Dick Meister

Dick Meister: Labor Day began in San Francisco

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By Dick Meister

By some reckoning, this is the 117th Labor Day, since it was first observed as a national holiday in 1894. But the observation actually began a quarter-century earlier in San Francisco.

It was on Feb. 21, 1868. Brass bands blared, flags, banners and torch lights waved high as more than 3000 union members marched proudly through the city’s downtown streets, led by shipyard workers and carpenters and men from dozens of other construction trades.

“A jollification,” the marchers called their parade – the climax of a three-year campaign of strikes and other pressures that had culminated in the establishment of the eight-hour workday as a legal right in California.

New York unionists staged a similar parade in 1882 that is often erroneously cited as the first Labor Day parade, even though it occurred 14 years after the march in San Francisco.

Honors for holding the first official Labor Day are usually granted the state of Oregon, which proclaimed a Labor Day holiday in 1887 – seven years before the Federal Government got around to proclaiming the holiday that is now observed nationwide.

But Oregon’s move came nearly a year after Gov. George Stoneman of California issued a proclamation setting aside May 11, 1886, as a legal holiday to honor a new organization of California unions – the year-old Iron Trades Council.

That, said renowned labor historian Ira. B. Cross of the University of California, was “the first legalized Labor Day in the United States.,

San Francisco also played a major role in that celebration of 1886. The city was the scene of the chief event – a march down Market Street by more than 10,000 men and women from some 40 unions, led by the uniformed rank-and-file of the Coast Seamen’s Union. Gov. Stoneman and is entire staff marched right along with them.

The process was seven miles long, took more than two hours to pass any given point and generated enthusiasm that the San Francisco Examiner said was “entirely unprecedented – even in political campaigns.”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Busting the union busters, a labor day lament

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By Dick Meister

This is not a very happy Labor Day for labor, considering the continued heavy attacks on public employee unions, which have become the vanguard of organized labor. More than one-third of public employees are now in unions, while only about 7 percent of private sector workers are unionized.

Probably nothing could be more damaging to the labor movement in general than the attempts by anti-union forces to weaken unions at all levels of government by trying to limit– if not withdraw – their collective bargaining rights and right to strike, in addition to unilaterally cutting the pay and pensions, health care and other benefits their unions have won in bargaining.

Although that’s all been done in the name of budget balancing, it’s more accurately described as union busting, spurred on by the steady increase in public employee union members, even as the number of private sector unionists has been declining.

It hasn’t helped unions, either, that President Obama has turned out to be far less friendly to labor than he’d promised while securing lots of union money and lots of union supporters to help him win the presidency. Ironically, the key role unions played in Obama’s election has led to moves by anti-union forces to try to also weaken unions’ political rights.

The best example of the heavy pressures public employees and their unions are feeling is in Wisconsin, where the movement to strip public employees of their union rights began, under notoriously anti-labor Gov. Scott Walker.

Republican Walker is not only seeking to deny unionization to most state, county and municipal employees. He’s also been pushing measures that would increase the employees’ contributions to pension and health care funds by up to 50 percent, require their contracts to be re-negotiated yearly, and no longer allow unions to deduct dues from employee paychecks. It’s hard to imagine a union surviving under such restraints. Certainly Gov. Walker and his political friends don’t imagine it.

Wisconsin is but one of at least 18 states, including several once considered union friendly, where public employees are under heavy attack. On the federal level, supposedly labor-friendly Obama has imposed a federal pay freeze.

Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, is trying to outdo Walker. He’s proposing, among other anti-union measures, to eliminate the bargaining rights of more than 35,000 of Ohio’s public employees, to outlaw teacher strikes, prevent child care and home care workers from unionizing and repeal a rule that requires paying union wages to non-union workers on public construction projects.

Gov. Walker, however, remains the poster boy for anti-labor stalwarts. His most outrageous act has been to back a new state law that requires about two-thirds of Wisconsin’s school districts to use employee handbooks to replace collective bargaining agreements that for decades outlined the teachers’ pay and duties.

Substituting the handbooks for negotiated contracts gives school administrators the authority to dictate broad changes in the teachers’ working conditions without so much as consulting the teachers. In some school districts, even the administrators were not consulted before the handbooks with their stringent new conditions were issued.

Teachers are probably our most important public employees. Yet despite their great importance – or maybe because of it – Gov. Walker is eagerly supporting, not only a withdrawal of teachers’ collective bargaining rights, but also an end to teacher tenure, which protects them from unwarranted attacks by union foes such as Walker.

Walker also wants a substantial increase in the already high contributions to their health insurance by teachers and teacher retirees and changes that curtail the teachers’ basic rights and security by allowing them to be hired on a year-to-year basis. The new rules also mandate that in times of financial constraint, seniority can no longer be a basis for deciding which teachers to lay off.

Some Wisconsin school districts are even trying to reduce the number of sick days allowed teachers, however unwise it may seem to have teachers with possible communicative illnesses remain in the classroom because they can’t afford to take days off.

Other districts are doing away with at least some paid holidays or changing extra days used for professional development into workdays and cutting paid lesson preparation periods in half. The Wisconsin Journal Sentinel’s Erin Richards quotes one of Wisconsin’s major teacher union leaders as noting that teachers across the state have been most concerned with losing prep time, which can have a direct effect on the quality of lessons and student performance.

Gov. Walker and other leading Republicans don’t seem to be much concerned about that. What’s more important to them is cutting Wisconsin’s education budget, the influence of teachers on education policy and, of course, all but eliminating the union rights of teachers and all other public employees.

But Walker may very well have gone too far. The negative reaction has been strong and growing in Wisconsin and elsewhere. It’s widely realized that if the public employee union busters are successful, private sector unions throughout the country will feel even stronger opposition. And it’s clear that if anti-union forces can weaken the public employee unions that are the strongest segments of today’s labor movement, it’s more than likely that private sector unions will be the next target.

The good news is that recently, Wisconsin voters easily turned back a GOP attempt to recall two strong pro-worker state senators who had helped lead the fight against Walker’s anti-worker legislation. The fight began in the spring when Republicans targeted eight Democratic senators for recall – and lost. There have been nine recall elections since then and labor has won five of them.

Labor and the Democrats had hoped to wrest control of the State Senate from the GOP. But though failing to do so, they did narrow the Republicans Senate majority to a razor-thin 17-16.

Democrats and union leaders are rightly celebrating the pro-labor election victories as a possible opening shot against anti-labor extremism nationwide, which could in turn lead to an attempt to recall Gov. Walker or at least force him to back off.

Actually, Walker has done his labor enemies a great favor by provoking public outrage that has brought important new strength and solidarity to the cause of working people and their unions everywhere.

So it may be a happy Labor Day after all, thanks to a labor opponent.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dick Meister: What Charlie wanted, Charlie got

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By Dick Meister

(Part five of a five part daily series on the farmworkers)

As SF Chronicle labor editor, I had been among the first to report on the campaign to win union rights for farm workers that had been launched under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, after I determined that he and his followers were dead serious about what so many others had tried and failed to do.

I devoted much of my time to covering what turned out to be a major worldwide story. But, as I soon found out, Chronicle management thought I was spending too much time on the story. Publisher Charles de Young Thieriot was angered about my stories on the poor state of farm workers and the emerging United Farm Workers union.

The miserable conditions of farm workers didn’t seem to trouble Thieriot. He was concerned above all with the interests of his fellow Burlingame Country Club members, and they included some of the state’s wealthiest agribusiness interests – the UFW’s chief targets. No one, including the publisher, accused me of slanting my stories in favor of the UFW. They were simply concerned that my stories, pro or con, called attention to Chavez and the union.

As the secretary of Chronicle Executive Editor Scott Newhall told me, Theriot often stormed into the editor’s office and slammed on his desk the morning’s paper which carried my UFW coverage. “We’ve got to Forget Chavez!”said Theriot. “Ignore him! He’s nothing but a damned agitator!”

Soon, my suggestions for stories on the farm workers – or anything else– were being ignored and labor coverage generally was reduced drastically. I was told by my immediate supervisor, City Editor Abe Mellinkoff, to quit complaining about it – or else.

The end came after I got word that the UFW was about to make peace with the state’s grape growers after five years of highly visible strikes and boycotts. Since I had already done a story on the generally undisclosed terms of the union contracts the UFW and growers were about to sign, Mellinkoff agreed I should do a color story from Delano, covering the feelings of the growers and farm workers as well as the general atmosphere.

I wrote such a story and dictated it by phone. But unknown to me, Mellinkoff turned immediately to a reporter at the Chronicle and had my story rewritten so it became little more than a reiteration of the contract terms I had disclosed the day before.

Mellinkoff apparently was not happy that my story from Delano had noted at some length the poor treatment of farm workers by the publisher’s grower friends that had led to the strikes and boycotts and eventually to contracts guaranteeing them decent treatment.

It was just one of many examples of how the Chronicle was abandoning balanced and thorough coverage of labor-management affairs in favor of coverage that downgraded, distorted or ignored labor’s side of the story. That’s how Charlie Theriot wanted it, and that’s how it was going to be.

I was left with no other choice. I quit.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

Dolores Huerta: “Don’t be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!”

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By Dick Meister

(Part four of a five part daily series on the Farmworkers)

“When I think of Dolores Huerta,” playwright and filmmaker Luis Valdez once said, “I think of earth. Powerful, beautiful, fecund, challenging, conscious, yet so incredibly delicate.”

She’s been all of that in a remarkable career that has spanned more than a half-century. Huerta, now 80, is probably best known for her work with Cesar Chavez in the founding and operations of the United Farm Workers. But that’s just been a part of her lifelong and extraordinarily successful and courageous fight for economic and social justice.

Huerta, five-foot-two, 110 pounds, hardly looks the part. What’s more, she’s had 11 children to raise along the way, much of the time as a single mother.

She’s traveled the country, speaking out and joining demonstrations in behalf of a wide variety of causes. She’s lobbied legislators to win gains for Latino immigrants and others. She was a key leader in the worldwide grape boycott that forced growers to agree in 1970 to some of the country’s very first farm union contracts – which she negotiated despite her utter lack of experience in union negotiating. She remains a leading Latina, feminist, labor and anti-war activist and a role model for women everywhere.

Huerta started out as an elementary school teacher in Stockton in 1955, but quickly tired of “seeing little children come to school hungry and without shoes.” That and her anger “at the injustices that happened to farm workers” in the area, led Huerta to quit teaching and join the Community Services Organization (CSO) which helped local Chicanos wage voter registration drives and take other actions to win a strong political and economic voice.

Chavez, who was general director of the 22-chapter CSO, stressed “grass roots organizing with vengeance” above all. Huerta agreed and generally agreed as well on tactics – including an unwavering commitment to non-violence. But where Chavez was shy, she was bold and outspoken. She had to be if she was to assume the leadership to which her commitment had drawn her. Mexican American men did not easily grant leadership to women, most certainly not to diminutive, attractive women like Huerta.

She was assigned to the State Capitol as the CSO’s full-time lobbyist. It was an unfamiliar task, but during two years in Sacramento, Huerta pushed through an impressive array of legislation, including bills that extended social insurance coverage to farm workers and immigrants and liberalized welfare benefits. I worked in the capitol as an Associated Press reporter and counted Huerta as one of the best – and certainly most principled – lobbyists in Sacramento.

Huerta soon realized, however, that legislation “could not solve the real problems” of the poor that she represented. What they needed was not government aid passed down from above to try to ease their poverty, but some way to escape the poverty. The way out, Huerta concluded, was farm labor organizing.

Chavez agreed, and in 1962, when the other CSO leaders and members rejected his plans for organizing farm workers, he quit to start organizing on his own, Huerta followed, helping create the organizations that eventually evolved into the UFW, with Chavez as president and Huerta as vice president and chief negotiator, later as secretary-treasurer. Like Chavez, she was paid but $5 a week plus essential expenses.

Huerta has paid a heavy physical price for her militancy. She nearly died in 1988 after being clubbed by a policeman while demonstrating with about 1,000 others outside a fund raiser in San Francisco for then Vice President George H.W, Bush, who had ridiculed the UFW and its grape boycott. Huerta’s spleen was ruptured and had to be removed, leading to a near-fatal loss of blood.

She was operated on for other serious problems in 2000. Huerta, long an active Democrat, stepped down as a UFW officer that year to join Democrat Al Gore’s presidential campaign, but remained active in Democratic Party affairs. She continued to lobby for immigrant rights, helping train a new generation of organizers and joining campaigns to improve the lot of janitors, nursing home employees and other highly exploited workers.

Dolores Huerta has shown us, beyond doubt, that injustice can be overcome if we confront it forcefully, if we heed the demand she has been known to shout in urging passers-by to join UFW picket lines:

“Don’t be a marshmallow! Stop being vegetables! Work for justice!”

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

 

 

Dick Meister: VIVA EL BOICOTTEO!

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By Dick Meister

(Third part of a five part daily series)

Although the United Farm Workers initially relied solely on strikes in its drive to win union contracts for California’s farm workers, it soon switched to the much more effective weapon of the boycott.

Growers could easily replace strikers, and often did. But they couldn’t do much about customers – individuals and institutions – who heeded the UFW’s call to not buy any grapes, lettuce or wine from growers who continued to rebuff the UFW demands for union recognition.

The boycotts helped forge a potent coalition of clergymen, industrial unionists, young activists and civil rights advocates, liberal Democratic politicians, socially conscious shoppers and others. They also waved crimson banners, sang the farm workers’ songs, chanted their slogans and espoused non-violence, on city streets, outside supermarkets, in meeting halls, wherever they could. There were an estimated 17 million of them worldwide between 1968 and 1975, including 10 to 12 percent of all U.S. adults. Later boycotts drew less support but were nevertheless effective in winning new contracts.

John Giumarra Jr., a young lawyer who spoke for the grape growers who signed the first UFW contracts, declared that boycott pressures had been threatening to “destroy a number of farmers.” Lionel Steinberg, a major Coachella Valley grape grower who was the first to agree to a UFW contract, urged others to quickly reach an agreement, lest they continue losing millions of dollars in sales.

Steinberg told his fellow growers, “It is costing us more to produce and sell our grapes than we are getting paid for them. We are losing maybe 20 percent of our market. The boycott is illegal and immoral, but it also is a fact.”

The signing of the union contracts with grape growers in Delano signaled the inevitable. California’s farm workers were going to be organized, and the next target would be those in the nearby Salinas and Santa Maria valleys, which produced 70 percent of the nation’s iceberg lettuce and much of its other vegetables. It was called “America’s Salad Bowl,” a flat, fertile place where morning fog hung heavy over land carpeted green for miles.

Men and women hovered over the land, gripping hoes so short their handles scarcely protruded above their fast-moving hands as they stooped and cut, stooped and cut. Most worked under the supervision of men with the broad accents of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas who had wielded hoes for small independent growers before giant corporations bought up the land and hired them to manage their new holdings. These men were among the Dust Bowl Refugees of the 1930s who had made their own violently opposed demands for better working lives during the Great Depression.

Many of the former Dust Bowl Refugees were lured into urban employment when the depression ended, but those who remained as managers joined the farm corporations to oppose the demands of the Chicano and Filipino American farm workers who replaced the at the bottom of the economic totem pole.

The demands were for union recognition elections in which the UFW seemed a certain winner. But if they didn’t agree to elections, the growers faced the certain prospect of a boycott like that which had been so costly to grape growers.

There was, however, an alternative that the growers had overlooked until the inevitability of unionization arrived with the UFW demands. They might arrange to bypass elections and sign with another union that would demand less than the aggressive, unorthodox UFW and at the same time ease the sting of a boycott by enabling by enabling growers to point out that their workers were unionized.

The growers found their alternative in the Teamsters Union, which feared that UFW strikes and boycotts would endanger the flow of produce handled by truck drivers, cannery workers and other Teamster members. What’s more, Teamster officials were eager for representation rights that would allow them to control the field workers. The potential was immense: more than 30,000 farm workers in the two valleys alone. That would bring a lot of new money into the dues and pension funds used by leaders of the corruption-ridden Teamsters to gain power, influence and fat salaries for themselves.

Virtually all the 170 growers in the two valleys soon announced they had signed Teamster contracts, even though the Teamsters had no farm worker members. The growers and Teamsters hadn’t even agreed on specific contract terms. They were in so great a rush to head off the UFW, they merely signed agreements that the terms would be filled in later. The terms, however, would not be decided in consultation with the workers or their union. Terms were left solely to grower and Teamster representatives.

The workers were not even allowed to ratify the contracts, although they would be required to join the Teamsters and have union dues deducted from their paychecks. If they didn’t join the Teamsters, they’d be fired. Most workers got basic pay raises of 10 to 50 cents an hour in return for forced membership in the Teamsters and some minimal health and welfare benefits – but that was all.

Teamster recognition was a very small price for growers to pay in exchange for maintaining their ability to make decisions on pay and working conditions in isolation from the direct collective demands of their employees. Since the Teamsters’ main interest lay elsewhere, in transportation and food processing, growers also could expect that even the minimal terms of the contracts would not be fully enforced and that strikes and boycotts were hardly a possibility. But on the slim chance that the growers might still feel insecure, the contracts were written to stand for five years.

Chavez was outraged at the Teamsters’ “act of treason against the legitimate aspirations of farm workers.” He declared “all-out war against the Teamsters and the bosses ” and marched into Salinas with several hundred farm workers and an AFL-CIO contingent headed by Organizing Director Bill Kircher. Pickets went immediately to a farm where 250 workers had been fired for not joining the Teamsters. Hundreds of workers struck at other farms and the UFW began preparing for legal action and a nationwide lettuce boycott.

Growers got a court order against what was ruled an illegal jurisdictional dispute, but the pickets and boycotters kept marching nevertheless and Chavez began “a penitential fast against injustice.”

In less than two weeks, the Teamsters were asking for a treaty with the UFW. It was quickly reached. The Teamsters agreed to reallocate jurisdiction over field workers to the UFW and agreed that growers who had signed with the Teamsters could switch to the UFW without penalty.

But there was a catch. Growers who had signed Teamster contracts would not give them up. Finally, UFW members voted to strike. It was, at the start, the largest and most effective farm strike since the mid-1930s. More than 5000 workers left their jobs at nearly 150 farms, and produce shipments were cut from 200 carloads a day to 75 or less. Growers were losing an average of $500,000 a day.

Unlike the vineyard strike, this dispute was violent, with beatings suffered by UFW and Teamster partisans alike. Some of the turmoil was caused by officials of a Teamster cannery workers local who were charged with using $25,000 in union funds to hire some of the local’s burly members to “guard” fields from UFW organizers.

A judge ruled there could only be one informational picket at 22 of the Salinas Valley farms that made up the strikers’ main targets, none at the eight others. Nor would the UFW be allowed to call a boycott against any of the 170 growers who held Teamster contracts. The union nevertheless called a boycott. Officially, the strike continued, but the major effort was at food markets in 64 cities across the country, where UFW members and supporters urged shoppers to bypass lettuce from the struck growers.

A judge ordered Chavez arrested. He went to jail accompanied by more than 2000 UFW members and supporters, including Coretta King and Ethel Kennedy. They cheered Chavez’ parting advice to “boycott the hell out of them!” and then began a series of prayer vigils and other highly publicized demonstrations. After three weeks, Chavez was released, pending the outcome of a UFW appeal.

The boycott continued at an intensified pace throughout the early months of 1971 until a committee of Catholic bishops mediated a settlement between national Teamster and AFL-CIO leaders. But growers still refused to give up their Teamster contracts. They held them for a half-dozen years more, until the Teamsters, beaten badly in a series of union representation elections under California’s new farm worker bargaining law, finally abandoned as futile the fierce fight they had waged against the UFW for more than a decade.

Meanwhile, the boycott continued, as the UFW expanded its organizing efforts to Florida and Arizona. The UFW’s victory in California was truly spectacular. Imagine, one of the youngest and smallest unions in the country, representing the most oppressed of American workers, decisively beating the country’s largest and most powerful union.

It was the UFW’s incredible use of the boycott that did it,  the major non-violent weapon available to all who would seek justice from an oppressor.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: si se puede!

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By Dick Meister

(The second part of a daily five part series)

For me, it all began on a hot summer night in 1965 in the little Kern County town of Delano. I’d been told repeatedly by people whose judgment I respected that, as the SF Chronicle’s labor editor, I should talk with some guy named Chavez who was pitting together an honest-to-God farm workers’ union in Delano.

I scoffed, but I went. Chavez, shining black hair trailing over the edge of a face brushed with traces of Indian ancestry, wearing a green plaid shirt that had become almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red Formica.

“Si se puede!” he said repeatedly to me as we talked into the early morning hours there in the cluttered shack that served as headquarters for Chavez and the others who were trying to create an effective farm workers union.

“Si se puede – it can be done!

But I would not be swayed. Too many others, over too many years, had tried and failed to win for farm workers the union rights they had to have if they were to escape the severe economic and social deprivation inflicted on them by their grower employers.

The Industrial Workers of the World who stormed across western fields early in the last century, the Communists who followed, the socialists, the AFL and CIO organizers – all their efforts had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growers and their powerful political allies.

I was certain this effort would be no different. I was dead wrong. I had not accounted for the tactical brilliance of Cesar Chavez, a sad-eyed, disarmingly soft-spoken man who talked of militancy in calm, measured tones; a devout Roman Catholic; a gentle and incredibly patient man who hid great strategic talent behind shy smiles and an attitude of utter candor.

Chavez grasped the essential fact that farm workers had to organize themselves. Outside organizers, however well-intentioned, could not do it. Chavez, a farm worker himself, carefully put together a grass-roots organization that enabled the workers to form their own union, the United Farm Workers, which then sought out – and won – widespread support from influential outsiders, including major labor, religious and political figures.

The key weapon of the newly formed UFW was the boycott. The union’s boycotts against grape and lettuce growers and wineries in the late 1960s won the UFW union contracts that had been denied farm workers for more than a century.

That led ultimately to enactment of the California law that requires growers to bargain collectively with workers who vote for unionization, despite the workers exclusion from the federal law that grants most non-farm workers the legal right of collective bargaining. And with that came substantial improvements in the pay, benefits, working conditions and general status of the state’s farm workers.

The struggle was extremely difficult for the impoverished workers, and Chavez risked his health – if not his life – to provide them extreme examples of the sacrifices necessary for victory. Most notably, he engaged in lengthy, highly publicized fasts that helped rally the public to the farm workers cause and that may very well have contributed to his untimely death in 1993 at age 66.

Fasts, boycotts. It’s no coincidence that those were among the principal tools of Mohandas Gandhi, for Chavez drew much of his inspiration from the Indian leader. Like Gandhi and another of his models, Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez believed fervently in the tactics of non-violence. Like them, he showed the world how profoundly effective they can be in seeking justice from even the most powerful of opponents.

What the UFW accomplished, and how the union accomplished it, will never be forgotten – not by the millions of social activists who have been inspired and energized by the farm workers’ struggle, nor by the workers themselves.

The struggle continues, for despite the UFW’s successes, most farm workers are still mired in poverty. But because of the union, they have a genuine hope of bettering their condition.

The UFW won important legal rights for them. But more than union contracts, and more than laws, farm workers now have what Cesar Chavez insisted was needed above all else. That, as he told me so many years ago, “is to have the workers truly believe and understand and know that they are free, that they are free men and women, that they can stand up and say how they feel.”

Freedom. No leader has ever left a greater legacy.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: the farmworkers are marching to Sacramento

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By Dick Meister

(Part one of a five part daily series on the farmworkers)

It’s hot, very hot, in the Central Valley, but still they march on toward Sacramento, thousands of members and supporters of the United Farm Workers union. They’ve been at it since August 22nd, when the 13-day, 200-mile trek began. The UFW has done it before, and for good reason. Like the others in the past, this march has drawn public attention to the union’s cause, energized its members and current supporters and doubtless added to its many supporters worldwide.

But will the march accomplish its immediate goal? That’s to win passage of the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act that would overcome serious obstacles to farm worker unionization, and another bill that would grant farm workers the right to be paid overtime after eight hours a day, 40 hours a week like non-agricultural workers.

That is largely up to Gov. Jerry Brown, who in June vetoed the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act for being “too drastic,” despite direct pressure from more than 1000 workers during the 12 days he deliberated before acting on the bill. They fasted, held vigils outside his office and rallies on the capitol grounds, complaining loudly about the desperate need for firm union rights to improve their miserable pay and working conditions, including the great need to protect them from the severe – sometimes deadly – heat in which they must work.

As a Kern County vineyard worker, Eva Orozco, explained:

“The pay is very low, they pressure us heavily to produce, they don’t respect us and we have to run and drink water quickly and use the bathroom quickly because if we take long we could be fired. Sometimes I’m afraid to show up for work for fear that that I will not work fast enough and I will be fired.”

The marchers will bring their complaints and demands directly to Brown when their march ends Sept. 4 outside Brown’s office. Like his father, former Gov. Pat Brown, Jerry Brown once was one of the UFW’s closest allies. In his earlier term as governor, Jerry Brown pushed through the Legislature the pioneering bill that granted California farm workers the union rights denied them elsewhere.

Ironically, the first of the UFW’s marches to Sacramento, in 1966, was aimed at pressuring Gov. Pat Brown to sponsor a bill that would grant union rights to farm workers. He refused, despite the urgings of more than 8,000 UFW members and supporters who gathered outside the Capitol at the end of the 25-day march.

Farm workers did not get those rights until his son won passage of the bill – the Agricultural Labor Relations Act or ALRA – that granted the rights nine years later after a week long march from San Francisco to the Modesto headquarters of the huge Gallo winery, which had rebuffed vineyard workers’ demands for a union representation election.

More than 15,000 people marched into Modesto, convincing Jerry Brown and state legislators that the UFW retained a sizable and influential constituency and great organizational ability. That had very much to do with passage of the ALRA and the consequent success of the UFW in winning union contracts, The law, however, was barely enforced by Democrat Brown’s successors as governor, Republicans George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson and Democrat Gray Davis.

The latest march could very well convince Jerry Brown to come to the aid of some of the state’s neediest, yet most broadly supported workers. He did it before and he can do it again.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Labor’s unhappy anniversary

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By Dick Meister

It was 30 years ago this month that Ronald Reagan struck the blow that sent the American labor movement tumbling into a decline it’s still struggling to reverse.

Reagan, one of the most anti-labor presidents in history, set the decline in motion by firing 11,500 of the overworked and underpaid air traffic controllers whose work was essential to the operation of the world’s most complex aviation system.

Reagan fired them because they dared respond to his administration’s refusal to bargain fairly on a new contract by striking in violation of the law prohibiting strikes by federal employees. What’s more, he virtually destroyed their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).

Public and private employers everywhere treated Reagan’s 1981 action as a signal to take an uncompromising stand against the unions that they had accepted and bargained with, however reluctantly, as the legitimate representatives of their workers.

At that time, one-fourth of the U.S. workforce was represented by unions. Today, largely because of employer actions since then – often openly illegal actions – the percentage of workers with union bargaining rights is less than half that.

Ironically, PATCO had broken with other AFL-CIO affiliates to endorse Reagan’s successful run for president in 1980. The union did so because Reagan had promised to “take whatever steps are necessary” to improve working conditions and otherwise “bring about a spirit of cooperation between the president and the air traffic controllers.”

Yet PATCO negotiators were rebuffed a year later when they asked for a reduction in working hours, lowering of the retirement age and other steps to ease the controllers’ extraordinary stress, plus a substantial pay raise and updated equipment.

PATCO was faced with either abandoning its demands or striking to try to enforce them. And when the union struck, Reagan, certain of broad public support because of his great popularity, issued an ultimatum to the strikers: Return to work within 48 hours or be fired and replaced permanently by non-union workers.

Faced with millions of dollars in fines for violating Reagan’s order and the anti-strike injunctions that his administration and airlines had sought, and stripped of its right to represent the controllers, PATCO declared bankruptcy and went out of business.

Reagan’s ban on re-hiring strikers was later lifted by Bill Clinton, and three unions, including a revived PATCO, now represent controllers, among them hundreds of those who had been fired. But safety experts say the air traffic control system remains understaffed and the controllers still under far too much stress.

Part of the blame for that rests with Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, who was as anti-labor as Reagan. The Bush administration, in fact, imposed an onerous new contract on the controllers that cut their pay and pensions.

It’s not likely that other employers will soon abandon the crippling anti-labor practices that were inspired and furthered by Reagan. Hiring and permanently replacing strikers, previously a rare occurrence, has become a relatively common employer tactic. And strikes – an indispensable weapon for workers in collective bargaining – have become relatively rare post-Reagan.

It isn’t just strikers who face penalties for exercising their legal rights. Some employers also have taken to firing or otherwise penalizing workers who seek union recognition, despite the law that promises them the right to freely choose to unionize. Many employers have also hired “management consultants” who specialize in Reagan-style union busting.

It’s no coincidence that, as union ranks have shrunk under the relentless anti-labor pressures first applied to air traffic controllers three decades ago by Ronald Reagan, the ranks of the middle class also have shrunk –– as has the ordinary American’s share of the country’s wealth.

The situation for air traffic controllers has stayed much the same. They’re still demanding longer rest periods during working hours and between shifts and other improved working conditions that are clearly necessary for their well-being and that of those they serve. And they’re still being rebuffed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

Republican leaders in Congress have made it even more difficult for the controllers and many others by insisting that a measure making it more difficult for workers to unionize be attached to the current bill that would continue the FAA’s funding for another year. A congressional stalemate over that was the principal reason for the recent partial shutdown of the FAA, which cost the government millions of dollars in lost airline taxes, threw several thousand airport construction workers and FAA employees out of work, and forced airline safety inspectors to work without pay throughout the two-week stalemate.

Although air traffic controllers and other FAA employees are back on the job, that could be only a temporary respite. The stalemate could very well resume when Congress returns from its current recess on September16th and again takes up FAA funding.

The attempt by congressional Republicans to weaken FAA employees’ basic union rights – and their willingness to shut down the air traffic system in order to further that goal ­– is yet another aspect of the legacy of Ronald Reagan, one of the most damaging and successful union-busters of all time.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Workers gaining in fight for union rights

Maria Poblet
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This year marks the 76th anniversary of the National Labor Relations Act, the Depression-era law that was essential in building an American middle class – and which remains essential to the well-being of all working Americans. 

But you know what? Powerful corporate interests and their Republican buddies in Congress are nevertheless trying mightily to cripple what has so long been one of the most important U.S. laws of any kind.

Their main target currently is the National Labor Relations Board – the NLRB –which administers the National Labor Relations Act and takes seriously the act’s stated purpose of encouraging collective bargaining between workers and their employers.

The five-member labor board did very little to carry out its task of encouraging unionization during the notoriously anti-union Bush administration. But under President Obama, the NLRB has been doing its job – or has been trying to do its job — in the face of stiff Republican opposition.

The Republican opponents claim – what else? – that under Obama, the NLRB has become a tool of organized labor, Big Labor, as they like to call it.

It’s impossible to take those charges seriously. The labor board obviously has not been acting as an agent of unions, big or small. It’s merely been enforcing the law. But that, of course, means anti-labor forces no longer have the firm cooperation of the NLRB in their attempts to weaken unions as much as possible. They no longer have an ally in the White House. Bush is gone.

Imagine that. The National Labor Relations Board is actually doing what the law says it should do. And unions are actually getting a more or less even break vis-à-vis the corporate interests with whom they collectively bargain – or with whom they try to bargain.

What’s really got the anti-labor crowd sputtering lately is a ruling by the NLRB’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon,  against the Boeing Aircraft Company. Boeing was charged with breaking the labor law by moving a major assembly line from a unionized plant in Washington State to South Carolina, a notably anti-union state, in response to a machinist strike at the Washington plant. 

Moving the assembly line was done in violation of a provision in the National Labor Relations Act that bans companies from punishing striking unions by withholding or transferring jobs. Thus, said the NLRB’s Solomon, the assembly line should be moved back to Washington State.

Oh, boy, those union-hating Republicans in Congress didn’t like that at all. They threatened to defund the NLRB if it doesn’t withdraw its order to Boeing, trotting out their usual tired response to just about anything done in favor of unions these days. You’ve undoubtedly heard it – thousands of  times, maybe. Yes, that’s right. A ruling in favor of labor and labor law would be . . . Ah, yes, a job killer. Sure.

GOP House members have actually introduced something called – really – “The Protecting Jobs From Government Interference  Act.” that would void the NLRB order against Boeing  and prohibit future such orders. The proposed law undoubtedly has the approval of the union-hating U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has led the right-wing charge against the NLRB. It complains that the labor board is “out of control.”

Actually, the NLRB is out of control  – out of control of the right-wingers who had  their way throughout Bush’s two terms and are miffed that, unlike Bush, Obama doesn’t think their way is the only way to handle labor-management relations.

Much to the chagrin of the right-wingers, the labor board has come back strong under Obama. One of the board’s most important steps has been to develop rules to streamline the workplace elections that are held to determine if workers want to unionize. 

The board has cut short the pre-election periods that employers have used to harass workers into voting against unionization, approaching them individually and in mass meetings, frequently threatening to fire or otherwise penalize workers who vote for union representation. Obama’s NLRB also has cut back the time for management to appeal the outcome of a vote for unionization.

The changes, as one union attorney noted, are “common sense changes that drag labor law into the 21st century.” 

Common sense often doesn’t mean much to anti-labor Republicans. Sensible or not, they plunge onward on the anti-labor path that’s always been theirs. According to a count by Politico.com’s Joseph Williams, House Republicans have convened oversight hearings on the NLRB or summoned board members to Capitol Hill 14 times since the midterm elections to answer harassing questions and have threatened to severely cut the NLRB’s budget to “bring the board to heel.”

So, it’s still not easy for unions and workers who want to join unions, despite the progressive change in the NLRB’s attitude and operations. 

But the situation is looking much better since the change has come, since the law that promises American workers the right of unionization – and the important benefits that come from it – -is now being enforced by people who believe that their mission is not to hamper unions, but to encourage their growth for the benefit of all Americans.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 350 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: New hope for domestic workers

Maria Poblet
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0

 

With a lot of luck, we may finally take decisive action to guarantee decent treatment for the world’s highly exploited housekeepers, maids, nannies and other domestic workers. There are an estimated 100 million of them, working in more than 180 countries.

Their pay is generally at the poverty level, and very few have fringe benefits such as pensions and employer-paid health care. Few have the protection of unions or labor laws, and they’re often at the mercy of unscrupulous labor contractors.  Almost half of them are not entitled to even one day off per week. About a third of the female workers are denied maternity leave.

The hope for improving the domestics’ slavery-like conditions has arisen from action taken in Geneva this month at the annual meeting of the United Nation’s International Labor Organization – the ILO.

Delegates representing unions, employers and governments voted 396 to 16  for what’s called a “Convention on Domestic Workers.” The non-binding convention spells out how domestics should be treated in UN member countries – most importantly in the pace-setting United States.

In the U.S., as in most other countries, an estimated 80 percent of the domestics are women of color, subject to racial discrimination and physical and sexual abuse.  In the United States, most of them are immigrants as well . They’re easy targets for exploitation, especially since, as elsewhere, domestics mainly work in private unregulated households, usually alone.

What’s more, U.S. domestics lack most of the protections of state and federal labor laws that are granted most U.S. workers outside of agriculture . Most other non-agricultural workers at least have the right to unionize. But domestics don’t even have that basic right.

The National Labor Relations Act specifically denies union rights to anyone “in the domestic service of any family or person.” That’s right. The Depression-era law that was designed to pull poverty-stricken workers out of poverty and build a middle class does indeed prohibit an entire group of exceptionally needy workers  from taking a major step to improve their extremely poor working conditions. The word for that is “un-American.” 

That outrageous legal prohibition has its roots in racism. Pressures from southern states, which objected to granting union rights to the mainly black domestics, was the main reason domestics were excluded from the National Labor Relations Act.

 Some domestics have nevertheless formed union-like organizations to seek better treatment. But they need the force of law behind them.

The ILO convention calls for guaranteeing domestic workers in the United States and everywhere else some of the key rights that unionized workers invariably have, among them, regular working hours, vacations, maternity leaves and Social Security benefits.

Domestics would be promised what amount to contracts with employers that would make clear just what they would be expected to do, for how long, and for how much pay.  Their working conditions would have to include time off of at least 24 hours a week.

Migrant workers would have to be provided with a written job offer of employment or a contract before crossing  the border into another country to work.

It took several years for ILO representatives to adopt the domestic workers convention. It was finally adopted as a direct result of campaigning here and aboard by groups of activists from unions and other organizations. They will  be working for the next few years to get as many nations as possible to implement the ILO convention with their help.

The effort in this country is being led by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, with major support from the AFL-CIO, which has arranged to have some domestic workers represent themselves in ILO meetings and voting.

Among other things, proponents hope to make it clear that “domestic workers are real workers, NOT powerless individuals who are expected to remain in quiet servitude and endure long hours without overtime pay, along with hazardous working conditions without access to health and safety protections.”

Proponents also hope to end the “cultural relativity excuse that sleeping on a mattress in an unheated garage is better than he or she would get in their home country, or that the poor treatment of domestics is a tradition.”  The ILO convention says otherwise and workers in the United States and other countries where it is adopted  “will be armed with the knowledge that there is an international standard that protects them.”

Domestics already are granted labor rights in New York State, and California legislators are considering a proposal to bring them under that state’s labor laws. But winning basic rights for the badly exploited domestic workers elsewhere will be very difficult. But so was convincing ILO representatives to take on the task, the long needed task of granting domestic workers union rights and, with them, the decent wages, hours and working conditions that come with unionization.

Yes, winning the union rights for domestics worldwide will be very difficult. But we know it can be done.  And certainly we know that it should be done. 


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century.  He can be reached through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Farm workers need drastic change

Maria Poblet
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0

No workers are more in need of union protection than the nation’s miserably treated farm workers. Yet a promising new effort to ease their path to unionization has been blocked by one of their former champions, Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brown was rightly hailed for signing, in an earlier term as governor, the 1975 law that granted farm workers in California the collective bargaining rights denied them nationwide. It’s the weapon farm workers must have if they are to escape poverty and the arbitrary and often harmful actions of grower employers.

But now, Brown has vetoed a bill sponsored by the United Farm Workers union, the UFW, that would have made it much easier for farm workers to unionize. Currently, they can be granted bargaining rights only if a majority working for a particular grower votes for unionization. The vetoed measure, the so-called Card-Check Bill, would have granted bargaining rights simply on the showing of union membership cards or petitions for union recognition signed by a majority of workers.

Farm workers, of course, are among our most important workers. They help feed us, after all. Their pay nevertheless averages less than $10,000 a year, and most lack employer-paid health care and other benefits. They work hard, frequently under the blazing sun, with few  – if any – rest breaks and without even such simple on-the-job amenities as fresh drinking water and toilets.

The UFW, which sponsored California’s 1975 law, has been trying for many years to remedy farm workers’ conditions by leading them in drives aimed at winning union contracts that promise them decent treatment and an effective voice in determining their wages, hours and working conditions.

 It’s not been easy for the UFW, even with the law in effect. Thanks mainly to employer intimidation and high worker turnover, the union has been able to sign up only a small part of California’s farm labor force and to win only a relatively few contracts from growers. But it’s an important start. Without the law, it would have been nearly impossible.

So why in the world did self-proclaimed farm worker advocate Jerry Brown veto the bill that would have strengthened the union rights granted farm workers in the bill he signed 36 years earlier?

Well, Brown didn’t say much, but did say he didn’t like the bill because it called for “drastic change.”  Which it did, of course. That, as Brown must know, is exactly what’s needed.

Requiring union rights to be granted only by elections gives growers a great opportunity to unfairly pressure workers into voting against unionization – and many take full advantage of the opportunity.

It’s common for growers faced with elections to require workers to attend meetings at which they rail against unions, threaten to fire union supporters and warn that they might have to go out of business if their farms are unionized, or at least greatly curtail operations and thus job opportunities.

“You’re talking about voting on the employer’s site, with foremen and supervisors making eye-contact with you after they’ve alluded to or flat out threatened you with the loss of your job or your housing,” notes a UFW vice president, Armando Elenes. “It takes a lot of strength to even vote.”

There’s plenty of evidence that employers do indeed put lots of pressure on workers to vote against unionization. UFW President Arturo Rodriguez notes, for example, instances of growers pulling guns on workers who were trying to organize.  That may seem exaggerated – but not to anyone who’s experienced the superheated grower-worker confrontation up close.

The UFW is not giving up the struggle for Card-Check recognition. The union will soon re-introduce the Card-Check bill in Congress with the strong backing of the nation’s labor leaders. Some of them call it the single most important labor bill in the country this year.

It certainly is for farm workers and should be for workers in other industries throughout the country who also seek Card-Check rights, and for anyone who wants decent treatment for those whose vital work helps put food on our tables.

 

Dick Meister is co-author of “A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers” (Macmillan). He can be reached through his website, www. dickmeister.com.

 

Dick Meister: Paid sick leave is good for us all

Maria Poblet
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The latest figures show that some 44 million workers in private employment  – more than 40 percent of the private sector workforce – do not have paid sick days that they could use to recover from illnesses, including contagious illnesses such as the flu, or worse.

It should be of particular concern that those occupations which are currently least likely to provide paid sick days include occupations most likely to have regular contact with the public – most importantly and most disturbingly, food service and food preparation.

That raises serious health problems – especially in these tight economic times, when workers need to stay on the job as much as they can, no matter how ill they are, to earn as much money as they can. Which, of course, endangers the health of those who come in contact with them, as well as delaying their recovery from their illness.

Public health experts note that the fewer the number of workers who are able to stay at home when sick, the more likely it is that diseases will spread. In addition to the increased suffering of the public and other workers which that causes, it also causes significant economic losses.

Laws have been proposed in several states and in Congress that would require employers to grant paid sick leaves to their employees, but it seems unlikely that the measures, however much they are needed, will pass any time soon – if at all.

But there has at least been a start, however slight, toward what’s broadly needed. That’s a paid sick leave law that was adopted by the city of San Francisco five years ago – the first citywide such law in the country. If nothing else, the San Francisco ordinance proves that such laws are quite feasible, and not the “job killers” that anti-labor forces contend they would be.

San Francisco business groups fought fiercely against adoption of the ordinance and thankfully lost big time. The ordinance was approved by 61 percent of the voters in a citywide election in 2006.

Under the ordinance, workers in businesses with fewer than 10 workers can earn up to five paid sick days a year, while workers in larger businesses can earn up to nine paid sick days.  Workers accrue one hour of paid sick leave for every 30 hours they work. They may use the sick time to recover from their own illnesses, care for a sick family member, or seek routine medical care.

A recent independent survey of nearly 1,200 San Francisco workers and nearly 700 employers by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research came up with findings that the city ordinance was, in the words of the California AFL-CIO, “overwhelmingly positive for workers, businesses and the public.”

The labor federation called the study “further evidence policies that help working families meet their responsibilities at work and at home are good for everyone.”

The study shows, in short, that the San Francisco ordinance has had a great impact on workers’ lives but little or no impact on the city’s businesses.  They overwhelmingly report that the law has not cut into their profits. Two-thirds of them reported no problems implementing the law.

It seems likely that the reason for the slight impact on businesses business can be attributed to the fact that most workers take sick leave days only when they need them.  Even though the law allows workers five to nine sick days a year, San Francisco workers used a median of just three days a year. And one-quarter of the workers didn’t take a single sick day.

Even the major opponent of the law prior to its passage, the local, politically powerful restaurant association that led the political fight against the city ordinance, now concedes it hasn’t led to employee abuses or hurt restaurants or other business.

Most important, as the state AFL-CIO noted, the survey proved that having paid sick days makes a substantial difference for working families.  More than half the workers surveyed said they’ve benefitted from the law. Among other important things, the law has given workers who need paid sick days the most, including parent and workers with chronic health conditions, the time they need to care for their health and that of their children.

The labor federation reports that it hears regularly “the stories of parents who are forced to choose between their children’s health and the financial well-being of their family . . . who have put off visits to the doctor and sacrifice their health to avoid losing their jobs.

Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee have followed San Francisco’s lead and adopted ordinances providing paid sick leave for workers.  And some states, California, New Jersey and Connecticut among them, have adopted similar though less extensive laws.

But what’s most needed is a federal law – a law that, if properly enforced, would grant sick leave pay to all workers, helping them, their families and anyone else who might be exposed to their illness.

It’s obviously the sensible thing to do.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Can a woman beat Hoffa?

Maria Poblet
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0

 

A woman as president of the macho Teamsters Union that was once headed by supermacho Jimmy Hoffa? It could happen. 

Sandy Pope thinks so, and she’s going to try as hard as she can to make it happen – going to try as hard as she can to succeed Hoffa’s lawyer son, Jimmy junior, as head of one of the country’s largest and most powerful unions.

If a majority of delegates at the Teamster convention that opened today in Las Vegas vote for Pope to unseat Hoffa, who was first elected a dozen years ago, she’ll be only the third woman to ever head an international union.

Randi Weingarten, the highly regarded president of the American Federation of Teachers, who took office in 2008, is one of the others. The third is Mary Kay Henry, who just recently succeeded the controversial Andy Stern as president of the country’s largest union, the 1.3 million-member Service Employees International Union, the SEIU.

The Teamsters comes in at number two, with 1.2 million members. Hoffa’s supporters argue that Sandy Pope is not up to handling such a huge and diverse union. Her record, however, seems to indicate otherwise.

For 33 years, the 54-year-old Pope has held her own in the union’s macho culture, as a driver of big long haul freight trucks and as a warehouse worker.  For seven years she’s been president of a New York Teamster local of drivers and warehouse workers, one of only 16 of the Teamster’s 407 locals nationwide to be headed by a woman.

Before that, Pope was an international union representative in the Teamster’s warehouse division. She’s been a longtime leader of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), which has exposed much of the corruption that’s been common in the union since the days of Hoffa senior as president.

The TDU’s work has led to some important corrections in union operations, but much remains to be done, and it’s unlikely that Hoffa junior would do much about it.  As the incumbent, he’s running a status quo campaign. Some local level Teamster officials fear retaliation from Hoffa and his allies if they campaign for Pope.

But Pope certainly isn’t backing off one bit. She’s promising to halt or at least slow the concessions that Teamster negotiators have granted employers in recent years.  Under her, she says, the union” will close the concessions stand.”

It also would push the union’s officers off the gravy train. In one Minnesota Teamsters local closely allied with Hoffa, for instance, the principal officer is paid $200,000 a year. Hoffa himself is paid $363,000.  And that’s going on at the same time that many rank-and-file Teamsters are taking pay and benefit cuts and otherwise feeling the effects of a declining economy.

It’s what the pro-labor magazine “Labor Notes” quite accurately calls “the union leadership’s back-scratching, pocket-lining culture.”

Generally speaking, Pope’s promising to return to the basics of union operations – to build public support, mobilize the union’s current members and wage a major organizing drive to recruit new members. Pope also promises that some 20,000 of the union’s members whose jobs have been downgraded to part-time can expect a drive to make those jobs full-time.

It’s clear that, like many dissident Teamsters, Sandy Pope is “sick of having a lawyer with a big name hijack our union.”

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: The battle of our generation

Maria Poblet
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0

 

President Bob King of the United Auto Workers union is proving again that he’s one of our most astute labor leaders, a worthy occupant of the position once held by the legendary Walter Reuther.

King’s latest column in Solidarity, the UAW’s official magazine, certainly proves that. King writes about the severe weakening of the union rights that are supposedly guaranteed all working people – the right to organize. King calls that “the first amendment for workers.”

That basic and essential right was granted U.S. workers by the National Labor Relations Act – the NLRA – that was enacted in 1935 as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal measures that were designed in part to pull the country out of the Great Depression.

But now, says UAW President King, the NLRA’s basic process for determining whether workers want to organize – having them vote for or against unionization – is “fatally flawed.” King says the National Labor Relations Board ­–­ the NLRB – which is charged with enforcing the NLRA, does not do that – “does not protect workers’ right to organize.”

Workers’ lack of adequate legal protection is not a new development, as King notes. It’s been a serious problem for several decades. Since the 1970s, employers have been allowed to hire anti-union consultants “to design sophisticated ways to intimidate workers trying to organize.”

Boy, have they. Supervisors are trained to put pressure on individual workers to vote against unionizing. Workers are forced to attend meetings where they are warned of the dire consequences they’ll face if they vote for unionizing. Employers threaten to close down if their employees vote for a union. Union supporters are commonly disciplined, sometimes fired. And employer lawyers “find thousands of excuses for delaying elections. “

King needn’t look beyond his own union for examples of the NLRB’s ineffectiveness against the dictatorial actions of employers against unions. He could cite hundreds of cases involving the UAW.

For instance, last August, six years after the UAW lost a union election by just three votes at a facility in North Carolina, the NLRB finally ordered a new election “because the employer violated the law in more than a dozen ways.” The violations included threatening to do away with the jobs held by union supporters, spying on workers’ meetings and interrogating workers about union activity.

By now, however, all 25 members of the union’s organizing committee have left for other jobs, most union supporters have been fired, laid off or quit. And the new election still hasn’t been scheduled.

Another example involves a California facility. Seventy percent of the workers there signed union membership cards, but were so intimidated by management that only 19 workers out of 161 dared vote for UAW representation.

King says the union is “returning to its roots of direct action on behalf of workers rights.” Which is no small matter, given the UAW’s influential position within the labor movement.

The union is demanding that “all corporations, whether American or foreign-owned, allow their workers to freely decide whether to organize.”

King calls that “the battle of our generation,” as it surely is. He says “the battle for the First Amendment right to organize will determine the survival of the labor movement. It is the mission of our generation of trade unionists to secure these rights for future generations. We must win this fight for our children and grandchildren.”

King and other UAW officers are going to “call upon each and every member to give some time – perhaps two hours a week – to participate in public demonstrations for the First Amendment.”

The union also will be seeking the support of workers and their unions in other countries, since the UAW is dealing with companies whose owners are in Japan, Korea and Germany and whose products are sold worldwide. The UAW will in turn support the struggles of foreign workers for union rights in their countries, as part of “the global fight to force corporations to respect workers’ right to organize.”

It’s important to remember the UAW’s crucial role in helping establish a true middle class in this country through its organizing of the auto industry. That led workers in other industries to also demand – and get – decent wages, benefits and working conditions.

UAW President King thinks his union can lead the way again, this time to reforms that will protect and expand the union rights that the autoworkers and others won seven decades ago. Those are the rights that had so much to do with the rise of a true middle class, whose standing is now endangered by the anti-union onslaughts of employers and their government allies.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Unions save lives

Maria Poblet
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1

 

A miner’s life is like a sailor’s

‘Board a ship to cross the waves

Every day his life’s in danger

Still he ventures being brave

—Traditional labor song

A new study shows that unionization is a sure way to dramatically lessen the many deaths and serious injuries that have been all too common in the nation’s coal mines.

That ‘s the unequivocal conclusion of the independent study of coal mining between 1993 and 2008 conducted by Stanford law professor Allson Morantz and funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

There’s no doubting it: Workers in unionized mines are far less likely to be killed or seriously injured than are workers in non-union mines.

The study indicates that the number of fatalities in individual non-union mines can decline by one-third up to nearly three-fourths and serious injuries decline by as much as one-third if the mines unionize.

It’s no coincidence, notes President Cecil Roberts of the United Mine Workers Union, that several major mine disasters recently were at non-union mines. That includes the explosion at Massey Energies’ Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 miners last year, the Crandell Canyon, Utah, blast that killed nine miners in 2007 and the Sago explosion in West Virginia in 2006 that killed 12.

“The simple truth,” Roberts concludes, “is that union mines are safer mines, and this study proves that.”

He gets ready agreement for that obvious truth from union leaders and members at all levels of the labor movement, right up to AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. He was a coal miner himself, as were his father and grandfather.

Trumka says he learned firsthand “the vital importance of workers having a voice on the job through their union.”

Spreading unionization throughout the coal mining industry is a key mission of the United Mine Workers. But though that doubtlessly would lead to greater coal mine safety, the union’s Democratic Party allies must meanwhile continue pressing for stronger mine safety laws – and stronger enforcement of the laws.

Those steps and the labor-management cooperation in collective bargaining and otherwise that the steps would require would guarantee that coal mine job safety would continue to improve – perhaps at even a faster rate than shown by Professor Morantz’ study.

Labor, management and government would be in a far better position to do much more of what’s needed to continue lowering the still high number of mine worker fatalities.

That’s not just a daydream. Listen to the AFL-CIO’s Mike Hall. He knows. Says Hall: “With all we know today, and all the avenues of protection available, there is simply no need for even one life to be lost on the job.”

One of Congress’ most outspoken and effective safety advocates, veteran Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, sees the study as unassailable evidence that unionization leads to greater safety.

Miller, ranking Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee, is certain 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.”

It clearly demonstrates that “by giving miners the support they need to speak out, unions can save miners lives.”  So can the United Mine Workers’ stepped-up campaign to bring more workers under the direct protection of the union and the union’s expanding safety training programs for miners everywhere.

Saving lives. No union could have a greater purpose.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: The minimum wage is a poverty wage

Maria Poblet
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Imagine trying to live on pay of $7.25 an hour. Even if you managed to work full eight-hour days, you’d be making only about  $58 a day, $290 a week, or a measly $15,000 a year.  And out of that would come taxes and other deductions.

According to the standards of the federal government, you’d be living in poverty. Yet $7.25 an hour is the federal minimum wage set by Congress. State legislatures can and do set state minimums higher than the federal rate, but never lower, much as some would like to.

Far too many workers have no choice but to take minimum wage jobs, no choice that is, but to live in poverty. New research out of Columbia University’s law school lays out the sorry details of the minimum wage workers’ very serious situation, one that should never be tolerated in a country with such riches as ours.

In many states, the minimum wage laws are but barely enforced, in part because there’s little or no money budgeted for enforcement. But it’s also because the government agencies charged with enforcing the laws are clearly not much interested in carrying out their mandate.

Equally at fault are the governors and state legislators who’ve done virtually nothing to try to help their state’s neediest workers earn a decent living. They have to be aware that no one can make a decent living at the current minimum wage rates.

The government officials who have been ignoring the problems could at least try to make sure that employers pay workers the legal minimum, however inadequate it might be.  And the government officials could apply effective pressure to raise the minimum. They could, but given their record in such matters, that’s most doubtful.

Congress could raise the federal minimum, but having just recently raised it, that’s extremely unlikely, even though it should be obvious to everyone that a higher rate is needed to effectively help the many working people who badly need help.

It may be hard to believe, but despite the great need of workers and despite the widespread violations of the minimum wage laws, five states – Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi – have no agency assigned to enforce the minimum wage laws and other laws designed to protect workers rights.

The researchers also found that a majority of states do not fine or penalize employers who violate the minimum wage laws and other wage and hour laws. Which means that employers “have little or no incentive to obey wage and hour laws if the only repercussion for violating them is to have to pay wages owed in the first place.”

The report warns that “without meaningful enforcement by state regulators, some employers will simply disregard their legal obligation if doing so allows them to save time, money or effort, putting the majority who wish t abide by the law at a significant competitive disadvantage, This creates a regulatory race to the bottom by states as they seek to compete to attract businesses.”

Most important, it denies workers the basic rights and protections the law promises them but often fails to deliver.

 

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

 

 

Dick Meister: A Memorial Day Massacre

Maria Poblet
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1

 

It’s a dramatic, shocking and violent film. Some 200 uniformed policemen armed with billy clubs, revolvers and tear gas angrily charge an unarmed crowd of several hundred striking steelworkers and their wives and children who are desperately running away. The police club those they can reach, shoving them to the ground and ignoring their pleas as they batter them with further blows. They stand above the fallen to fire at the backs of those who’ve outraced them.

Police drag the injured along the ground and into patrol wagons, where they are jammed in with dozens of others who were also arrested. Four are already dead from police bullets, six others are to die shortly. Eighty are wounded, two-dozen others so badly beaten that they, too, must be hospitalized.

The close-ups are particularly brutal. As one newspaper reviewer noted, “In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back.”

The film ends with a sweaty, fatigued policeman looking into the camera, grinning, and motioning as if dusting off his hands.

The film was made in 1937. It was not, however, one of those popular cops and robbers features of the thirties. It was not fictional. It was an on-the-scene report of what historians call “The Memorial Day Massacre,” a newsreel segment filmed by Paramount Pictures as it was happening on the south side of Chicago on May 30, 1937.

We’re accustomed these days to the use of videotaped evidence to show wrongdoing by abusive law enforcement officers. Video technology was unknown in 1937, of course, and though film was available, it had rarely – if ever – been used for that purpose. The 1937 film, in fact, was initially kept from the general public by Paramount’s executives. Fearful of “inciting riots,” they refused to include it in any of their newsreels that were shown regularly in movie theaters nationwide.

But the film was shown to a closed session of a Senate investigating committee chaired by Robert LaFollette Jr. of Wisconsin. The committee, concerned primarily with civil liberties, was outraged – particularly since the Chicago police had acted in violation of the two-year-old federal law that guaranteed workers the right to strike and engage in other peaceful union activities.

The committee found that strikers and their families, while noisily demanding collective bargaining rights as they massed in front of the South Chicago plant operated by Republic Steel, had indeed been generally peaceful.

But that was beside the point to the police in Chicago and other cities with plants operated by Republic and two other members of the “Little Steel” alliance that also were struck.  For, as the committee concluded, the police had been “loosed … to shoot down citizens on the streets and highways” at the companies’ behest. The companies even supplied them with weapons and ammunition from their own stockpiles.

The committee said the companies had spent more than $40,000 on machine guns, rifles, shotguns, revolvers, tear gas canisters and launchers and 10,000 rounds of ammunition to use against strikers. Republic alone had more supplies than any law enforcement agency in the entire country.

The companies were prepared to go to any extreme to remain non-union. Two closed their plants temporarily, anticipating that most of the 85,000 strikers would soon be forced to return to work because they had little – if any – savings. But though Republic Steel closed most of its plants, it continued to operate the Chicago plant and a few others.

Republic fired union members at the plants that remained open and, with police help, cleared out union sympathizers and brought in strikebreakers to replace them. The strikebreakers, guarded by police day and night, ate and slept in the plants to avoid confronting the pickets outside.

Municipal police, company police and National Guardsmen harassed and often arrested pickets for doing little more than lawfully picketing. Six strikers were killed outside Republic’s Ohio plants in Cleveland, Youngstown, Canton and Massillon.

The killings and other violence, the steadily increasing financial pressures on strikers, unceasing anti-union propaganda – all that and more combined to end the strike in mid-July, two months after it had begun.

But the steelworkers didn’t give up.  Determined to not have made such great sacrifices in vain, they turned to the labor-friendly administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. They got it in 1941, when heavy pressures from the administration finally forced the steel companies to recognize their employees’ legal right to unionization and the many benefits, financial and otherwise, that it brought them and the many other industrial union members who followed their lead.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Child Labor-Back to the 19th Century?

Maria Poblet
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Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

Even the most casual students of American labor history undoubtedly have come across the appalling accounts of child labor, accompanied by photos of exhausted, grime-covered teen and pre-teen children staring sad-eyed into the camera.

The children stand outside the mines, mills, farms and other often highly dangerous places where they worked 10, 12, 15 hours a day, sometimes even more. They worked at home as well, in their impoverished families’ dilapidated tenement flats, rolling cigars, stitching garments and doing other work for long, miserably paid hours.

It began with the New England colonists, who brought the practice of child labor with them from England. Use of child labor regardless of the age or frailty of the child was common throughout the colonies, and remained common after independence – including in the southern U.S., where the black slaves’ children were ordered to work along with their captive parents.

Finally, in the 1840s, reform groups managed to pressure several state legislatures in New England to ban the labor of minors under 15 for more than 10 hours a day without their parents’ written consent. Yes, that’s how bad it was – so bad that allowing kids under 15 to work more than 10 hours a day was OK. All they needed was the agreement of their economically desperate parents.

The ten-hour, six-day workweek became standard for minors in most states. Again, that was considered a major reform. Most states also adopted reforms that prohibited children from working in hazardous industries. That was ignored, however, in the particularly dangerous coal mines of Pennsylvania and Appalachia.

In 1914, the federal government stepped in to levy a 10 percent excise tax on employers who hired 14-year-olds. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed a law prohibiting some employers from hiring anyone under 16. But, believe it or not, the Supreme Court voided both laws.

Child advocates couldn’t even get congressional approval for a law empowering the government to regulate the labor of minors under 18, mainly because of a business campaign that called that idea “socialism.” Sound familiar? Then, as now, that could be enough to defeat progressive measures.

But finally, with the coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms in the 1930s, decisive steps were taken to regulate the use of child labor. They came mainly with passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The law, which covers workers under 18, limits the hours they can work, depending on their age and occupation.  They must be paid at least as much as the legal minimum wage, and they must be covered by the protective laws that apply to adult workers.

The idea was not only to protect children from the harmful exploitation they commonly suffered but specifically to give them the time and opportunity to get a decent education, to get enough rest and time for study.

Passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act obviously did not end the misuse of child labor. Yet it did set a standard for protecting young workers that’s been followed by states that have enacted their own versions of the act, some more liberal than the federal law.

But now come business trade associations, employer groups, reactionary Republican politicians and Tea Party activists to urge severe weakening of the state laws, and, ultimately, of the federal law. They agree with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that the child labor laws are unconstitutional for a variety of obscure legal reasons. They’ve begun their legal attacks on state laws with the laws in Maine and Missouri.

In Maine, which was among the first states to enact child labor laws, they’ve been pushing a bill that would allow employers to pay anyone under 20 a six-month “training wage” that would be more than $2 an hour below the minimum wage. They’d also eliminate rules setting a maximum number of hours kids 16 and older can work during school days and allow those under 16 to work up to four hours on school days and up to 11 p.m.

The Missouri bill is even worse. It would lift provisions in the current state law that bar children under 14 from employment, They’d be allowed to work all hours of the day and no longer need work permits from their schools. What’s more, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections by the federal agency that enforces the child labor laws.

By the time you read this, the proposed laws in Maine and Missouri may have been passed – or, hopefully, rejected. But that’s almost beside the point. What’s worse is that 11 years into the 21st century, people are actually taking seriously proposals that would send us back into the 19th century.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

 

Dick Meister: Hey, Nike — Pay up!

Maria Poblet
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7

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

OK, Nike, pay up! You owe me big. Exactly how much, I can’t say, since I don’t know the going rate for athletes and others who act as human billboards for you. You know, those whose team uniforms, workout gear and other garments display your swoosh brand symbol prominently.

I assume the swoosh-marked college athletes are not paid openly, lest they lose their amateur status, although their colleges, while profiting from the athletes’ play and display of the swoosh and other brand symbols, of course face no penalties for doing so.

My days as an athlete are long gone and, sad to say, there were no swoosh contracts back in those days. But now, I think, it’s time for me to collect a little.  You see, I was recently quite ill, and on leaving the hospital was under strict orders to go easy and, among other things, to wear light, loose fitting clothing.  No tight jeans and such.

But sweatpants, they’d be perfect. So I popped into by favorite clothing establishment and grabbed a pair of sweatpants off the rack without bothering to check anything but the size. Didn’t even try them on.

Oh, but when I got the pants home. The shock, the shock. There it was on the side of the left leg, the dreaded swoosh for all the world to see on my daily doctor-prescribed walks and other sweatpants-clad forays into the community. I had become a walking billboard for Nike.

So where’s my endorsement money, Nike? My pay. I’m working for you, after all. Do I have to bring in a union to get me what I ‘m owed? I’m not asking for much, just whatever you’re paying other human billboards. I’m not exactly a celebrity, but I am known rather well . . . and highly regarded, I like to believe, in some parts of my community. Seeing me wearing the swoosh might influence some of my neighbors to rush out and buy their own Nike gear. Naturally.

But realistically, I must tell you it’s not likely I’ll get paid for my valuable work on behalf of Nike. Big time athletes are paid, and paid well for wearing and endorsing the swoosh. But not us plain folks who wear the Nike brand.  We need a union to demand decent pay . . . to demand decent treatment.

That’s it, a union to demand decent treatment for all who wear the Nike brand . . . plus the money they should be owed by Nike for doing so. There are, of course, unions of professional athletes. But their concern, as I guess it should be, is for their members. We need to form a union of our own to also get the big bucks for wearing the swoosh.

And while we’re at it, we could use the leverage of our union to effectively demand much better treatment for the workers in Nike sweatshops in poor countries who produce most of the swoosh brand stuff.  Nor should we forget the celebrity athletes whose huge pay for endorsement of Nike products drives up the price we ordinary folks have to pay for sweatpants and other gear that the celebrities endorse only because they are paid to endorse them.

It’s highly doubtful that any of our spoiled, hugely paid athletes would readily agree to share their endorsement money with lesser-paid citizens. But with a union, who knows? Professional athletes have their own powerful unions, so why don’t their unions take up the cause of unpaid Nike endorsers?

That’s one of the basic principles of unionism, unions seeing that their members get a fair share and helping members of other unions get their fair share. You know, solidarity and all that.

So, swoosh wearers, unite! Unionize! We have nothing to lose but our swooshes!


Dick Meister,  former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com which includes more than 300 of his columns.

Dick Meister: The Real May Day

Maria Poblet
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0

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

May Day. A day to herald the coming of Spring with song and dance, a day for children with flowers in their hair to skip around beribboned maypoles, a time to crown May Day queens.

But it also is a day for demonstrations heralding the causes of working people and their unions such as are being held on Sunday that were crucial in winning important rights for working people. The first May Day demonstrations, in 1886,  won the  most important of tthe rights rever won by working people – the right demanded above all others by the labor activists of a century ago:

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

Winning the eight-hour workday took years of hard struggle, beginning in the mid-1800s. By 1867, the federal government, six states and several cities had passed laws limiting their employees’ hours to eight per day. The laws were not effectively enforced and in some cases were overturned by courts, but they set an important precedent that finally led to a powerful popular movement.

The movement was launched in 1886 by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, then one of the country’s major labor organizations. The federation called for workers to negotiate with their employers for an eight-hour workday and, if that failed, to strike on May 1 in support of the demand.

Some negotiated, some marched and otherwise demonstrated.  More than 300,000 struck. And all won strong support, in dozens of cities – Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee, St. Louis, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Denver, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Detroit, Washington, Newark, Brooklyn, St. Paul and others.

More than 30,000 workers had won the eight-hour day by April. On May Day, another 350,000 workers walked off their jobs at nearly 12,000 establishments, more than 185,000 of them eventually winning their demand. Most of the others won at least some reduction in working hours that had ranged up to 16 a day.

Additionally, many employers cut Saturday operations to a half-day, and the practice of working on Sundays, also relatively common, was all but abandoned by major industries.

“Hurray for Shorter Time,” declared a headline in the New York Sun over a story describing a torchlight procession of 25,000 workers that highlighted the eight-hour-day activities in New York. Never before had the city experienced so large a demonstration.

Not all newspapers were as supportive, however. The strikes and demonstrations, one paper complained, amounted to “communism, lurid and rampant.” The eight-hour day, another said, would encourage “loafing and gambling, rioting, debauchery, and drunkenness.”

The greatest opposition came in response to the demonstrations led by anarchist and socialist groups in Chicago, the heart of the eight-hour day movement. Four demonstrators were killed and more than 200 wounded by police who waded into their ranks, but what the demonstrators’ opponents seized on were the events two days later at a protest rally in Haymarket Square. A bomb was thrown into the ranks of the police who had surrounded the square, killing seven and wounding 59.

The bomb thrower was never discovered, but eight labor, socialist and anarchist leaders – branded as violent, dangerous radicals by press and police alike – were arrested on the clearly trumped up charge that they had conspired to commit murder.  Four of them were hanged, one committed suicide while in jail, and three were pardoned six years later by Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld.

Employers responded to the so-called Haymarket Riot by mounting a counter-offensive that seriously eroded the eight-hour day movement’s gains. But the movement was an extremely effective organizing tool for the country’s unions, and in 1890 President Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor was able to call for “an International Labor Day” in favor of the eight-hour workday. Similar proclamations were made by socialist and union leaders in other nations where, to this day, May Day is celebrated as Labor Day.

Workers in the United States and 13 other countries demonstrated on that May Day of 1890 – including 30,000 of them in Chicago. The New York World hailed it as “Labor’s Emancipation Day.” It was. For it marked the start of an irreversible drive that finally established the eight-hour day as the standard for millions of working people.


Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for more than a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

Dick Meister: 11 Million a Year Bandits

Maria Poblet
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5

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has an important question for you.

“How much,” he asks, “did your pay go up last year? How about your friends and family?”

Before you answer, Trumka asks that you consider this: In 2010, the CEOs of major companies averaged $11.4 million for their year’s work. That was an increase of  an increase of 23 percent over their pay in 2009.

All told, the CEOs were paid $2 trillion last year.  That, of course. was during a recessionary time like now when working people were lucky to have jobs at all, whatever the pay. And the pay of those who did have jobs stayed pretty much the same, or actually went down.

The CEOs of major companies faced no such problems, obviously, with their pay increasing hugely to more than $11 million a year.  Which leads the AFL-CIO to wonder “how many firefighters, nurses, teachers or construction workers does it take to equal the pay of one CEO today?”

I’d also like to know how many CEOs do work as important as that of rank-and-file firefighters, nurses, teachers and construction workers?

The AFL-CIO’s Trumka notes that despite the collapse of financial markets three years ago at the hands of many of those same astronomically paid CEOs, the “disparity between CEO and workers’ pay has continued to grow to levels that are simply stunning.”

Think of it. Those CEOs collecting enormous pay were in charge when we sunk into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. When we lost 8 million jobs and millions of small businesses. When housing prices plummeted and millions of dollars in personal savings were wiped out.  Yet at the same time those in charge of the economy, notes Trumka, “still found a way to make out like bandits.”

Rich Trumka is a pretty outspoken guy, not known for understatement. But in this case, he probably is understating the situation.  The difference between CEO pay at major companies and workers’ pay is beyond stunning, beyond outrageous.

I’d say it’s virtually beyond human understanding. How could we let that happen? Is this not a democracy in which the great wealth generated here is spread more or less equally?

Hah!

OK, I’m asking foolish questions. But if ours was a true economic democracy, the spread between CEO and workers’ pay would be far less than it is. How many workers got pay raises of more than 20 percent last year? How many were paid more than $11 million?

How many needed that much money to live comfortably?

Trumka, notes that corporate CEOs “are hoarding $2 trillion in cash.” Indeed, the money-grubbing CEOs chose to take their $2 trillion in raises rather than use the money, or at least part of it, to create decent -paying jobs for their fellow citizens who are so much less fortunate than they.

To describe the CEOs as greedy would be a gross understatement.

I know I’m laying it on thick, but I’m mad – damn mad – and think you should be, too. The CEOs and their companies are stealing us blind and getting way with it.

The AFL-CIO’s Trumka does offer the possibility of better times, however. He says that “although pay is more out of balance than it has been during most of our lifetimes, for the first time there is hope that things are changing.”

That, says Trumka, is because of a new law, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The act, as President Obama said when signing it into law last year, is “a sweeping overhaul of the United States financial regulatory system on a scale not seen since the reforms that followed the Great Depression.”

The lack of sufficient financial regulations sufficiently enforced was, or course, the main factor in the continuing Great recession, just as it was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The new law is already under attack by Congressional Republicans who have announced their intention to try to repeal it. They particularly object to provisions that would give shareholders a vote on CEO pay and require companies to publicly disclose the ratio between the pay of their CEOs and their workers.

Trumka says it truly shocks him that companies and their GOP allies “have the nerve to argue against those provisions in public, and lobby against them – after the companies drove our country off an economic cliff.”

Trumka says the AFL-CIO “is ready to have this debate. We will take on Wall Street and we will win.”

Strong words, but the AFL-CIO has the powerful political allies, the funding and the troops to carry out Trumka’s bold promise. Let’s hope fervently that labor and its supporters can indeed win the debate, If not, we could be in line for more serious Wall Street-based troubles  – an extended recession for sure, maybe worse.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 300 of his columns.

Dick Meister: Rebuilding the American Middle Class

Maria Poblet
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0

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century.

Of all the many comments, pro and con, that have been made about the widespread attempts to weaken American unions, none have been clearer or more on the mark than the words of President Bob King of the United Auto Workers Union.

King, of course, is on the union side of the argument. But as King made very clear, that’s the side to be on if you believe working people should have full collective bargaining rights and the decent wages, hours and working conditions that result from fair bargaining.

King’s comments came in an exceptional column in the latest issue of Solidarity, the UAW’s official magazine.  The column is titled, simply, “Do Justice.”

To Bob King, “doing justice does not mean trying to reduce the wages, benefits and standard of living of all workers in America,” as far too many Republican politicians at all levels of government are trying to accomplish, with their main target – for now  – public employees.

“Doing justice to me,” said King, “means that everyone has an equal opportunity, and if they make the individual decision to work hard and live by the rules, then they will be able to live a middle-class standard of living and retire with dignity and maintain their middle-class standard of living.”

I know, and you know, that can’t happen if working people are denied the essential right to unionization – the essential right to a strong bargaining voice in determining their pay and benefits through their unions. That’s obvious, for unionization is the main reason for the rise of an American middle class,  beginning with the granting of union rights to most workers by federal law in the 1930s.

But as Bob King warned, those rights and the middle class they established are under serious attack by anti-union politicians and others who “preach the vision of scarcity, the vision of division and the vision of fear.”

Ours is a country gifted with great abundance, with plenty to give each of us a fair share. But union opponents preaching “the vision of scarcity” deny that. They act as if there’s not enough in this, the world’s richest country, to give a fair share to all.

Yet there is enough to go around, as we should know, and unions are the primary vehicles for guaranteeing that working people get their fair share of our abundance.

Which is why greedy corporate interests and other anti-labor forces that want a larger share at the expense of others argue selfishly against unions and, indeed, against the very concept of collective bargaining.

Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

Dick Meister: More Than a Game

Maria Poblet
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1

Baseball season again. That smell again. It overwhelms me — the incredibly fresh smell of newly cut grass and stale earthy odor of freshly watered basepaths, the very essence of baseball.

I’m up on the edge of some infield, somewhere, crouching. I’m up on my toes, leaning forward anxiously and peering intently at a batter, my stubby-fingered fielder’s glove skimming the dirt. Bits of damp grass cling to the paper-thin kangaroo leather of my black spiked shoes and those of my teammates. Our uniforms hang on us in folds, like baggy woolen sacks.

Is it 1942? 1945? 1950?

Is it a ballpark in San Francisco? We look like human billboards with that splashy lettering all over the front of our uniform shirts. What’s that it says? Leslie Salt, Bucher Asbestos, Ghiselli Meats, Farallon Cleaners? Molkenbuhr Jewelers? Johnnies Billiards?

It could be any one of the two dozen or so neighborhood parks in SF that I so clearly recall, parks that swarmed year-round with players – young kids, teenagers, twenty-year-olds, middle aged men. Baseball was the ladder the younger players hoped to climb to fame and fortune, the chief form of recreation for all.

Sunday was the big day. Three games on each of the parks’ diamonds, at ten in the morning, at noon and two o’clock, between the city’s hundreds of merchant-sponsored teams, well sprinkled with professionals during the winter.

But the field I recall could be in Boonville, California. Or in Coquille, Oregon. 
Or Medicine Hat, Alberta. Or in any of the other towns where I also once played – in tumble-down parks, you’d probably call them, though we hardly noticed.

Mingled with the moist smell of the grass and the dirt and the sourness of sweat-soaked flannel uniforms is the sweet and sour of freshly cut lumber. It wafts from the mills where summertime semi-professional ballplayers from the city earned their keep when not racing across lumpy, sun-blistered fields while entire towns watched, cheered and jeered.

I mean places like Boonville, a town of 700 people 120 miles north of San Francisco, where I played a half-century ago, a 17-year-old shortstop not yet out of high school in San Francisco certain he was making the first stop on the road to major league stardom.

The Boonville fans – farmers, sheepherders, lumbermen and their families – barreled into town at noontime on Saturdays and Sundays, straight down the highway that doubled as Main Street, climbed out of dented and dusty pickups and long fish-tailed sedans and hurried into the Boonville Lodge. They jostled good-naturedly as they yelled out their orders: Beer and chicken-fried steak, beer and hamburger steak, beer and fried chicken or, for those feeling flush, beer and the house special, T-bone steak.

Soon the laughing, noisy crowd, grasping bottles of beer and washtubs filled with ice and more beer, crossed the highway and jounced down a dirt road on the other side to a field a few hundred yards away. The heat rose in waves; you could see it through the thick clouds of dust kicked up by the infielders, warming up as the crowd clambered up into the bleachers, rattling the seats formed from sagging wooden planks, old, dry and smelling of resin.

The crowd of two, three-hundred people yelled out advice and encouragement full blast through the afternoon, and fans came down under the bleachers between innings to offer icy, dripping bottles of beer that we downed in quick, gasping gulps.

It didn’t end with the games. We walked, players and fans, the sweat-soaked lot of us, across the highway afterward, replaying the games as we made our way to the lodge, there to continue our talk, inside and in boisterous groups that spilled out onto the sidewalk. More beer, and the raucous, endlessly blasting jukebox sound of country boys singing country songs.

That was Boonville on just about any weekend in the summer of 1950. That could have been just about any small town anywhere.

But sometimes when I remember baseball, I’m not playing at all. I’m in Seals Stadium in San Francisco, and younger. It’s a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1941.

We hear the haunting echo of bat against ball that fills the virtually empty stadium during pre-game practice, the shuffle of feet as the crowd begins filing in. We hear the thump of balls in gloves as the players warm up, performing one of the most effortlessly graceful of human activities, a simple game of catch between skilled ballplayers. We hear the sing-song chatter of the players.

Suddenly, the umpire-in-chief bellows, “Play ball!” The crowd cheers, and the San Francisco Seals stream out of the home team dugout just behind the square white pillow of third base, figures in loosely-fitting uniforms of white daubed with black and orange. They move with arrogant grace onto the emerald green of the outfield and rich deep brown of the infield. We leap up to join in a fresh round of cheers.

Half-stumbling with excitement, we bound down flights of concrete steps 
between rows of dark green wooden seats set apart by ornate arms of cast-iron. We reach over the low railing in left field and into the San Francisco Seals’ bullpen to pluck at the pinstriped sleeve of a hero’s garment.

It’s Pard Ballou, the great relief pitcher. He’s the best, we’re sure, in the whole Pacific Coast League – a friendly, fat-faced man who’s always there, and always, the grownups tell us, just a little “under the influence.” Well, his breath does smell kind of bad sometimes – but, boy, can Old Pard pitch.

“Hi ya, kids,” says Pard, squinting up through the bright sunlight as he turns sideways on the bullpen bench. “How ya today?” He winks, and grins in a funny, lopsided way. “Think we can beat the bums?”

Seals Stadium was a very special place, but so was the little ballpark in Boonville and the neighborhood parks of San Francisco. So are the parks and stadiums of today, whatever their size and wherever they are. Jim Lefebvre, who played long and well for the Los Angeles Dodgers, likens them to temples.

Temples? Well, it may be only a game, but think about it.

A baseball park is a place of myth, isn’t it, of tradition, and veneration and ritual and order, of wisdom being passed from generation to generation, from elder to younger.

A temple also is a place in which to pay reverence to beauty, and what’s more beautiful than the graceful motion and timing of baseball, its unique rhythm, the exquisite ebb and flow of action and anticipation, action and thought. That’s right, exquisite, and you know it, unless you’ve been watching exclusively on TV, with its commercials, instant replays and non-stop announcers.

A ballpark is a place, too, where you demonstrate faith. Everyone who enters a ballpark believes it’s always possible to “beat the bums,” that it isn’t over until the very last out of the very last inning, that the innings, the game can go on for as long as the players perform well.

The commandments in the rule book promise that. There are no clocks measuring off quarters and halves, no point during a game when there is not 
enough time left to win, no rule saying how long it should take to make three outs and complete an inning, or how long it should take to win or lose a game.

Yes, life outside the temple may not always offer quite so much hope. But if it did, who’d need religion? Who’d need baseball?

Dick Meister is a longtime San Francisco journalist. Contact him through his website www.dickmeister.com

Dick Meister: Teachers Need Strong Unions

Maria Poblet
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Like many people, I’m sure, Washington Post writer Matt Miller is confused about, “where to come down on the question of who should ‘win”” in the struggle of public employees against attempts to strip them of collective bargaining rights and otherwise weaken them.

I know which side I’m on – the public employees and their unions.  But though highly sympathetic to the public employees cause, Matt Miller is not against the employees and their unions losing some of their powers and benefits – with one major exception: Teachers.

Again, I make no exceptions. I think we should rally around the cause of all public employees. But though Miller doesn’t necessarily agree, he does make a strong argument for making special efforts in behalf of teachers. For “the  future of the country depends on the public-sector workers known as teachers.”

I guess I should make a full disclosure here:  I was formerly a member of the AFL-CIO’s American Federation of Teachers and my wife Gerry is a current member. So I’m probably prejudiced. And should be.

Anyway, Miller makes a very strong case for paying close attention to the needs and demands of teachers. As he says, “We’ll never attract the kind of talented young people we need to the teaching profession unless it pays more than it does today.”  With starting teachers pay averaging  $39,000 a year nationally and rising to a maximum of merely  $67,000, it’s no surprise to Miller that “we  draw teachers from the bottom two-thirds of the college class. For schools in poor neighborhoods, teachers come largely from the bottom third.”

Adds Miller: ” We’re the only leading nation that thinks it can stay a leading nation with a ‘strategy’ of recruiting mediocre students and praying that they’ll prove to be excellent teachers.”

Miller may not be an outright supporter of teacher unions, but he does point out that the highest performing school systems in the world all have strong teacher unions. He means the systems in countries such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea, where school administrators work closely with unions to continually improve their schools’ performances.

Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, a leading expert on the subject, says the highest performing countries have educational systems that are built around attracting, rigorously training and retraining top talent for teaching. The stress is on supporting good teachers – not on getting bad teachers out. That’s partly because there just aren’t that many bad teachers in those countries.

I agree with Matt Miller that what’s clearly needed is a national strategy to make teaching the career of choice for talented young people. Wisconsin’s math scores, for instance, put its students not only behind Korea, Finland and Taiwan, but behind Slovenia, Estonia and Lithuania. But, hey, they still outpace students in Latvia and Bulgaria . . . though barely.

As Miller notes, the only people who can change that, the only ones who can provide decent educations to Wisconsin’s children, are public employees , teachers  – teachers, furthermore, who must be given a strong voice, a unionized voice in setting their pay, benefits and working conditions.

Teachers need the firm right to collective bargaining no less than Wisconsin’s other public employees, no less than the public employees of every other state.


Dick Meister, former editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor and politics for a half-century. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his columns.

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