A Different Class

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (I’ve covered their...

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:48:00 -0400

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (I’ve covered their work before, here) hit NYC on Saturday ahead of Wendy’s shareholder meeting to protest the fast food chain’s refusal to sign their fair food agreement. The agreement requires that companies pay a penny more per pound of tomatoes purchased, to be paid back to the workers. It’s certainly not enough to lift them out of poverty, but it helps.

The CIW’s actions are always raucous, joyful and full of music and great art. This one was no exception. Check it:

My screenshot of the unedited, terrible NPR Morning Edition...

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:54:28 -0400

My screenshot of the unedited, terrible NPR Morning Edition profile of Kirsten Gillibrand. Note the part where they call her “petite, blond and perky” and talk about her “girlie” voice.

"The workers have to pay for and maintain their own trucks, effectively forcing them to pay to work...."

Wed, 15 May 2013 17:01:56 -0400

“The workers have to pay for and maintain their own trucks, effectively forcing them to pay to work. Because of that, and because the workers are mostly black, a 2010 report [PDF] from the National Employment Law Project and the labor federation Change to Win calls the situation of the truckers “sharecropping on wheels.” Some of them are forced to lease trucks from the companies they work for, meaning that they’re literally paying their bosses to be able to do their jobs. The report estimates that these costs can run up to 60 percent of the drivers’ income. “By the time we’ve taken out for fuel, insurances, our cell phones that we have to have at the companies that we’re with, by the time we get all those deductions, then it’s time to pay bills, we’re down to nothing,” says port truck driver Carol Cauley, another member of the organizing committee. “We kind of have to choose bills or family.” Lewis Grant, also a driver and committee member, adds, “With funds being low there’s some tough decisions that I have to make on a weekly basis. Do I buy new tires for my truck or do I put food in the refrigerator? Do I send my kids to day care this week?””

- Sharecropping on Wheels - Working In These Times

I wrote about Savannah’s port truck drivers, who are classified as “independent contractors” by their bosses but don’t get to make their own schedules or control the work that they do. What they DO get is the “right” to pay for their own trucks and equipment, charged for the cell phones the companies require them to use and other miscellaneous “repairs” to their trucks that they’re never sure were actually performed.

But they control a very important part of the supply chain, and they’re getting organized. So much for those who say we can’t organize the South.

"Right now, as we pass over this particular tipping point—or bent moral arc, or whatever it might..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:12:57 -0400

“Right now, as we pass over this particular tipping point—or bent moral arc, or whatever it might be—LGBT issues have become a wedge to use against Republicans, instead of—as has historically been the case—against Dems.”

- Free to Work, Free to Marry

E.J. Graff has a great piece on ENDA and why it matters, and this point, near the end, is one of the most important ones in it. Remember when Thomas Frank wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” explaining that gay rights and abortion were the wedge issues that kept rural working-class folks voting Republican against their economic self-interest? Looks like that tide has turned.

Unfortunately, it’s turned without Democrats turning in large numbers to economic populism—we’ve got Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, a few members of the House, but largely Dems are still too timid to do more than mouth class war platitudes on the campaign trail and then pitch Social Security cuts and let the sequester stand.

To understand how we can see this huge shift in attitudes on so-called social issues (like marriage) while bills that would impact economic inequality (like ENDA) remain stalled even though they’re vastly more popular, we need to really look at how the Right and the Left (and the squishy Democrats in the middle) talk about economic justice, and see why Republicans have been able to appeal, not just on social issues, but to people who are feeling the squeeze in their wallets.

That’s why—you heard it here first, unless you didn’t—I’m working on a book* to discuss just that. And a whole lot more, too.

*Proposal in the works. More info when I have it. I promise.

"But there’s another option: Go after the big banks to get back the money the state lost through..."

Thu, 09 May 2013 16:31:14 -0400

“

But there’s another option: Go after the big banks to get back the money the state lost through financial chicanery.

This is the proposal representatives for the 48,000 members of Local 503 currently in collective-bargaining talks are making. Last Friday, they unveiled their plan to demand the banks in their negotiations with the state at a press conference, with the support of the state AFL-CIO, AFSCME, the other major public-sector union, the Oregon Students Association, the Working Families Party, and other community allies.

“Traditionally, unions’ argument has been ‘We need to raise taxes.’ But if you think about the bank deals as an unfair tax on the public, then the union is simultaneously saying, ‘We need to stop banks from taxing the public,’” says Stephen Lerner, a longtime union organizer and adviser to Local 503’s campaign.

The local’s demands include that the governor and state treasurer sue the banks over illegal activities on behalf of Oregon’s public employees—they’ve calculated $110 million in losses to LIBOR rigging alone. They also want to see a task force established that would include workers struggling with debt and foreclosure to investigate the ways the state has been ripped off by Wall Street. “We do intend to go to the mat on these issues, we think that they’re vital in terms of putting the state on the right track for the future,” Heather Conroy, executive director of Local 503, says.

”

- Unions to Banks: Pay Up

When politicians won’t lead and instead blame public workers for state budget troubles, what do we do?

OK, it doesn’t make a great chant, but it does make an interesting story.

"The re-election of Mulgrew itself wasn’t surprising. But given that the Chicago teachers..."

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 08:57:59 -0400

“

The re-election of Mulgrew itself wasn’t surprising. But given that the Chicago teachers strike made major headlines this fall, and was led by a reform caucus that upset the union leadership in 2010 elections (the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, or CORE), many eyes were on the UFT election to see if its dissident caucus, modeled on CORE, would seize control in New York.

That caucus, the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE), came in second, passing the other opposition group, New Action, in every category except retirees, and coming within 160 votes of Unity in the high schools. That’s an impressive showing for a reform caucus that some six months ago was unsure it was even going to put up a slate of candidates to run. “Our fear was that we had so much work to do to build up our group that running in the elections would take so much energy away from our main goal of building up a strong activist network inside the schools,” says Brian Jones, MORE’s candidate for UFT secretary. “I think what we found was that there was a way to run in the elections that actually allows you to build up that network.”

”

- New York Didn’t Pull a Chicago, But Dissident Teachers Aren’t Giving Up - Working In These Times

"Cha explains to Working in These Times that women who have care-giving responsibilities at home are..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:27:32 -0400

“

Cha explains to Working in These Times that women who have care-giving responsibilities at home are less likely to be able to work all day long, and care work is still seen as a woman’s job—in her paper, Cha cites a 2012 study that found that even women who make more money than their spouses spend 30 percent more time with their children. Yet male-dominated occupations—which still, Cha notes, pay more than female-dominated ones—demand long hours of workers. Fields like law or medicine expect total commitment, and even skilled blue-collar jobs tend to require longer work hours and lots of overtime. The expectation that workers will be able to stay on the job longer, combined with the expectation that women will do most of the care-giving, leads to more women leaving those male-dominated fields, either exiting the labor force entirely or finding a job that doesn’t have the same kinds of demands.

In fields dominated by men, Cha notes, women are less likely to have social support in the workplace. “Basically, women’s experiences are not reflected in workplace policy, workplace practices and norms. This makes it more difficult to combine family responsibilities and at the same time meet workplace expectations,” she says.

”

- Overworking Women: How Long Hours Lead to Gender-Segregated Jobs - Working In These Times

And a bit of a follow-up.

"“Not only wages — I am thinking here of the ‘female wage’ and the ‘family wage’ — but hours, too,..."

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:21:54 -0400

“

“Not only wages — I am thinking here of the ‘female wage’ and the ‘family wage’ — but hours, too, were constructed historically with reference to the family,” Weeks notes. The eight-hour day and five-day week presumed that the worker was a man supported by a woman in the home, and it shaped expectations that his work was important and should be decently paid, while women’s work was not really work at all (even though, as Weeks notes, the gender division of labor was supported by some paid domestic work, done largely by women of color). The postwar labor movement focused on overtime pay and wages, leaving the women’s issue of shorter hours mostly forgotten.

But the power of the eight-hour-day movement was that it didn’t require the worker to love her job, to identify with it for life, and to take pride in it in order to organize for better conditions. The industrial union movement rose up to organize those left out of the craft unions, the so-called “unskilled” workers who recognized that they were not defined by their work and that they wanted to be liberated from it as much as possible. That, in their minds, was what made them worthy of respect, not their skill level or some intrinsic identity.

The fight for shorter hours unified workers across gender and race, class and nationality, skill and ability. It did not require the valorization of “man’s work” or the idealization of women’s natural goodness.

”

- A Day Without Care | Jacobin

Working time, care work, gender, and strikes.

"The government does not spend money on a cash benefit program, it just channels it to someone who..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:27:36 -0400

“The government does not spend money on a cash benefit program, it just channels it to someone who spends it. The only coherent objection that can be raised against such a program is that the people the money is channeled to should not be entitled to spend it, that the money should actually be spent by other people. But this is a purely distributive argument. It is not a government spending argument, not even slightly. We should treat objections to cash benefit programs for what they actually are: complaints about the economic distribution that those programs usher in, not complaints about government spending. Doing so will allow us to get at the real argument that is going on beneath the surface, which is the argument about who deserves what and why. If the right-wing believes that the poor, disabled, and elderly deserve to have less, then they should be forced to actually make that point overtly. I would love to see it too as I am especially interested in knowing just how much poorer the poor need to be in order for us to have a just economic distribution. But as it is, the actual disagreement about distributive justice never gets fought out. Instead, everyone involved fights a totally contrived proxy battle about government budgets that entirely obscures what’s the debate is really about.”

- Cash Benefit Programs Are Not Really Government Spending - The Demos Blog - PolicyShop

Matt Breunig demolishes the argument that conservatives opposed to “entitlement” programs are opposed to “government spending.”

"Edwin Guzman already lost his job once for union-organizing. But today, he and several hundred fast..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:09:34 -0400

“

Edwin Guzman already lost his job once for union-organizing. But today, he and several hundred fast food workers across New York City are on strike anyway.

A few weeks ago, an organizer with the Fast Food Forward campaign, begun by New York Communities for Change (NYCC) and supported by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other labor and community groups walked into the Burger King in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where Guzman works. He had a petition with him, calling for a raise to $15-an-hour and union recognition for the workers. Guzman and some of his colleagues signed.

Not long afterward, he had to take a couple of days off for a court date—he was being evicted from his apartment, in part because of his steadily decreasing hours and low pay at his job. Like most of the city’s fast food workers, he makes just $7.25 an hour and struggles with irregular scheduling. When he returned to work, his supervisor called him in to talk.

“He told me he had to let me go,” Guzman explained. “He felt like I disrespected him. He felt violated that I signed the petition.”

When Guzman told the organizers what had happened, they explained to him that firing workers for union activity is illegal, and that they’d support him if he wanted to fight back. With the help of City Councilman Brad Lander, after a meeting with the boss, Guzman and one of his other coworkers were reinstated. That cemented his commitment to the union campaign.

***

Today is the second citywide day of strikes in New York’s fast food industry. On November 29, 2012, some 200 workers at McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, KFC, Taco Bell, and Domino’s Pizza locations across multiple boroughs struck in what Jonathan Westin, executive director of NYCC, called “their coming out party.” Before that, Westin explained, the workers had been organizing behind the scenes, keeping their plans quiet. Now, he said, even in the face of intimidation from their bosses, the workers have been able to grow their movement.

“We’ll have double the number of strikers, four or five hundred workers on strike, and double the locations too,” Westin said. “We will have several stores where it will not just be minority strikes like it was last time, we will have the majority of workers at several stores out on strikes, making it hard for them to do business on this day.”

”

- The McJobs Strike Back: Will Fast-Food Workers Ever Get a Living Wage? - Sarah Jaffe - The Atlantic

At least three fast food restaurants couldn’t open today because a majority of their workers were out on strike. Minimum wage increase is coming for NY, but the fast food workers aren’t waiting.

"Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online..."

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 08:33:39 -0400

“Wal-Mart Stores Inc is considering a radical plan to have store customers deliver packages to online buyers, a new twist on speedier delivery services that the company hopes will enable it to better compete with Amazon.com Inc. Tapping customers to deliver goods would put the world’s largest retailer squarely in middle of a new phenomenon sometimes known as “crowd-sourcing,” or the “sharing economy.” A plethora of start-ups now help people make money by renting out a spare room, a car, or even a cocktail dress, and Wal-Mart would in effect be inviting people to rent out space in their vehicle and their willingness to deliver packages to others.”

- Exclusive: Wal-Mart may get customers to deliver packages to online buyers

No, Walmart, it is not the “sharing economy” when the world’s richest company tries to save money by getting customers to deliver packages for it. It’s just getting around paying minimum wage for labor.

"March 22 saw the first forward movement in some time on New York City’s paid sick days bill, which..."

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:49:27 -0400

“March 22 saw the first forward movement in some time on New York City’s paid sick days bill, which RH Reality Check covered extensively last month. The city council’s Committee on Civil Service and Labor held a hearing on the bill, with plenty of debate and at times heated questioning.”

- New York City Council Holds Paid Sick Days Hearing, But Mayoral Hopeful Quinn Barely Shows | RH Reality Check

Oh, and I reported from the paid sick days hearing today, too.

"A look at the corporations on the Lean In Foundation’s advisory board also raises some..."

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 17:42:56 -0400

“A look at the corporations on the Lean In Foundation’s advisory board also raises some troubling questions. Wal-Mart, for example, is the target of an on-going sex discrimination case, with close to two thousand female employees claiming the company shortchanged them when it came to paychecks and promotions.”

- Sheryl Sandberg is the ultimate good girl careful not to upset those in power | Money | guardian.co.uk

I’ll just be quietly over here whistling “Which side are you on?”

"And then there’s the way we talk about the problem, which makes it hard to see that the culture of..."

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:24:34 -0400

“And then there’s the way we talk about the problem, which makes it hard to see that the culture of overwork hurts everyone, not just those who can’t hack it. “One of the things that feminism had at core was that it saw these as societal issues that needed to be addressed at a large scale, not at the individual level,” Ken Matos, a researcher at the Work and Families Institute said. “The narrative changed. It became the story of the unique individual who overcomes barriers in spite of all odds. That wasn’t the story that was supposed to be told.””

- Stay-at-Home Mom Debate: It’s About Work Hours | New Republic

Working time and the mommy wars: guess what, kids, “opting out” is more complicated.

"We are pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, Dissent will launch our first podcast,..."

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:41:18 -0400

“We are pleased to announce that in just a few weeks, Dissent will launch our first podcast, Belabored, with hosts Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe. Josh and Sarah are among the finest labor journalists working today. And we hear they have spectacular banter. Every week, they’ll take listeners behind the scenes of the latest stories in labor journalism. They’ll interview high-profile guests and working people. There will be debates and denouncements. Sarah and Josh have broken major stories in the past year, and on Belabored you’ll hear what didn’t make it into the official accounts.”

- Announcing Belabored: A Dissent Podcast Hosted by Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe | Dissent Magazine

So that’s happening. GET ON IT.

"So why can’t companies find workers? A 2012 survey by Manpower asked firms why they have difficulty..."

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:39:12 -0500

“So why can’t companies find workers? A 2012 survey by Manpower asked firms why they have difficulty hiring and 54 percent said candidates were “looking for more pay than is offered.” As Atlantic writer Barbara Kiviat put it, in response to such surveys, “When firms post job openings at a certain wage and no one comes forward, we call this a skills mismatch. In a different universe, we might call it a pay mismatch.””

- Murphy’s Law: The World According to Tim Sullivan | Urban Milwaukee

Your weekly reminder that the “skills gap” is still bullshit.

"I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic..."

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:16:06 -0500

““I’m very grateful to both those guys,” said Mr. Coates, who was inked to a blog deal by The Atlantic soon after the article came out, “but it shows the power of that networking. I couldn’t help notice that it was one well-placed white dude talking to another well-placed white dude to get it published.””

- Fear of a Black Pundit: Ta-Nehisi Coates raises his voice in American media | Observer

Another of the (male) writers I deeply respect, Ta-Nehisi Coates, on his first big hit and how it came about. And many other things, including why he turned down a New York Times column.

I find the obsession with “black pundit” rather annoying—Ta-Nehisi Coates is as good a writer on politics as we have, and the fact that many still see him as simply a “black” writer reflects my own annoyance with being seen as a “woman” writer (an editor, in a conversation about what I could write for him, compared me to his publication’s female columnists, when my work is actually much closer to that of some of the men who work there). We need more writers who acknowledge the subjects of race and gender, who consider it and reflect on it. (Indeed one of my favorite pieces of Coates’s is his post about the labor of pregnancy. Do yourself a favor and read it. Twice.) We do not need the entire pundit class anointing one man, good as he is, the conscience of the entire media on race issues.

We need to think about why it takes white dudes talking to well-placed white dudes to get a black man talking about race a place to publish, and we need to talk about why when he writes about every subject under the sun, white people still only see him as writing about race.

Anyway. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of a handful of writers who impress me as a thinker, a prose stylist, and as being genuinely kind on the page. Honesty and humility combined with a faith in his own work—it shines through in everything he writes.

Been doing a lot of thinking about the value of my own work lately. This helped.

"Economist Larry Mishel has found that since 1979 low- and middle-income workers have increased their..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:35:02 -0500

“

Economist Larry Mishel has found that since 1979 low- and middle-income workers have increased their hours of work much more than the top 5%, yet the biggest wage gains have consistently accrued to the
highest earners.

Top-earning women are the exception to this rule, stepping up work hours by a whopping 81% since 1979, and yet they still work fewer hours than women on average. Given these trends, it is no wonder that even before the recession a growing share of all income growth was being captured by an increasingly exclusive group of wealthy earners.

”

- Wealth inequality will keep growing unless workers demand better | Mark Price | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Lean in, ladies! But it won’t actually help you because you already work more than the richest women.

"How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 08:12:55 -0500

“

How do you think it feels to be an autoworker right now? And I’ve spent time with plenty of laidoff paper mill workers, construction workers and miners. They’ve got skills; they’ve got experience. They just don’t have jobs.

So let me be the first to say this to you: Welcome to the American working class.

You won’t get rich, unless of course you develop a sideline in blackmail or bank robbery. You’ll be living some of the problems you report on - the struggle for health insurance, for child care, for affordable housing. You might never have a cleaning lady. In fact, you might be one. I can’t tell you how many writers I know who have moonlighted as cleaning ladies or waitresses. And you know what? They were good writers. And good cleaning ladies too, which is no small thing.

”

- Welcome to a dying industry, journalism grads - SFGate

Jeremy Scahill’s comments reminded me of this wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich speech. People who inspire me to do what I do, to care about what I care about, to do the work for its own sake and for that of the people I get to talk to every day.

I’m accountable to them. Not to someone’s idea of whose rich and powerful ass I should be kissing.

"Donald Windham’s incredible life story should serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers and..."

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:56:50 -0500

““Donald Windham’s incredible life story should serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers and journalists for generations to come. He was living proof that heart, passion and determination can be far more valuable than any formal academic credentials. I have always believed that journalism is a trade, like plumbing or carpentry, and that some of the best journalists never stepped foot in a journalism class. I am deeply honored to be among the first recipients of the Windham Campbell Prize and am very grateful to the fiercely independent man who made it possible.””

- YaleNews | Yale awards $1.35 million to nine writers

Jeremy Scahill, one of the people who helped me get my start, someone I’m proud to call a friend, won a $150,000 literary prize from Yale, and managed to make his thank-you a deeply honest statement about journalism as a working-class job.

Here’s to Jeremy and to all the working journalists in his tradition.