A grant helps the cross-border campaign for Colombian flower workers

 
Berger-Marks awards $129,177
to organizers & groups for 2008

Four women organizers, six groups and two research/education proposals won new Berger-Marks support this Spring. Earlier, two grants for ongoing campaigns were also renewed.

Read about '08 grantees & why we're excited about their work

 

Can the boss fire or harass you for filing a complaint?

Supreme Court says no in 2 new cases

The most anti-worker Supreme Court in modern history finally ruled for workers this May, saying they're protected from being retaliated against for complaining about discrimination. By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court said that two civil rights laws bar retaliation, even though they don't directly say so.

This contrasted strongly with the Court's decision last year to throw out a lawsuit by Lilly Ledbetter, saying that since she hadn't sued when her employer started to discriminate against her decades ago, she couldn't sue over continuing unfair pay.

Post office & Cracker Barrel were defendants

In one of the new cases Myrna Gómez-Pérez, a post office clerk in Puerto Rico said that after she complained of age discrimination, her supervisors targeted her with retaliatory actions. In the other case a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick G. Humphries, lost his job after complaining that another black employee was being discriminated against.

Retaliation complaints to the EEOC have doubled over the past 15 years, partly because it's often easier to show that you were punished for opposing discrimination than that you were a victim of discrimination in the first place.

Two major laws that protect against race, sex and age discrimination state clearly that workers are protected against retaliation -- Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. But there's no such clarity in age-discrimination law for federal government workers. Likewise, a post-Civil War-era law that gives “all persons” the same right “as enjoyed by white citizens” in making and enforcing contracts like employment is silent on retaliation.

In deciding for the workers, the Court said it turned for guidance to a 5-4 decision by the previous Supreme Court. That ruling said school officials can't retaliate against students who sue over sex discrimination in schools and colleges, even though the law barring discrimination doesn't directly say so.

Chief Justice Roberts was in the dissenting minority in the post office case, as were Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in both cases.

 

Burger King backs down,
tomato pickers win 71% raise

But concerns continue over corporate spying and slave conditions in the U.S.

CIW members & Sen. Bernie Sanders with Burger King representatives, after workers won raises

Until May 23, Burger King was, a stubborn holdout against  granting even a penny of justice to tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida, Taco Bell’s parent company and McDonalds had yielded to pressure from a nationwide coalition of workers, students and community leaders. But on May 23, Burger King finally agreed to pay Florida farmworkers a penny  more for each pound of tomatoes they picked.  That small concession means an annual raise of 71% for the farmworkers who, on average, earned only $10,000 a year. The company will pay another half a penny to the tomato growers.

That prompted the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, which represents 90 percent of the state’s tomato growers, to withdraw its threat of imposing $100,000 fines on members who granted a penny-a-pound pay raise.

Immokalee -- hidden in the heart of Florida...

Spearheading the nationwide campaign for “Fair Food principles” is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. If you’ve gone to Florida, you probably didn’t see Immokalee. Hidden along dusty roads just a few miles inland  from the beautiful beaches and lawns of Ft. Myers, Naples and other Gulf coast resorts is another world, one of decrepit shacks and trailers. There immigrant families eke out a living picking tomatoes under the hot sun. When Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont paid Immokalee a visit and saw the conditions, he concluded  they were “perhaps the most exploited workers in America.” You can visit  the people and hear their story on the Coalition's excellent  web site.

Detective likens it to slavery

In April, The Senate  held hearings into the exploitation in the Florida tomato fields. Amid revelations that some migrants weren’t being paid at all, a detective from the Collier County (Florida) Sheriff's Department likened it to slavery, and called for stronger laws. “In almost all cases of labor trafficking in Florida,” he added, “the traffickers are subcontractors to larger businesses.  This system also allows the larger corporation to remain willfully blind of any abuses occurring and minimize any liability.  In turn, both the trafficker and the business profit from the work of the enslaved victim.”

Corporate spying under the radar -- until now

Burger King's own dirty tricks raise questions about just what corporations are doing to stop organizing in this country. "Burger With a Side of Spies,"  a New York Times article by award-winning author Eric Schlosser,  revealed that the company hired a sleazy private detective firm to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance, a group of idealistic college students supporting the Immokalee workers. “While the Patriot Act has raised fears about government spying on ordinary citizens, the growing threat to civil liberties posed by corporate spying has received much less attention,” Eric Schlosser warned.

The company defended the spying, saying it had "a right and duty to protect its employees and assets from potential harm.” Later it backed down and said it would stop using the “investigation firm.” It also fired  two executives who'd been caught secretly blogging criticisms of the farmworkers’ group. Schlosser believes that 's not enough: “The Bill of Rights was adopted to protect Americans from the abusive power of their government. I’ve come to believe that we now need a similar set of restrictions to defend against irresponsible corporate power.”

The Coalition was born in 1993 as a small group of workers.It grew and led three general strikes, a month-long hunger strike by six members in 1998, and an historic 230-mile march from Ft. Myers to Orlando in 2000. Recently it launched an Anti-Slavery Campaign.

 

Summer schools for women in '08:

Great opportunities to learn, connect

 

UALE Union Women Summer Schools

Sponsored by the United Association for Labor Education (UALE), in cooperation with the AFL-CIO and CLUW, these programs for union women offer valuable skills and new information. At them, women network with union sisters from across their respective region.

Here are the 2008 Summer Schools. More information will be posted on the UALE website as it becomes available.

• July 9-13: The Western region's Summer Institute for Union Women will be at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island ,BC. Click here for save-the-date flier. For further information, contact:  Jane Staschuk at the BC Federation of Labour.
• July 10-13: The Midwest and Southern Regions will hold a combined Women's School at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. For information, contact Judy Ancel or Roz Sherman Voellinger.
• August 3-8: The Northeast Regional Summer School for Union Women will take place at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Connecticut. Download flier. The contacts are Lee Clarke and Ana Ketch.

Women’s Institute for Leadership Development Summer Institute (WILD)

June 20-22: 'From Union Maids to WILD women'

Held at Clark University in Worcester, MA, WILD's institute offers union women courses in leadership development and other skill and information areas.  The theme this year is: "2008 Elections: What’s at Stake for Working Women?"

For more information see The Women's Institute for Leadership Development website, or contact 617-426-0520 or info@wildlabor.org.

2008 Michigan Summer School for Women Workers

July 31st - Aug. 3rd

If you ever want to take advantage of this opportunity, the time is now, says program director Skip Turner. "In this time of budget cuts and uncertain futures... attendance is vital to the continued operation of these programs." People who value education are urged to sign up for the school, to be held at Somerset Inn, Troy, Michigan.

For information call 734-764-0492

 

 

Breastfeeding at the workplace

It might be good for business as well as families

Do women have to deprive their children of the health and bonding benefits of breastfeeding when they go to work? Although less than half of mothers who work full-time can breastfeed their newborns exclusively, granting more women the ability to do so might actually be good for employers. That might be one reason the number of women workers breastfeeding has doubled over the past 5 years.

A new Sloan Foundation Policy Briefing paper shows how the benefits of granting women the freedom to breastfeed can outweigh the costs:

• If their babies are healthy, employees won’t miss as much work. Breastfeeding mothers report fewer physician visits than mothers who do not breastfeed their children. Of the 40 illnesses causing one-day absences for employed mothers, only 25% occurred in breastfed babies while 75% occurred in formula-fed babies.
• The additional cost of health care services for illnesses of formula-fed infants in the first year of life averaged between $331 and $475 for each never-breastfed infant.
• Having to deal with a sick child can hurt a worker's productivity. Eighty-six percent of infants who experienced no illness during one year of a recent study were breastfed as opposed to formula-fed

States already guarantee some breastfeeding rights

 

• 27 States have passed laws giving women the right to breastfeed in any location, public or private, where the mother is authorized to be present.
• Seven States have laws that require workplace support of breastfeeding.
• Two States have made it illegal to discriminate against breastfeeding mothers.

 

Why flextime needs to be geared to family needs

Useful facts from Sloan Foundation briefing

Time is something workers need every bit as much as better pay and benefits, says the Sloan Work and Family Research Network. A briefing paper it created for legislators this year, "Providing Working Families with an Important Resource," lays out facts on our time deficit:

• More caregivers in the labor force. The vast majority of American children are now raised in families in which both parents, or the sole parent in single parent families, work for pay. Additionally, 25% of workers have elder care responsibilities.
• Longer Work Hours. Over the past 25 years, the average combined weekly work hours of dual-earner couples with children has increased from 81 to 91 hours.
• Longer Commutes. Average commute times continue to rise and families who work need additional time to drop off and pick up children at school or at child care facilities.
• Mismatched Schedules. In today’s 24/7 economy, work hours are frequently at odds with the daily schedules of other family members.

 

Make It a Family Affair!

Postal Workers organizing drive involves whole family

If you're a member of the APWU Postal workers union, your kids and grand kids could win a prize from the union for creating a video or DVD, recording a 5-minute song, writing a poem or making a PowerPoint presentation.

The union's creativity contest adds a new twist to its campaign to sign up new members featured last year in the article, Postal Workers’ Woman-to-Woman Campaign fires up, signs up, members. The nationwide Women’s Organizing Campaign 2008 is involving families as well.

When the Sacramento Area Local kicked off its organizing drive, one of its strongest promoters was Dorothy Wilcox, now in her ninth decade, who says that right after she started work at the post office, her husband suffered a heart attack and she found out she was pregnant. “Postal management wanted me to quit,” Wilcox recalls. “If it weren’t for the union, I would not have kept my job.”

The Fort Wayne Area Local's membership drive has been successful because of the family atmosphere. Organizing Committee Co-Chair Amy Sutcliffe said “My two teenage daughters — and their boyfriends — helped out and saw firsthand how crucial ‘family’ is to the labor movement.”

 

Brutal raid at Iowa beef plant also 'deported' the UFCW union drive

Taken from PAI article by Mark Gruenberg

When the feds swept in to Postville, Iowa on May 20 to raid the nation’s largest kosher beef slaughtering plant, Agriprocessors, Inc. , they rounded up 389 people that the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) claimed were illegal immigrants. Children were suddenly wrenched apart from their families, prompting many rights advocates to complain to Congress about the brutality of the raid.

Jerome Hanus, the Catholic archbishop of Dubuque, said ICE created “a state of terror” in the town. Tearing children from their parents and caregivers is part of a pattern in ICE raids since the start of last year, and since then, 4,900 people have been arrested nationwide -- 45 times as many as in 2001. Dubuque Lutheran Bishop Steven Ullestad complains that only one out of four of the detained parents were released to their families. Even children of U.S. citizens “are having nightmares about their own parents being taken away,” he added.

The disruption also stopped the United Food and Commercial Workers organizing drive at the plant dead in its tracks. Minnesota-based UFCW Local 789 had been supporting the workers in their conflicts with company officials over pay and conditions

No one raided management for defying the law

It's no surprise that Agriprocessors workers had wanted a union. The company has been breaking the law in other ways -- Iowa officials caught it violating health and safety and wage and hour laws, and a group of Agriprocessors workers is suing the company for unpaid wages for the time they spend donning and taking off protective equipment. But none of these violations led to a raid.

. "This raid and abusive detention signifies union-busting," said UFCW Local 789 organizer Rafael Espinosa. It also interfered with an on-going child labor investigation.

Under pressure and without lawyers, many workers did plead guilty and were sentenced to deportation. D.C. lawmakers split along party lines about ICE’s military-like strikes at food processing plants. Meanwhile, the atmosphere of fear is crippling to union efforts to organize for humane conditions and other rights.

Across the nation, employers are even calling in ICE agents to raid and arrest workers, specifically to stop UFCW’s organizing. ICE, disregarding the employers’ motives, responds in force.

 

Evidence mounts that women get the worst of 2008 hard times

"Whether the issue is retirement savings, or feeding your children or paying for medicine, women are more worried about economic security than men," notes Rockefeller Foundation Associate Director Margot Brandenburg. "And single moms are the hardest hit."

A new report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, shows that as America's economy gets worse, women are getting the worst of it.

Among the findings of the report entitled "Women at Greater Risk of Economic Insecurity" are these disturbing facts. In the past year:

• One out of five women had a medical prescription they couldn't afford to fill, while only one out of eight men had that happen;
• One out of eight women reported that they could not afford to take a child to the doctor during the past year. Only one out of sixteen men reported having the same problem.
• One out of 14 American women went hungry at some time last year because of lack of money—twice as many women as men (one out of 25 American men went without enough food).
• Among low-income women (whose family income is less than $19,000), hunger struck fully one out of four last year.
• More than half of all American women (56%) are worried about the government cutting Social Security, while only 41% of men share that worry. That's because more retired women count on their Social Security checks as a major source of income, and men are much more likely to have an employer retirement plan.
• Women of color are at greatest risk of economic hardship. Five out of 10 African American women, and four in 10 Hispanic women have had trouble paying bills on time.
• Single mothers face double jeopardy, says report co-author Vicky Lovell. "First, they have lower earnings because they're female, and then they have more financial stress because they're parents... And mothers face a 50% higher risk of losing their jobs than fathers."

Recommendations:

1. As a society, we should reduce financial vulnerability for everyone. No one should go without adequate income, health care, food, and shelter. Policies directed at this goal should be targeted to low-income people, especially parents, people of color, and single mothers.

2. Protection of Social Security retirement benefits is absolutely critical for maintaining the well-being of America’s elderly—especially women.

3. We need to do more to equalize earnings between women and men and between people of color and whites, providing better access to job training, and equal labor market opportunities.

4. Parents need help to get on a more equal footing with non-parents, especially single mothers, who are the most vulnerable. More public support for the financial and time burdens of raising children is essential.

A related IWPR Fact Sheet explains "Why Americans Worry About Retirement Security, and Why Women Worry More Than Men."

Minority kept Senate from taking the first step

The previous month, Senator Kennedy had released a report on the hardship the recession is imposing on women. But the next week, a Senate minority blocked the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that the House had passed the previous July. It takes 60 votes to stop debate to vote on a measure.