Category Archives: Organizing

Immigrant Rights, labor, Organizing

Rights for Immigrants Benefit All Workers

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Immigration Reform Prevents Employer Abuse

By Leo Gerard
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

Feb 4, 2013 –

Oscar came to the United States at the age of 16 to work. There were no jobs for him in his native Guatemala, and he felt obligated to help support his parents.

He was lured across borders by the promise of work. He believed, as so many immigrants do, that there would be a job for him in America.

For the past five years, he has worked at a Los Angeles car wash that cheated him and other immigrant workers out of pay, refused protective gear and even denied drinking water.

Employers such as car washes, corporate farms, construction companies and lawn care businesses entice immigrants into the United States by providing jobs with no questions asked. They lure undocumented workers in, and then abuse them with impunity. This endangers all workers because the low-wage, hazardous conditions undocumented workers endure can become the standard. This is especially true in bad economic times. More border security is fine. But to ensure safe, family-supporting jobs remain the norm, America must hold employers to account for baiting immigrants.

Like many immigrants, Oscar, now 29, stayed with a relative when he arrived in America. At first, he found work delivering cosmetics. The company treated him decently but laid him off when business declined. That’s when he got the job at Vermont Car Wash in L.A.

Continue reading Rights for Immigrants Benefit All Workers →

labor, Organizing, trade unions, unemployment

Want to Bust a Recession? Create More Jobs, Organize More Unions…

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Organizing McDonald’s and Wal-mart, and Why Austerity Economics Hurts Low-Wage Workers the Most

By Robert Reich
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

Nov 30, 2012 – What does the drama in Washington over the "fiscal cliff" have to do with strikes and work stoppages among America’s lowest-paid workers at Walmart, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Domino’s Pizza?

Everything.

Jobs are slowly returning to America, but most of them pay lousy wages and low if non-existent benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that seven out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains. That’s why the median wage keeps dropping, especially for the 80 percent of the workforce that’s paid by the hour.

It also part of the reason why the percent of Americans living below the poverty line has been increasing even as the economy has started to recover — from 12.3 percent in 2006 to 15 percent in 2011. More than 46 million Americans now live below the poverty line.

Many of them have jobs. The problem is these jobs just don’t pay enough to lift their families out of poverty.

So, encouraged by the economic recovery and perhaps also by the election returns, low-wage workers have started to organize.

Continue reading Want to Bust a Recession? Create More Jobs, Organize More Unions… →

Organizing, Racism, Seniors, Voting Rights

Here We Go Again, Get Ready for Round Two

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Judge Expects Summer Trial on Pennsylvania’s Voter ID Law

By Karen Langley
Beaver County Blue via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

HARRISBURG, Dec 13, 2012 – The legal battle over the Pennsylvania voter ID law is set to continue for months after a judge this morning said he anticipates a summer trial on a request for a permanent injunction.

The law requiring photo identification at the polls was the subject of an extended courtroom battle that resulted in an order lifting the requirement for the election last month while postponing a decision on permanently stopping the law.

Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson, who issued the temporary injunction, said he expects to issue an order in the coming days scheduling a trial for the summer. The schedule would be intended to allow time for the Supreme Court to review the decision before the November 2013 elections.

Senior Deputy Attorney General Patrick Cawley, arguing for the state, suggested holding the trial sooner so the future of the law could be resolved before the May 21 municipal primary. But attorneys for the parties challenging the law argued more time is needed for legal discovery.

The parties referred to the possibility of a hearing in the spring to determine whether the law will be enforced during the May primary election. Karen Langley: klangley@post-gazette.com or 717-787-2141 .

2012 Election, GOP, Organizing, PDA

Standing Firm: PDA Organizing at Charlotte Convention

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Stage being set up for PDA’s Progressive Central’ forum near the Democratic Convention in North Carolina

2012 Convention: Pulling Democrats’ Platform to the Left

By Martin Wisckol
Beaver County Blue via Orange County Register

Sept 5, 2012 – Proudly liberal activist Tim Carpenter, who toiled in Orange County for more than 20 years before resettling in Massachusetts and co-founding Progressive Democrats of America, has made a career of standing staunchly to the left of mainstream Democrats, relentlessly beckoning and cajoling others to come a little closer.

His 8-year-old PDA group was at it again Tuesday, with a “People’s Convention” at a Charlotte church and soup kitchen that featured the Rev. Jesse Jackson, former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, a couple Congress members, several Congressional hopefuls – including Paul Ryan‘s Democratic opponent – and a host of progressive leaders.

“The country would have been a lot better if Jesse Jackson was elected and, if not, Michael Dukakis,” said Carpenter, recalling the 1988 presidential field from which George H.W. Bush emerged victorious.“We wouldn’t have had Bush I and maybe not Bush II. But (Jackson and Dukakis) are still engaged. And they’re coming here instead of parading around the convention.”

As usual, Carpenter is pushing an agenda beyond which most Democratic lawmakers are ready to support.  But before outlining the list, Carpenter took a moment to celebrate a Tuesday victory: At the Democratic convention, delegates approved a platform backing marriage rights for gays – a clear distinction from Republicans.

“This election is not simply a choice between two candidates or two political parties,” the platform summarizes, “but between two fundamentally different paths for our country and families.”

The specific support for gay marriage comes after President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law and, until recently, Barack Obama opposed gay marriage.

“That’s a victory that’s been a struggle for a long time,” Carpenter said.

Among the 240 people who paid registration dues for the Tuesday event were 92 convention delegates, rallying around eight central issues including:

A single-payer, “Medicare for all” health-care system that, unlike the Affordable Care Act, would leave no American without health insurance. A series of initiatives to diminish corporate influence over the political system. “Main Street, not Wall Street,” Carpenter said. A carbon tax and other measures to address global warming. Immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan. A diplomatic solution to the brewing conflict with Iran. “We’ve got to stop the saber rattling,” Carpenter said.

While it’s trying to pull Obama more toward these positions, PDA supports the incumbent’s reelection as far preferable to a Mitt Romney presidency.

And Carpenter remains as positive and optimistic as ever on a number of fronts. Take, for instance, Rob Zerban, the PDA member challenging vice presidential candidate Ryan in his other race, reelection to Congress.

“Now we get to beat Paul Ryan twice,” he quipped.

Economy, Green Jobs, Organizing, unemployment

July 28 – Discussion of Worker Coops at Aliquippa Coffee House

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 Download Flyer as PDF to print

Organizing, trade unions

Needed: Worker Organizing and Education

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There is No Substitute for Organizing:

How Unions Might Help Win Future Battles

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Jane McAlevey
Beaver County Blue via The Nation

July 3, 2012 – Before Wisconsinites voted down the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, and certainly since, principled progressives inside and outside of unions have disagreed on whether or not the campaign should have happened. In fact, between the two of us, we don’t fully agree about whether or not the recall was the correct tactic.

But with the defeat in the rear view mirror, two clear lessons can be drawn from Wisconsin: unions need to reinvest in mass participatory education—sometimes called internal organizing in union lingo; and, unions need to stop focusing on “collective bargaining” and actually kick down the walls separating workplace and non-workplace issues by going all-out on the broader agenda of the working class and the poor.

Once you get past the reports that Walker outspent the Wisconsin workers by 7:1, the next most startling fact is that 38 percent of union households voted to keep the anti-worker Governor. That’s slightly more than one third, and had the pro-recall forces held the union households, Walker would no longer be Governor.

With major media outlets drubbing us with the 38 percent number, the liberal political elite seem stuck on a rhetorical question: why do poor people and workers vote against their material self-interest? Actually, in our own experience, the poor and working class don’t vote against their self-interest—but there’s a precondition: we have to create the space for ordinary people to better understand what their self-interest is, and how it connects with hundreds of millions in the US and globally.

Continue reading Needed: Worker Organizing and Education →

Organizing, trade unions, Youth and students

Workers Occupy Factory to Stop Shutdown, with Occupy Chicago as Allies

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UE Occupies Chicago Window Plant Again, and Wins Reprieve

By Jane Slaughter
Beaver County Blue via Labor Notes

Feb 24, 2012 – President Armando Robles and members of the United Electrical Workers won another reprieve for a Chicago window factory, re-occupying the plant they famously held in 2008. Photo: OccupyEverything.

Members of the United Electrical Workers won another reprieve for a Chicago window factory, re-occupying the plant they famously held in 2008.

UE Local 1110 members took over the Serious Materials plant yesterday after being told by local management that the factory would close immediately.

When they were confronted with the same news in 2008, workers voted unanimously to occupy their workplace, guarding the machines at the former Republic Windows and Doors for six days until the major creditor, Bank of America, released $1.75 million in wages and benefits owed the workers.

Republic sold the plant to Serious and workers celebrated as the first sit-down strike in years won a favorable settlement in the teeth of the great recession.

This week’s plant closing came with no warning. The union got a call from the boss that he wanted a meeting, but he wouldn’t say why. Officers and UE staff were summoned to the offices of the notorious union-busting law firm Seyfarth and Shaw at 9 a.m. yesterday.

There executives said they would close the plant, effective immediately. Workers would be put on leave while management dismantled the window-making machinery and shipped it to the company’s other plants in Pennsylvania and Colorado.

Workers would be paid what they were owed under the WARN Act, which requires employers to provide notice 60 days ahead of plant closings and mass layoffs. (The penalty for violations is up to two months of pay and benefits.)

But the provisions typically only apply to businesses that would lay off 50 or more.

Illinois has a stronger law, which requires notice when 25 or more full-time employees will lose their jobs, and gives the director of the state labor department the right to investigate the company’s books.

Management provided nothing in writing to back up its promises.

Union officers—Armando Robles, Ricky Maclin, and Vicente Rangel—and staffers spent three hours arguing with management that the closure was unacceptable. Serious had a legal and moral obligation to do more to try to save the jobs, they said.

“We wanted to find a buyer,” said UE rep Leah Fried, “but they were not interested. They said it was not an option.”

Meanwhile, the Serious workers were building windows inside the plant.

February is not a big time for demand for windows, and their numbers were down to 38 after a recent layoff. Only 75 of the original 240 workers had ever been called back after Serious bought the plant from Republic.

All Out

President Robles and Fried left the meeting with management Thursday and began calling laid-off workers, asking them to come to the plant. At 2 p.m., the end of the shift, 50 workers met to discuss their options.

Robles presented them soberly: Do nothing, or fight—stay and occupy the plant again. Without much hullabaloo, matter-of-factly, the members voted unanimously to occupy.

Continue reading Workers Occupy Factory to Stop Shutdown, with Occupy Chicago as Allies →

Afghanistan, antiwar, Militarism, Organizing

Valentine’s Day in War Zones

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Afghan boys

Cold, Cold Heart

By Kathy Kelly
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPort

Feb 14, 2012 – It’s Valentine’s Day, and opening the little cartoon on the Google page brings up a sentimental animation with Tony Bennett singing "why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart."

Here in Dubai, where I’m awaiting a visa to visit Afghanistan, the weather is already warm and humid. But my bags are packed with sweaters because Kabul is still reeling from the coldest winter on record. Two weeks ago, eight children under age five froze to death there in one of the sprawling refugee camps inhabited by so many who have fled from the battles in other provinces. Since January 15, at least 23 children under the age of five have frozen to death in the camps.

And just over a week ago, eight young shepherds, all but one of them under the age of 14, lit a fire for warmth on the snowy Afghan mountainside in Kapisa Province where they were helping support their families by grazing sheep. French troops saw the fire, and acted on faulty information, and the boys were all killed in two successive NATO airstrikes. The usual denunciations from local authorities, and Western apologies, followed.

So I’m thinking about warmth, and who we share it with and who we don’t.

This is an unexpected trip for me. I had first planned to spend this week at home in Chicago, and then, rather suddenly, agreed to join a group of informal human rights observers traveling to Bahrain for the one year anniversary of their brutally repressed "February 17th Revolution" (please follow events there, and demand that the U.S. cease arming Bahrain’s dictatorship, at witnessbahrain.org). Bahraini authorities declined to issue me a visa, and so I asked the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers if I could change my plans and spend the coming week with them.

My friends tell me that the apartment where I’m headed has been without electricity for several days in a row. The pipes have frozen, so there will be no running water. But in spite of the cold, it’s an especially good time to visit them because twelve of them will be there, on winter vacation from school, including two 14-year-old boys I couldn’t meet during my last visit who spent much of the last year away from the others, back home in Bamiyan province, in their mountain villages, supporting their families.

Continue reading Valentine’s Day in War Zones →

Community, Economy, Organizing, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

OWS in Allentown, Youngstown, Toledo

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Occupying the Rust Belt: In Three Deindustrialized Cities,

Protesters Find Friendly Cops, Determination and Despair

Americans here are beaten down. But in occupations around the country they have found a space where they can speak of their struggles, burdens and aspirations.

Photo: Youngstown occupier

By Arun Gupta
Beaver County Blue via Alternet.org

Oct 25, 2011 – The surefire method to find occupations in small cities is to head for the center of town. After leaving Philadelphia on our Occupy America tour, we drive an hour north to Allentown. Pennsylvania’s third-largest city at 118,000 residents, Allentown has been weathered by years of deindustrialization in the steel, cement and textile industries that once made it an economic powerhouse.

Along MacArthur Boulevard, one of Allentown’s main drags, tidy but weary brick row homes line outlying neighborhoods. Close to Center Square, site of the requisite Civil War monument, the neighborhoods are heavily Latino and buildings exhibit signs of disrepair.

Occupy Allentown has taken up residence in Center Square, inhabiting one of the four red-brick plazas on each corner. There are a handful of tents, a well-supplied kitchen pavilion and an information desk. A large blue and gray nylon tent, which 12 people crammed into the first night of the occupation, has laundry hanging off a clothesline in back and a cardboard sign on the front that reads “Zuccotti Arms,” in reference to the original Wall Street occupation.

We’ve come in search of Adam Santo, said to be the local leader of a leaderless movement. A handsome, boxy-glassed youth a few years out of college, Santo says he knew about the planning for Occupy Wall Street prior to Sept. 17.

“I wanted to go to New York, but I’ve been unemployed and finances were tight, so I thought wouldn’t it be cool to have an occupation in the Lehigh Valley,” where Allentown is nestled. Eight months earlier he and three co-workers were laid off from their jobs at a local bank because of a “lack of work.”

Continue reading OWS in Allentown, Youngstown, Toledo →

Economy, Organizing, unemployment, Wall Street, Youth and students

‘There Are No Jobs Out There…’

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Global Jobs Crisis Takes Biggest

Toll On Struggling Youth Everywhere

By Lila Shapiro
Beaver County Blue via HuffPost

Oct 20, 2011 – Of all those that have suffered from global joblessness, it could be the young job seekers in developed economies that have paid the highest price. And the collective frustration is beginning to add up.

At the end of last year, there were an estimated 75.1 million young people around the world struggling to find jobs — a group nearly the size of the population of Iran. The group of job hunters, ages 15 to 24, has expanded by 4.6 million since the Great Recession began, according to a new report by the International Labour Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations.

The burden is heaviest for the young in Europe, the U.S., and other advanced economies, where the youth unemployment rate saw the biggest overall jump between 2008-2010. Adding to the concern: While other regions of the world saw youth unemployment rates peak in 2009, these countries were among the few, globally, that continued to see the unemployment rate creep up.

This course does not appear to be changing, at least not any time soon.

Continue reading ‘There Are No Jobs Out There…’ →