Category Archives: Labor Organizing

Tell JPMorgan Chase you won’t Bank with a company that ignores tobacco farmworker exploitation.

Click Here to Take Action!

JP Morgan Chase is one of the lead banks in a consortium of lenders that provides $498 million dollars in credit to Reynolds American, one of the largest tobacco companies in the US. While Reynolds American and JP Morgan Chase make billions, tobacco farmworkers continue to suffer serious human rights abuses in the fields. Although Reynolds does not directly employ these farmworkers, they determine the terms for contract growers which directly affects the living and working conditions of farmworkers.
Other large banks such as Wachovia and Citibank are also Reynolds lenders. Consider moving your money to a local credit union!

Reynolds American and JP Morgan Chase have the ultimate responsibility and financial resources to ensure safe and humane working conditions for tobacco farmworkers.

As a major lender to Reynolds, Chase has the stature and resources to convince Reynolds to improve conditions for tobacco farmworkers. Since May 12, 2010 FLOC has been asking Chase to use their influence to push Reynolds to address farmworker exploitation.  To date Chase has refused to take any action.

SUPPORT THE DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGN! Close your Chase bank accounts and credit cards and send Chase an e-fax  telling Chase you support justice for tobacco farmworkers.

Not a Chase customer? You can still support the campaign! Pledge not to bank with Chase and send an e-fax.

After 400 years in the shadows of slavery…..
75 years of invisibility and exclusion under US labor law…..
6 years of a hard-fought struggle in the New York State legislature…..
Domestic workers are finally gaining rights, respect, and recognition.

On Tuesday morning September 31, 2010, domestic workers in New York State made history. Under the leadership of Domestic Workers United, the mainly People of Color and women organization waged a determined campaign to get this historic piece of legislation passed. They were certainly aware that their exclusion from the protections of the National Labor Relations Act was due to the fact that their sector of the workforce was, as it is now, almost entirely Black and Brown people in 1935 when the legislation was passed. In this sense, they have made things right for the hundreds of thousands of women and some men who have suffered at the hands of callous employers and racist lawmakers who cared nothing about their well being.

Among other provisions, this bill provides for:

• The right to overtime pay at time and a half after 40 hours of work in a week, or 44 hours for in-home workers;
• A day of rest every seven days, or overtime pay if it is waived;
• Three paid days of rest annually after one year of work;
• The removal of the domestic workers exemption from the Human Rights Law, and the creation of a special cause of action for domestic workers who suffer sexual or racial harassment;
• The extension of statutory disability benefits to domestic workers, to the same degree as other workers; and
• A study by the Commissioner of Labor on the practicality of extending collective bargaining rights to domestic workers.

Domestic workers are at the forefront of the Excluded Workers movement which emerged out of the Excluded Workers Congress held at the US Social Forum in Detroit in June of this year. This grouping includes agricultural workers, taxi drivers, immigrant workers, day laborers, ex-offenders and Southern workers. The broad sector is also mainly people of color located in increasingly important areas of the economic which place them in a strategic position and makes them a key factor in the fledgling trade union movement.

Governor Paterson signed the bill as people cried and cheered as they viewed the ceremony.

Work of the Excluded Workers Congress will continue in the Southern Region when workers and activists gather for the Southern Human Rights Organizing Committee (SHROC VIII) in Birmingham, Alabama starting on December 10.

Workers in North Carolina have been hit hard by the US eco-nomic crisis. More than 41,000 workers across the state lost their jobs in March, driving unemployment to 10.8 percent.  North Carolina’s jobless rate is among the country’s most severe, surpassed only by Michigan, which is at 12.6 percent. Harry Davis, Appalachian State University banking professor and chief economist for the North Carolina Bankers Associa-tion, said he expects North Carolina’s unemployment to rise to 12 percent by summer and for layoffs to continue until this time next year.

Workers in the eastern North Carolina counties where trade unions are the least organized, and in a state where only slightly more than 3 percent of the workers belong to unions, have few organizations helping to combat the employer abuses that are part of the crisis.

The Carolina Auto, Aerospace and Machine Workers Union is a non-majority union and private sector chapter of the North Carolina Public Service Workers Union-UE Local 150. The chapter organized at a Cummins Diesel Engine Plant outside of Rocky Mount and has launched a campaign in four eastern NC counties for worker recall rights. The campaign calls on area employers to establish a 30-month period of recall rights for workers laid-off during this crisis that will enable them to return to work when the economic downturn is over.

The campaign includes a petition and a model resolution call-ing on the city and county governments in Edgecombe, Nash, Wilson and Halifax counties to pass ordinances for employers to commit to recall rights for their workers. A public hearing will mobilize workers from the four counties to testify about the impact of unemployment on their families and communi-ties.

This campaign and its demands on area governments is an expression of developing consciousness about the need for workers to have representation and power in government, to help them fight for changes that improve their conditions.
It encourages workers to discuss Obama Administration’s Stimulus Package and the need for it to create jobs with fam-ily-supporting wages, to guarantee worker rights to organize, and to mandate employer accountability to workers and to the communities where they are located.

This campaign is also helping to raise awareness about the need to organize unions, and the importance of passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

by Kerry Taylor

In little more than a week, the Charleston sanitation workers have gathered hundreds of signatures in support of their efforts to establish a union to protect their safety and defend their rights on the job. Members of Local 1199, which represents the sanitation workers, and their allies have spread across the city to take their case directly to the voters. The workers are demanding that the City negotiate with the democratically-elected representatives of Local 1199 in order to restore some dignity to the department.

Organizers launched the campaign on April 4 to mark the dark day 41 years ago when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. It is sometimes forgotten that Dr. King was murdered while lending his support to the Memphis sanitation workers as they organized for union recognition.

Canvassers will continue their efforts each Saturday morning through May, when the matter is taken up by City Council. Supporters gather at the International Longshoremen’s Association hall (ILA 1422) on 1142 Morrison Dr. at 9am. For those who cannot canvass, please sign the newly available online petition and pass the word along to friends.

http://www.petitiononline.com/loc1199b/petition.html

If you can volunteer or for more information, please contact Mary Moultrie at 843-805-9697 or show up at the ILA hall on Saturdays for the canvass.

by BWFJ

Workers at Republic Windows and Doors, members of UE 1110, picket while other members continue plant takeover.

As millions of workers are losing their jobs and homes with no real relief in sight, they are seeing the government grant over $1 trillion to bailout the big banks and corporations who’s monopolizing and exploitative global financial practices are the major source of the economic crisis. Another trillion has been spent on an unjust and corporate driven war for the control of oil in Iraq and the Middle East.

However, there has been no bailout of the workers – no relief for the housing foreclosures, no improvement in the public schools, more than 40 million lack health insurance, the roads, levees, bridges and other infrastructure is crumbling and the environment is in danger because of the destructive and profits above human needs creed of capitalism.

The Republic workers, the majority being immigrants from throughout Latin America, along with African Americans have witnessed the racist attacks on themselves and their communities by government agencies and the police, and have rightfully lost confidence in the US government to protect their human rights.

Republic workers, like millions of workers throughout the USvoted for Obama in hopes of change that benefits working people. However, the Republic workers recognized that they had to be agents of working class change by setting a direction and calling on those committed to change to support their demands and actions.

The plant occupation symbolized workers exercising their power to control the wealth that they produce that creates profits for the banks and corporations. They are saying by their actions, that a living wage job or income is a human right.

Like Sister Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, and the sit-in by Black students at the lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, the Republic workers struggle sends a message, that social movement and human rights unionism means that workers must not allow capital to conduct business as usual.

It is the UE’s rank-and-file democratic principles of trade unionism that allows and encourages workers to exercise real workers power; to decide themselves what sacrifices they are willing to make to fight for their human rights and to build support for their struggles.

In North Carolina and throughout the South where the right of collective bargaining for public sector workers is denied in varying degrees and out of compliance with international human rights standards, and where private sector workers face some of the most vicious corporate and government supported anti union attacks, the workers need a strong social movement and human rights unionism – not a business unionism that makes deals with the bosses and disempowers the workers.

Join with the UE 150 and build a Progressive Organizing Alliance in North Carolina and throughout the South to promote Social Movement and Human Rights Unionism.