Apple was against union organizing and that working nonunion was part of the job. The comment was “thrown in there with the sexual harassment training.”

Moll told industry website Inside Apple Store that he has begun working with a “prominent national union” to organize his own store and that he has received e-mails from workers at 100 other stores interested in union representation.

Apple, which has more than 30,000 employees in 325 stores around the world, did not respond to a request for comment.

This blog originally appeared In These Times on June 24, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Josh Eidelson is a freelance writer and a union organizer based in Philadelphia. He’s written about politics as a contributor to Campus Progress, a columnist for the Yale Daily News, and a research fellow for Talking Points Media. His work has appeared online at publications including In These Times, Dissent, Washington Monthly, and Alternet. Check out his blog: http://www.josheidelson.com Twitter: @josheidelson E-mail: jeidelson@gmail.com.

In advance of a politically motivated hearing, South Carolina working men and women called today on lawmakers to focus on creating good jobs instead of mounting a political three-ring circus in defense of Boeing lobbyists and CEOs.

The workers spoke prior to a field hearing in North Charleston, S.C., organized by House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and attended by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and several Republican members of Congress.

In April, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint alleging that Boeing’s 2009 decision to locate a Dreamliner 787 final assembly line in North Charleston represented illegal retaliation against Machinists (IAM) members who work for the company. The NLRB is seeking a court order requiring Boeing to operate the second 787 line, including supply lines, with union workers in the Puget Sound. To learn more and check out the real deal on the NLRB and Boeing, click here and here.

In a statement, Machinists (IAM) Vice President Bob Martinez said:

Based on clear-cut evidence of law breaking by Boeing that’s available on YouTube, federal law enforcers had no choice but to move forward with an investigation. Today’s hearing is about GOP opposition to the very existence of a federal agency that enforces labor law.

Workers emphasized that South Carolinians support Boeing bringing jobs to the Palmetto state but said the corporation should not break the law to do it. “We have heard a lot of talk recently about what is right for South Carolinians from lawmakers, both here in our state and in Washington D.C.,” said Joe Shelley, a mill worker at the Kapstone paper mill in Charleston.

Well, I am here today, as a South Carolinian, to share my opinion about what we need to create good jobs and a stronger economy and it isn’t the political grandstanding you see here today.

Georgette Carr, a Charleston long shore worker said:

South Carolinians want good jobs, including the jobs Boeing has to offer, but employers who break the law, as Boeing is doing in Washington State, need to be held accountable and must respect workers’ rights.

The South Carolina workers emphasized that today’s hearing is part of a broader political assault on working families taking place nationwide. James Johnson, a recently laid off construction worker from Summerville, said:

This is just another example of the extreme political agenda being pushed by politicians around the country to reward corporate CEOs and lobbyists who are rigging the system– not working families. We have seen it in Wisconsin and Ohio, with the attacks on public service workers, in Washington, D.C., with the GOP budget plan to gut Medicare, and now right here in our backyard.

“The right-wing attacks on the NLRB have nothing to do with the facts of the case or the economy, and everything to do with politics,” said Erin McKee, Charleston Labor Council president.  “Working people play by the rules, and so should businesses.”

Yesterday, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Education and the Workforce Committee, called on  Issa to delay his demand that the NLRB’s Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon testify at today’s hearing about the Boeing case, which is currently being argued before an administrative law judge. Top Republicans on both the committees also have requested that Solomon turn over sensitive internal documents relating to the ongoing case.

Check back for coverage of the hearing today.

This article originally appeared on the AFL-CIO blog on June 17, 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.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Late last week, three workers at Boeing’s North Charleston, S.C., factory filed for a right to intervene in the upcoming National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case against the aerospace company. As I have reported, the federal agency has charged Boeing with illegally shifting work away from a union facility in Washington state to South Carolina as punishment for a 2008 strike at a Puget Sound facility.

The three South Carolina workers claimed that that they would be hurt if production was moved back to Washington because of the NLRB ruling. By gaining the right to intervene in the NLRB case, the nonunion South Carolina workers would have had the right to subpoena the union—and more important, be seen as the public face of Boeing’s argument that the jobs should not be moved back to the union facility in Washington state. Today, an NLRB judge dismissed the three workers’ motion.

International Association of Machinists (IAM) officials disputed that the workers were acting on their own without support from Boeing to file their charge. The legal brief was paid for by the National Right to Work Legal Foundation, which is rumored to be funded in part by corporations like Boeing. The National Right to Work Legal Foundation refuses to release records of its donors. The organization’s spokesman declined to respond to questions about whether or not the foundation is funded by Boeing. A Boeing spokesman could not be reached for comment.

IAM officials claim all three workers did not work in a section of the South Charleston facility that would be affected if work was moved back to the union facility in Washington State. The NLRB agreed, and denied the motion by the three South Carolina workers to have the right to intervene on the grounds that they had no direct financial interest in the proceedings.

But the complaint is still significant to understanding the anti-union strategy of Boeing.

The complaint represents a strategy by Boeing to say that enforcement of the law against Boeing would cost American jobs overall. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed written by Boeing CEO Jerry McNeiry, McNeiry claimed closing the factory would cost Americans jobs at a time when they desperately need them.

Union officials say this is a false dichotomy: Whether or not the Boeing plant is located in South Carolina or Washington state, it would create jobs. Also, IAM officials claim that the nonunion facility in South Carolina would eventually result in the loss of nearly 1,800 jobs at the Everett, Wash., facility as work is shifted to the South Carolina facility.

Perhaps even more significantly, the complaint of the three nonunion workers proves IAM’s point that work was shifted to South Carolina because the facility was nonunion. According to the Wall Street Journal, one of three employees involved in filing the complaint was involved in an effort to decertify the union at the North Charleston, S.C., facility. In the motion filed by the three workers, the worker says they led the effort to decertify the union “in part to improve Boeing’s chances of building the new facility.”

Additionally, the motion by three nonunion workers represented a broader legal strategy by a nervous Boeing to pressure workers involved in the rulings. Boeing recently subpoenaed all the communications of several union officials involved in the matter. “They issued a very broad reaching subpoena that may or may not have anything to do Boeing or the NLRB case,” said IAM Local 751 spokesman Bryan Corliss, which represents several thousand union Boeing workers in Washington state.

It is extraordinarily rare for a company to subpoena all the documents of union in an NLRB case and is seen by union officials as an attempt to intimidate the union. Meeting the requirements of the subpoena will be very costly to the union. The subpoena request is troubling to union officials since Boeing would be allowed to acquire sensitive union documents that have absolutely nothing to do with the NLRB case at hand. Boeing could acquire documents relating to new organizing at facilities and use the documents to disrupt the organizing and the privacy of the workers involved in the matter.

Boeing, with the help of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, appears to be involved in a no-holds-barred legal and media fight to stop the NLRB from siding with the Boeing workers. The company’s campaign is aimed not only at intimidating IAM Boeing workers, but also at union workers in other sectors who would be inspired to file similar charges against a company for moving work away from union facilities.

“For private sector manufacturing workers, this is our Wisconsin. If Boeing prevails, these corporations will have the right to pack up and move for any reason at all,” says IAM Local 751 spokesman Bryan Corliss. “Being able to punish American workers for exercising the rights under federal law is a threat to all workers. If you can’t discriminate based on the basis of race creed or religion why should you be able to do it on first amendment of freedom of association.”

The question remains: Will progressives respond to the Boeing case the way they responded to Wisconsin? The answer could be vital to future fights over the fate of the country’s manufacturing industry.

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on June 9, 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.

It was just a few months ago when Transportation Security Administration (TSA) workers were granted the right to form a union following months of contentious debates in Congress.

The move paved the way for the largest federal labor election in U.S. history; balloting began in early March. But two amendments recently passed by the House of Representatives could undermine the efforts of more than 45,000 airports workers to organize as union run-off elections are set to conclude in the weeks ahead.

Last Thursday, the Republican-led House approved legislation that would eliminate collective bargaining and cut the TSA’s budget, which the unions and the federal agency say would cost thousands of jobs. The amendments were part of the 2012 homeland security budget bill for fiscal year 2012.

Rep. Todd Rokita’s (R-Ind.) amendment, which passed 218–205, prevents the use of federal funds for collective bargaining by the TSA workers, who provide security for the nations’s airports. Another measure cuts more than $270 million from the agency and was led by Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), who is also House Chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The timing of the bill coincided with a report released by Rep. Mica on Friday, which found that private screeners operate more efficiently and could save the government at least $1 billion over five years. A TSA spokesperson told the Washington Post that the 10 percent workforce reduction would cutabout 5,000 jobs.

In a statement, Rep. Rokita echoed similar sentiments, but went further by saying collective bargaining “would hamper the critical nature of TSA agents’ national security responsibilities.” He added that collective bargaining would make it difficult for people to settle disputes with the security workers.

The financial undercutting and rollback of union rights comes as the workers are currently voting to decide whether the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) or the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) will represent them.

In April, neither union received a majority vote, leading to a run-off election that will continue until June 21; ballot counting will occur two days later. The landmark voting came just two months after TSA administrator John Pistole allowed limited collectively bargaining rights for the first time in the agency’s ten-year history.

In spite of the election, both unions have separately called on their supporters to mobilize against the House bills. “AFGE will not allow these corporate, right-wing politicians to make being in a union un-American,” saidnational union president John Gage in a statement. “This amendment is nothing but a repeat of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s unfounded attack on the right of all Americans to have a voice at work and the right to bargain collectively.”

The NTEU also appealed to some Senate members in hopes that the bill will not pass under the Democratic majority. President Colleen M. Kelley also called Rep. Mica’s study “partisan” and refuted the report. She writes:

In the wake of 9/11, Congress and the President determined, with wide public support, that airport security functions are better performed by federal employees. Not only does NTEU question the validity of the study, I believe the American traveling public would be loathe to return to the days [of] less than a decade ago, when low-paid, ill-trained employees of private contractors handled air passenger screening duties.

An updated study by the Government Accountability Office found that using private screeners would cost 3 percent more after an analysis of revised data from the TSA. A 2007 GAO study found that the costs were upwards of 17 percent. In January, Pistole suspended private screening programs because he did not find any “substantial advantages.”

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on June 8, 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.

More than 200 people—many of them janitorial workers—marched, rallied and protested in front of Cub Foods grocery store this week in Minneapolis, Minn., to urge the chain to treat their workers better.

They’ve been waiting for a year for Cub Foods to come to the table. They’ve petitioned the chain, sent letters to Cub Foods representatives and sent a petition with hundreds of names, organized delegations to store headquarters. But the chain refuses to waiver.

Ten people have taken up a hunger strike and are now entering Day 7. They’ve pitched their tents near the store in what is called “Camp Hunger.” They say they’ll continue to fast until Cub Foods responds to their demands for fair wages and improved conditions for the workers who clean their stores. On Monday, the workers and their allies delivered letters nationwide to Supervalu stores, which is the parent company of Cub Foods, demanding a Code of Conduct that would ensure fair treatment.

“Workers across the country are concerned about the extreme deterioration of working conditions in the retail cleaning industry nationwide and want to ensure justice not only for retail cleaning workers in the Twin Cities but to ensure that retail cleaning workers across the country don’t continue to see their wages drop and their workloads increase,” said Veronica Mendez of the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), an affiliate of the national organization Interfaith Worker Justice.

Last year, I reported on the efforts of janitors at Safeway stores in Northern California to improve working conditions at that chain. Just as Safeway did, Cub Foods says it’s not responsible for the poor treatment of workers because they are subcontracted out to a cleaning company.

That company is Carlson Building Maintenance, whom Cub says is responsible for their workers. (Janitors in the Safeway fight, by the way, eventually ratified a collective bargaining agreement with Safeway’s janitorial services contractor, waging the base wages and strengthening health standards).

Cub Foods and Carlson are using a common loophole to wash their hands of any responsibility to the worker. The retail companies contract out to professional maintenance companies. Then they take the lowest bid, pitting the maintenance companies against each other.

While workers used to earn $10 an hour and work with a cleaning crew of four people, their pay has now dropped to $7.50 and the crew has shrunk to two, according to Mendez.

One of the worker-organizers, Mario Colloly Torres, was a cleaner at the store. He told In These Times, “Many who have worked ten years in the industry know there were four workers to a shift and today there are two workers doing the same work. In some stores workers don’t even have time to take a break because the workload is so big.”

Colloly Torres says he worked at the company for several years “without one problem.” Then he started organizing the workers, and says he was abruptly fired. “They make money off the community. And make money cheating the workers,” he said. Charges have been filed with the National Labor Relations Board stating that Cub Foods and Carlson unfairly fired Colloly Torres for organizing coworkers to demand fair wages and working conditions.

“I held two jobs because of the low wages. We work in a place filled with food and yet we can barely feed our families,” says Colloly Torres, adding, “They look for a cleaning company that is going to give the lowest price for the work. The result for us: lower wages and increased workloads.”

Last year, when the campaign for Justice in Retail Cleaning began, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said, “No corporation can escape its responsibility to workers by simply outsourcing their work to some other company that doesn’t observe the rights of those workers.”

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on May 27, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: R.M. Arrieta was born and raised in Los Angeles. She has worked at three daily newspapers and two television stations and is a former editor of the Bay Area’s independent community bilingual biweekly El Tecolote. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is a freelance journalist writing for a variety of outlets. She can be reached at rmarrieta@inthesetimes.com.