U.S. Labor News Roundup

We are pleased to announce weekly postings in Spanish and English of labor news and analysis from the U.S. We’ll summarize several stories from the past week’s Labor Notes website. Please pass them on to your Spanish-speaking friends.

Click above for the Spanish version, and click here for an RSS feed of weekly Spanish summaries.

Fighting Wage Theft, Winning with Direct Action

Wage theft—the illegal underpayment or non-payment of wages owed—is rampant in restaurants and construction. Low-wage workers are often forced to work before and after shifts or through meal and rest breaks.

We Are Oregon, a community organizing project funded by the Service Employees union, has built a committee of community members who believe in direct action as a tactic. The committee has grown as workers won back their stolen wages and then stayed involved to support others.

So far, we have won almost every campaign, worked with dozens of wage theft victims, and recovered more than $6,000.

Recently we organized with workers who had quit or been fired from Yaw’s Restaurant in Portland, Oregon. Workers had been required to attend unpaid meetings, and the restaurant illegally deducted money for “uniform fees.”

Yaw’s workers agreed that if the boss tried to pay off some of them, they would refuse the money until everyone was paid.

They organized themselves and 30 community members. The crowd marched to the restaurant. In the lobby, a young man read a letter, saying how much the workers were owed and that the community was here.

Within days, the manager called some workers and offered to pay them but not others. Everybody held firm.

Often we shoot a short video the day we deliver the demands. Each worker is interviewed on camera. We share this video online to increase pressure on the boss.

We keep escalating with leafleting, community pickets, social and traditional media stories, and larger delegations, so that each action brings a little more pressure than the last.

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Our maxim is, “The boss will never give in because of the thing you did yesterday, but because of what he is afraid you will do tomorrow.”

One week after the action, management agreed to give the workers their full checks.

Coping with ‘Right to Work’ in Michigan

Michigan passed an anti-union law (misnamed “right to work”) in December. The law says no worker in a union workplace has to pay union dues, even though the union must represent him or her.

But by quickly settling contracts before the new law took effect March 28, many teachers’ locals locked in the payment of dues. In most cases, the new contracts reflect the fact that employers had the upper hand.

In Taylor, a suburb of Detroit, the Teachers local locked in 10 years of dues—and a five-year contract with a 10 percent pay cut.

Detroit school teachers signed a pay freeze through 2016—after already taking huge cuts in 2010 and 2011.

At least 54 school districts signed contracts, covering close to 20 percent of Michigan teachers.

In Detroit, Wayne State University’s full-time faculty union got eight years of dues in exchange for what chief negotiator Anca Vlasopolos called “a decent contract—in these days.” Raises will not keep up with inflation.

Vlasopolos said, “We had to make concessions to obtain the length of the contract. We were not able to hold on as strongly to things that were … important for the university to remain a university.”

In particular, the question of online teaching—where professors now have no say and may have as many as 200 students in a class—was put off to a joint committee.