Dick Meister

A fitting memorial to labor’s dead and injured

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

We’re coming up on another Workers Memorial Day April 28 – a day when organized labor and its allies honor the millions of men and women who’ve needlessly suffered and died because of workplace hazards and to demand that the government act to lessen the hazards.

It’s certain that unless federal authorities do act to expand and adequately enforce the neglected job safety laws, the number of victims will remain at a terrible and unnecessarily high level.

Every year, more than 6,000 Americans are killed on the job. More than 6 million are injured, at least half of them seriously. Another 60,000 die from their injuries or from cancer, lung and heart ailments and other occupational diseases caused by exposure to toxic substances.

 Think of that: An average of at least 16 workers killed and nearly 5,500 badly hurt on each and every day, plus 135 or more dying daily from job-related illness. The financial toll also is high: More than $3 billion in health care expenses and other costs to employers and workers, such as lost wages and production.

Trying to reduce workplace dangers, always a difficult task, became even more difficult when the Bush administration took office in 2000 and began eight years of what the United Auto Workers accurately cited as  “a harsh, vindictive attack on health and safety standards.”

Under President Bush, important new health and safety regulations proposed by experts were brushed aside by the Labor Department. Job-site inspections were all but abandoned and employers were asked merely to certify that they had voluntarily complied with the existing regulations.  Fines for violations were rare, in any case, as were criminal charges against employers whose willful violations led to injury, illness or death.

There was, in short, very little enforcement of the job safety laws, and absolutely no progress in reducing workplace dangers or the ever-mounting number of work-related injuries and fatalities.

But under President Obama, there’s genuine hope for change. As Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, made clear at her swearing-in: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

Solis has shifted from reliance on voluntary compliance to stricter enforcement, hiring hundreds of new investigators and enforcers for the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health and Mine Safety Administrations. Most of them are longtime advocates for working people, some of them from organized labor. They’re holding jobs held during the Bush years by employer advocates whose main concern was shielding employers from the costs of making work safer.

Solis’ team has moved to enforce new rules to better protect some of the most endangered workers, including mine workers and crane operators. She’s also stressing the need to help the millions who suffer chronic pain in the neck, back, shoulders, arms or wrists and other suffering resulting from the endlessly repetitive movements and often heavy lifting required in many jobs today.

Those so-called ergonomic injuries are the most common  – and most neglected – of the  serious injuries suffered by U.S. workers.

Solis has put a task force to work designing a much tougher enforcement program for serious or repeat offenders, who will face mandatory job-site inspections. What’s more, she and Obama have named one of the country’s most distinguished safety experts, David Michaels of Georgetown University, to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

Michaels’ main goal is to get employers and workers and their unions to jointly develop programs that would include safety training for workers as part of an effort to meet what Michaels and other safety experts see as a great need to change  OSHA’s  direction and philosophy.

Michaels and Solis have gotten important help from congressional Democrats who introduced legislation to strengthen the safety laws, in part by increasing  penalties imposed on violators. Penalties now are so minimal that many employers simply ignore the law and consider the fines, if any, a routine cost of doing business.

The measures also call for more strongly protecting workers who report safety violations by their employers, extending the laws’ coverage to farmworkers, local and state government employees and other groups not currently covered, and otherwise strengthening workers’ job safety rights.

It’s certain, at any rate, that labor, Obama, Solis and their supporters will indeed wage the major battle for true job safety that they’ve promised and have, in fact,  already started. There could be no more fitting a memorial to the millions who’ve been needlessly maimed or killed while working to sustain themselves and their families.

Dick Meister, formerly 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 350 of his  recent columns.

Cheating U.S. workers

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The drive to strengthen workers’ rights is one of the most important ever undertaken by an American administration

Hundreds of thousands of workers are being cheated by U.S. employers who blatantly violate the laws that are supposed to guarantee workers decent wages, hours and working conditions.

That’s been going on for a long time, but rarely as extensively as it was during the administration of George W. Bush. Thankfully, Bush is gone. And thankfully, President Obama and his outstanding Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, have this month launched a major campaign to try to overcome the very serious damage of the past.

Even the name of the campaign itself is very un-Bush-like. “We Can Help,” it’s called. Bush, of course, never so much as offered help to badly exploited workers. But he did, of course, offer plenty of help to their law-breaking employers.

So, just what are Obama, Solis and their allies in the labor movement and elsewhere up to? They’re taking some very big steps to encourage workers to report employer violations of the wage and hour laws – especially low-wage workers, who are the most exploited. And they’re trying to respond as quickly as possible to the workers’ complaints.

Undocumented immigrants, who are perhaps the most exploited of all workers, are being encouraged to make complaints and are promised they won’t be punished for their illegal status. As the Labor Department explains, all workers deserve decent treatment, whatever their legal status.

Solis’ Labor Department has made the campaign a top priority. The department has already hired more than 250 new investigators, increasing the number by more than one-third. Even with a lesser number, the department recovered more than $170 million in back pay for more than 200,000 workers since Obama took office.

The key element of the campaign is to make sure that workers understand their rights under the laws and report any violations of those rights.

Certainly there’s no doubt that there are plenty of violations to report. For instance, a recent survey of workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago found thousands of rampant abuses of low-wage workers, many of them undocumented immigrants. They worked in stores, in factories and offices, at construction sites, in janitorial and food service jobs, in  warehouses, in  private homes  and elsewhere.

More than one-fourth of the workers had been paid less than the legal minimum wage, often by more than $1 an hour less. That amounted to an average of more than $50 week in underpayments on wages that averaged not much more than $300 a week to begin with.

Many of the workers had been denied overtime pay or had their pay illegally docked for the cost of tools or transportation. Some were forced work without pay before and after their regular work shifts. Slavery is the word for that – being forced to work without pay.

Although the Labor Department is relying primarily on workers themselves to report on employers’ labor law violations, the department is also getting help from the AFL-CIO, its affiliated unions and other worker advocacy groups.

They are distributing posters, fact sheets and booklets spelling out the wage and hour laws and how to report violations, arranging meetings between workers and Labor Department staffers, holding forums at union halls, and other steps.

The department also has begun a publicity campaign in English and Spanish that includes TV ads featuring prominent Latinos, such as Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, and prominent Puerto Rican actor Jimmy Smits.

Win or lose, the drive to greatly strengthen workers’ rights is one of the most important ever undertaken by an American administration. And I strongly suspect it will come in a winner.

Dick Meister, formerly 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 recent columns.

 

 

 

 

Stop mistreating working women!

David Talbot
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Dick Meister, formerly 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

Although the global recession has had a serious impact on working men and women alike, two new reports make clear that women in the United States and throughout the world have suffered most because of long-standing discrimination.

The findings come from two highly regarded sources – the United Nations’ International Labor Office (ILO), and the New Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff for President Clinton.

Above all, the reports show the critical need to combat the worldwide mistreatment of working women, especially in these times of economic distress. The initial blow of the recession was felt in work dominated by men, such as finance, manufacturing and construction. But the main impact has shifted to other areas of work, including service work, where women generally are dominant.

Nevertheless, as the CAP report notes, “Most of the jobs that have been lost have been lost by men, leaving millions of women and mothers to support their families.”

That’s a rough task for many women. For though they’re usually doing essentially the same work as men, or the equivalent of it, women earn substantially less than the men – internationally, 30 to 40 percent less, despite a narrowing of the gap in recent years. The gap is narrower within the United States, but even so, U.S. women average only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.

The pay gaps exist in part because, as the ILO’s Sara Elder says,  “We still find many more women than men taking up low pay and precarious work, either because this is the only type of job made available or because they need to find something that allows them to balance work and family responsibilities. Men do not face these same constraints.”

And it may get worse for women, even after the recession ends, since “we know from previous crises that female job-losers find it more difficult to return to work as economic recovery settles in.”

What’s needed everywhere, of course, is equal treatment for working women – paying them the same as men doing comparable work and otherwise treating them the same.

In the United States that would mean cracking down on the widespread violations of the 47-year-old Equal Pay Act that has never delivered its promise to guarantee women equal treatment on the job.

Better yet would be the passage – and strict enforcement  – of the long stalled Paycheck Fairness Act. It would close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act that have made it relatively easy for employers to discriminate against women in pay and other matters.

It’s estimated that if U.S. women were granted equal pay , they could each earn as much as $2  million more over the whole of their working lives. It’s estimated as well that equal pay would reduce the number of families living in poverty by as much as half.

Probably the most essential reform aside from paycheck fairness would be, as the CAP report recommends, worldwide updating of basic labor standards “to recognize that most workers have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible work schedules, family and medical leaves and paid sick days.” That would assure that women “who stay employed to support their families” won’t end up unemployed because of  “family-work.

At least in the United States, those and other reforms would likely win broad public support. A recent poll cited in the CAP report showed that “a large majority of Americans support new, more family-friendly workplace policies.” Eighty-five percent “said businesses that fail to adapt to needs of modern families risk losing good workers.”

And businesses that fail to adapt will be furthering the mistreatment of working women that’s gone virtually unchecked for far too many years. No matter what the recession – or its end – brings, we will not have a truly healthy economy until working women are guaranteed their full rights.

Dick Meister, formerly 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

True believers

David Talbot
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The best season of the year is finally here. Baseball season. Sure, it’s only a game – but it’s a game that can be very serious business to the young people who play it.

I once was one of them, playing in the 1940s and 1950s on some of the many semi-professional teams that once were common in San Francisco, as in many other cities, as well as on teams in the Mendocino County, Southwestern Oregon and Western Canadian Leagues.

We were true believers, all of us. For there are no heretics on a baseball diamond. We accepted, without question, that the game must be governed by the mystical number of three and its multiples. Three strikes and you’re out. Three outs per inning. Nine players per side. Nine innings per game. Sixty feet, six inches from pitcher’s mound to home plate. Ninety feet between bases.

We knew, too, that there were foul lines within which we had to play, and that if we were hurt or weary, we had better stay in the game anyway. If we left, there was no returning. And we knew we had to do everything, to hit, to run and to field.

It was that way because there was no other possible way for it to be, the way it had been since the 1800s, when mustachioed men wearing dark suits and derby hats had laid down the rules.

The ball, for instance: It is ideally sized. At 5 to 5.25 ounces and 2.86 to 2.94 inches round, noted Roger Angell, baseball’s poet laureate, the ball “is a perfect object for a man’s hand,” one that “instantly suggests its purpose. . . to be thrown a considerable distance – thrown hard and with precision . . . If it were a fraction of an inch larger or smaller, a few centigrams heavier or lighter, the game would be utterly different. . . Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand . . .You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody.”

And that 90 feet between bases, as sportswriter Red Smith observed, “represents man’s closest approach to perfection. The fastest man in the world hits a grounder to an infielder, who fields it cleanly.  The hitter must lose the race.  But if the ball is bobbled or slowed by the grass, he can win. That’s perfect balance.”

There were unquestioned patterns of behavior as well as rules to guide us. We invariably swung three bats round and round over our heads – Louisville Sluggers, naturally – as we waited our turn to hit, and glared threateningly at the pitcher as we stood in the batter’s box pawing at the ground.

We glanced coolly down to the third base coaching box where coaches and managers ran their fingers over the bills of their caps, across the front of their uniform shirts, along the outside of their thighs, pinched their noses, scratched their ears, passing us secret orders we never dared challenge, telling us to hit, take a pitch, bunt.

In the field, we spat on the ground and into our gloves between pitches, rubbing the saliva deep into the leather of the pocket as we earnestly chattered, and chattered.
“Get him out, Mick . . . humbabe . . . you can do it . . . YOU CAN DO IT! Easyout! Easyout!

That’s how the professionals did it, and we were certain, many of us, that our play was preparing us for professional careers.

Like apprentices in any other trade, we had to master a special vocabulary. If a pitcher was left handed, he was a “southpaw,” of course. Men on base were “ducks on the pond.” As a second baseman or shortstop, I was part of the “keystone combination.”
Unfortunately, I was a “banjo hitter” as well, one of those batters who hit too many “Texas Leaguers” and easily caught “cans of corn,” and had too many “K’s” – strikeouts – charged against him.

We never asked how those terms came to be used, for the “why” of things didn’t concern young ballplayers, only the “what.”

We were careful never to step on the white foul line as we trotted on and off the field, although we did kick first or third base on the way by.  It was things like that which caused – or didn’t cause – all the otherwise inexplicable happenings in baseball, a game in which the element of chance was as important as the precise rules we followed.

There was no other way to explain such things as why a ball hit to a particular spot in one inning would take a nice easy bounce into your waiting glove, but in the very next inning, a ball hit to the same spot would bounce up and over your glove.

That’s why I ate a liverwurst sandwich on a roll – always liverwurst, always on a roll — and washed it down with tomato juice – always tomato juice – before every game.  Boy, how I learned to hate liverwurst; but once I had followed such a lunch by getting four hits.  It had to be the liverwurst.

Standing out on the field we learned our importance. We were part of a team, sure, but each of us stood apart, alone.  Each of us had a unique role to fill if we were to be a team, for there were nine of us, and nine different positions.

When the ball was hit, only one of us would reach it, and that player would be the center of attention; everybody would be watching, the other players, the spectators.  What happened next in the game would be solely his doing. He was in control of his destiny and the destiny of those around him.

It was the same when your team was at bat, in that tense, electric moment before the ball was hit and attention shifted from batter to fielder. You stood alone at home plate waiting for the pitch, the entire team relying on what you would do.

There was no faking and no hiding. You did what you did in public. Your performance, your past, was never forgotten. It was etched forever in cold, hard statistics, facts that could never be challenged. Whatever you did would be compared to what others were doing, or had done, no matter when they had done it.

You were competing against players alive and dead, whose recorded performances would never die. Many of them were hitting or had hit .300 – and so should you. Many were playing or had played errorless games – and so should you.

And those umpires we argued with – the argument was just another part of the ritual of baseball.  We knew a pitch was not a strike or a ball because it crossed or didn’t cross home plate at a point delineated in the rulebook. It was a strike or a ball because the umpire said it was a strike or a ball.  A base runner was not out because we tagged him before he reached the base.  He was out because the umpire said he was out.

We learned those things, and more.  But we, of course, thought we were only learning baseball.

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

Si Se Puede: The legacy of Cesar Chavez

David Talbot
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(Scroll down for a personal note from Dick Meister)

March 31st is a special day in eleven states, including California, and in dozens of cities and counties nationwide– and should be. It’s Cesar Chavez Day, honoring the late founder of the United Farm Workers union on the 83rd anniversary of his birth.

Certainly there are few people in any field more deserving of such an honor, certainly no one I’ve met in more than 50 years of labor reporting.

I first met Cesar Chavez when I was reporting on labor for the SF Chronicle.  It was a hot summer night in 1965 in the little San Joaquin Valley town of Delano, California. Chavez, shining black hair trailing across his smooth brown forehead, wearing a red plaid shirt that had become almost a uniform, sat behind a makeshift desk topped with bright red Formica, deadly serious but quick to smile.

 “Si se puede,” he said repeatedly to me, a highly skeptical reporter, as we talked deep into the early morning hours there in the cluttered shack that served as headquarters for him 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 had 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.

Although they did the indispensable work of harvesting the food that sustains us all, farm workers typically were paid at or below the poverty level, had few fringe benefits and very little legal protection from employer mistreatment. Most lacked even such on-the-job amenities as toilets and fresh drinking water, and were regularly exposed to pesticide poisoning and other hazards. Their living conditions were generally as abominable.

The futile attempts to arm the workers with the essential weapon of unionization began with  the Industrial Workers of the World,  who stormed across western fields early in the last century. Next came Communists, socialists, AFL and CIO organizers. All their efforts had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growers and their powerful political and corporate allies.

I was certain Chavez’ effort would be no different.  I was wrong.  I had not accounted for the tactical brilliance, creativity, courage and just plain stubbornness of Cesar Chavez, a sad-eyed, disarmingly soft-spoken man who talked of militancy in calm, measured tones, 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, which then sought out — and won — widespread support from influential outsiders.

The key weapon of this United Farm Workers union was the boycott. The UFW’s boycotts against grape and lettuce growers and wineries in the late 1960s won the first farm union contracts in history.  That in turn led to enactment in 1975 of the California law — also a first — that requires growers to bargain collectively with workers who vote for unionization. That has brought  substantial improvements in the pay, benefits, working conditions and general status of the state’s farmworkers.

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.

As Chavez explained,  “We have our bodies and spirits and the justice of our cause as our weapons.”

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, is co-author of “A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers (Macmillan). Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

Sidebar: Let’s truly honor Cesar Chavez

It’s way past time that Congress declared the birthdate of Cesar Chavez a national holiday. President Obama agrees. So do the millions of people who are expected to sign petitions being circulated by the United Farm Workers, the union founded by Chavez. And so do Democratic Rep. Joe Barca of California and 43 co-sponsors who have introduced a bill designating March 31st as Cesar Chavez Day nationwide.

President Obama says Chavez should be honored  “for what he’s taught us about making America a stronger, more just, and more prosperous nation” and for providing inspirational strength “as farm workers and laborers across America continue to struggle for fair treatment and fair wages.”

Like Martin Luther Jr., who’s rightly honored with a national holiday, Chavez inspired and energized millions of people worldwide to seek – and to win – basic human rights that had long been denied them, and inspired millions of others to join the struggle.  He, too, showed that the poor and oppressed can prevail against even the most powerful opponents – if they can organize themselves and adopt non-violence as their principal tactic.

A national holiday would be a well-deserved tribute, not only to Chavez, but also to Latinos generally, to organized labor and to all those who do the hard, dirty and dangerous work that puts food on our tables.

–Dick Meister

A good, stubborn Irishman

David Talbot
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He was one of the last of the old-line labor leaders who once had great influence in many cities. He was Irish-Catholic, of course, a resident of the city’s principal working class district, and from one of the blue-collar trades.

 His name was Joseph Michael O’Sullivan. He had been president of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council and for four decades head of its main carpenters union local.
 
Those who would truly understand the history of San Francisco and in  particular the key role organized labor has played in the city’s development, as in that of so many other cities, must pay attention to the memory of Joe O’Sullivan.

 He was a very good man. He also was a very stubborn man. I remember, for instance, that time in 1976 when he insisted on going to jail.

 O’Sullivan and three other construction union officials had been sentenced to jail for having led a strike by municipal craftsmen — who, as public employees, supposedly did not have the legal right to strike. O’Sullivan — then aged 74 and ailing — didn’t have to go to jail, since union lawyers were certain they could overturn the sentences, as they ultimately did.

The other union officials were content to have the lawyers handle the matter through court appeals, but O’Sullivan refused to be “a damned labor bureaucrat.” He preferred to be a labor activist, and so turned himself over to the San Francisco County sheriff for a five-day stay behind bars.

 O’Sullivan thought that was a small price to pay for the badly needed opportunity it would give the city’s unions to bounce back from the severe beating they had suffered in the craftsmen’s strike. Surely, he thought, the unions would mount a major campaign to protest the jailing of one of their best known and most respected leaders over one of the most fundamental of labor rights.

 That would draw maximum attention to the injustice of a court ruling which had denied that fundamental right to thousands of working people. It would show that the unions still were capable of the militancy that had earned San Francisco a reputation as one of the country’s premier “union towns.”

And it would be an ideal way for the unions to seek the support essential to restoring their former influence — the support of public employees and others in the heavily non-union white collar occupations that had come to dominate the city’s economy and that of so many other cities as unionized blue collar occupations once did.

 But the unions allowed Joe O’Sullivan to enter jail, and to leave jail, quietly and alone.  There were no protest rallies. no demonstrations, no marches, no angry speeches, no picketing, no sympathy strikes, none of the militant actions that had marked labor’s rise to economic, political and social prominence.
 There was only grumbling, among most of the city’s other labor leaders, that O’Sullivan was “grandstanding” in trying to get them top rely on more than just largely unpublicized courtroom arguments.

 But the arguments won the unions very little. About all they got was a narrow court ruling that, although indeed overturning the decision which had ordered the strike leaders to jail, did so on purely technical grounds. The ruling did not upset the previous finding that city employees could not legally strike.

Union strategists argue to this day whether activist tactics would have countered that anti-unionism of the 1970s, as they argue whether such tactics would be the best way to counter the anti-unionism that has plagued the labor movement of San Francisco and other cities ever since.
 
Such questions rarely even occurred to O’Sullivan. Activism was virtually the only tactic he knew. He learned it very early in life, as an 11-year-old telegraph messenger working with the Irish Republican Army in 1913, against the British forces occupying his native village of Tralle, County Kerry.

 Young O’Sullivan, entrusted by the British authorities to deliver messages to the occupying British troops, showed the messages first to local IRA leaders — despite the leaders’ warnings “that if I was caught, it would be the finish for me.”
 
 So why did he do it? “The messages were very important, they wanted them, and I felt that whatever I could do for Ireland … well, I would do it.”
 
 O’Sullivan left the messenger’s job to work with his father, a master carpenter and secretary of the carpenters union in Tralle, but continued his IRA activities.
 
“Whenever they were going to ambush a British lorry,” he recalled, “the IRA had to know when it was leaving to come out in the country. So I would put out a gas lamp, then another boy a mile away would see that and he would put out another one.  That would be the signal. The IRA would did a trench in the road and the lorry would fall into it. Our guys would call on them to surrender. We’d take the rifles and ammunition, and their shoes, and then make them walk back into town. . .
 “We never went to kill them — though people were killed, that was for sure . . . But there was more caskets going back to England than were being lowered in the ground in Ireland.”

 O’Sullivan’s IRA activities ended abruptly one night when two British soldiers burst into the cottage where he lived and dragged him away at gun point after O’Sullivan’s mother, certain he was to be killed, “started throwing holy water on me.”  Once outside the cottage, O’Sullivan knocked away the rifle of one of the soldiers and ran. Although wounded by the other soldier, he escaped, eventually making his way to the United States.

 O’Sullivan arrived in San Francisco in 1925, seeking work through the carpenters union local he eventually would head. At the time, the local was leading a major strike aimed at forcing contractors to bargain with construction unions on pay and working conditions.  Contractors had brought in more than 1,000 non-union strikebreakers from Southern California to replace the strikers, and they became the striking union’s main targets.

 “We formed ‘wrecking crews’ — ‘thugs,’ they used to call us in the newspapers — and got $1.50 a day from the union to get into a job, roust the scabs, break their tools,” O’Sullivan remembered. “When we shut a job down, nobody worked — they got out fast. We just used our hands, but we worked the scabs over good …. Maybe it was the right thing to do, maybe it was wrong — but that’s the way it got done.”

 At one point, O’Sullivan and the six other members of his “wrecking crew” were arrested for the murder of a strikebreaker. They were held three weeks, until two other men confessed to the killing.

 The construction unions lost the strike after a year of fierce struggle and O’Sullivan, blacklisted by employers, had to move to the  city of Vallejo across San Francisco Bay to find work. But he later returned to San Francisco and, in 1935, was elected to head Carpenters Local No. 22.  O’Sullivan held that job until 1977, helping lead carpenters and other building tradesmen in the struggles that finally won them the right to effective union representation.

 The relatively high pay and benefits and decent working conditions of the tradesmen today are taken for granted. But the workers wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for their unions, which had to fight hard to get employers to grant even the simplest amenities.  O’Sullivan’s nephew James vividly recalled his uncle’s great pride in getting “fresh water and toilets on the job for the carpenters and a pension plan to take care of them when they grew old.”

O’Sullivan was stubborn to the end. He left union office only because of the adoption, over the strong objections of O’Sullivan and many of his local’s members, of an amendment to the carpenters’ national constitution that prohibited anyone over 70 — O’Sullivan included — from seeking union office.

But he was no grim advocate, despite his stubbornness, dedication and determination. I recall watching him turn on his considerable Gaelic charm in Israel, where he had gone with a delegation of touring labor leaders in 1973. The most important day of the tour was March 17, when the leaders were to confer with David Ben-Gurion.

As the senior member of the delegation, O’Sullivan greeted the legendary former prime minister, who stood before the visitors with an air of immense and almost forbidding dignity.  Joseph Michael O’Sullivan, looking and sounding only as someone who had been baptized in Ireland with such a name could look and sound, quickly broke the ice.

 “Mr. Ben-Gurion,” he said, “let me be the first to wish you a happy St. Patrick’s Day.”

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

Harry Bridges: Working class hero

David Talbot
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He died 20 years ago this month, but I can still see him, a tall, wiry, gray-haired, hawk-nosed man. I can hear him.

I see him pacing restlessly back and forth behind the podium at union meetings, nervously twirling a gavel, puffing incessantly on a cigarette. I hear him calling on members, white, black, Asian, Latino, in the broad accent of his native Australia, actually encouraging debate and dissent.

He died in San Francisco at the age of 88 — Harry Bridges, co-founder and for 40 years president of one of the most influential organizations in this or any other country, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.

Bridges often was irritating to the ILWU’s friends and foes alike. He was irascible and obstinate. But he was unquestionably one of the past century’s greatest leaders.

Bridges was not in it for money. His salary as union president was far less than he would have made had he remained a working longshoreman. Bridges was in it because of his unswerving belief in “the rank-and-file,” as he once told me, a naive and inquisitive young Chronicle reporter — “the working stiff, that’s who! Can you understand that?”

I understood, eventually. And though I and others sometimes harshly questioned Bridges’ specific notions of what was needed by working people, none could legitimately question his incredible commitment, skill and integrity.

“The basic thing about this lousy capitalist system,” Bridges declared, “is that the workers create the wealth, but those who own it, the rich, keep getting richer and the poor get poorer.”

Harry Bridges’ lifelong task, then, was to shift wealth from those who owned it to those who created it – a task he began in 1934, when he led his fellow longshoremen in a strike aimed at winning true collective bargaining rights from West Coast shipowners.

As Bridges’ biographer Charles Larrowe recalled, “The shipowners said ‘no,’ said it with tear gas vigilantes and billy clubs wielded by cops who thought they were in the front lines against a communist takeover. Up and down the coast, the waterfront was turned into a battlefield.”

Police bullets killed 10 men during the three-month-long strike that also prompted a four-day general strike in San Francisco. But the longshoremen ultimately got what they had demanded, most importantly, an end to the notorious system of job allocation known as the “shape-up. “

Previously, jobs were parceled out by hiring bosses in exchange for kickbacks from the longshoremen who lined up on the docks every morning clamoring for work. But after the strike, job assignments were made by an elected union dispatcher at a union-controlled hiring hall, using a rotation system that spread the work evenly among longshoremen. The victory was downright revolutionary, and had a profound impact on workers and employers nationwide.

Within two years, Bridges joined with Lou Goldblatt, the brilliant young leader of the warehousemen who worked closely with longshoremen on the docks. They brought the two groups together into a single powerful union. the ILWU, under the banner of the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations — the CIO.

The union ultimately extended its jurisdiction to virtually all waterfront workers on the Pacific coasts of the United States and Canada and to workers in a wide variety of occupations in Hawaii.

Bridges and Goldblatt used their potent base to help lead drives by other CIO unions that spread unionization from the waterfront to many other industries throughout the West at a time when employers treated workers as chattel, giving them little choice but to accept near-starvation wages and whatever else the employers demanded.

For the ILWU, Bridges and Goldblatt drafted a union constitution that still is unique in the control it grants members. Many union constitutions give members very little beyond the right of paying dues in exchange for the services provided them by the union’s securely entrenched bureaucrats. But the ILWU constitution guarantees that nothing of importance can be done without direct vote of the rank-and-file.

No one can take ILWU office except through a vote of the entire membership; no agreement with employers can be approved except by a vote of all members; the union cannot take a position on anything without membership approval.

The ILWU helped set important precedents that enhanced the civil liberties of everyone through its strong opposition to those who tried to deny constitutional rights to Bridges and others by labeling them Communists. The union’s efforts included an eight-year-battle against attempts to deport Bridges to Australia that ended with a Supreme Court ruling that enabled him to become a U.S. citizen in 1945.

The ILWU under Bridges was an outspoken foe of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, even at a time when most other unions enthusiastically supported involvement. And members backed their opposition to oppressive regimes abroad by refusing to handle cargo bound for or coming from their countries.

Thanks in large part to Bridges, the ILWU also was one of the first unions to be thoroughly integrated racially, and otherwise has always been probably the country’s most socially conscious union. And its members, now including women, have long been among the most highly compensated workers in any field, while at the same time benefitting from labor-saving equipment that makes their work easier. The new equipment and methods on the docks have brought employers higher profits, which union negotiators have made certain they share with dock workers.
The ILWU used its employer-provided pension funds to finance construction of low-rent apartments in San Francisco’s St. Francis Square, an extremely rare example of what the union calls “cooperative, affordable, integrated working-class housing.”

Harry Bridges led the way to that and much more which benefited the working stiffs to whom he devoted his life — and many, many others. As a newspaper that once reviled him as a dangerous radical said on his death, “He sought the best of all possible worlds. This one is much better due to his efforts.” Boy, is it.

Dick Meister, formerly 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 recent columns.

Let the Eagle Fly!

David Talbot
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The long and dramatic struggle for basic labor and civil rights by the California farmworkers led by Cesar Chavez is wonderfully told in an exceptional new musical, “Let the Eagle Fly,” that’s now playing a limited engagement in San Jose, the city where Chavez began the organizing career that brought him worldwide acclaim.

The musical score is excellent, as are the musicians and the actors – some in their teens or younger, others with broad experience. They tell the story of Chavez and the early struggles of the farm workers union he founded in 1964 and led for three decades – in lively song and dance, often with humor. And for all its artistry, the story they tell is accurate, down to small details. I know first-hand of the events dramatized, since I covered them in detail as the SF Chronicle’s labor editor.

Chavez’ start as an organizer for the Community Services Organization, his unwavering belief in the non-violent tactics of Mohandas Gandhi, his fasts and other personal sacrifices and those of his sometimes reluctant family . . .

The rushed and exhausting motions of vegetable pickers, wielding 18-inch hoes as they scurry over the fields like spiders, bent double, rhythmically bending, stooping and straightening, as they scoop up lettuce, carrots and other produce. Bend and pick. Bend and pick. Endlessly . . .

The fruit pickers, making their way swiftly through vineyards, reaching high to pluck the grapes. Reaching, stretching and picking. Reach, stretch, pick. Endlessly. Fast and endlessly.

The racist growers who fought fiercely to avoid giving their Chicano grape pickers decent pay and working conditions . . . the Kern County sheriff who sided with the growers . . . the dogged determination of Chavez and his followers . . . the nationwide grape boycott that finally won the workers the right to bargain with the growers and, in doing so, finally win union contracts guaranteeing them decent pay and working conditions . . . Chavez’ untimely death in 1993 . . .

The words and music show and tell all that and much more, and the audience can’t help but be drawn into the dramatic finale. We were quickly on our feet, cheering, applauding, clapping rhythmically, singing along with the actors, followed by a standing, cheering, much deserved ovation.

Only four more performances are left in the run of “Let the Eagle Fly” in the San Jose City College Theater – Thursday March 25, at 8 p.m.; Friday March 26, at 8 p.m.; Sunday, March 28, at 2 p.m.; and a final performance Wednesday, March 31, at 7:30 p.m. Details on ticket availability, prices and directions are available at www.lettheeaglefly.com.

Viva la huelga!

San Francisco writer Dick Meister is the co-author of “A Long Time Coming: The Struggle to Unionize America’s Farm Workers (Macmillan).

Safe at last?

David Talbot
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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 recent columns.

It’s called musculoskeletal disorder or MSD, the most common of the serious injuries suffered by U.S. workers. But because corporate employers fear that greater public awareness would force them to spend more on job safety, MSD has remained one of the least understood of injuries.

The latest government figures show that more than 60 percent of the million or more on-the-job injuries reported annually are MSD-related. Some of the victims are permanently disabled, and many more have to take time off from work while their injuries heal.

The victims include computer operators, factory and construction workers, meat and poultry processors, hospital and restaurant employees, supermarket clerks and many others.  They suffer serious neck, shoulder and back problems, chronically sore arms and wrists and other repetitive motion injuries resulting from work that requires them to be in almost constant motion, bending, reaching, typing, or frequently lifting heavy objects.

The first serious government efforts to combat the rapidly growing problem of MSD came ten years ago, in the final days of the Clinton administration. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued a lengthy set of so-called ergonomic regulations that were designed to lessen the dangers of MSD.

The regulations, which had taken three years to draft, covered such things as how long and how many breaks workers in particular occupations should get, what protective equipment should be issued to them, how their work stations should be designed and hundreds of related matters.

That was way too much for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other corporate employer representatives. They got their Republican allies, who controlled Congress, to repeal OSHA’s regulations just before the decidedly anti-labor George W. Bush succeeded Clinton.

Certainly neither Bush nor his OSHA appointees would even consider such impingements on their corporate friends. Signing the legislation that repealed the ergonomic regulations was one of Bush’s first acts as president. He followed that quickly by revoking 19 previously approved grants that were to go to unions, universities and labor-management groups to finance safety and health training programs for small business employers and particularly vulnerable groups such as construction workers and immigrants.

Bush’s OSHA appointees, many of them former executives of the industries they were supposed to regulate, blocked, withdrew or weakened dozens of other safety regulations in addition to those covering MSD. They discontinued safety education and training programs, worked with Congress to cut their own barely adequate budgets and instead of enforcing the safety laws, stressed  “voluntary compliance” by employers.

But now comes Barack Obama and his labor and Democratic Party allies to resume the fight for the ergonomic regulations President Clinton had been forced to abandon.

The initial proposals of President Obama’s OSHA appointees are modest. They’re asking merely that employers note, on the accident reports they are required to file, whether the injury was MSD-related. No such designation is currently required, which makes it difficult – if not impossible – for OSHA to collect the accurate data required to develop a program for effectively dealing with MSD, the most serious safety problem faced by American workers.

Corporate employers headed by the Chamber of Commerce oppose even that simple reform. They fear it would be a first step toward development of an ergonomic safety program that could cost employers millions of dollars to implement.

It also could bring badly needed protections to U.S. workers. But workers’ concerns are, of course, of secondary interest to the Chamber of Commerce and its Republican friends. They’re not much interested in helping working people. Their role is to further the profit-seeking of employers, even if that should come at the expense of the men and women who do the nation’s work.

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 recent columns.

Obits for sale

David Talbot
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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 recent columns.

Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins.  But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your profit chasing. I mean those who pay the Chronicle for running their loved ones’ death notices on the paper’s obituary pages.

Sure, the paper’s not making anywhere near as much as it once did from other classified ads, but don’t try to make up for it by outrageously exploiting the saddened friends and families of the recently deceased.

The basic price for death notices is $16 per printed line per day – $112 per column inch (about seven lines of type).  Those 1×1½ inch photos that sit atop many obits cost about $135 more. If you also want the obit on the Chronicle’s website, that will be another $25, please. And if you want the obit to run for a longer period, for say a week, that can get quite pricey – as much as  $784 per inch.

On a typical day this week, 40 notices ran on the Chronicle’s three pages of paid obits, 21 with photos. They ranged from two to 14 inches each and cost from about $225 to about $1570 to run for that one day. That’s right – $1570, plus the $135 charge for those with photos.

Like all papers, the Chronicle also runs unpaid news obituaries of particularly prominent people that are researched and written by the newspaper’s staffers or by an outside news agency that serves the paper. The paid obits are usually written by members of the deceased’s family or by employees of the mortuary that’s involved.

So, it’s like this: If you’re well known, it probably won’t cost your family or friends a dime to notify the public and remind people of your life story. But if you’re just plain folks, it’ll cost family or friends – and probably cost them dearly.  But at least your story will be told by friendly observers, eager to stress the good over the bad, eager to give you a proper send-off – if they can afford the Chronicle’s price for doing so.

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 recent columns.

State by state, unions matter

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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 recent columns.

Union members invariably have better pay and benefits than non-union workers. But, as a new study shows, the number of workers who’ve joined unions varies widely from state to state.

Even in some states with a relatively high number of union members, the number is only a small percentage of the state’s overall workforce, according to the study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

For example: Texas , the country’s second largest state, has the eighth highest number of union members — 615,000. But that’s only 6 percent of the Texas workforce. It is, in fact, the country’s fourth lowest rate of unionization and less than half the national average of 13.6 percent.

It’s no coincidence that Texas is a so-called right-to-work state that prohibits unions from negotiating contracts that include union shop provisions which require workers to join the union that represents them in dealing with employers. So why should workers in those states join the union when they can get the union’s services and the pay and benefits it negotiates without even paying dues?

Twenty-one other states have right-to-work laws, most in the South, Southwest and Midwest. They include North and South Carolina, where the percentage of workers in unions is at a national low of less than five percent.  It’s at a national high of more than 25 percent in New York and Hawaii.

California, the nation’s largest state, has the most union members — 2.6 million or 18 percent of its workers.  At the other end of the national scale, the numbers drop way down to Wyoming’s total of less than 20,000 unionized workers, only 9 percent of that right-to-work state’s workforce.

Public employees, who make up 10 to 20 percent of the states’ workforces, have unionization rates ranging from below 30 percent to more than 60 percent.
But what, specifically, do they and the 17 million other U.S. workers who’ve unionized get that other workers don’t get?

 The Center’s study found that union members’ pay is generally about 15 percent higher than that of non-union workers — roughly $2.50 or 15 percent more an hour for an average hourly rate of $6.25.  Union members also typically get benefits that many, if not most, non-union workers lack, such as employer-financed health insurance and pensions.

The conclusion should be obvious. The study’ s author, John Schmitt, noted that the findings show clearly that “unions substantially improved the pay and benefits of workers in every state.”

Beyond that, unionized workers have a greater say, not only about their working conditions, but also in political affairs and community activities, given organized labor’s prominence in such matters.

A large part of the reason many workers nevertheless remain outside of unions is the notoriously lax enforcement of the laws that were designed to guarantee working Americans the unfettered right to unionization. 

His findings, said Schmitt, “strongly suggest that better protection of workers right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits of workers in every state.”

The Employee Free Choice Act that’s long been stalled in Congress would provide the needed protection by cracking down on the widespread violation of labor laws. Many employers illegally interfere in unionization drives by disciplining, firing or otherwise intimidating union organizers and supporters.  Even those employers who recognize a union as their employees’ representative often refuse to bargain with the union and discipline employees who protest.

Until the Free Choice Act or something much like it is enacted, the growth of unions in California and every other state will be stunted.
                                         
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 recent columns.

A union that made black history

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The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was a pioneering union that led the battle from the l930s to l950s against racial discrimination that laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the l960s. 

Few of the groups that we should honor during Black History Month are more deserving than the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a pioneering union that played a key role in the winning of equal rights by African Americans. The union, the first to be founded by African Americans, was involved as much in political as in economic activity, joining with the NAACP to serve as the major political vehicle of African Americans from the late 1930s through the 1950s. It led the drives in those years against racial discrimination in employment, housing, education and other areas that laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The need for a porters’ union was distressingly obvious. Porters commonly worked 12 or more hours a day, six or even seven days a week, on the Pullman Company’s luxurious sleeping car coaches for a mere $72.50 a month. And out of that, they had to pay for their meals, uniforms, even the polish they used to shine passengers’ shoes. They got no fringe benefits, although they could ride the trains for half-fare on their days off – providing they were among the very few with the time and money to do so. And providing they didn’t ride a Pullman coach. Pay was so low porters often had to draw on the equally meager earnings of their wives, almost invariably employed as domestics, to pay the rent at month’s end. It was a marginal and humiliating experience.

Porters were rightly proud of their work, a pride that showed in their smiling, dignified bearing. But they knew that no matter how well they performed, they would never be promoted. They could never be conductors. Those jobs were reserved for white men. Porters knew most of all that their white passengers and white employers controlled everything. It was they alone who decided what the porters must do and what they’d get for doing it. No point in arguing. No point in even correcting the many passengers who called all porters “George” — as in George Pullman, their boss — whatever their actual names, just as slaves had been called by their masters’ given names. When a passenger pulled the bell cord, porters were to answer swiftly and cheerfully. Just do what the passengers asked – or demanded. Shine their shoes, fetch them drinks, make their beds, empty their cuspidors. No questions, no complaints, no protests. No rights. Nothing better epitomized the huge distance between black and white in American society. Hundreds of porters who challenged the status quo by daring to engage in union activity or other concerted action were fired.

But finally, the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt granted workers, black and white, the legal right to unionize, and finally, in 1937, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters won a union contract from Pullman. The contract was signed precisely 12 years after union founder and president A. Philip Randolph had called the union’s first organizing meeting in New York City. But the long struggle was well worth it. The contract pulled the porters out of poverty. It brought them pay at least equal to that of unionized workers in many other fields, a standard work week, full range of fringe benefits and, most important, the right to continue to bargain collectively with Pullman on those and other vital matters. Union President Randolph and Vice President C.L. Dellums, who succeeded him in 1968, led the drive that pressured President Roosevelt into creating a Fair Employment Practices Commission aimed at combating discrimination in housing as well as employment. FDR agreed to set up the commission — a model for several state commissions – only after Randolph and Dellums threatened to lead a march on Washington by more than 100,000 black workers and others who were demanding federal action against discrimination.

Dellums and Randolph struggled as hard against discrimination inside the labor movement, particularly against the practice of unions setting up segregated locals, one for white members, one for black members. Randolph, elected in 1957 as the AFL-CIO’s first black vice president, long was known as the civil rights conscience of the labor movement, often prodding federation President George Meany and other conservative AFL-CIO leaders to take stands against racial discrimination.

The sleeping car coaches that once were the height of travel luxury have long since disappeared, and there are very few sleeping car porters in this era of less-than-luxurious train travel. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters is gone, too. But before the union disappeared, it had reached goals as important as any ever sought by an American union – or any other organization. Dick Meister, formerly 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 recent columns.

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

Dick Meister: Combating workplace violence

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Organized labor and its allies are rightly alarmed over the high incidence of on-the-job accidents that have killed or maimed many thousands of workers. But they haven’t forgotten – nor should we forget – the on-the-job violence that also afflicts many thousands.

Consider this: Every year, almost two million American men and women are the victims of violent crime at their workplaces. That often forces the victims to stay off work for a week or more and costs their employers more than $60 billion a year in lost productivity.

The crimes are the tenth leading cause of all workplace injuries. They range from murder to verbal or written abuse and threatening behavior and harassment, including bullying by employers and supervisors.

Women have been particularly victimized. At least 30,000 a year are raped or otherwise sexually assaulted while on the job. The actual total is undoubtedly much higher, since it’s estimated that only about one-fourth of such crimes are reported to the police.

Estimates are that more than 900,000 of all on-the-job crimes go unreported yearly, including a large percentage of what’s thought to be some 13,000 cases annually that involve boyfriends or husbands attacking women at their workplaces.

The Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU), which represents many of the victimized workers, cites that as an example of the job violence problem that is often distorted by media coverage that “would lead us to believe that most workplace violence involves worker against worker situations.”

The union says that has focused many employers “on identifying troubled employees or disgruntled workers who might turn into violent predators at a moment’s notice. But in fact, 62 percent of all violence at worksites is caused by outsiders.”

As you might expect, those most vulnerable to the violence are workers who exchange money with the public, deliver passengers, goods or services, work alone or in small groups during late night or early morning hours in high-crime areas or wherever they have extensive contact with the public.

That includes police, security guards, water meter readers and other utility workers, telephone and cable TV installers, letter carriers, taxi drivers, flight attendants, probation officers and teachers. Convenience store clerks and other retail workers account for fully one-fifth of the victims.

The American Federation of Teachers is so concerned that it has provided each of its 1.4 million members a $100,000 life insurance policy payable if the teacher dies as the result of workplace violence.

The major violence victims also include health care and social service workers such as visiting nurses, and employees of nursing homes, psychiatric facilities and prisons. They suffer two-thirds of all physical assaults. Many of the victims regularly deal with volatile, abusive and dangerous clients, often alone because of the understaffing that’s become all too common.

It could get even worse, at least for some workers. The RWDSU warns that today’s troubled economic times create additional threats. The danger is especially great for retail workers whose stores are likely to face increased incidents of theft, some involving gun-wielding robbers.

The RWDSU and other unions have been pushing for recognition of workplace violence as an occupational as well as criminal justice issue. That would put it under the purview of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and state job safety agencies.

The federal and state agencies could then issue enforceable regulations designed to lessen the on-the-job dangers of violence, as they do for other hazardous working conditions. A few states do that already, but only for a very limited number of industries.

OSHA has issued guidelines for workers in late-night retail jobs, cab drivers and some healthcare workers, but the guidelines are strictly voluntary. Although the unions’ top priority is for legally binding regulations, they also are pressing employers to meanwhile voluntarily implement violence prevention programs.

Currently, only about one-fourth of them have such programs or any guidelines at all. The RWDSU ‘s Health and Safety Department is offering to help the other employers develop programs.

We have federal and state standards, laws and regulations designed to protect working Americans from many of the serious on-the-job hazards they face daily. Yet we have generally failed to lay down firm guidelines for protecting workers from the workplace violence that’s one of the most dangerous hazards of all.

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 recent columns.

Know Your Class

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

When Jack Hall died, flags were flown at half-staff throughout Hawaii, longshoremen closed the ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego for 24 hours, and thousands of other workers in Hawaii and all along the west coasts of the United States and Canada also stopped work to show their respect.

That was 40 years ago. Yet Jack Hall, one of America’s greatest labor leaders, is still remembered fondly by many working people. In Hawaii, where he was regional director of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, many ILWU members had a paid holiday on Jan. 2, the date of his death. Others will have a holiday on the Feb. 28th anniversary of Hall’s birth.

It would be hard to exaggerate Jack Hall’s importance. He was director of organization for the ILWU and one of its two vice presidents when a stroke killed him in 1971 at age 55 in San Francisco. But it was not what he had done during the previous 18 months in the drafty, run-down headquarters presided over by the legendary Harry Bridges that made Hall extraordinary.

Rather, it was what Hall had done before then in Hawaii, where he served for more than a quarter-century as the ILWU’s regional director. He was the key leader in bringing industrial democracy to Hawaii, transforming Hawaii from virtually a feudalistic territory controlled by a few huge financial interests into a modern pluralistic state in which workers and their unions have a major voice.

As former Gov. John Burns of Hawaii said, Hall Brought about “the full flowering of democracy in our islands.”

Hall’s first job was as a sailor in 1932. He sailed to the Far East, where he saw grinding poverty that sickened and angered him and, he later recalled, “determined which side of the fence I was on.” Hall landed in Hawaii four years later, a tall, skinny 26-year-old sent by the Sailors Union to help striking longshoremen win union recognition. Hall soon emerged as a leader of the longshoremen and later as a principal leader in organizing sugar and pineapple plantations.

Virtually all phases of life in the islands were controlled by five extremely powerful holding companies, popularly known as “the Big Five,” that owned the plantations. The workers, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Puerto Rican and others, were purposely segregated by race and ethnicity to keep them from acting jointly. They lived in company housing on the plantations where they worked, bought their food and clothing in company stores there, and had little choice but to do exactly what the bosses told them to do, at pay of less than 50 cents an hour.
The battles waged by Hall and his fellow organizers to overcome the employers’ absolute domination of their workers’ lives often got brutal. There were beatings, an attempt on Hall’s life, and a great furor over Hall’s admitted political radicalism.

The strike was the only weapon available to the workers. But when workers of a particular nationality struck to demand union rights, they’d be replaced immediately with workers of another nationality.

Hall, a tough, plainspoken, hard-drinking man, talked with the workers endlessly about the obvious need to bring them together in a single union. He spoke to them individually and often in meetings that were held in secret, outside the closely guarded plantations. He told the workers over and over that they could not achieve the unified strength necessary to overcome exploitation if they continued to remain apart because of racial and ethnic differences.

“Know your class,” Hall told them, “and be loyal to it.”

Finally, by the mid-1940s, the ILWU managed to organize workers on the plantations, as well as on Hawaii’s waterfronts. That gave the ILWU a powerful role in Hawaii’s economy that led the union quickly to a major role in Hawaii’s political life as well.

Hall helped put together a political league that became one of the most important political forces in Hawaii and the most racially and ethnically mixed such group anywhere. The union league helped break 50 consecutive years of Republican control of the State Legislature, which in turn led to passage of the most progressive laws of any state and helped make the ILWU as dominant in Hawaiian life as were the Big Five plantation owners before the coming of the union.

Plantation and longshore workers still are the backbone of the ILWU in Hawaii, but Hall long ago led the union into just about every other industry in the islands. Bakers, factory workers, automobile salesmen, supermarket clerks and a wide variety of other workers, especially including hotel workers and others in Hawaii’s ever-expanding tourist industry – all carry union cards.

Union membership is their guarantee of economic and political rights and rewards, of dignity and self-respect and the chance to determine their own destinies, of an effective voice on the job and in their communities, of fair and equal treatment their forebears could only dream of.

Jack Hall left a truly remarkable legacy.

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

Meister: Union rights for airport screeners

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Airport screeners and other vital employees of the
Transportation Safety Agency should finally have the basic rights and protections they have so long needed and deserved

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

The underpaid, overworked and otherwise poorly treated airport screeners who are essential to air passenger safety may finally be winning their long struggle for the badly needed union rights guaranteed other federal employees.

There are more than 40,000 screeners –- a first line of defense against terrorism — posted at X-ray machines, checkpoints and elsewhere in air terminals throughout the country. They work for the Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) that was set up in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 1, 2001.

Such related workers as federal border guards and immigration and Custom Service employees are unionized. But in 2003, President Bush denied union rights to screeners and other TSA employees on grounds that their unionization would somehow “threaten national security.”

A majority in the House and Senate voted in 2007 to restore the screeners’ union rights. But the congressional majority wasn’t large enough to overturn a veto threatened by the president, and the attempt was abandoned.

Denying the fundamental right of unionization to the screeners, as the United Nations’ International Labor Organization ruled, violates “core labor standards.”

The screeners’ need for unionization should be as obvious as the nation’s need for their invaluable service. Their complaints are widespread and numerous. They cite, for instance, inadequate pay, low morale, a high rate of workplace injuries, unfair promotion and scheduling policies, arbitrary work rules and high turnover rates.

The screeners’ hope for wining union rights rests primarily with President Obama, who voted as a senator to grant screeners union rights and promised during his presidential campaign to make granting them the rights “a priority for my administration.”

Winning congressional approval won’t be easy, but is also expected, despite stiff opposition expected to be led by a notably anti-labor Republican senator, John DeMint of South Carolina. He argues, much as George Bush had argued, that unionizing TSA employees would amount to putting air security and safety in the hands of those old right-wing bugaboos, “union bosses.”

Senator DeMint and his reactionary colleagues probably will lose their attempt to deprive some of our most deserving workers their basic rights. But they undoubtedly will cause some damage along the way to their ultimate defeat.

DeMint already has managed to stall Senate confirmation of Obama’s nominee to head the Transportation Safety Agency and carry out the reforms sought by Obama and TSA‘s employees. He’s invoked Senate rules to postpone the vote on whether to confirm the president’s appointment of a well-regarded former FBI agent and assistant chief of the Los Angeles Airport Police, Erroll Southers, to run the agency.

In the meantime, two government employee unions are competing for the right to represent TSA employees once they are granted union rights. The competition undoubtedly will result in more and stronger employee demands for improved conditions as the two unions vie vigorously to represent them.

One of the unions is the largest of federal employee unions, the 600,000-member American Federation of Government Employees, the other the 150,000-member National Treasury Union. But despite its much smaller size, the Treasury Union won three years ago in competing with the Federation of Government Employees to represent airport Customs and border protection officers.

The unions have been waging a vigorous campaign , signing up members, establishing union locals at airports nationwide, helping workers appeal unfair disciplinary actions, filing grievances against employer mistreatment and other actions. Both unions have promised to press hard for pay raises, better promotion policies and work rules and other matters important to TSA employees.

No matter which union wins, it’s certain that the airport screeners and other vital employees of the Transportation Safety Agency should finally have the important basic rights and protections they have so long needed and so long deserved.

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

Meister: A lesson too long unlearned

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Wisconsin has enacted a law that makes the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining part of the state’s model standards for social studies classes in the state’s public schools

(Dick Meister, former labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for half-century)

Despite the importance of unions in our lives, our schools pay only
slight attention to their importance – or even to their existence.

Little is done in the classroom to overcome the negative view of organized labor held by many Americans, little done to explain the true nature of organized labor.

There have been many attempts to remedy that situation, none more promising than the steps taken recently in Wisconsin with enactment of a law that makes the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining part of the state’s model standards for social studies classes in the state’s public schools.

The law does not mandate the teaching of labor history and collective bargaining, as its sponsors had wanted. But it amounts to just about the same thing, by requiring the state superintendent of public instruction to make the subjects part of the state’s educational standards and to provide schools and teachers assistance in teaching labor subjects.

The Wisconsin Labor History Society, the state AFL-CIO and other labor and educational groups worked a dozen years to finally win enactment of the law, the first such state law anywhere. But the History Society fully expects other states to follow Wisconsin’s example.

The importance of including labor history in the classroom was underscored effectively in the latest issue of the American Federation of Teachers journal,

American Educator.

“With the key protections for workers that unions have gained under attack,” said a journal article, “there is a greater need for the next generation to understand the real role of working men and women in building the nation and making it a better place.”

James Green, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, explains that, in studying labor, students learn important lessons – above all “the contributions that generations of union activists have made to building a nation and democratizing and humanizing its often brutal workplaces.”

Fred Glass, communications director of the California Federation of Teachers,

provides an ideal primer for students studying labor. His summary is an excellent guide to what they should know about labor – a guide to what we should all know.

“Some people,” said Glass, “interpret the decline of organized labor as if unions belong to the past, and have no role to play in the global economy of the 21st century. They point to the numbers and say that workers are choosing not to join unions anymore.

“The real picture is more complex and contradicts this view. Most workers would prefer to belong to unions if they could. But many are being prevented from joining, rather than choosing not to join.”

Unions, Glass concludes, “remain the best guarantee of economic protection and political advocacy for workers. But as unions shrink, fewer people know what unions are, and do. And fewer remember what unions have to do with the prosperity of working people.”

That’s what our schools should be teaching, and presumably what they’ll be teaching in Wisconsin shortly, thanks to the new law there. If we’re fortunate, more states will soon follow suit.

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

Dick Meister: Too damn old!

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The right to protection from age discrimination will remain a second class civil right

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

Racism and sexism we know plenty about. But what of ageism?

Ageism can strike anyone once they reach a certain age – sometimes as early as 40 – and it can make the victim feel unwanted, unneeded and oppressed by all in this work and youth oriented society.

It doesn’t matter if you’re white or black, brown or Asian, man or woman. What matters is your age.

Federal law and several state laws say employers cannot consider your age in deciding if you should be hired, fired, retired, promoted, laid off or whatever. But the laws are widely violated, and sometimes invalidated by courts.

Some of the court decisions have been downright bizarre. One recent ruling, for example, found that an employer who told a worker he was being fired because “you’re too damn old for this kind of work” was not violating the law. Another court said a boss who told a worker he had to make way for younger workers was simply stating “a fact of life.”

The Supreme Court recently made a key ruling that workers who are fired because of their age will have to prove that their age was the decisive factor in the firing, not just a contributing factor. A bill currently in Congress would invalidate that ruling.

The number of workers filing legal complaints of age discrimination has been growing steadily. Between 2007 and 2008, the number grew by 30 percent to nearly 25,000 cases. The actual number of older workers discriminated against is undoubtedly even higher, if only because many victims can’t afford the court proceedings that often follow the filing of complaints.

Age discrimination is expected to become an even greater problem as the number of older workers continues to grow steadily and because of current economic conditions that are forcing more and more older workers of retirement age to seek jobs.

The drying up of pension funds and the increase in the Social Security retirement age has also led more older people to seek jobs – jobs that are hard enough for anyone to find, but particularly hard for many older workers. Their unemployment figures have been consistently higher than those of most other groups.

Not all the unemployed older workers want or need jobs. But most do, as has been shown repeatedly in studies by private and public agencies. Many badly need the income. Most also seek jobs as the way to gain self-esteem and an active, meaningful existence.

But younger workers, of course, can be paid less than older workers with seniority and usually are less demanding and more easily directed because of their inexperience and eagerness to secure a foothold.

Employers also are greatly influenced by the myths about older workers that many people still accept as fact.

The widely-held assumption that as workers age their productivity declines, for instance, is simply not true on a general basis, As a matter of fact, the studies show that among white-collar workers, those 45 or older produce more than their younger counterparts, thanks to their greater knowledge and experience. Among blue-collar workers, there is no substantial difference in output.

Older workers also have lower rather than higher rates of absenteeism than younger workers, fewer on-the-job accidents and at least as great a capacity to learn new skills required by new technology.

Generally, older workers also are more stable and dependable. They show more satisfaction with their jobs and hold them much longer.

Those facts alone should be enough to cause employers to mend their prejudicial ways. But they haven’t been, and aren’t likely to be in the future. The right to protection from age discrimination, the right to protection from ageism sadly will remain what one writer calls a second-class civil right.

Dick Meister, formerly labor editor of the SF Chronicle and KQED-TV Newsroom, has covered labor, politics and other matters for a half-century. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com, which includes more than 250 of his recent columns.

No peace, no work

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OPINION Organized labor is set to mark May Day — International Workers’ Day — with what could be the loudest and most forceful demand yet for rapid withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.

Members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) will lead the way by refusing to work their eight-hour morning shifts at ports in California, Oregon, and Washington. For them, it will be a "no peace, no work" holiday — in effect, a strike against the war.

Like many other unions and labor organizations nationwide, the ILWU has long opposed the war in Iraq as an imperialist action in which the lives of young working-class Americans and Iraqi citizens are being needlessly wasted.

The ILWU hopes the dramatic act of shutting down West Coast ports will inspire Americans everywhere to oppose the war.

The coalition behind this movement, US Labor Against the War (USLAW), has been growing steadily since the invasion of Iraq. It’s now the largest organized antiwar group of any kind and is drawing important support, not only from unions but from a wide variety of socially-conscious activist groups outside the labor movement.

USLAW’s members, which represent millions of workers, significantly include the AFL-CIO and most of the federation’s 56 affiliated unions. No one can doubt USLAW’s ability to organize a massive protest like the one ILWU is hoping to lead: it was USLAW that put together the antiwar demonstration that drew half a million marchers to Washington, DC last year.

USLAW is demanding primarily that "our elected leaders stop funding the war, bring our troops home, and start meeting human needs here at home," notes Fred Mason, an AFL-CIO official in Maryland.

In the meantime, says Gerald McEntee, a key public employee union leader, "We are spreading violence in Iraq, not democracy." The Bush administration’s policies, says Musicians Union leader Tom Lee, "make us less secure, increase the threat of terrorism, and have put Iraq on a path of civil war."

ILWU President Robert McEllrath has urged unions and allied groups outside the United States to also mount protests "to honor labor history and express support for the troops by bringing them home safely."

The AFL-CIO’s role is particularly notable. It marks the first time the federation has ever opposed a war, whether the president was a pro-labor Democrat or, as now, an antilabor Republican.

The longshoremen’s union, which was not affiliated with the AFL-CIO at the time, was firmly opposed to the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. The ILWU also was a major opponent of dictatorial regimes in South and Central America and the apartheid regime in South Africa, its members often refusing to handle cargo coming from or going to those countries. Just recently, ILWU members in Tacoma, Wash., refused for conscientious reasons to load cargo headed for the Iraq war zone.

We can only hope — and hope fervently — that the union’s May Day show of strong opposition to the war in Iraq will help prompt millions of others to conclude that they, too, cannot in good conscience support that seemingly endless war.

Dick Meister

Dick Meister is a San Francisco–based writer who has covered labor and political issues for a half-century as a reporter, editor, and commentator. Contact him through his Web site: www.dickmeister.com

The business of censoring labor

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Most people, of course, work for a living. They spend at least half their lives working and, in fact, define themselves by their jobs. They obviously would be interested in ­ and obviously need ­ expert information on a regular basis about that most important aspect of their lives.

But the news media in effect censor that vital information. Their primary attention is not focused on those who do society¹s work. With the rare exception of such issues as the attempts to raise the minimum wage, or on special occasions like Labor Day, the media generally are not concerned with workers’ daily efforts to make a living. The media concentrate instead on the corporate interests and other employers like themselves who finance, direct and profit from the work.

Workers’ attempts to get a greater share of the profits and better working conditions by using the only effective tool available to them – collective action –­ are given only slight and frequently biased media attention. Strikes are an exception, but that coverage is usually concerned mainly with the strikes’ adverse effect on the general public.

Given their complexity and importance, collective bargaining and union activity generally should be among the most thoroughly and fairly covered of all subjects. Once, most newspapers had labor reporters to provide extensive if not always fair coverage. But almost no papers have such specialists today. With a very few exceptions, radio and television stations have never had them.

At most papers, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, labor coverage has been turned over to the business section. Since the material there is meant for readers who have a particular interest in business and a generally negative view of unions, the stories naturally are slanted that way by business reporters, who have little apparent understanding of labor.

The business pages typically downgrade, distort or simply ignore union views. They show little concern for general readers, including those who support unions or might want to if they had the opportunity to read thorough, balanced and expert accounts of their activities.

How about describing the country¹s major labor federation, the AFL-CIO, as a “trade association?” Or referring to democratically elected union leaders as “bosses?” The San Francisco Chronicle business page has made those petty but illustrative gaffes and, like the rest of the Bay Area¹s mainstream media, far more serious gaffes.

The list of important labor issues that have been ignored ­ censored ­ is seemingly endless. To cite just a few examples, the media:

— Frequently note that union membership is declining while failing to report that a principal cause is failure of the federal government to adequately enforce the laws that supposedly guarantee workers the right to unionize without employer interference.

— Fail to report numerous other anti-union actions of the Bush
administration, including its virtual non-enforcement of most other laws designed to protect workers.

— Rarely take notice of the on-the-job hazards that cause 6,000 deaths and more than 2 million serious injuries a year, and the need to strengthen and adequately enforce the job safety laws.

— Ignore labor¹s role as an advocate for the working people, union and non-union alike, who make up the vast bulk of the population, by characterizing labor as a “special interest.”

— Almost never report the views of union members and leaders on the major issues of the day. The views often are voiced at meetings of local labor councils and other union bodies that reporters ignore, while routinely seeking out the views of corporate and business executives.

— Pay little, if any, attention to many major union campaigns. Most recently, that’s notably included a nationwide drive to get McDonald’s to guarantee decent pay and working conditions to the impoverished tomato pickers whose work is essential to the hugely profitable fast-food industry.

So, despite the great importance of labor, despite most people¹s vested interest in it, despite the need to inform them fully about it, the media provide little that’s of real value to them in their working lives, and much that¹s prejudicial to their collective action.

Copyright © 2006 Dick Meister, former labor editor of the Chronicle and of KQED-TV’s Newsroom. Contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.

An Unhappy Anniversary for Labor

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It was 25 years ago this month that Ronald Reagan struck the blow that sent the American labor movement tumbling into a decline it’s still struggling mightily to reverse.
Reagan, one of the most antilabor 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 also destroyed their union, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO).
Public and private employers everywhere treated Reagan’s 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 US 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 had no choice but to abandon its demands or strike 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 nonunion workers.
Faced with millions of dollars in fines for vioutf8g Reagan’s order and the antistrike injunctions that his administration and airlines had sought and stripped by the administration of its right to represent the controllers, PATCO declared bankruptcy and went out of business.
Although Reagan’s ban on rehiring strikers was later lifted by Bill Clinton and a stronger, new union now represents controllers, safety experts say the air traffic control system remains understaffed and the controllers still under far too much stress.
That’s unlikely to change during the administration of George Bush, who’s as antilabor as was Ronald Reagan. The Bush administration, in fact, has imposed a new contract on the controllers that cuts their pay and pension benefits.
Neither is it likely that other employers will abandon the crippling antilabor practices that were inspired and furthered by Reagan.
Firing and permanently replacing strikers, previously a rare occurrence, has become a common employer tactic. It’s now the strike — an indispensable weapon for workers in collective bargaining — that only rarely occurs.
It isn’t just strikers who face penalties for exercising their legal rights. 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 unionization. Many employers have also hired “ management consultants” who specialize in Reagan-style union busting.
“For all practical purposes, Americans have lost the freedom to form unions,” notes AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. “Our labor laws are so weak and so feebly enforced that workers join the union in spite of the law.”
It’s no coincidence that as union ranks have shrunk under the relentless antilabor pressures first applied to air traffic controllers a quarter century ago by Ronald Reagan, the ranks of the American middle class also have shrunk — as has the ordinary American’s share of the country’s wealth. SFBG
Copyright © 2006 Dick Meister, a San Francisco–based writer who has covered labor issues for four decades. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.

It’s criminal what Congress has done to the working poor

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OPINION Congress’s Republican leaders belong in prison. They have openly violated one of our most basic laws, the 68-year-old Fair Labor Standards Act. It requires Congress to set the minimum wage high enough to guarantee a standard of living necessary for health, efficiency, and general well-being.
The current rate of $5.15 an hour comes nowhere near to doing that. Even those who manage to work full-time make only $10,700 a year – $206 a week or about $900 a month, minus taxes and other deductions. They and the 15 million other Americans who are paid at or near the minimum – more than one-third of them provide the main or sole support for their families – are by any reckoning poverty-stricken and barely surviving.
The law allows states and local governments to adopt minimum-wage rates higher than the federal rate. Although California and 20 other states, San Francisco and 139 other cities and counties, and the District of Columbia have done so, the higher minimums cover only about half of the country’s workers.
Democrats have argued long and hard in the current session of Congress for a higher federal minimum, as they have in every other session since the $5.15 rate was set in 1997. But the Republicans who’ve been running Congress have higher priorities – raising their own pay and cutting the taxes that are such a burden to their wealthy supporters.
Oh yes, the GOP leaders did introduce a bill that would have raised the minimum. But the measure made that contingent on cutting the estate taxes of the very wealthy – a linkage, opposed by even some Republicans, that guaranteed the bill’s defeat.
They’ve raised congressional pay in every session since 1997, while doing nothing for the working poor. That’s added more than $31,000 to the minimum wage of congressional members, currently $165,200, with a $3,300 raise scheduled for Jan. 1. Unlike minimum-wage workers, who rarely have fringe benefits, members of Congress also get free health care, pensions, and other expensive extras.
The minimum wage for ordinary people would have risen to $7.25 an hour over the next two years under the latest Democratic proposal blocked by the GOP’s congressional leaders. Its main proponent, Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, promised that the fight to raise the wage “will continue all across America.”
It is certain, in any case, that Democratic candidates will make it an issue in this fall’s election campaigns. They are well aware, certainly, of polls showing that an overwhelming majority of Americans favor a minimum-wage increase.
So why in the world are Republican leaders so adamantly against it?
Because their big-money backers in the restaurant business, who employ about 60 percent of all minimum-wage workers, are against it, as are many other business and corporate interests. The opponents have even formed a group, Coalition for Job Opportunities, to spread the fiction, much favored by the GOP, that a higher minimum would force employers to eliminate jobs.
Actually, the number of jobs has grown after each of the 19 times the minimum has been raised since it was initially set at 25 cents an hour in 1938.
The job growth has been spurred primarily by the increased spending of those whose pay has increased. Like all low-wage workers, they must spend virtually every cent they earn, thus raising the overall demand for goods and services and creating the need for new employees.
Think of the general benefits to society if the minimum-wage workers who now must depend on government assistance could earn enough to make it on their own.
Think of the benefits to employers. As several studies have shown, raising workers’ pay raises workers’ morale and, with it, their productivity, while decreasing absenteeism and recruiting and training costs.
Think of the benefits to small retailers. Opponents of a raise say they’d be hurt the most by a higher minimum wage, but it’s far more likely that they’d be among the greatest beneficiaries. For minimum-wage workers have no choice but to spend most of their meager earnings in neighborhood stores for food and other necessities. SFBG
Dick Meister
Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and political issues for four decades as a reporter, editor, and commentator. Contact him through his Web site, www.dickmeister.com.

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