Submitted by Tony Dunn on July 31, 2008 - 10:05am. |
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by Paul Abowd
Monthly Review
Returning to school after winter break, Austin Garrido found that Uloop, an online marketplace for college students, had cut his hourly pay. Elsewhere on the University of California-Polytechnic's campus in Pomona, his co-worker Sarah Doolittle also discovered a light paycheck.
Unhappy about $8 an hour and shrunken bonuses from the Craigslist-type outfit, the two posted their grievances at Uloop's online message board for workers. "It's the only way for employees on different campuses to communicate with each other," Garrido said.
They started a thread that raised the prospect of unionizing, but management was reading, too. Uloop removed the post five minutes later, and 20 minutes after that the company fired Garrido and Doolittle over the phone.
Their new manager, hired to oversee the wage cuts, cited under-performance, but it was clear that Garrido and Doolittle were singled out for their online organizing via the message board. "They didn't have a stated usage policy," said Garrido. "There were a number of non-work-related posts on there."
Claiming violations of their right to self-organize, the two filed a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) complaint, seeking back pay and their jobs.
Much to their surprise, the grievance quickly rose to the NLRB's Office of Advice in Washington, D.C, where it entered into a contentious national debate over workers' rights to online communication.
ON GUARD
Just before Garrido and Doolittle's complaint against ULoop, the Labor Board had laid out its first major ruling on electronic communications, in December 2007.
The controversial 3 to 2 Register-Guard decision stemmed from an incident in 2001, when management at the Eugene, Oregon, newspaper disciplined a copy editor, the Communications Workers (CWA) local president, for sending three union-related messages to the workforce on the company email system.
The Board majority said that the newspaper's property rights allowed it to decide how the email system would be used -- and that employees have no right to use the company email for "concerted activity."
As long as the ban on concerted activity is not wholesale, the three argued, employers are not compelled to facilitate the most convenient method for worker communication about union matters.
CWA argued that the company's policy banning "non-work" emails was illegal because it effectively banned union talk. On top of that, the company was selectively enforcing the policy by allowing solicitations about birthday parties and charity donations while punishing union use.
The Board majority broke NLRB precedent and gave employers the right to decide what types of "non-work" communication they wanted to allow.
THE RIGHT TO TALK UNION
The two dissenting members cited precedents dating to 1945 that said the employer's property rights must yield to the rights of employees to self-organize and take action on the job.
Arguments for employer restrictions don't hold up in the digital age, says West Virginia University law professor Anne Lofaso. "The Board talks about telephones and bulletin boards as having cost or space concerns," she said. "Neither of these concerns apply to email."
Because electronic communications are the primary tool for workers to maintain connection in virtual and remote workplaces, Lofaso called the Board decision disingenuous. "Everyone knows that people rely on email at work, so why did the majority decide to ignore that?" she asked. "Because it weakens their case."
The two dissenters called the decision hopelessly out of touch with workplace realities, and accused the majority of making the NLRB the "Rip Van Winkle of administrative agencies."
UNENFORCEABLE?
The Register-Guard decision appears devastating for workers' rights, but its effect will depend on how or whether it is enforced.
In Eugene, CWA Local 37194 President Randi Bjornstad noted that the new company policy against mass emails bars the union from sending the types of message that led to the original conflict.
Still, Bjornstad says that union-related emails remain common, without reprisals from the paper.
"Through our entire bargaining process, we have sent emails back and forth to company reps and to each other," she said. "It has been a rather nebulous kind of ruling in terms of how it has been put into practice."
Meanwhile, the Register-Guard case is in the Washington, D.C., appeals court, where CWA is challenging the new employer powers to single out union speech for punishment.
In the wake of Register-Guard, the Los Angeles office of the NLRB saw test case written all over the Uloop complaint. However, the Mountain View, California, company is inching toward a settlement, in order to avoid litigation.
The Register-Guard precedent continues to restrict workers' rights to electronic communications, but Lofaso is confident that the Uloop case exposes its fragility.
"Even a McCain-appointed NLRB could overturn this ruling," she said.
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Submitted by Tony Dunn on July 25, 2008 - 10:31am. |
As many of you already know, last week the State Senate voted on a drastically amended version of the Patient Safety Act that would actually make the current dangerous status quo even worse. Despite a vigorous effort to defeat this bill, we were unsuccessful, and the bill passed 23-13. Needless to say, we are very disappointed, a disappointment I know that all of you, who worked so hard on this legislation, will share.
In the immediate term, we must make sure that the Senate version of the bill does not somehow make its way to the Governor's desk. Accordingly, below are instructions, along with a chart listing how every member of the Senate voted.
This information will also be available on the MNA website @ http://www.massnurses.org/. Please note that on the action alert below we are asking that you make 2 calls - one to your senator, and one to your state rep.
Thanks to everyone for all of your hard work on this bill. While I know the outcome last week was disappointing, but we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move forward.
Onward!
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Below is the list of how your Senator voted on SB2805, a dramatically harmful version of the Patient Safety Act that would allow the state's hospitals to continue the dangerous and deadly status quo and even make the situation worse.
Under this legislation, there would be no uniform standard of care and instead, the Department of Public Health would only be in charge of enforcing varying and inadequate standards created by the private sector hospital industry-including the for - profit hospitals. Simply put: this bill is a hazardous step backward, and would ensure that current unsafe conditions continue to deteriorate.
Last week, the MNA called upon the State Senate to reject this bill and 13 members of the Senate supported the MNA and voted no on SB2805.
- Look and and see how your Senator voted on this legislation and thank those that and voted no. We also encourage you to share your disappointment with your elected officials that voted to support SB2805.
- Next, call your State Representative and ask them to reject the Senate version of the Patient Safety Act.
To contact your legislator, call 617-722-2000 or find your elected official online.
SENATE VOTE - JULY 17, 2008
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Antonioni -Gardner, Leominster
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YES
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Augustus - Worcester
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NO
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Baddour - Merrimac, North Andover
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YES
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Berry - Beverly, Danvers, Salem, Peabody
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YES
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Brewer - Ashburnham, Barre, Charlton
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YES
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Brown - Attleboro, Wrentham, Needham,Wayland
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YES
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Buoniconti -Agawam, Chicopee, W.Springfield
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YES
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Candaras - Belchertown, Hampden, Longmeadow, Springfield
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YES
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Chandler - Berlin, Holden, Paxton, Princeton
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NO
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Creedon - Brockton, Halifax, Hanover, Whitman
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YES
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Creem - Brookline, Newton, Wellesley
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NO
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Downing - Ashfield, Williamsburg, Williamstown
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YES
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Fargo- Chelmsford, Concord, Waltham
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YES
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Galluccio- Charlestown, Cambridge, Everett
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NO
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Hart - Boston, 1st Suffolk
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NO
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Hedlund - Cohasset, Duxbury, Hingham, Weymouth
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NO
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Jehlen - Medford, Somerville, Woburn
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NO
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Joyce - Avon, Canton, Milton, Randolph, Sharon, Stoughton
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YES
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Knapik - Chester, Chicopee, Southwick, Westfield
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YES
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Marzilli - Arlington, Billerica, Burlington, Lexington
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ABSENT
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McGee - Lynn, Marblehead, Nahant, Saugus, Swampscott
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NO
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Menard - Fall River, Lakeville, Somerset, Swansea, Westport
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YES
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Montigny - Achusnet, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Mattapoisett, New Bedford
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NO
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Moore - Bellingham, Blackstone, Douglas, Milford, Sutton, Uxbridge
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YES
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Morrissey - Abington, Braintree, Quincy, Rockland
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NO
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Murray - Bourne, Falmouth, Pembroke, Plymouth, Sandwich
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O'Leary - Brewster, Dennis, Chatham, Provincetown
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NO
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Pacheco - Bridgewater, Carver, Middleboro, Taunton
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ABSENT
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Panagiotakos - Dunstable, Groton, Lowell, Tyngsboro, Westford
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YES
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Petruccelli - Cambridge, Revere, Winthrop
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ABSENT
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Resor - Acton, Ayer, Boxboro, Littleton, Shirley, Sudbury, Westboro
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YES
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Rosenberg - Amherst, Greenfield, Hadley, Northampton
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YES
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Spilka - Ashland, Framingham, Franklin, Medway, Natick
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YES
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Tarr- Boxford, Gloucester, Rockport, Wilmington
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YES
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Timilty - Attleboro, Foxboro, Mansfield, Seekonk, Walpole
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NO
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Tisei - Malden, Melrose, Wakefield
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YES
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Tolman - Belmont, Watertown
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YES
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Tucker - Andover, Dracut, Lawrence, Tewksbury
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YES
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Walsh - Dedham, Norwood, Westwood
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NO
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Wilkerson - Boston 2nd Suffolk
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YES
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Barbara "Cookie" Cooke RN,
Associate Director
Massachusetts Nurses Association
Region 3 Community Organizer
Mobile Phone: 508.345.9219
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Submitted by Tony Dunn on July 18, 2008 - 8:26am. |
By Ellen Goodman | July 18, 2008
I FINALLY drew the line at a dinner invitation. My husband wanted to try a much-touted restaurant where they present you with a platter of raw foods and a hot pot. The prospect of this adventure in dining didn't exactly thrill me. If I want to cook my own food, I answered rather testily, I'll eat at home.
Until then, I had drifted along with the do-it-yourself economy. I bused my own lunch trays. I booked my own movie tickets. I checked myself in at hotel kiosks. I even succumbed when an upscale seafood restaurant expected me to swipe my credit card through a handheld computer as if I were in a supermarket.
But maybe it was the election-year rants about the offshoring of American jobs from steelworkers to computer programmers that finally got me. The outsourcing of work to other countries has produced endless ire. But what about the outsourcing of work to thee and me?
For every task shipped abroad by a corporation, isn't there another one sloughed off onto that domestic loser, the consumer? For every job that's going to a low-wage economy, isn't there another going into our very own no-wage economy?
I'm not just talking about do-it-yourself gas pumping, which is by now so routine that the memory of an actual person washing your windshield has receded into the mists of AARP nostalgia. Back when gas cost $2 a gallon, self-service was offered at a discount. Today, gas is more than $4 a gallon, and, in most parts of the country, full-service - a retronym if there ever was one - is available only at a premium.
What's happening on land is happening in air. We are now expected to book our own itinerary, print our boarding passes, and do everything at the airport except pat ourselves down for liquids.
In this self-service economy, we also serve (ourselves) by having intimate and endless conversations with voice-recognition machines simply to refill a prescription drug or check our bank balance. We are expected to interact with "labor-saving technology" without realizing that it's labor-transferring technology. The job has not been "saved," it's been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where Suckers "R" Us.
I am tempted to say that customer service has gone the way of the house call but that reminds me that even medicine has been outsourced to patients who buy do-it-yourself kits to test and track everything from HIV to blood pressure. In an era when operations are done on an outpatient basis, nursing care has already been outsourced to family members.
The axis of this evil isn't really globalization, it's privatization. Consider the jobs that have now become part of our personal portfolio. We've become our own computer geeks as help lines become self-help lines. We've become our own pension planners and financial analysts left to manage our 401(k)s. We are even expected to be healthcare analysts, determining which star in the galaxy of drug prescription plans covers the ever-changing cast of pills in our medicine cabinet.
All of this is framed in the language of free choice. As opposed to, say, free time.
An MIT economist assures me cheerily that many Americans are willing to accept less service for lower cost. In a society built on the value of self-reliance, I am told, we may even feel virtuous when we put together our own bookcase or install our own hard drive.
But I have yet to find an economist who has figured out the human cost of "lower cost," or tallied up the transfer of labor from companies to customers. I've yet to find a consumer who has added, subtracted, or multiplied the amount of time we are now spending on the second shift of life management.
Remember when women were asking "Can We Have It All?" The answer was that we could have it all only if we could do it all . . . and all by ourselves. Now men and women have both won equal opportunity in the do-it-all-by-yourself world. We have officially become our own nonprofit centers.
Welcome to the self-service economy where we are never without work to be done. Let's celebrate by dining out together. Bring your carrot peeler.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is goodman@globe.com. 
Submitted by Tony Dunn on July 8, 2008 - 8:07am. |
Saturday, July 5th 2008
Source: The Lynn Daily Item
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By David Liscio / The Daily Item
LYNN - Marisol Santiago of Lynn had reason to celebrate Thursday after returning from a meeting with Gov. Deval Patrick.
"This is a great day," said the North Shore's lead organizer for Neighbor to Neighbor, a grassroots coalition of community and labor organizations. "We have been fighting to close these corporate tax loopholes for years and finally the new governor has seen the importance of it. He has signed the bill to make it happen."
Santiago said the bill accomplishes several reforms. "This will prevent multi-national companies from shifting profits out of Massachusetts," she said. "It will increase resources for public investments in schools, our infrastructure, and other building blocks of a strong economy."
According to Santiago, the loopholes are being closed in response to a five-year grassroots campaign led by Neighbor to Neighbor. The group's low-income members made thousands of calls to legislators in support of closing loopholes, organized hundreds of meetings within their legislative districts, and brought hundreds of people to the State House in support of the issue.
The bill is expected to raise nearly $300 million in revenue this year and $150 million annually when fully implemented, she said, noting that it combines closing corporate tax loopholes with a cut in the corporate tax rate to 8 percent.
Neighbor to Neighbor is concerned that some measures included in the bill will continue to allow a certain level of tax avoidance, but see the measure as a positive step overall. "This will level the playing field for local businesses," said Karen Arsenault, a Neighbor to Neighbor activist in Lynn. "I'm glad that multi-national companies making profits in Massachusetts will be making more of a contribution to our state."
Lynn School Committee member Maria Carrasco praised Gov. Patrick for signing the bill. "We knew this campaign made sense, especially in support for small businesses that are paying their share. Closing corporate tax loopholes is one of the fairest ways to get the critical funding needed in our state, for education and other local services," she said.
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Submitted by Tony Dunn on June 11, 2008 - 3:05pm. |
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By GHS Posted Jun 10, 2008 @ 11:58 PM
Daily News Tribune
BOSTON -
John D'Agostino, of Newton, his son Romeo D'Agostino, of Needham, and their company, D'Agostino Associates, Inc., were assessed $12,970 in penalties as well as over $2,800 in restitution for failing to pay the prevailing wage to 14 employees.
Attorney General Martha Coakley's office has issued three citations for the transgressions at three public construction sites.
The Prevailing Wage Laws require that certain minimum wage rates, as set by the state Department of Labor, be paid to all employees working on public works construction projects. The Prevailing Wage Laws allow all contractors bidding on public works projects to enjoy a "level playing field" by standardizing the rate of pay the workers will earn.
In June 2006, the Attorney General's Fair Labor Division received a complaint that D'Agostino Associates had failed to pay the prevailing wage to employees working at the East Fairhaven Elementary School project in Fairhaven.
A subsequent complaint filed in August 2007 alleged that the company had also failed to pay the prevailing wage at the M.J. Kuss Middle School public works project in Fall River. Investigators from the Attorney General's Office reviewed the company's certified payroll records and discovered that the company failed to pay employees a total of over $2,200 on those two projects.
Investigators from the Attorney General's Fair Labor Division also conducted an audit of the company's payroll records for the Franklin Department of Public Works Building Project after a complaint was received in March 2007.
Authorities discovered that D'Agostino Associates owed back wages totaling over $500 on the Franklin project as a result of failing to pay the correct prevailing wage to the employees on that work site.
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Submitted by Tony Dunn on April 14, 2008 - 9:20am. |
Come to the May 8 rally! For more information, call/email Corey: 617-284-1142 or corey.leaffer@1199.org
Transportation may be available from Lynn
Please join not yet union hospital workers, members of 1199SEIU, allies, and elected officials in a march and rally for Boston hospital workers
About the campaign - Many Boston hospital workers are struggling to make ends meet on wages that don't reward our years of labor, and thousands of us can't afford healthcare for ourselves or our children. We have a vision of making our hospitals workplaces where caregivers have dignity and respect by joining together as a union with 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. We want to make sure our patients get even better care. In cities throughout the country, hospital executives have agreed to codes of conduct guaranteeing a Free and Fair voting election process for healthcare workers who want to vote to form a union. Now, we must ensure that all Boston hospital workers have the same opportunity. When workers have a free and fair election process, we are FREE to make up our own minds through FAIR secret ballot voting conditions.
What Are "Free & Fair" Elections?
A Free and Fair union election means that employees are Free to decide whether we want to join together as a union, Free from management intimidation in a Fair secret ballot vote. Free and fair election agreements often include the following principles:
Hospital workers would be allowed to make our own decision to join together as a union;
Hospital executives would not devote patient care funds to run an anti-union campaign;
Hospital workers would not be forced into meetings, taken away from patient care duties, to dissuade us from joining
together as a union;
Union supporters would run a positive campaign without personal attacks against the administration;
The election would be done quickly, any disputes resolved quickly and fairly, and the election results would be honored,
whatever the outcome;
Management and the union agree not to violate any labor laws;
This Code of Conduct would be agreed to in writing, so that it is legally enforceable.
Submitted by Tony Dunn on April 10, 2008 - 11:15am. |
As the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is being introduced on Capitol Hill, working families are launching an advertising campaign to get Congress to reject the deal. An ad sponsored by the AFL-CIO will run in three Capitol Hill newspapers tomorrow. The ad urges lawmakers "Don't Reward Murder. Stop the Colombia Free Trade Agreement." (Click here to tell your representative to oppose a trade deal with Colombia until their government makes real progress in protecting the lives and rights of union members.
http://www.aflcio.org/issues/jobseconomy/globaleconomy/upload/colombia_factsheet.pdf
The ad features a photo of a Colombian woman crying over the casket of a loved one. Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade union member. Thirty-nine trade unionists were murdered in 2007, and another 17 have been killed in 2008--a rate of more than one a week. Of the more than 2,500 murders of trade unionists since 1986, the government has successfully prosecuted less than 3 percent of these cases.
Despite the strong objections of the leadership of both the U.S. House and the Senate, President Bush decided to send the agreement to Congress and to try and force a vote before he leaves office in January. Bush's stubborn insistence on pushing a deal opposed by most workers in both countries "shows an outrageous disregard for basic human and workers' rights," AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says. Once the agreement is submitted, Congress has 90 legislative days to act under the Fast Track trade authority rules that expired in July 2007 but still apply to deals pending at that time.
Submitted by Tony Dunn on April 10, 2008 - 11:30am. |
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Barbaraehrenreich.com
Monday 07 April 2008
Until the beginning of this month, Americans seemed to have nothing to say about their ongoing economic ruin except, "Hit me! Please, hit me again!" You can take my house, but let me mow the lawn for you one more time before you repossess. Take my job and I'll just slink off somewhere out of sight. Oh, and take my health insurance too; I can always fall back on Advil.
Then, on April 1, in a wave of defiance, truck drivers began taking the strongest form of action they can take - inaction. Faced with $4/gallon diesel fuel, they slowed down, shut down and started honking. On the New Jersey Turnpike, a convoy of trucks stretching "as far as the eye can see," according to a turnpike spokesman, drove at a glacial 20 mph. Outside of Chicago, they slowed and drove three abreast, blocking traffic and taking arrests. They jammed into Harrisburg PA; they slowed down the Port of Tampa where 50 rigs sat idle in protest. Near Buffalo, one driver told the press he was taking the week off "to pray for the economy."
The truckers who organized the protests - by CB radio and internet - have a specific goal: reducing the price of diesel fuel. They are owner-operators, meaning they are also businesspeople, and they can't break even with current fuel costs. They want the government to release its fuel reserves. They want an investigation into oil company profits and government subsidies of the oil companies. Of the drivers I talked to, all were acutely aware that the government had found, in the course of a weekend, $30 billion to bail out Bear Stearns, while their own businesses are in a tailspin.
But the truckers' protests have ramifications far beyond the owner-operators' plight -first, because trucking is hardly a marginal business. You may imagine, here in the blogosphere, that everything important travels at the speed of pixels bouncing off of satellites, but 70 percent of the nation's goods - from Cheerios to Chapstick -travel by truck. We were able to survive a writers' strike, but a trucking strike would affect a lot more than your viewing options. As Donald Hayden, a Maine trucker put it to me: "If all the truckers decide to shut this country down, there's going to be nothing they can do about it."
More importantly, the activist truckers understand their protest to be part of a larger effort to "take back America," as one put it to me. "We continue to maintain this is not just about us," "JB" - which is his CB handle and stands for the "Jake Brake" on large rigs - told me from a rest stop in Virginia on his way to Florida. "It's about everybody - the homeowners, the construction workers, the elderly people who can't afford their heating bills ... This is not the action of the truck drivers, but of the people." Hayden mentions his parents, ages and 81 and 76, who've fought the Maine winter on a fixed income. Missouri-based driver Dan Little sees stores shutting down in his little town of Carrollton. "We're Americans," he tells me, "We built this country, and I'll be damned if I'm going to lie down and take this."
At least one of the truckers' tactics may be translatable to the foreclosure crisis. On March 29, Hayden surrendered three rigs to be repossessed by Daimler-Chrysler - only he did it publicly, with flair, right in front of the statehouse in Augusta. "Repossession is something people don't usually see," he says, and he wanted the state legislature to take notice. As he took the keys, the representative of Daimler-Chrysler said, according to Hayden, "I don't see why you couldn't make the payments." To which Hayden responded, "See, I have to pay for fuel and food, and I've eaten too many meals in my life to give that up."
Suppose homeowners were to start making their foreclosures into public events- inviting the neighbors and the press, at least getting someone to camcord the children sitting disconsolately on the steps and the furniture spread out on the lawn. Maybe, for a nice dramatic touch, have the neighbors shower the bankers, when they arrive, with dollar bills and loose change, since those bankers never can seem to get enough.
But the larger message of the truckers' protest is about pride or, more humbly put, self-respect, which these men channel from their roots. Dan Little tells me, "My granddad said, and he was the smartest man I ever knew, 'If you don't stand up for yourself ain't nobody gonna stand up for you.'" Go to theamericandriver.com, run by JB and his brother in Texas, where you're greeted by a giant American flag, and you'll find - among the driving tips, weather info, and drivers' favorite photos -the entire Constitution and Declaration of Independence. "The last time we faced something as impacting on us," JB tells me, "There was a revolution."
The actions of the first week in April were just the beginning. There's talk of a protest in Indiana on the 18th, another in New York City, and a giant convergence of trucks on DC on the 28th. Who knows what it will all add up to? Already, according to JB, some of the big trucking companies are threatening to fire any of their employees who join the owner-operators' protests.
But at least we have one shining example of defiance of the face of economic assault. There comes a point, sooner or later, when you stop scrambling around on all fours and, like JB and his fellow drivers all over the country, you finally stand up.
If you would like to help support the truckers in any way, go to http://www.theamericandriver.com/files/TruckersAndCitizensUnited.html
Submitted by Tony Dunn on February 26, 2008 - 11:48am. |
 res1517941722Victory Report! Jin Workers Win! Jin Workers Win Class Settlement for Stolen Tips Chinese wait-staff who lodged a class action lawsuit against Jin Asian Cuisine Restaurant reached a settlement last month, compensating workers for tip theft and other wage irregularities. The owners of Jin Restaurant, a 1,000-seat venue located in Saugus, agreed to pay $110,000 to all tipped employees who worked at the restaurant between 2004 and the present -estimated at approximately 30 to 50 workers. Thank you to all that stood in solidarity with these workers.
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