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.

A new study shows that miners in unionized coal mines are far less likely to be killed or injured on the job than miners in nonunion operations. The independent study funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) found that “unionization predicts an 18-33 percent drop in traumatic injuries and a 27-68 percent drop in fatalities.”

The comprehensive study, conducted by Stanford University law professor Alison D. Morantz,  the John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Stanford Law School, looked at coal mine fatality and injury statistics from 1993 to 2008.

Mine Workers (UMWA) President Cecil Roberts says the study “quantifies the profound differences in safety underground coal miners experience when working union versus working nonunion.”

He points out that recent mining disasters, including the blast at Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine that killed 29 miners last year, the Crandall Canyon (Utah) disaster that killed nine in 2007 and the Sago explosion in 2006 that killed 12 miners, have all been in nonunion mines.

The simple truth is that union mines are safer mines, and this study proves that.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, a third-generation coal miner, says he knows “firsthand the vital importance of workers having a voice on the job through their union.”

This study confirms what working people have known all along:  Unions, strong laws, and enforcement are crucial to protecting the lives of our nation’s miners. With all we know today and with all the avenues of prevention available, there is simply no need for even one life to be lost on the job.

Rep. George Miller (R-Calf.) ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee and long-time mine safety advocate says the study shows that

when workers have a voice in the mine through their union, they are safer. In union mines, workers are empowered to point out dangerous conditions to inspectors without fear of retaliation from management. By giving miners the support they need to speak out, unions can save miners’ lives.

The study’s findings suggest that the union safety effect may even have “intensified” since the early 1990s as the UMWA instituted a more comprehensive safety program and expanded training for union safety experts on the local and national levels.

Roberts says that while the study shows union mines are safer, tragedies can still happen, such as the 2001 explosion at the Jim Walters #5 mine in Brookwood, Ala., that killed 13 miners.

We in the UMWA learned hard lessons in that tragedy and others that preceded it. We took steps to provide better protection for our members, and this study demonstrates that those steps are working. We will continue to work as hard as we can to keep the mines where UMWA members work the safest in the world.

Click here for the full report.

This article originally appeared in the AFL-CIO blog on May 25, 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.

Nationwide, millions of domestic workers—largely immigrant women—labor long hours cleaning, cooking, taking care of other people’s children and otherwise performing necessary tasks for wealthier people whose own jobs or lifestyles don’t leave them time or energy for this work.

The work is frequently off-the-books and rarely covered by binding labor agreements or even individual contracts. They are not included under the National Labor Relations Act. There are ample horror stories of domestic workers being abused or even held captive by their employers.

On Tuesday, May 10, the AFL-CIO formally recognized domestic workers as members of organized labor, as an agreement was made between the AFL-CIO and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which includes 33 groups representing about 2.5 million domestic workers in 11 states and 17 major cities.

The NDWA has long been pushing for the strengthening of labor rights nationally for domestic workers and domestic workers bills of rights in individual states, including California. They claimed an historic victory last summer when New York passed a law granting domestic workers formal labor rights. The alliance is also calling for a convention on domestic workers’ rights under the International Labor Organization, which is part of the United Nations.

The agreement between the AFL-CIO and the NDWA says:

Through explicit and implicit exclusion of domestic workers from most labor and employment laws, domestic workers’ contributions to our nation’s and individual families’ household economies have gone hidden, devalued, and little understood.

This history of exclusion can be traced to the specifics of the industry and race politics. Primarily working in isolation in private homes, domestic workers who were predominantly African-American women were subjected to discrimination, unsafe working conditions, stolen wages, intimidation, and a long list of other abuses.

Although the demographics of domestic workers have changed to a mostly immigrant women workforce, the working conditions in the industry have changed very little.

Some of the rights sought by the NDWA are things so seemingly basic that they are not even an issue for almost every other profession—for example, the right to five hours of uninterrupted sleep per night and the right to cook their own food. The Alliance’s website says:

Domestic workers often labor around the clock, placing themselves and the people they care for at risk of sickness and unintentional mistakes caused by exhaustion.

The alliance also seeks—and in New York has obtained—the same things that workers are either guaranteed or seeking in other fields: paid sick days and paid vacation days, overtime, workers compensation.

The partnership could help further these goals on multiple levels, emphasizing that domestic workers are indeed “workers” entitled to the same rights as people in other jobs; and the aforementioned rights are things that all people should have access to. (People in other professions—including restaurant work, farm work and construction—are, of course, also typically denied paid sick days, vacation days and overtime.)

The partnership’s goals, as spelled out in the agreement, are:

—Local City and county level campaigns to enact ordinances or laws to expand protections and promote the rights of domestic workers;
—Statewide campaigns to establish labor standards for domestic workers;
—Campaigns to create administrative and regulatory changes at state and federal Departments of Labor;
National campaigns to establish labor standards, expand collective bargaining rights, create dignified jobs and support quality care for all, such as the Caring Across Generations campaign;
—International collaboration to bring visibility and dignity to the global domestic workforce, including the Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention at the International Labor Organization.

The AFL-CIO and the domestic workers groups plan to accomplish these goals and generally increase the diversity and strength of the labor movement by fostering cooperation between state federations and local labor councils and domestic workers’ groups, in furtherance of both specific campaigns and general labor rights. This is part of a larger move to widen the scope of “organized labor” to include workers not traditionally represented by unions.

The agreement says:

Until these communities know each other, work with each other, and have an institutional connection to each other, it will be much more difficult to plan and strategize together, and to build a level of trust necessary to work effectively together in pursuit of our common goals and objectives.

The agreement also describes how domestic workers groups can affiliate with a local union, in keeping with the AFL-CIO’s National Worker Center program launched in 2006. The agreement also stipulates that the AFL-CIO and members of NDWA won’t compete with each other in situations where unions or domestic worker groups are organizing, and won’t undermine each other’s efforts.

While the agreement could have great concrete and symbolic effects for millions of domestic workers, it is limited to workers who are connected with domestic workers organizations. That means scores of domestic workers won’t be part of the partnership, likely including the most vulnerable workers in rural areas and/or in situations where they are highly isolated or exploited by their employers.

Hence continued outreach and organizing among domestic workers, continued strengthening and enforcement of labor laws, and even basic human rights protections—plus comprehensive immigration reform, as Michelle Chen noted yesterday—will be key to making sure domestic workers nationwide are truly empowered and protected.

This article originally appeared on the Working In These Times blog on May 12, 2011. Reprinted with permission.

About the Author: Kari Lydersen, 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.

More than 500 workers from ver.di, the German telecommunications workers union, today descended on Deutsche Telekom’s global annual shareholders’ meeting in Cologne  to demand  the company ensure its American employees at T-Mobile USA the same rights enjoyed by its German workforce.

The workers formed a human chain around the meeting venue and released black balloons as a sign of mourning for their U.S. co-workers’ rights.

In Germany, Deutsche Telecom recognizes the union and has a collective bargaining agreement with workers. But at its American subsidiary, T-Mobile USA, management harasses workers who try to join the union, and has implemented a company-wide strategy of refusing to recognize the workers’ choice of a union and collective bargaining rights.

Communications Workers America (CWA) President Larry Cohen, said:

T-Mobile workers must be allowed to choose a union, and the harassment must stop. We thank German workers for standing up for our rights.

“Deutsche Telekom should change its behaviour in the United States as soon as possible. Its global standing is at stake and it should use this chance to improve its reputation,” said ver.di’s Ado Wilhelm.

Philip Jennings, general secretary of UNI Global Union, which brings together unions in the telecoms sector, said “responsible employers don’t act this way.”

We expect better from one of the world’s leading telecom companies with solid industrial relations in its home country.

On March 20, Deutsche Telekom agreed to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T, which respects workers’ rights to union representation and collective bargaining. The government review of the merger could take a year.

Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), said T-Mobile workers should not have to wait a year to gain their rights.

This article originally appeared in AFL-CIO blog on May 12, 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.

Rite Aid workers at the company’s massive Southwest Distribution Center in Lancaster, Calif., declared victory on May 1 in their five-year effort to form a union and improve working conditions.

Workers signed a three-year tentative contract with management—subject to a May 12 membership ratification vote—that will improve conditions at the million-square-foot facility in California’s high desert by guaranteeing:

• Health insurance rates that are fair for both individual workers and their families
• Job security provisions to prevent work from being sub-contracted
• A worker voice in production standards and ability to challenge unfair standards
• Protection against intense summer heat and winter cold, using innovative indoor-temperature standards
• A fair and impartial process for resolving disputes
• Wage increases in each of the next 3 years.

“We’re excited about winning this victory, even if it took longer than it should have,” said Carlos “Chico” Rubio, a 10-year warehouse worker who helped negotiate the union contract with a team of eight co-workers.

Employees decided to form their union in March of 2006 after contacting the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union (ILWU). Within months, Local 26 President Luisa Gratz was helping workers address problems with indoor heat and production standards.

Unfortunately, Rite Aid began aggressively interfering with the workers’ freedom to organize:

Responding to these challenges, Rite Aid workers stayed united and helped their union lead a sophisticated campaign that included:

• Opening a direct line of communication with company shareholders and board members
• Actively participating in the company’s annual shareholder meetings in New York City and Harrisburg, Penn.
• Forming a nationwide network of Rite Aid workers and unions that including UFCW, SEIU, and Teamsters, who shared information and coordinated actions,
• Building a powerful national coalition with United Students Against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice.
• Launching a “pinpoint” boycott campaign at two Rite Aid stores in San Pedro, Calif., on April 1, 2011.

“Rite Aid made this process much more difficult on workers and families than it needed to,” said ILWU International Vice President Ray Familathe, who helped workers reach their May 1 settlement.

This post originally appeared in In These Times on May 4, 2011.

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

Before the words “Koch Brothers” became an epithet among labor activists everywhere, the oil industry barons were already persona non grata to Mother Earth. This Earth Day, let us celebrate the myriad ways Koch has touched the lives of flora and fauna alike.

The Brothers Koch are primarily known as chief financiers of the anti-union showdown in Wisconsin. Koch-addicted Gov. Scott Walker and other Wisconsin conservatives pushed anti-union legislation that faithfully reflected Koch’s neo-libertarian, anti-government agenda. The grassroots backlash drew a diverse coalition of public and private sector workers, civil rights groups, and other advocacy organizations from many demographics–so broadly offensive was the bill’s attack on collective bargaining rights and critical social programs.

Wisconsin environmentalists, too, have fought on common ground with labor. As an oil mogul, Koch obviously has an interest in environmental deregulation (as seen in its battle against various anti-pollution policies, according to Think Progress). Walker’s budget plan actually serves Koch’s twin agendas of assaulting unions and the environment simultaneously. Nick Milroy at the Superior Telegram says the Governor wants to pull the plug on the budding green economy:

One of the governor’s first acts after being elected was to give federal train money to other states. He gave away $810 million in train money and 5,500 jobs to Illinois and other states. This action appears to be pay back to the oil, coal and gas industries that contributed $127,693 to Walker, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, www.wisdc.org.

Walker then proposed the most restrictive rules in the nation for wind energy. Wisconsin should be open to clean energy businesses like wind energy. The governor has already killed two projects and threatened 1,000 jobs.

In his budget repair bill, the governor attempted to sell state power plants with no bid contracts and canceled a biomass power plant that would have created jobs and helped wean us off fossil fuels. It makes no sense to sell these power plants and stop biomass when Wisconsin imports $16 billion a year in oil, gas, and coal each year, costing us over 300,000 jobs.

Forward-thinking labor groups (including some in Wisconsin) have often been at the forefront of pushing for green jobs, both as a movement toward long-term sustainability, as well as toward a more balanced and equitable framework for economic development.

The New York Times reported in February that Koch Industries had relatively few workers in the state and thus “no direct stake in the union debate… The pending legislation would not directly affect its bottom line.” This gave the impression that Koch’s attack on Wisconsin’s labor movement was largely ideological—hence its connections to Americans for Prosperity, the faux-populist astroturf group behind the Tea Party.

However, by steamrolling labor, Koch—which has also poured millions into anti-science climate “skepticism” campaign groups—undermine the public’s ability to resist ruthless profiteering. For big oil, any policy that disempowers public institutions—whether it’s the regulatory system, public  unions, or the social programs and schools that nurture civil society—expands the corporate grip on our workplaces, neighborhoods, and governments.

The Koch team is quietly changing the political climate up north as well. Geoff Dembicki at the Tyee describes an intricate feedback loop in which Koch’s profits from the horribly polluting Canadian tar sands indirectly feed into the anti-science, pro-corporate and anti-labor agenda on the other side of the border.

Together, America’s fifth-richest citizens — each worth $21.5 billion — own Koch Industries, a refining, pipeline, chemical and paper conglomerate that manufactures common household products such as Brawny paper towels and Stainmaster carpets. They’re also one of the biggest refiners of Alberta oil sands crude, handling an estimated 25 percent of all imports entering the U.S.

Anytime a clean energy law threatens to impact those operations, the Kochs fight back hard. Not content anymore to wage war from the sidelines, the brothers and their allies have now installed themselves at the heart of Republican power in Washington, D.C.

Earlier investigations by Dembicki have exposed other links between Koch and Canadian oil:

• Minnesota-based Koch subsidiary Flint Hills Resources boasts of being “among the top processors of Canadian crude in the United States,” according to its website.
• Incidentally, a pipeline that carries this oil runs straight into Wisconsin. So it’s hardly surprising that Wisconsin lawmakers obediently scrubbed a low-carbon fuel standard from an energy bill in the face of heavy pressure from the Koch lobby last April.
• Flint Hills was one of the biggest donors in the corporate opposition to the Proposition 23 ballot measure in California, which threatened to suspend the state’s landmark climate change law. (The referendum, which was ultimately defeated, would have not only rolled back the state’s emissions-reduction plan, but threatened major green job investments).

So lest you think that the Koch brothers are union-haters pure and simple, remember that stifling democracy, starving the government and smothering the ecosystem, are all bricks upholding Koch’s oil empire.

This week, The Nation published an article co-written by In These Times Contributing Editor Mike Elk that revealed an audacious Koch-sponsored propaganda campaign last November in Washington State. 2012 will likely see the corporate-political nexus explode with even more Koch PR blitzes, now that the Citizens United ruling has unraveled political spending limits.

So get ready for more Wisconsin-like showdowns as the Koch Empire gears up to mow down any worker, community or habitat standing in its way.

About the Author: Michelle Chen ’s work has appeared in AirAmerica, Extra!, Colorlines and Alternet, along with her self-published zine, cain. She is a regular contributor to In These Times’ workers’ rights blog, Working In These Times, and is a member of the In These Times Board of Editors. She also blogs at Colorlines.com. She can be reached at michellechen @ inthesetimes.com.

This blog originally appeared in These Times on April 22. 2011. Reprinted with Permission.

Berkeley, Calif.—A strike of more than 450 workers in one of the largest foundries on the west coast brought production to a halt Sunday night, at Pacific Steel Castings.  The work stoppage, which began at midnight, has continued with round-the-clock picketing at the factory gates in West Berkeley.

Local 164B of the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union (GMP) has been negotiating a new labor agreement at Pacific Steel for several months. The old agreement expired on Sunday night.

The strike was caused by demands from the company’s owners for concessions and takeaway proposals in contract negotiations. Those include:

• requiring workers to pay at least 20% of the cost of their medical insurance, amounting to about $300 per month per employee.
• a wage freeze for the first two years of the agreement, and tiny raises after that.
• eliminating the ability of workers to use their seniority to bid for overtime, allowing criteria including speedup, discrimination and favoritism.

Striking Pacific Steel Castings workers on Berkeley's new picket line, outside their foundry on Tuesday, March 22, 2011. (Photo by David Bacon)

“All eight other foundries in the Bay Area have agreed to a fair contract,” said Ignacio De La Fuente, GMP international vice-president. “Workers at Pacific Steel haven’t had a raise in the last two years, in order to help the company pay for increases in health plan costs.  Pacific Steel is now alone among the rest in trying to make its workers give back $300 a month.”

The $300/month would mean an approximately 10 percent cut in wages for most workers at the foundry.

Joel Soto, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, has worked eight years at Pacific Steel, and has a wife, 2-year-old child and another on the way.  Soto said, “We’ve been trying to save money for a house. If we have to give up $300 a month, we’ll have to continue renting.  My wife and I both support our parents, and that $300 cut is what we’re able to give them now that they’re old.  And with my wife pregnant, we can’t do without that medical care.”

Benito Navarro has 10 years at the foundry, and a wife and son. “That $300 is what I pay for my car to get to work. I’m the only one in my family working, so if we don’t  have that money, I’ll have to give up the car.  But I’d rather eat than drive.”

On both Monday and Tuesday dozens of Berkeley police, with helmets and face shields, shoved and hit strikers as they attempted to help the company bring trucks full of castings out of its struck facility. On Tuesday, one striker, Norma Garcia, who is seven months pregnant, was struck in the abdomen and taken to a hospital.

“It is inexcusable that Berkeley is spending precious municipal resources on providing protection for this business, and opening the city to liability through these unprovoked actions by police against strikers,” said De La Fuente.

“That violence isn’t necessary,” added Soto. “We’re just struggling for our rights. I wouldn’t be so surprised to see this in other cities, but Berkeley?”  Another worker showed the swelling on his arm he said was caused by a blow from a police baton.

Workers feel additionally betrayed by the company because they and their union testified before the Berkeley City Council three years ago.  They urged the city to draft environmental regulations that would allow the foundry to continue operating while installing needed pollution control equipment.

Pacific Steel Casting Co. is a privately held corporation, the third-largest steel foundry in the United States. Its large corporate customers include vehicle manufacturers, like Petebilt Corp., and big oil companies, including BARCO.  The company has been very productive in recent years, despite the recession. It chose not to comment.

About the Author: David Bacon is writer, photographer and former union organizer. He is the author of Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (2008), Communities Without Borders (2006), and The Children of NAFTA: Labor Wars on the US/Mexico Border (2004). His website is at dbacon.igc.org.

This Blog Originally Appeared In These Times on March 23, 2011. Reprinted with Permission.