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#4732 From: SIUHIN@...
Date: Wed Mar 7, 2012 8:16 am
Subject: Spring 2012 National Immigrant Solidarity Network Monthly News Alert!
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Spring 2012 National Immigrant Solidarity  Network  Monthly News Digest and
News Alert!

National Immigrant  Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support Immigrant  Rights!

URL:  http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail:   Info@...
Information about the Network:   FLYER

Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
New York:  (212)330-8172
Los  Angeles: (213)403-0131
Chicago:   (773)942-2268

====================================
Every  Donation  Counts! Please Support Us!
Send check pay to:
National  Immigrant  Solidarity Network/AFGJ

National Immigrant Solidarity  Network
P.O. Box  751
South Pasadena, CA 91031-0751
(All donations  are tax  deductible)
====================================

Spring  2012 U.S.  Immigrant Alert! Newsletter
Published by National Immigrant  Solidarity Network

May Day 2012 National Call To the Action!
NO to  the NDAA!

Please Download Our Newsletter:
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Spring12.pdf
[Requires  Adobe  Acrobat, to download, go: http://www.adobe.com]

In This  Issue:
1) May Day 2012 Call To Action!
2) The NDAA's Historic Assault on  American Liberty
3) ‘Trespass Bill’ will make protest illegal
4) ICE  Detainee Death in CA
5) Immig detention is no hospitality suite
6)3/23  Newark, NJ :Conf on Immigrant Detainees
7) Updates, Please Support NISN!  Subscribe the Newsletter!

Please download our latest newsletter:
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Spring12.pdf

=====================================================

May  Day 2012
National Mobilization For Immigrant Workers Rights!
National  Immigrant Solidarity Network http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org

Please  send your May Day 2012 action report to info@...
We are  calling A national day of multi-ethnic unity with youth, labor,
peace and  justice communities in solidarity with immigrant workers and
building new  immigrant rights & civil rights movement! Wear White T-Shirt;
organize local  actions to support immigrant worker rights!

1. No to anti-immigrant  legislation, police surveillance and the
criminalization of the immigrant  communities.
2. No to militarization of the border.
3. No to the private  prison, immigrant detention and deportation.
4. No to the guest worker  program.
5. No to the NDAA.
6. Yes to a path to legalization without  condition for undocumented
immigrants NOW.
7. Yes to speedy family  reunification.
8. Yes to civil rights and humane immigration law.
9. Yes  to labor rights and living wages for all workers.
10. Yes to the education  and LGBTQ immigrant legislation.

We encourages everyone to actively  linking our issues with different
struggles: wars in Africa, the Americas, Asia,  Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine &
Korea with sweatshops exploitation in Asia as  well as in Los Angeles, New
York; international arm sales and WTO, FTAA, NAFTA  & CAFTA with AIDS, hunger,
child labors and child solider; as well as  multinational corporations and
economic exploitation with racism and poverty at  home—in order we can win
the struggle together at this May Day 2012!

=====================================================

The NDAA's  Historic Assault on American Liberty

By signing into law the NDAA, the  president has awarded the military
extraordinary powers to detain US citizens  without trial

Jonathan Turley - Monday, January 2, 2012

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with
its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic
  moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and
celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in
the history of our country ... and citizens partied in unwitting bliss into
the  New Year.

Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the  law, Obama
broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that  he
really does not want to detain citizens.

Obama insisted that he signed  the bill simply to keep funding for the
troops. It was a continuation of the  dishonest treatment of the issue by the
White House since the law first came to  light. As discussed earlier, the
White House told citizens that the president  would not sign the NDAA because of
the provision. That spin ended after sponsor  Senator Carl Levin (Democrat,
Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it  was the White House and
insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the  indefinite
detention provision.

The latest claim is even more insulting.  You do not "support our troops"
by denying the principles for which they are  fighting. They are not fighting
to consolidate authoritarian powers in the  president. The "American way of
life" is defined by our constitution and  specifically the bill of rights.
Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend  to use authoritarian powers
does not alter the fact that you just signed an  authoritarian measure. It
is not the use but the right to use such powers that  defines authoritarian
systems.

The almost complete failure of the  mainstream media to cover this issue is
shocking. Many reporters have bought  into the spin of the Obama
administration as they did the spin over torture by  the Bush administration.
Even
today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding  torture despite the long line of
cases and experts defining waterboarding as  torture for decades.

On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim  that this law only
codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The  administration has
fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a  true court review.
Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention  of citizens
violates the constitution.

There are also those who continue  the longstanding effort to excuse
Obama's horrific record on civil liberties by  blaming either others or the
times.
One successful myth is that there is an  exception for citizens. The White
House is saying that changes to the law made  it unnecessary to veto the
legislation. That spin is ridiculous. The changes  were the inclusion of some
meaningless rhetoric after key amendments protecting  citizens were defeated.
The provision merely states that nothing in the  provisions could be
construed to alter Americans' legal rights. Since the Senate  clearly views
citizens as not just subject to indefinite detention but even to  execution
without a trial, the change offers nothing but rhetoric to hide the  harsh
reality.

The Obama administration and Democratic members are in  full spin mode -
using language designed to obscure the authority given to the  military. The
exemption for American citizens from the mandatory detention  requirement
(section 1032) is the screening language for the next section, 1031,  which
offers no exemption for American citizens from the authorisation to use  the
military to indefinitely detain people without charge or trial.

Obama  could have refused to sign the bill and the Congress would have
rushed to fund  the troops. Instead, as confirmed by Senator Levin, the White
House conducted a  misinformation campaign to secure this power while
portraying the president as  some type of reluctant absolute ruler, or, as Obama
maintains, a reluctant  president with dictatorial powers.

Most Democratic members joined their  Republican colleagues in voting for
this un-American measure. Some Montana  citizens are moving to force the
removal of these members who, they insist,  betrayed their oaths of office and
their constituents. Most citizens, however,  are continuing to treat the
matter as a distraction from the holiday  cheer.

For civil libertarians, the NDAA is our Mayan moment: 2012 is when  the
nation embraced authoritarian powers with little more than a pause between
rounds of drinks.

* Jonathan Turley is a professor of law at George  Washington  University.

=====================================================

National   Immigrant Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support Immigrant   Rights!
webpage: http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail:   info@...

New York: (212)330-8172
Los  Angeles:  (213)403-0131
Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
Chicago:   (773)942-2268

Please consider making a donation to the important work  of  National
Immigrant Solidarity Network

Send check pay  to:
National  Immigrant Solidarity Network/AFGJ

National  Immigrant Solidarity  Network
P.O. Box 751
South Pasadena, CA  91031-0751
(All donations are  tax deductible)

*to join the  immigrant Solidarity Network daily news  litserv, send e-mail
to:  isn-subscribe@...

=======================================================

#4733 From: SIUHIN@...
Date: Mon Mar 12, 2012 8:57 pm
Subject: May Day 2012: National Mobilization For Immigrant Workers Rights!
borderactions
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May Day 2012

National Mobilization For  Immigrant Workers Rights!
National Immigrant Solidarity Network  http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org

Please send your May Day 2012 action  report to info@...
We are calling A national day of  multi-ethnic unity with youth, labor,
peace and justice communities in  solidarity with immigrant workers and
building new immigrant rights & civil  rights movement! Wear White T-Shirt;
organize local actions to support immigrant  worker rights!

1. No to anti-immigrant legislation, police surveillance  and the
criminalization of the immigrant communities.
2. No to  militarization of the border.
3. No to the private prison, immigrant  detention and deportation.
4. No to the guest worker program.
5. No to  the NDAA.
6. Yes to a path to legalization without condition for  undocumented
immigrants NOW.
7. Yes to speedy family reunification.
8.  Yes to civil rights and humane immigration law.
9. Yes to labor rights and  living wages for all workers.
10. Yes to the education and LGBTQ immigrant  legislation.

We encourages everyone to actively linking our issues with  different
struggles: wars in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan,  Palestine &
Korea with sweatshops exploitation in Asia as well as in Los  Angeles, New
York; international arm sales and WTO, FTAA, NAFTA & CAFTA with  AIDS, hunger,
child labors and child solider; as well as multinational  corporations and
economic exploitation with racism and poverty at home—in order  we can win
the struggle together at this May Day  2012!

============================================================================
==

National  Immigrant Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support Immigrant  Rights!
webpage: http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail:  info@...

New York: (212)330-8172
Los Angeles:  (213)403-0131
Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
Chicago:  (773)942-2268


* join the immigrant Solidarity Network daily  news litserv, send e-mail
to: isn-subscribe@...


Please  consider making a donation to the important work of National
Immigrant  Solidarity Network

Send check pay to:
National Immigrant Solidarity  Network/AFGJ

National Immigrant Solidarity Network
P.O. Box  751
South Pasadena, CA 91031-0751
(All donations are tax deductible)

#4734 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Mar 19, 2012 9:51 pm
Subject: Fwd: NYC GCA Carpenters NLRB Vote Reminder
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Capelli <webmaster@...>
To: gregoryabutler <gregoryabutler@...>
Sent: Mon, Mar 19, 2012 3:09 pm
Subject: NLRB Vote Reminder

Northeast Regional Council of Carpenters
E-Letter
 
March 19, 2012
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
 
 
 
 
For those of you eligible to vote in the important NLRB election to determine who represents carpenters employed by the GCA in New York City, please read the important reminder below.
 
  • This is a mail-in ballot election.
  • Ballots must be received at the NLRB’s offices is Friday March 23rd, by 5pm.
  • To ensure your vote is counted, YOU MUST MAIL IN YOUR BALLOT SUPPORTING THE NEW YORK CITY DISTRICT COUNCIL OF CARPENTERS NO LATER THAN TUESDAY MARCH 20TH.
 
This outcome of this vote will determine representation for carpenters employed by the GCA so your vote counts! Not mailing in your ballot is as good as a vote for Amalgamated.
 
The NLRB will count ballots on March 29th. Once we receive notification, we will post election results on our website www.northeastcarpenters.org.
 
Fraternally,
 
Michael Capelli, EST
 


This message was sent to gregoryabutler@... from:
Michael Capelli | 91 Fieldcrest Avenue | Edison, NJ 08837
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#4735 From: laborink@...
Date: Tue Mar 20, 2012 5:18 pm
Subject: Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? Peak Oil / Wall Street Speculation?‏
laborink
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Why The Huge Spike in Oil Prices? Peak Oil / Wall Street Speculation?‏
3-16-12 Global Research by F.William Engdahl
Since around October last year,  the price of crude oil on world futures markets has exploded. Different people have different explanations. The most common one is the belief in financial markets that a war between either Israel and Iran or the USA and Iran or all three is imminent. Another camp argues that the price is rising unavoidably because the world has passed what they call "Peak Oil"the point on an imaginary Gaussian Bell Curve (see graph above) at which half of all world known oil reserves have been depleted and the remaining oil will decline in quantity at an accelerating pace with rising price.
 
Both the war danger and peak oil explanations are off base. As in the astronomic price run-up in the Summer of 2008 when oil in futures markets briefly hit $147 a barrel, oil today is rising because of the speculative pressure on oil futures markets from hedge funds and major banks such as Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and most notably, Goldman Sachs, the bank always present when there are big bucks to be won for little effort betting on a sure thing.  They're getting a generous assist from the US Government agency entrusted with regulating financial derivatives, the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation (CFTC).
 
Why then the huge spike in oil prices?
Playing with `paper oil'
 
A brief look at how today's "paper oil" markets function is useful. Since Goldman Sachs bought J. Aron & Co., a savvy commodities trader in the 1980's, trading in crude oil has gone from a domain of buyers and sellers of spot or physical oil to a market where unregulated speculation in oil futures, bets on a price of a given crude on a specific future date, usually in 30 or 60 or 90 days, and not actual supply-demand of physical oil determine daily oil prices.
 
In recent years, a Wall Street-friendly (and Wall Street financed) US Congress has passed several laws to help the banks that were interested in trading oil futures, among them one that allowed the bankrupt Enron to get away with a financial ponzi scheme worth billions in 2001 before it went bankrupt.
 
The Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (CFMA) was drafted by the man who today is President Obama's Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. The  CFMA in effect gave over-the-counter (between financial institutions) derivatives trading in energy futures free reign, absent any US Government supervision, as a result of the financially influential lobbying pressure of the Wall Street banks.  Oil and other energy products were exempt under what came to be called the "Enron Loophole."

#4736 From: laborink@...
Date: Wed Mar 21, 2012 4:27 pm
Subject: Speculation Adds $.56 to A Gallon of Gasoline
laborink
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Speculation In Crude Oil Adds $23.39 To The Price Per Barrel
2-27-12 Forbes by Robert Lenzner
- - - A barrel of crude oil is $23.39 higher because of speculative action in the commodity markets this translates out into a premium for gasoline at the pump of $.56 a gallon. - - -

#4737 From: "Charles S." <chasmn@...>
Date: Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:09 am
Subject: Subsidy Tracker
wilsoncharless
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Subsidy Tracker
Discover Where Corporations are Getting Taxpayer Handouts Across the United States.
A growing number of state governments are disclosing which companies they are giving tax breaks and other subsidies in the name of job creation and economic development. Yet much of that information is being disseminated through hard-to-find reports and web pages. Subsidy Tracker is the first national search engine for state economic development subsidies. It brings together recipient data from a wide range of subsidy programs in states across the country.
 
Using - If you don't have a company name you can enter only the state in the search windows and it will bring up the entire state.
You can also search only by city and state.

#4738 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Mar 26, 2012 7:53 pm
Subject: Fwd: SAVE THE DATE: Workers Demonstration, April 4, 12 PM
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: Justice Will Be Served Campaign (JWBS) <nmass@...>
To: gregoryabutler <gregoryabutler@...>
Sent: Mon, Mar 26, 2012 1:05 pm
Subject: SAVE THE DATE: Workers Demonstration, April 4, 12 PM


Join us:
STOP THE ATTACK ON WORKERS
Equal rights for all workers
WORKER DEMONSTRATION
Jacob Javitz Federal Building (26 Federal Plaza, Broadway side)
Dear members and supporters:

We've got an important event coming up and we want you to be a part of it. Please join us at a demonstration on Wednesday, April 4, 12 PM at 26 Federal Plaza (Jacob Javitz Federal Building, Broadway side).

We will be calling for justice: we want the federal government to act
now and prosecute the corrupt federal (USDOL and FBI) agents who threatened and locked up Yes Car workers who were standing up for their labor rights. These agents used workers' immigration status to divide workers who were uniting to enforce the labor law.
 
We are uniting with many community organizations and workers of different industries, neighborhoods, and nationalities to demand equal rights for all workers, and abolish today's slave law, Employer Sanctions Provision (IRCA)!


Sincerely,
Sophie DeBenedetto
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS)
(212) 358-0295

Equal Rights for All Workers

Repeal Employer Sanctions




Endorsing organizations (list in formation): Justice Will Be Served! Campaign, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Chinese Staff & Workers Association, American Friends Service Committee, Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, Urban Justice Center Community Development Project, United Methodist Global Ministries, Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State, Common Law, West Park Presbyterian Church, Episcopal Community Services Long Island, St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church Flushing Greens, Harlem Tenants Council, Sweatshop Free Upper West Side, Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrants Rights, Independent Workers' Movement, Industrial Workers of the World, Jornaleros Unidos, Brandworkers, Million Workers March, People's Organization for Progress, Philippine Forum, Sisa Pakari Labor Committee, International Action Center, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Nodutdol, May 1st Coalition, Project Reach, Global Action Project, CUNY Law Labor Coalition for Workers Rights & Economic Justice, Rabbi Neal Kaunfer-Director of Judeotutor Educational Services, Hunger Action Network of New York State, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice

 
The Justice Will Be Served! Campaign (JWBS) organizes delivery, nail salon, restaurant, hotel, deli, and other service workers through out the tri-state area to challenge sweatshop conditions like forced overtime, low wages, tip stealing, and retaliation. While organizing workers for improvements in their workplaces, JWBS also unites workers across industries to demand enforcement of labor laws, the right to a 40-hour workweek, and the abolishment of the divisive Employer Sanctions Provision.

This email was sent to gregoryabutler@... by nmass@... |  
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops | 345 Grand Street | New York | NY | 10002

#4739 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Apr 2, 2012 3:36 pm
Subject: TWO BIG ELECTION VICTORIES FOR NEW YORK CARPENTERS is the NYC District Council of Carpenters on the road to a comeback?
vinniegangbox
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TWO BIG ELECTION VICTORIES
FOR NEW YORK CARPENTERS
IS THE NYC DISTRICT COUNCIL OF CARPENTERS ON THE ROAD TO A COMEBACK?
 
The New York City District Council of Carpenters and its 15,000 members had two major election victories in the last week of March 2012.
 
One was the defeat of union contracts that would have gutted the unions Out of Work List job referral system; the other was the defeat of an attempt by the Painters Union to raid the Carpenters Union’s dockbuilder jurisdiction.
 
On the contracts, the pacts with the Building Contractors Association, the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, the Cement League and the Greater New York Floor Coverers Association would’ve let contractors to avoid hiring any union carpenters from the union other than one shop steward per jobsite.
 
About two thirds of the union’s membership (the “local men” as they are known) work off of the Out of Work List, including a disproportionate number of the union’s apprentices, African Americans, West Indians, Latinos, women and older carpenters.
 
Without that list, they’d have to struggle to find jobs directly from contractors, in competition with the union’s much smaller number of “company men” (carpenters who have full time jobs) who are disproportionately White and male and some of whom are related to contractors by family, marriage or ethnic origin.
 
In the 1990s, the leadership of the District Council at that time (since ousted by federal court action with many of the officers at the time also convicted of racketeering charges and jailed) agreed to a similar agreement (then known as “the request system”).
 
The request system made it much harder for local men to get jobs, led to increased discrimination against third and fourth year apprentices, African Americans, West Indians, Latinos, women, older carpenters and also led to a situation where, particularly in residential drywall and hirise concrete jobs, company man carpenters had to “work for cash” (get paid off the books for less than union pay and no benefits) to get jobs.
 
Considering the longstanding practice, dating back to the 1970s, of a section of union carpentry contractors, often with organized crime ties, abusing the union’s job referral system to force a portion of their workforce to work for less than union scale and to discriminate against those who refuse to work off the books, there’s no reason to think that similar labor abuses wouldn’t materialize under full mobility.
 
This so called “full mobility” agreement was voted down by a two thirds majority, with only a small number of scaffold carpenters (a group who are disproportionately company men) voting for a full mobility agreement with the Hoisting Trade Association that only affects their specialty.
 
This sends the agreements – and 11 other agreements with other employers associations – back to the negotiating table where, hopefully, they will drop the demand to eliminate our hiring hall system.
 
The same week, an attempt by the Painters Union to take over representation for the Carpenters Union’s 1,000 New York, Long Island and New Jersey dockbuilders (heavy construction workers who do pile diving, pier, bridge, waterfront and foundation work) also went down to defeat.
 
In a shamelessly opportunist bid to take advantage of disarray and member disenchantment in the New York City District Council of Carpenters, and widespread conflict on a North America-wide basis between Carpenters Union members and the union’s controversial general president, Douglas J. “Cash” McCarron,  the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades chartered a puppet union called the “Amalgamated Carpenters”.
 
The Amalgamated’s New York City affiliate was run out of the New Jersey law offices of an attorney with a long history of representing members of the Genovese cosa nostra crime family and many of the officers of the bogus union had been ousted from posts in the District Council of Carpenters for misconduct and/or organized crime connections.
 
The Amalgamated targeted the dockbuilders first because many members of that craft were upset that their local, Dockbuilders local 1456, had recently been merged with another heavy construction carpenters local, Timbermens local 1536 (representing workers who do heavy timber work on sewer and foundation jobs and the carpenters who build and dismantle scaffolds and temporary jobsite elevators) into the newly chartered local 1556.
 
To the contractors, the Painters Union offered wages that are up to 30% lower than the current union dockbuilder scale, no pension fund contributions and the abolition of the union job referral system.
 
Considering the deep concessions the Painters Union granted to the Association of Master Painters and Decorators in the current union contract (some painters took a 60% cut in wages and benefits) there was no doubt that they were serious in inflicting these deep cuts on dockbuilders working for heavy and highway contractors affiliated to the Associated General Contractors.
 
However, despite an intense almost yearlong campaign, which included hoodwinking Painters Union members into picketing Carpenters local 1556 meetings, the 1,000 dockbuilders finally spoke in an NLRB representation election.
 
Eight hundred and nineteen dockbuilders voted – 361 for the District Council of Carpenters, 186 for the Painters Union-controlled Amalgamated Carpenters, 7 for no union at all and 265 ballots were contested and, as of this writing, have not been counted.
 
While the 265 contested ballots exceed the Carpenters Union’s 175 vote margin of victory, the vote still sent a strong message to the Painters Union, and may cause them to reconsider further raids on the Carpenters Union, both in New York City and in other parts of the country.
 
The defeat of full mobility and the victory over the Painters Union’s raid probably wouldn’t have happened without the recent election of reform Executive Secretary Treasurer Mike Bilello.
 
His administration, elected at the tail end of a trusteeship by the District Council’s parent union and still under the supervision of a 19 year long federal court monitorship, is the first union administration since 1916 that isn’t in some way tied to organized crime.
 
Bilello, a carpenter for 37 years, is quite the contrast to the rogue’s gallery that preceded him.
 
Of the last 5 leaders of the New York District Council of Carpenters prior to Bilello, Teddy Maritas is presumed to have been killed in a mob hit, Big John O’Connor narrowly survived a mob hit with four gunshot wounds to the butt, Paschal McGuinness was forced out of office by the federal racketeering probe that led to the present monitorship, Fred Devine served a long prison sentence and Mike Forde is still in federal prison and will be for the next 8 years.
 
Quite a crew.
 
The years of racketeer domination took their toll.
 
At its peak in the 1970s, the District Council had 40,000 members and its members did pretty much all of the carpentry work on every structure built in the city, from bodega to hirise.
 
Starting in the late 1970s, residential construction went scab first, with city subsidized housing renovation work the first to be deunionized.
 
These days, there are still about 40,000 carpenters working in the city – but only 15,000 are union and a large chunk of the non union carpenters work off the books for less than minimum wage.
 
During those years, much of the rest of the NYC building trades went into decline as well, falling from nearly all of the city’s then 240,000 tradespeople being union 40 years ago to barely 100,000 of NYC’s 200,000 construction workers being union these days – and about 50,000 of the city’s 100,000 non union workers being paid subminimum wages off the books.
 
Racketeer domination of the city’s construction union movement was a big part of why the city’s real estate developers, contractors and the city government were able to get away with that kind of mass deunionization without any significant resistance.
 
Racketeering also gave the federal government, the State of New York and the New York County District Attorney’s Office an excuse to extensively involve themselves in the internal affairs of many New York area construction unions.
 
On the one hand, that government intervention freed us from almost a century of gangster unionism, which was, indisputably, was a victory for construction workers in this city.
 
However, it also put strong limits on the freedom of action of building trades unions, not to mention imposing a huge financial burden on the treasuries of our unions, which have to pay for the monitors and investigators appointed by the courts.
 
In any case, with the defeat of full mobility and the NLRB election victory over the Painters Union, the Bilello administration has won two major defensive victories for union carpenters.
 
This would be a good time to go on the offensive, take on the corrupt contractors who have abused the system for so long and to organize the great mass of non union carpenters who do the majority of carpentry work in this city.
 
We’re on the verge of another building boom in New York, and that’s always a good time for craft unions to fight to expand the unionized segment of the market and improve conditions in both union and scab sectors of our industry.
 
Let’s see what the Bilello administration is prepared to do.
 
 
-          commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER
FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”
               Originally published on Monday, April 2, 2012
               © 2012 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.
 
 

#4740 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Apr 2, 2012 4:01 pm
Subject: Fwd: Workers Demonstration, April 4, 12 PM
vinniegangbox
Send Email Send Email
 



-----Original Message-----
From: Justice Will Be Served Campaign (JWBS) <nmass@...>
To: gregoryabutler <gregoryabutler@...>
Sent: Mon, Apr 2, 2012 11:55 am
Subject: Workers Demonstration, April 4, 12 PM


Join us:
Repeal Employer Sanctions
Equal rights for all workers
WORKER DEMONSTRATION APRIL 4th
Jacob Javitz Federal Building (26 Federal Plaza, Broadway side)
Dear members and supporters:

We've got an important event coming up and we want you to be a part of it. Please join us at a demonstration on Wednesday, April 4, 12 PM at 26 Federal Plaza (Jacob Javitz Federal Building, Broadway side).

We will be calling for justice: we want the federal government to act
now and prosecute the corrupt federal (USDOL and FBI) agents who threatened and locked up Yes Car workers who were standing up for their labor rights. These agents used workers' immigration status to divide workers who were uniting to enforce the labor law.
 
We are uniting with many community organizations and workers of different industries, neighborhoods, and nationalities to demand equal rights for all workers, and abolish today's slave law, Employer Sanctions Provision (IRCA)!


Endorsing organizations (list in formation): Justice Will Be Served! Campaign, National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, Chinese Staff & Workers Association, American Friends Service Committee, Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund, Urban Justice Center Community Development Project, United Methodist Global Ministries, Labor-Religion Coalition of New York State, Common Law, West Park Presbyterian Church, Episcopal Community Services Long Island, St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church Flushing Greens, Harlem Tenants Council, Sweatshop Free Upper West Side, Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrants Rights, Independent Workers' Movement, Industrial Workers of the World, Jornaleros Unidos, Brandworkers, Million Workers March, People's Organization for Progress, Philippine Forum, Sisa Pakari Labor Committee, International Action Center, Desis Rising Up and Moving, Nodutdol, May 1st Coalition, Project Reach, Global Action Project, CUNY Law Labor Coalition for Workers Rights & Economic Justice, Rabbi Neal Kaunfer-Director of Judeotutor Educational Services, Hunger Action Network of New York State, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice

The Justice Will Be Served! Campaign (JWBS) organizes delivery, nail salon, restaurant, hotel, deli, and other service workers through out the tri-state area to challenge sweatshop conditions like forced overtime, low wages, tip stealing, and retaliation. While organizing workers for improvements in their workplaces, JWBS also unites workers across industries to demand enforcement of labor laws, the right to a 40-hour workweek, and the abolishment of the divisive Employer Sanctions Provision.

This email was sent to gregoryabutler@... by nmass@... |  
National Mobilization Against Sweatshops | 345 Grand Street | New York | NY | 10002

#4741 From: laborink@...
Date: Tue Apr 10, 2012 1:16 am
Subject: Shamus Cooke in "Workers Action"
laborink
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Why Campaigning for Democrats Cripples Labor Unions
4-9-12 Workers Action by Shamus Cooke
 
As labor leaders across the U.S. shift resources away from defending workers and into Obama's re-election campaign, millions of organized and non-organized workers remain unemployed and hopeless. Contrary to the "optimistic" government jobs numbers, the jobs crisis grinds onward. Some labor leaders will argue that getting Obama elected is the first step towards addressing the jobs crisis, but they know better.
 
The recent so-called JOBS Act that passed with strong Democrat and Republican support will create zero jobs the law's intent is to lower regulations for banks and corporations, in an attempt to boost their profits. The JOBS wording was used for popularity's sake, requiring heavy doses of deceit.
 
Workers Action Home Page: http://workerscompass.org/

#4742 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Apr 13, 2012 5:02 pm
Subject: VACANCY PROFITEERING how NYC's landlords keep rents high by keeping buildings and land off the market - and what NYC tenants can do about it
vinniegangbox
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VACANCY PROFITEERING
how NYC’s landlords keep rents high by keeping buildings and
land off the market – and what NYC tenants can do about it
 
On April Fool’s Day 2012, New York City-based housing rights advocacy group Picture the Homeless issued a report on the city’s 65 year long housing crisis. The document, BANKING ON VACANCY, homelessness and real estate speculation, exposed how New York landlords have deliberately kept 3,551 abandoned apartment buildings and 2,489 vacant lots off the market.
 
These properties, if developed as low income housing, could provide apartments for 199,981 poor and working class New Yorkers – five apartments for every one of the city’s 40,000 homeless people!
 
Keeping these properties undeveloped maintains an artificial shortage of housing, helping landlords to keep vacancies low and rents high. As a result, average apartment rents in Manhattan are over $3,000 a month, half of the city’s population spend more than 30% of their income on housing and hundreds of thousands of New York tenants live doubled or tripled up with relatives or roommates.
 
The City, which owns 10% of these vacant properties, is part of the problem, having deliberately kept many of its vacant buildings off the market for many years, to preserve them for future profitable use by the real estate interests.
 
A disproportionate amount of these vacant housing units are concentrated in predominantly African American and Latino working class neighborhoods like Harlem, the East Bronx, Bushwick, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Far Rockaway and the North Shore of Staten Island.
 
These communities are also the neighborhoods of origin of many of the city’s 40,000 homeless people, with thousands more doubled and tripled up because of high rents and few vacancies.
 
There are also a large number of vacant units in gentrified areas like SoHo, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg – areas that were overdeveloped in the early 2000s and are now dotted with luxury housing construction sites abandoned because of market conditions.
 
Picture the Homeless wants the city government to develop low income housing the vacant properties and lots that it directly owns, and to require landlords to develop vacant properties that they own for rental to the city’s working class and poor and to provide those landlords with subsidies to build those housing units.
 
They also call for the city, state and federal government adjust the rent guidelines for affordable housing, which currently allow developers who receive federal, state and city subsidies supposedly intended to build low income housing to charge luxury housing rents for the units they build.
 
Picture the Homeless also appeals to the city’s construction unions to join them in a call for a City funded jobs program that would train unemployed inner city residents to work as apprentices, at union scale, on these low income housing jobs.
 
As far as actually implementing this simple but  radical plan, Picture the Homeless has gotten one of its allies in the City Council, former SEIU local 32bj organizer Melissa Mark-Viverito (D – East Harlem) to sponsor a bill, Intro 48, that would enact some of their proposals into law.
 
Predictably, in a city with a mayor with a net worth of $ 19 billion and where real estate developers are the dominant element of the local capitalist class who bankroll both parties, Intro 48 was quickly pigeonholed by Council Speaker Christine Quinn and in the two years since it was introduced hasn’t had so much as a public hearing.
 
Obviously, it’s going to take a fight to get this very necessary proposal actually carried out.
 
Considering the power that the real estate developers have in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and the influence with the city’s politically powerful not for profit sector that the developers are able to buy with their billions, it would take a very powerful mass movement of the 80% of the city who are renters to force the City to deal with vacancy abuse by the landlords.
 
Since a majority of the city’s construction workers live in the city, and most of the city resident tradespeople are renters, we have a stake in this fight too, especially if the housing units were going to be built with 100% union labor.
 
That movement would also have to be sustained to preserve these housing reforms.
 
In 1947, after 25 years of struggle by communist-led tenants rights groups, Mayor William O’Dwyer (D) and the City of New York was forced to acknowledge that there was a housing crisis (a crisis that we are still in to this day) and impose the Rent Control Law on the city’s real estate interests.
 
That law, along with the construction of thousands of units of public housing by the New York City Housing Authority, forced landlords to charge reasonable rents and made life bearable for the city’s working class and poor for a quarter century.
 
However, the mass movement that built the Rent Control Law was disbanded almost as soon as the bill was passed.
 
Just 24 years later, the city’s real estate interests got the administration of Mayor John Lindsay (R) to repeal the Rent Control Law, and replace it with the far more pro landlord Rent Stabilization Law.
 
Rent Stabilization, and the annual rent increases authorized every two years by the nominally independent but actually landlord controlled Rent Guidelines Board, began the upward spiral in housing costs that have made this city’s rents so stratospherically high.
 
A package of $ 784 million in long term low interest city loans to real estate developers  gave them a direct financial incentive to tear down low rent units and replace them with luxury housing, which they proceeded to do with gusto.
 
Unfortunately, the construction unions of the day supported this development, for the same reason they support any construction projects that are going to be built union, regardless of whatever social consequences might arise from them.
 
The landlords also began a parallel blatantly illegal campaign of hiring “torches” (arsonists) to destroy units in areas of the city where luxury housing wasn’t commercially feasible. 
 
Some of the more decent torches would give the tenants a warning, often by slipping notes under their apartment doors, shortly before burning the building.
 
Sometimes, they just struck a match, with the tenants still inside.
 
A few of the torches were jailed, almost none of the landlords ever saw the inside of a courtroom for their blatant terroristic criminality towards the tenants of New York.
 
Hundreds of tenants and dozens of firemen died and nearly a quarter million New Yorkers, mostly Black and Latino and almost entirely poor or working class, were driven from their homes by the fiery terrorism of the landlords.
 
The City of New York also went bankrupt, because the $ 784 million in long term low interest loans given to the developers by the city to build luxury housing had been borrowed by the City short term at high interest from Lazard Frères, Citibank and other leading Wall Street financial houses.
 
They called in their loans in the summer of 1975; the City couldn’t pay so the bankers seized control of the City’s finances to get their money.
 
This cut off the gravy train for the developers and finally stopped the fires from burning.
 
It also left much of the city in ruins.
 
In the wake of the city’s bankruptcy, newly elected mayor Ed Koch (D) launched a series of initiatives to partially rebuild the most aggressively torched neighborhoods.
 
Koch’s newly created Department of Housing Preservation and Development contracted with publicly financed but privately run not for profit Community Based Organizations to hire the contractors who would do the actual housing construction.
 
This was basically a legal form of money laundering. If the city had directly used public funds, it would have been bound by Davis Bacon Act requirements that mandated that workers on those jobs get paid prevailing wages (in New York those are pegged to union pay and benefit scales).
 
However, privatizing the funds enabled the city to use the lowest paid workers available to do the work, legal requirements be damned.
 
The unions did nothing to resist this, in part because the main unions in residential construction (Carpenters, Laborers, Bricklayers and Painters) were so heavily dominated by gangsters that they were incapable of fighting the City or the scab contractors it hired.
 
Even with the low wages paid to the workers, the City failed to build enough low income housing to meet the demand – especially with the landlord arson-created housing shortage being used to drive up rents citywide.
 
In the absence of any serious organized struggle against the real estate developers, rents soared, decent low income housing was scarce and, by the 1980s, New York began to see homeless people actually sleeping on the streets.
 
The City and the corporate media tried to explain away homelessness as a “mental health problem” and falsely blamed disabled rights activists for the sudden rise of people sleeping on the streets. In reality, increasing civil rights for psychiatric patients didn’t cause homelessness.
 
Landlord profiteering, specifically the demolition of single room occupancy residences (SROs) to build luxury housing was actually the cause of this horrible social phenomenon.
 
These attacks on working class tenants went unanswered.
 
The more activist oriented tenant rights groups put all of their energy into these basically ceremonial protests at the biannual Rent Guidelines Board hearings, providing a street theater backdrop to the landlord dominated body’s dog and pony show hearings and having no outcome on the rent increases that the RGB always imposed.
 
The more social service oriented tenants rights groups got sucked into administering various HPD run programs. A few low income people got assistance thanks to their efforts, but this had no impact on the broader class wide attacks on working class tenants by the real estate interests.
 
It didn’t help matters that much of that so called  “low income housing” being built with those HPD subsidies wasn’t actually going to low income people.
 
HPD and the US Department of Housing and Urban Development calculate the rents and income requirements for low income housing based on a formula that sets the incomes for prospective tenants far higher than the average income in NYC’s poor minority neighborhoods.
 
In HPD’s bizarro universe, $ 64,000 a year is the MINIMUM income for some of these “low income” housing units!
 
In practice, HPD and HUD were using low income housing programs to gentrify poor minority neighborhoods and price their present residents out of their communities.
 
The only “low incomes” in these housing developments was the subminimum wages paid to the non union construction workers building these apartments - $ 7/hr off the books for skilled carpenters and masons, $ 4/hr for laborers and helpers.
 
Yes, public funds were being used to openly violate federal and state minimum wage laws and to evade federal, state, city, social security, disability, workers compensation  and unemployment insurance withholding requirements.
 
As for the construction unions, at this point the federal government and the New York County District Attorney’s office had intervened in a number of the more corrupt and openly gangster ruled building trades unions (in particular, the District Council of Carpenters and the Mason Tenders District Council)
 
This intervention was due to the fact that cosa nostra had used these unions to collect bribes from developers in return for labor peace. However, as the unions had gotten weaker due to gangster rule and no longer posed as much of a threat of leading struggles of tradespeople on the jobsites, the real estate interests no longer wanted to pay those bribes. Unable to defeat the unions and the gangsters themselves, the developers had the feds and the DA’s office do it for them.
 
One of the positive effects of law enforcement intervention in the District Council of Carpenters and the Mason Tenders District Council was a revival of union organizing by those bodies, the first time that any of New York’s construction unions had done any new organizing since the 1920s.
 
The Carpenters and the Mason Tenders were the only organizations that exposed the labor abuses of HPD’s low income housing developers and contractors.
 
Unfortunately, they weren’t able to unionize the roughly 50,000 brutally underpaid subminimum wage non union workers in this sector. If they had, it would have been a colossal victory not only for the New York building trades but the American labor movement as a whole.
 
The Wall Street meltdown of 2007 and the massive recession that resulted brought residential construction in New York City to a standstill.  Many apartment buildings were abandoned in mid build, a phenomenon this city hasn’t seen since the 1970s.
 
This explosion of abandoned units accelerated the city’s housing crisis – one of the reasons that rents continue to rise, despite the collapse of the housing market.
 
The bottom line is, the housing crisis and the exploitation of the people of New York City, in particular the poor and working classes, by the real estate developers is the central political question  here and has been since the 1940s.
 
The enormous political influence of the real estate developers, and their allies the Wall Street bankers, acts as a barrier to resolving this crisis.
 
Billionaire media mogul Mike Bloomberg, (R), the city’s mayor for the last 10 years, is an ardent backer of the real estate interests, as was his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani (R), and the entire Republican Party establishment and the leadership of the Republican satellite Conservative and Independence parties.
 
Republican Mayor John Lindsay was also the architect of the pro landlord Rent Stabilization regime which caused the wave of arson and gentrification in the 1970s that created so much mass misery for working class tenants in this city.
 
However, the Democrats, by far the city’s largest party (80% of New York voters are registered Democrats and 90% of the city’s councilpeople, assemblypeople, state senators and congresspeople are Democrats) is just as thoroughly under the influence of the real estate developers.
 
The Republican Lindsay may have imposed Rent Stabilization, but the attacks on working class tenants created by that law were also carried out by the next three Democratic mayors (Abe Beame, Ed Koch and David Dinkins) and by the overwhelming Democratic majorities in the City Council and the city’s delegations to the State Assembly and the State Senate.
 
The Democratic Party’s pro landlord bias isn’t as readily evident as the Republicans, due to the fact that some of the more liberal of the party’s elected officials often make pro tenant statements or introduce bills that would expand tenant’s rights.
 
Be that as it may, the Democratic Party’s hierarchy and its more conservative officials make sure those pro tenant laws never actually get voted on in the City Council or the State Legislature.
 
The city’s supposed “labor” party, the Working Families Party, has, in practice, done little to actually fight for working class tenants, although, on paper, the party is supposedly pro tenant and the party’s only elected official, Brooklyn City Councilwoman Leticia James, is known for rhetorically supporting tenants rights and cosponsoring pro tenant bills (that, inevitably, get pigeonholed by the Council’s centrist Democratic leadership and never get put to a vote). 
 
Despite the fact that New York has a huge far left, none of the many socialist, communist or anarchist groups in the city have attempted to deal with the housing question in a major way. The city’s only leftist electoral party, Black Panther turned liberal Democrat Councilman Charles Barron’s Freedom Party, has also studiously ignored the rent gouging crisis. The most recent entrant to the city’s left wing political scene, the Occupy Wall Street movement, has also had little to say about the housing crisis (even though it is a clear example of “the 1%” exploiting “the 99%”).
 
Sadly, just about the only political figure in the city that’s tried to mobilize around rent gouging in a political way is eccentric building super turned activist Jimmy McMillan and his “Rent is 2 Damn High Party” (he got 40,000 votes in the last gubernatorial election, running a one-man campaign with no resources or money, solely on the single issue of excessively high rents in New York City).
 
The city’s unelected “permanent government” of publicly subsidized but privately run not for profit corporations are also close allies of the real estate interests, in large part because they themselves are major players in the real estate game here.
 
The city’s three biggest not for profit entities (the New York Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church, Columbia University and New York University) happen to be the city’s biggest landlords. Columbia University is also the leading gentrifier in Harlem, with NYU playing a similar role in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side.
 
They aren’t the only not for profits on the landlord’s side of the fence. Many of the housing related not for profits have spent decades administering HPD’s “affordable housing” programs, which, as I explained above, were often thinly disguised luxury housing construction programs, using underpaid sweatshop labor to build six figure apartments for the wealthy.
 
Much of the city’s labor movement are also on the side of the landlords, with the building trades unions, local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union and UNITE-HERE’s Hotel Trades Council among the most aggressive defenders of landlord interests in the labor movement.
 
The city’s public sector unions, which represent the bulk of New York’s million union members, are largely silent on housing questions, even though these are life-and-death bread and butter issues for the vast majority of their members who live in rental apartments.
 
Ironically enough, most of the members of those unions, like most New York City workers, are tenants who are as victimized by landlord profiteering as any working class New Yorker.
 
Facing down the heavy battalions of the landlords, the city’s 80% tenant majority have very few forces on their side.
 
There are tenant activist groups in the city, however, on the whole, much of their activity consists of the ineffectual street theater protests at the Rent Guidelines Board hearings and individual legal and social services assistance to tenants who’ve been hauled into Housing Court by their landlords.
 
Unfortunately, their efforts aren’t nearly adequate to fight against landlord profiteering.
 
There are exceptions (Picture the Homeless being a good example) however they have limited forces and are facing powerful enemies.
 
This is tragic, because landlord profiteering and rent gouging is the lynchpin political issue in New York City. Eighty percent of the population here are renters – not only the vast majority of the city’s poor and working class, but also most of the middle class and even a section of the rich also are plundered by the landlords. In the case of store owners and small businesspeople, they get gouged twice, by high rents for their apartments and for their businesses.
 
The one issue that could unite the common people of New York City against the multimillionaires and billionaires, it is the real estate question.
 
There is an urgent need for the city’s labor unions, the tenants’ rights movement, Occupy Wall Street and the city’s left to unite around the question of fighting for more low income housing and a rollback and freeze in rents.
 
This is a lot harder than it sounds.
 
It would involve these groups breaking with the real estate interests (a tall order for the building trades unions, the SEIU and the Hotel Trades Council, the leaders of which have long been close allies of the developers) and, more importantly, it would involve these groups having to break with the pro corporate leadership of Democratic Party.
 
It would also be necessary for these groups to put the “friends of labor” and “progressives” among the ranks of Democratic Party politicians on the spot. They would have to challenge these elected officials to live up to their professed principles and break with the pro corporate leaders of the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party.
 
Again, that’s easy to say but hard to actually accomplish in the real world.
 
Of course, the only way that the pro tenant legislation that these Democratic politicians propose in the City Council and the State Legislature will ever actually get passed is if there is massive pressure from the labor movement, the working class and the poor.
 
A good start point for a campaign would be to demand that two bills in particular be brought up for debate and passed – Melissa Mark-Viverito’s Intro 48 that would force the city and the developers to use abandoned buildings and vacant lots to build affordable housing and Senator Adriano Espaillat (D – Manhattan) and Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez’ (D – Brooklyn) S. 2893/A. 2472 that would require that construction workers on HPD subsidized low income housing jobs receive prevailing wages.
 
Both Intro 48 and S. 2893/A. 2472 are currently in limbo, safely pigeonholed by the Democratic leadership in their respective legislative bodies with no hope of being debated any time soon.
 
Building a mass movement among New York City’s poor, working class and those sections of the middle class and small businesspeople who are also exploited by landlord profiteering would be a giant step forward, not only in terms of the immediate issue of excessive rents and inadequate housing, but also in terms of increasing the power of the working class and weakening the rule of bankers and billionaires over our society.
 
Again, this is easier said than done, but we really need to start making moves in this direction.
 
-          commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER
FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”
               Originally published on Friday, April 13, 2012
               © 2012 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

#4743 From: laborink@...
Date: Tue Apr 17, 2012 6:21 pm
Subject: Kim Scipes - The AFL-CIO's Secret War Against Developing Country Workers
laborink
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Kim Scipes on The AFL-CIO's Secret War Against Developing Country Workers
Steve Zeltzer did almost an hour-long interview with Kim Scipes when he was in San Francisco in March 2012 about his book, AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers:  Solidarity or Sabotage?, the AFL-CIO's foreign policy program and the labor movement in general.  It is now on-line at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUsLrlie_Q .  (For details about the book--now out in paperback--links to reviews, and a 20% discount off the cover price, you can go to http://faculty.pnc.edu/kscipes/book.htm .)
I would appreciate it if you would forward on to your lists, as I'd like to get this out widely.
Hope you are well!
best--
Kim
Watch Presentation at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzUsLrlie_Q 58 min

#4744 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 2:45 pm
Subject: Fwd: OCCUPY FOR LAUNDRY WORKERS today Thu 12:30 PM
vinniegangbox
Send Email Send Email
 



-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Eaton // NYPROTEST <toddeaton@...>
To: *NYPROTEST EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT LISTSERV* <NYPROTEST@...>
Sent: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 10:30 am
Subject: OCCUPY FOR LAUNDRY WORKERS today Thu 12:30 PM

 . Occupy Mark Samson's Office in Support of Laundry Workers Center
Today Thursday 12:30 PM at E. 29th St. & Park Avenue South

 . Justice for Pat and All Abused Domestic Workers!
Today Thursday 4-6 PM at 10 East 40th Street between 5th and Madison in front of Sheryl Shade's advertising firm, Shade Global. Join Domestic Workers United, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and countless allies
..........

Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:48:47 -0400 From: <nastaranmohit@...> Subject: Re: [LOC Talk] Tomorrow!!! [sic] "99 Picket Lines" for justice in the  workplace!! < http://groups.google.com/group/loc-talk/subscribe?hl=en_US>, \On Apr 19, 2012, at 8:39 AM, "Barbara Lynch" <Barbara@...> wrote:
From: Nastaran Mohit
To: Justin ; Rose Bookbinder ; loc-talk@googlegroups.com ; labor-outreach-committee ; OWS IMMIGRANTS ; Joyce New DWU ; Virgilio Oscar Aran ; mayday@...
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:18 PM
Subject: [LOC Talk] Tomorrow!!! "99 Picket Lines" for justice in the workplace!!

Please join us tomorrow for two important "99 Picket Line" actions
for dignity and justice in the workplace!

12:30 PM
Occupy Mark Samson's Office in Support of Laundry Workers Center!

CALLING ALL OCCUPIERS! Join us tomorrow at 12:30 PM on the corner of 29th St. and Park Avenue. We will be filing into Mark Samsons office, the owner of Hot and Crusty, who has refused to respect the dignity of LWC members organizing in the workplace. Workers have demanded the reinstatement of Gretel Areco, a female co-worker who was sexually harassed and forced from her job. Samson has refused to reinstate her out of fear of her continued organizing efforts and the power of the solidarity of Hot and Crusty workers. Samson, who heads private equity firm Praesidian Capital, has also refused to recognize the workers newly formed labor organization, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association, and has terminated negotiations until they stop their public campaign. These brave workers have won historic gains in only a few short months, and need our support in showing Samson they are not alone!

On Thursday, OWS supporters and allies of LWC will take to the offices of Praesidian Capital to demand the rights of workers be respected--or WE'LL BE BACK!

Sneak out for a quick lunch break for worker justice!

Please call (914) 557-6408 with any questions.

4-6 PM
Justice for Pat and All Abused Domestic Workers!

Pat Francois is a domestic worker who has fought tirelessly with Domestic Workers United for the rights of nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers. In 2008, Pat was physically assaulted by her employer while trying to protect the little girl she cared for from her fathers verbal abuse, and nearly 3 1/2 years later, justice has yet to be served. Pat was punched in the face, beaten on her hand and called a"stupid black b***ch" by Matthew Mazar when she tried to call the police. While Mazar walks free, and he and his wife Sheryl Shade both enjoy successful careers and a swanky 1%'er lifestyle, Pat has gone without work for over 3 years now while bravely battling breast cancer.

Pat is the kind of tireless advocate for worker and immigrant rights we should all be so blessed to work with, and has always treated the struggles of other workers as though they are her own. She has supported Occupy Wall Street from the first days of the encampment, and regularly checks in on our work even as she deals with the pain of her chemotherapy treatments. She needs our support now more than ever. We cannot allow this brutal, racist and sexist attack on Pat, or any other community members, to go unanswered. She has spent her life fighting side by side with other sisters and brothers in struggle, and her fight is very much our own.

There will be a rally on Thursday evening from 4-6PM at 10 East 40th street (between 5th and Madison) in front of Sheryl Shade's advertising firm, Shade Global. Domestic Workers United, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and countless allies and supporters will be rallying together to demand the respect and justice Pat deserves.  Please join us. Our numbers and strength will send a clear message to Mazar and Shade that we're not going anywhere until justice is served.


Please sign the Change.org petition in support of Pat here:
https://www.change.org/petitions/justice-for-pat-stand-up-for-abused-domestic-workers


For more details/questions about the action, please call Nastaran at (914)557-6408 or the DWU office at (212) 481-5747.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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This new list is for general discussion and announcements of events that do not directly pertain to meetings and deliberations of the Labor Outreach Committee. This is a new list from the Labor Outreach Committee (LOC), which also maintains a separate list specifically for logistics regarding the LOC called the �LOC Logistics� list.
 
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This year I have all but completely stopped e-mailing event announcements.  Please send any NYC left event announcements that you find directly to:  


...as well as to me here. 

No subscription needed.  Where possible, please no file attachments.  Send using TO: (not BCC:).  In-person, primarily political events only.  Submission approvals use no consistent, specific political line.  Progressive events, both for sx worker rights and against sx work, are welcome.  Events both for and against Zimbabwe, Tibet or Darfur are similarly ok.  Occasionally I post the rare Holocaust event that doesn't seem Rightist or like some Brand Israel front group.  Call me any hour with sincere questions about using this list.

See msg. archive at  http://snipurl.com/nyprotest

Meanwhile I for one am convinced that we urgently need some sort of sustainable and collective system for communicating event announcements between NYC left factions and groups.  Please help figure out how to do that.







#4745 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu Apr 19, 2012 2:45 pm
Subject: Fwd: RESPECT FOR DOMESTIC WORKERS: today Thu. 4-6 PM
vinniegangbox
Send Email Send Email
 



-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Eaton // NYPROTEST <toddeaton@...>
To: *NYPROTEST EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT LISTSERV* <NYPROTEST@...>
Sent: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 10:30 am
Subject: RESPECT FOR DOMESTIC WORKERS: today Thu. 4-6 PM

 . Occupy Mark Samson's Office in Support of Laundry Workers Center
Today Thursday 12:30 PM at E. 29th St. & Park Avenue South

 . Justice for Pat and All Abused Domestic Workers!
Today Thursday 4:00-6:00 PM at 10 East 40th Street between 5th and Madison
in front of Sheryl Shade's advertising firm, Shade Global. Join Domestic Workers United, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and countless allies
..........

Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2012 09:48:47 -0400 From: <nastaranmohit@...> Subject: Re: [LOC Talk] Tomorrow!!! [sic] "99 Picket Lines" for justice in the  workplace!! < http://groups.google.com/group/loc-talk/subscribe?hl=en_US>, \On Apr 19, 2012, at 8:39 AM, "Barbara Lynch" <Barbara@...> wrote:
From: Nastaran Mohit
To: Justin ; Rose Bookbinder ; loc-talk@googlegroups.com ; labor-outreach-committee ; OWS IMMIGRANTS ; Joyce New DWU ; Virgilio Oscar Aran ; mayday@...
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 10:18 PM
Subject: [LOC Talk] Tomorrow!!! "99 Picket Lines" for justice in the workplace!!

Please join us tomorrow for two important "99 Picket Line" actions
for dignity and justice in the workplace!

12:30 PM
Occupy Mark Samson's Office in Support of Laundry Workers Center!

CALLING ALL OCCUPIERS! Join us tomorrow at 12:30 PM on the corner of 29th St. and Park Avenue. We will be filing into Mark Samsons office, the owner of Hot and Crusty, who has refused to respect the dignity of LWC members organizing in the workplace. Workers have demanded the reinstatement of Gretel Areco, a female co-worker who was sexually harassed and forced from her job. Samson has refused to reinstate her out of fear of her continued organizing efforts and the power of the solidarity of Hot and Crusty workers. Samson, who heads private equity firm Praesidian Capital, has also refused to recognize the workers newly formed labor organization, the Hot and Crusty Workers Association, and has terminated negotiations until they stop their public campaign. These brave workers have won historic gains in only a few short months, and need our support in showing Samson they are not alone!

On Thursday, OWS supporters and allies of LWC will take to the offices of Praesidian Capital to demand the rights of workers be respected--or WE'LL BE BACK!

Sneak out for a quick lunch break for worker justice!

Please call (914) 557-6408 with any questions.

4-6 PM
Justice for Pat and All Abused Domestic Workers!

Pat Francois is a domestic worker who has fought tirelessly with Domestic Workers United for the rights of nannies, housekeepers, and elderly caregivers. In 2008, Pat was physically assaulted by her employer while trying to protect the little girl she cared for from her fathers verbal abuse, and nearly 3 1/2 years later, justice has yet to be served. Pat was punched in the face, beaten on her hand and called a"stupid black b***ch" by Matthew Mazar when she tried to call the police. While Mazar walks free, and he and his wife Sheryl Shade both enjoy successful careers and a swanky 1%'er lifestyle, Pat has gone without work for over 3 years now while bravely battling breast cancer.

Pat is the kind of tireless advocate for worker and immigrant rights we should all be so blessed to work with, and has always treated the struggles of other workers as though they are her own. She has supported Occupy Wall Street from the first days of the encampment, and regularly checks in on our work even as she deals with the pain of her chemotherapy treatments. She needs our support now more than ever. We cannot allow this brutal, racist and sexist attack on Pat, or any other community members, to go unanswered. She has spent her life fighting side by side with other sisters and brothers in struggle, and her fight is very much our own.

There will be a rally on Thursday evening from 4-6PM at 10 East 40th street (between 5th and Madison) in front of Sheryl Shade's advertising firm, Shade Global. Domestic Workers United, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and countless allies and supporters will be rallying together to demand the respect and justice Pat deserves.  Please join us. Our numbers and strength will send a clear message to Mazar and Shade that we're not going anywhere until justice is served.


Please sign the Change.org petition in support of Pat here:
https://www.change.org/petitions/justice-for-pat-stand-up-for-abused-domestic-workers


For more details/questions about the action, please call Nastaran at (914)557-6408 or the DWU office at (212) 481-5747.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



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This new list is for general discussion and announcements of events that do not directly pertain to meetings and deliberations of the Labor Outreach Committee. This is a new list from the Labor Outreach Committee (LOC), which also maintains a separate list specifically for logistics regarding the LOC called the �LOC Logistics� list.
 
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This year I have all but completely stopped e-mailing event announcements.  Please send any NYC left event announcements that you find directly to:  


...as well as to me here. 

No subscription needed.  Where possible, please no file attachments.  Send using TO: (not BCC:).  In-person, primarily political events only.  Submission approvals use no consistent, specific political line.  Progressive events, both for sx worker rights and against sx work, are welcome.  Events both for and against Zimbabwe, Tibet or Darfur are similarly ok.  Occasionally I post the rare Holocaust event that doesn't seem Rightist or like some Brand Israel front group.  Call me any hour with sincere questions about using this list.

See msg. archive at  http://snipurl.com/nyprotest

Meanwhile I for one am convinced that we urgently need some sort of sustainable and collective system for communicating event announcements between NYC left factions and groups.  Please help figure out how to do that.







#4746 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Apr 20, 2012 2:51 pm
Subject: Fwd: All Out for May Day 2012
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: MAY 1st COALITION <internationalactioncenter.nyc@...>
To: nyprotest <nyprotest@...>
Sent: Fri, Apr 20, 2012 10:35 am
Subject: All Out for May Day 2012

All Out for May Day 2012

Join immigrant groups, labor &
the Occupy Wall Street movement on

TUESDAY MAY 1st as we say
‘We are the 99%: LEGALIZE, UNIONIZE, & ORGANIZE’

  • Next meeting of the Solidarity Coalition Monday, April 23 at 630 pm at Local 1199, 310 West 43rd St.
  • Join Saturday street and subway outreach. Come by the Solidarity Center at 12 noon to participate in Sound Cars!! 55 West 17th St. 5th Floor
  • Pick up flyers, stickers to help get the word out at Local 1199 or at the Solidarity Center
In 2006, immigrant workers and their supporters revived May Day as part of a spring of actions against the Sensenbrenner bill which attempted to criminalize immigrants, especially the undocumented.
May Day was born in the U.S. out of workers struggles for the 8-hour day. This year, a May Day that fights for the end of deportations, for legalizations, jobs, the rights of all workers, and an end to racist abuse is urgently needed.
That's why the unity of labor and immigrant groups along with the Occupy Wall Street movement is so welcome this May Day. That unity should be celebrated.
On Tuesday, May 1st we will join together at Union Square to commemorate May Day.
This coalition will be assembling at 4 pm in Union Square and march to Wall Street at 5:30 pm. From 12-4 pm, the May 1st Coalition will be gathering at Union Square for workers who are unemployed or are able to come to May Day early. The Occupy Wall Street movement will be holding Know your Rights workshops at Union Square throughout the day.
All are invited to this historic event which is permitted, family-friendly and will have "pacers" (i.e. people's security) provided by coalition members. This unity and organizing will not end on May Day, it will continue.
You can start TODAY by taking the following actions:
  1. Spread the flyer
  2. Like us on FACEBOOK; follow us on twitter @M1Solidarity; and find us on the web at www.MayDaySolidarity2012.org.

TUESDAY MAY 1st 
MAY DAY Solidarity at 4 pm at Union Square
14th Street and Broadway, south side of the park
For those who can come early,
12 noon 4 pm rally
and workshops throughout the afternoon.


www.may1.info  or  www.MayDaySolidarity2012.org


 
 



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#4747 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Apr 27, 2012 2:00 am
Subject: Fwd: All Out for May Day at Union Square staring 12 noon
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: MAY 1st COALITION <internationalactioncenter.nyc@...>
To: nyprotest <nyprotest@...>
Sent: Thu, Apr 26, 2012 9:29 pm
Subject: All Out for May Day at Union Square staring 12 noon

  ALL OUT FOR MAY DAY 2012   
Tuesday MAY 1st
@ Union Square

►LEGALIZE ►ORGANIZE ►UNIONIZE
STOP THE DEPORTATIONS
JUSTICE FOR TRAYVON MARTIN–
END RACISM
TELL THE SUPREME COURT:
STOP ARIZONA'S SB1070

MAY 1st Coalition Rally12 noon
OWS, Labor & Immigrant Solidarity Rally 4 pm
March to Wall Street @ 5:30 pm
Ending Rally in front of MTA w/ TWU President
Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine
to perform at 4 pm Rally
Danza Azteca to perform at 12 noon Rally
  S C H E D U L E 
  • Subway & Street Outreach Every Day

  • Sat., April 28, 1 pm Peoples Assembly in Support of May Day
    Brook Park at Brook Ave. Between E. 141st St. & E. 140
    Three blocks from Brook Avenue local stop on the #6 subway; nine blocks from the 149th Street stop on the #2 

  • Sat., April 28 at 2pm March for May Day in Queens
    Gather at Bayanihan Center
    4021 69th St in Queens
    Take the #7 to the 69th Street stop

  • Sat., April 28 Fiesta del Pueblo – May 1st Coalition Fundraiser
    9 pm at Solidarity Center 55 W. 17th St. 5th Floor

  • Sun., April 29 Outreach & Work Session 
    Call Solidarity Center for details:  212.633.6646

  • Mon., April 30 ►  Outreach ►outreach ► outreach!

  • TUESDAY, MAY DAY!  MAY DAY! 
    Starting at 12 noon Union Square ►March to Wall Street at 5:30 pm
    Tues., 8 am ► Be part of the 99% - May 1 Picket at the Post Office
    33 St. and 8th Ave.
      For more information on Be part of the 99% May 1 pickets visit mayday2012
    Know Your Rights & Skill Workshops throughout the day organized by
    the Occupy Wall Street Movement
 


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#4748 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu May 10, 2012 12:55 am
Subject: Fw: The Nation: Harry Kelber Interview
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Sent on the Sprint Now Network from my BlackBerry

From: "David Johnson" <dlj725@...>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 19:00:37 -0500
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient>
Subject: Fw: The Nation: Harry Kelber Interview

 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2012 5:21 PM
Subject: FW: The Nation: Harry Kelber Interview


------ Forwarded Message
From: Lew Friedman <lromfried@...>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 13:31:47 -0600
To: Harry Kelber <hkelber@...>
Subject: Fwd: The Nation: Harry Kelber Interview







Labor Educator Harry Kelber Is Interviewed
By the magazines reporter, Josh Eidelson

Over eight decades in the labor movement, Harry Kelber has been a rank-and-file union leader, an author and an academic. At 25, he edited two weekly labor newspapers. At 57, he helped found a labor college at Empire State College. At 81, he ran for AFL-CIO vice president. Now 97, he writes three columns a week for his website, The Labor Educator. The Nation talked to Kelber about his experience of the labor movements past, his critique of its present and what he sees in its future. What follows is a condensed and edited transcript of our conversation.

As a teenager during the Depression, you led a grocery workers strike. How did you do it?

We were working seventy-eight hours a week at Weinsteins. On Saturday nights, whoever had the lowest sales for the week was fired. I was a favorite of the owner, and he said, Ill make you an assistant manager. When I said no, he fired me on the spot.

So I called up a union. We went around talking to workers around the city, and we decided that the next morning that we would all assemble outside the store, and no one would go in. The manager and the assistant manager were the only ones who stepped into the store. That created quite a commotion.

We kept up that strike for four months, until we were pretty desperate, and then just at the moment we were exhausted and said we cant continue this, we reached an agreement. The strike was settled, and workers went back with a five dollar increase and an improvement in the workloadon the condition that I was never to return to the store.

How did it shape your view of the labor movement?

What I saw during the Depression convinced me that we needed a new society to allow people to earn a living.

It was during the toughest time. But my co-workers had very good motivations: They felt that they were being abused, and that there was no future for them. And they wanted to have a little recognition and respect. And we won Social Security, child labor laws and a resurgent movement. Now, why cant we do that today?

What does the past years uprising in Wisconsin mean for labor?

Theres a marvelous new development. It shows the possibility of workers responding to horrible legislative actions. I think its going to spread throughout the country.

One of the problems that the labor movement has to deal with is that it seems to be always on the defensive, trying to block anti-worker campaigns. If you act like a union youre going to grow. But there are not too many unions that are growing. A lot of them are just trying to survive, even with concessions to the employer. Thats not healthy.

Wisconsin is very heartening, and my feeling is that at some point, there will be a congress of all these people from all these separate actions around the country, who will seek either to change the AFL-CIO or to set up an entirely new organization that will represent the needs and sentiments of working people.

How do you see Occupys plans for a General Strike May 1? What can the labor movement learn from Occupy?

In terms of general strike, I would say that before occupiers takes that action they should check around with all the unions to see what support it will get. It would be terrible if it had minimal support and no one really noticed.

But there is no question that there will be support for May Day actions. Occupy is doing a great job, and certainly has a good outlook. They have made a tremendous impact on the American labor movement, and I am positive that important changes will be taking place in the AFL-CIO because of it.

Organized labor should learn from Occupy that working people have to be involved in their own fate. In the AFL-CIO and the labor movement, union members are utterly ignored. The AFL-CIO is ruled by a handful of international union presidents. They can ignore working people at their pleasure and do whatever they want to do. For more than 100 years, no member out of a state federation of labor or central labor council or local union has ever been elected to a national leadership position.

Organized labor also has to recognize the significance of inequality, here and around the world. I mean the fight against inequality has now erupted, and what the occupation of Wall Street has done at a very minimum is to make that an issue that will continue forever until there is some reasonable solution.

How can labor wield more power in our politics?

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka promised, as a concession to worker protests, that they would have an independent worker voice and that they would not be dependent on the Democratic Partythat they would speak in terms of their own needs and desires. But that has never happened. Theres a division within labor about what to do about the Democratic Party. Theres strong opposition to many of the Democratic leaders, but theres no action taken to form some kind of committee that will take this opposition forward.

They just had another demonstration on tax day. Their policy is to have demonstrations and e-mails as pressure points against the White House. By now they should know it doesnt work. Theyre pretending.

There is no single action that can turn this quiescent, do-nothing leadership around. If the two candidates are anti-labor, we can run our own. We may not win an election, but were making a statement. And we must be more energetic. For example, hold sit-downs in Congress, or a four-hour strike.

Or leave it to workers and tell them: Look, youre not going to have any jobs in the futurewhat do you propose to do? Let the workers decide, because if youre in a situation where the future is as bleak as many workers are facing, theyre not going to sit around and mope around. Theyre going to find ways to express their anger. Right now theyre not expressing their anger in sufficient form.

How do you see the state of labors relationship to other progressive movements?

The AFL-CIO has, to its credit, tried to broaden itself by adding new allies to its campaigns, allies that agree in general, or in some cases on particular issues. And thats all to the good. But not much has come from that. They put out literature, they perform an educational job, and thats pretty much it.

On the other hand, the AFL-CIO website and statements from its officials will absolutely ignore the topic of contraception and abortion, because they say these are controversial issues. They ignore the fact that women represent 42 percent of the entire AFL-CIO membership.

What will the labor movement look like twenty years from now, or fifty?

Working people in the future will have to deal with the fact that millions of workers will no longer have jobs, because the economy is already in the process of change. New technology and automation are reducing the workforce. That will be the most serious problem: who will get the jobs?

What kind of living will the workers of tomorrow have? I dont fancy that it will be really great. The unions are still limited to wages and hours. But we could end up with a poorly educated working class that cannot compete with the working class of other countries. Its going to be a very tough thing for our children and grandchildren to cope with.

Our generation did pretty well at survivingnot great, but pretty well. But the question that bothers me is, What is the legacy that we can leave our children and grandchildren that will help them in their future lives? I dont see any.

But I have confidence that our children and grandchildren will find a way to deal with the incredible pressing problems that they will face. I have in mind the Egyptian spring. Workers will stand so much, and then rebel. I do have confidence that we will see that day. We are seeing some of it today.

I, as an individual, am absolutely committed that for whatever years I have left, I will do my part to see that working people have their rights, and that the kind of chance for living that we promise people in the preamble to our Constitution actually takes place.

I wouldnt be working spending my late years involved in these activities if I did not believe that theres something in human character in the human being that will rebel against consistent abuse. Im counting on that.


Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/167632/qa-harry-kelber-working-people-have-be-involved-their-own-fate





------ End of Forwarded Message

#4749 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu May 24, 2012 6:27 am
Subject: SHEETROCK SWEATSHOP how New York's scab contractors make millions off the backs of their low wage tradespeople
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SHEETROCK SWEATSHOP
how New York’s scab contractors make millions
off the backs of their low wage tradespeople
 
I. PAUPERS AND PALACES
 
New York’s boutique hotel construction sector has been just about the only branch of the building industry that hasn’t been crippled by the recession caused by the Wall Street meltdown of 2007.

Small luxury hotels serving rich travelers have opened up all over the city, especially in recently gentrified parts of the outer boroughs that are popular with artists and entertainers – especially Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

While the room rents for these hotels are very high, the wages of the men and women who build them are quite low. Wages range anywhere from $ 12 - $ 25/hr with no benefits, far below the New York City area prevailing wage of $ 46/hr plus benefits for carpenters.
 
Building high class buildings with low wage labor is very profitable for the owners of these boutique hotels – and for the contractors who supply them with cheap labor.
 
One of those contractors is Flintlock Construction, owned by brothers Andrew and Steven (“Chip”) Weiss. The Weiss brothers are probably the most aggressive scab contractors in the city, trying very hard to break into market areas that have remained all union, such as hirise construction.
 
Most scab contractors here stick with buildings that are less than 12 stories, a market segment they have come to almost completely dominate over the past 20 years (virtually 100% of the residential structures less than 12 stories tall in this city are built scab).
 
They avoid higher projects because that means they can operate without having to rent a crane, which in the New York City market area means dealing with a crane rental contractor that has a contract with the Operating Engineers union and uses union crane operators.
 
Flintlock went out and brought a crane in Chicago to enable them to do hirise jobs without having to have union crane operators on their sites. To date, Flintlock’s highest project is a 33 story hotel, built all non union.
 
They’ve come a long way since the company’s first incarnation in the early 1990s.
 
Back then they were Diversified Flintlock, a low income housing renovation general contractor owned by the Weiss brothers, their father (now deceased) and DeCosta “Bobo” Headley, a shady Brooklyn Democratic Party activist who’s co-ownership of the firm enabled them to bid on city funded low income housing renovation jobs as a “minority owned” company (Headley, unlike the Weiss family, is African American).
 
In later years, minus their late father their African American faceman Bobo Headley, the brothers Weiss and their now renamed firm, Flintlock, found their niche in boutique hotel construction.
 
In this market segment, hotel developers like Sam Chang use money from private equity funds to build hotels that have marquee names like Hilton or Marriott (with room rates to match) but are built and operated on a discount basis.
 
The secret to their success is cheap labor – low wage non union tradespeople to build their hotels and low paid non union hotel workers to operate them once they are opened.
 
This bold challenge to the union in hirise construction (an all union market segment here since before World War I) is a severe danger for the unionized trades here, especially at a time when there is high unemployment in the industry, both on the union side and the scab side and we need to put a stop to it sooner rather than later.
 
There has been a slight uptick in construction, with many developers applying for permits on the Far West Side and in Harlem, the big hotspots of residential apartment house construction in the 1990s and the 2000s.
 
A lot of that work went scab back then, more of it could go scab now.
 
This time, the scab contractors might not confine themselves to the residential sector.
 
There have already been inroads by non union furniture installation contractors into the office interior work sector, a market area that has long been overwhelmingly unionized.

We’ve even seen inroads of non union work in the trade show sector, a market segment that has been almost entirely union since the 1920s.  
 
The Frieze Art Fair, a major art show in London, sponsored by Deutsche Bank, decided to start a New York City edition of their show this year.
 
They built the biggest free standing tent in the world to house the show out on Randall’s island, and they did the entire job, both tent building and the installation of the booths inside the tent, 100% non union, with scab contractors that pay their workers only $ 12/hr. Despite vigorous union picketing of both the Randall’s Island site of the show and Deutsche Bank headquarters in Manhattan, the show managers have not budged about setting up their show union.
 
In other words, dealing with non union contractors and developers who use them is a necessity, or we might lose all our work (it’s happened to construction unions in other parts of the country).
 
So far, the building trades answer here has been public exposure of scab contractors like Flintlock through informational picketing (with the New York District Council of Carpenters doing almost all of that public exposure) and attempts by the Building Trades Council to sign lower than union scale Project Labor Agreements with developers like Sam Chang.
 
To date, despite best efforts on the union’s part, that really hasn’t worked.
 
We’ll take a look at why that hasn’t succeeded, and explore some ideas that might work.
 
Before we go there,  let’s take a look at how we got in this fix to begin with.
 
II. SCABS AMID THE RUINS
 
From 1903 to 1978, virtually all construction in New York City was done by union labor.
 
From the smallest apartment house to the biggest office building to the network of subway lines, highways and railroads that transport the city’s millions of residents and workers, if it was built here in that era unionized tradesmen did the building.
 
The New York building trades unions achieved 100% market share through a half century of struggle, leading class battles that helped build the American labor movement and achieve the 8 hour day.
 
However, once the construction unions achieved that power, the leaders of those unions abandoned the half century of socialist-oriented labor militancy that had built the unions, and entered into a one sided alliance with the contractors.
 
This isolated the building trades from the rest of labor and the working class – in particular, the Black, Latino and Chinese sections of the class, who the unions helped the contractors systematically exclude from employment in almost every craft in the industry (only the lowest paid laborer jobs were open to tradesmen of color).
 
That alliance also led to the construction unions being junior partners of the gangsters who used extortion, bribes and the threat of arson and violence to bring market stability to the construction industry.
 
For a long time, it was hard to see how the cancer of labor racketeering and union-sanctioned race discrimination weakened the unions.
 
The New York building trades, the most powerful local unions on the face of the planet, controlled all the work and the workers who were allowed to join the unions had higher than average wages.  
 
The most privileged of those workers, the company men (full time employees and foremen for the contractors) had a very high standard of living. They were also the social base of the pro contractor, pro gangster leaderships of the building trades unions, and their conservatism became the dominant ideology of that entire sector of the labor movement.
 
The building trades were so strong that, even in the depths of the Great Depression in 1936, with half their members out of work, they were able to win the 7 hour day (a gain that NYC construction unions still hang on to up to this very day). After WW II, the NYC trades were among the first unions to win employer paid pensions and health insurance as well.
 
Civil rights protesters challenged this labor/management/organized crime alliance in the 1960s.
 
In the face of militant and often armed protests by unemployed Black and Latino workers, organized into protest groups collectively known as “the Coalition”, the building trades were forced to make some concessions, particularly on minority hiring on city funded jobs in Black or Latino neighborhoods
 
Then, in  1971, a change in City of New York rent regulations set off an avalanche that would eventually change construction labor relations in this city forever.
 
Mayor John Lindsay repealed the 1947 Rent Control Law, which had made apartment rents affordable for working class New York City tenants for the previous quarter century. The part of the law that was most devastating was the clause that preserved rents for tenants who stayed in their apartments, but let landlords jack up the rent if they could get the tenants to leave.
 
This touched off a wave of landlord intimidation of tenants to force them to leave. Some landlords took things a step further and burned down their buildings, often with the tenants still in them, for the insurance.
 
It didn’t help matters that the Lindsay Administration had launched a subsidy program to give public funds to landlords who converted their buildings from affordable housing to luxury rentals or co-ops.
 
Worse yet, the City borrowed the $ 784 million in the program from the Wall Street banks short term at high interest and lent it out to the developers long term at low interest.
 
The combined effect of these pro landlord anti tenant policies touched off a major crisis.
 
Over 200,000 New Yorkers, mostly working class and largely Black or Latino, were driven out of their homes by the fires. Tens of thousands more were displaced by the conversion of affordable rentals to luxury housing. The City also went bankrupt in June 1975 when the $ 784 million in loans came due. The City didn’t have the money, so Lazard Frères and the other banks in the consortium that had lent the money took the City into receivership.
 
While all this was happening, the building trades unions, as well as the rest of the labor movement, didn’t have even one word of criticism for these attacks on NYC’s working class.
 
For the building trades, the bottom line was the buildings that were being renovated from affordable to luxury with those City funds were being built union and that was all that mattered, no matter how bad it hurt the rest of the city’s working class.
 
Even when the Municipal Assistance Corporation, the banker’s junta that took over the City of New York’s finances in 1975, began attacking municipal workers unions the building trades, like the rest of NYC’s labor movement, stood idly by and let it happen with no organized resistance.
 
Soon, the building trades would face the wrath of the bankers and the city government they’d installed.
 
In 1978, the newly elected administration of Mayor Ed Koch began rebuilding the apartment houses that the landlords had torched earlier in the decade. The Koch administration, under pressure from the banker’s junta, looked to cut corners in these housing renovation jobs by figuring out a legal way to pay less than prevailing wages for the construction workers on these jobs.
 
Koch’s newly created NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development found a loophole by laundering city, state and federal housing construction funds through not for profit community based organizations. This made the money, on paper, private funds, so the legal requirement that prevailing wages be paid to workers on these jobs could be ignored.
 
Now all they had to do was find contractors who would pay their construction workers substandard wages.
Since virtually every contractor in the city in the late 1970s was unionized and bound by contract to pay union scale wages, this would seem to be a difficult task.
 
Actually, it was surprisingly easy, considering the organized crime ties of many of those bosses.
 
The most organized crime tied of the contractors was one Vincent Di Napoli, the owner of the largest unionized carpentry contractor in the city, Inner City Drywall, the president of the Metropolitan New York Drywall Association and a captain in the Genovese crime family, the city’s largest cosa nostra family.
 
Di Napoli negotiated an agreement with the NYC District Council of Carpenters calling for lower pay scales on renovation jobs. When another, smaller, construction union, Drywall Tapers local 1977 of the Painters Union, refused to go along and went on strike, he and fellow Genovese family captain Louis Moscatiello got the Carpenters and the other construction unions to scab on the strike and got the Plasterers Union to charter a scab drywall tapers local to provide scab tapers to break the strike.
 
Di Napoli also illegally hired union carpenters at less than union scale, a practice that came to be known as “lumping” and was soon copied by other union contractors, particularly in residential renovation work.
 
Since the Carpenters and the other building trades unions in residential (Mason Tenders, Bricklayers, Plasterers) were dominated by the Genovese family, there was no resistance to Di Napoli’s attacks on the unions. The Painters were dominated by another cosa nostra family, the Lucchese family (that’s one of the reasons they had resisted Di Napoli’s wage cuts with the tapers strike) but they had been very weakened by the loss of that strike and weren’t in a position to stop the Genovese attacks on residential construction worker living standards.
 
The weakening of union standards by cosa nostra-linked union contractors encouraged other businesspeople to set up outright non union construction companies. They soon began to start bidding on HPD housing renovation jobs, with their lower wage scales enabling them to outbid competitors from the unionized segment of the industry (even the ones that hired lumpers).
 
These new scab contractors had no problem hiring labor – thanks to the racially exclusionary policies of the unions, there was a large pool of non union Black and Latino workers who could be recruited through the Coalitions to man these jobs. There was also a large pool of unemployed union members available to work these jobs as well, due to the fact that the entire industry had been hit by a major recession in 1975 and all the unions had lots of members on the bench.
 
The Carpenters, Mason Tenders, Bricklayers, Plasterers and the Painters weren’t able to resist the deunionization of this sector either, also due to how weakened they were by decades of gangster domination.
 
The federal government had taken some interest in the activities of the Genoveses. This wasn’t because of the gangsters attacks on construction workers incomes, but because many of them had committed fraud against the real estate developers and bankers by paying scab wages but charging their clients as if they had paid union.
 
Ripping off tradespeople had gone unpunished, but stealing from the rich attracted major heat from law enforcement and touched off what would be the first of many criminal probes into racketeering in the NYC construction industry.
 
By the mid 1980s, about a quarter of the industry had been deunionized. Building Trades union membership had declined by 40%, from 250,000 to 150,000 and non union workers had gone from almost negligible to over 50,000 tradespeople.
 
This membership loss wasn’t distributed evenly; residential construction workers were more heavily represented in the deunionized workforce than their commercial construction counterparts.
 
Most commercial construction stayed union, except for renovation jobs on retail stores in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, interior demolition work in office buildings, asbestos and lead abatement and much of the sidewalk bridge scaffold industry.
 
The Carpenters took the biggest loss, declining from 40,000 members to 25,000, with the Bricklayers and Mason Tenders also suffering membership losses. The Electricians and the mechanical trades, by contrast, were almost untouched and retained their pre crisis membership levels.
 
There was a separate and even more drastic decline of construction union membership nationally. An association of CEOs of banks and manufacturing companies, the Business Roundtable, had launched a nationwide attack on the construction unions, centered in the South, the Rocky Mountain States and the rural and suburban areas of the Northeast, Midwest and the Far West. By the 1980s, they had cut construction union density nationally from over 80% of the market to under 30%.
 
Ironically enough, as sharply as union membership had declined in NYC, the city was still one of the citadels of unionized construction nationally.
 
This, along with the cosa nostra-inspired corruption and cozy relationships with contractors, made the leaders of the New York City building trades unwilling to make the kind of changes that needed to be made to preserve union power in the NYC construction industry.
 
This pretty much guaranteed that the non union sector would continue its growth and that union conditions would decay in the more marginal parts of the union segment of the industry, especially the one segment of residential construction that remained union, new construction of luxury co-ops.
 
Soon, forces that were beyond the control of the union leadership stepped in to force change upon them.
 
III. LAWYERS AND GANGSTERS
 
In 1994, the two biggest construction unions in the city, the District Council of Carpenters and the Mason Tenders District Council, both were taken under federal monitorship due to decades of labor racketeering in those unions.
 
The federal monitorship in the Mason Tenders District Council, an affiliate of the Laborers Union that represented laborers that work for General Contractors and masonry subcontractors, was by far the most thorough cleanout of any of the construction unions.
 
This was because the GCs shared the desire of the government and the real estate developers to clean out racketeering from the industry. The labor foremen and company man laborers of the GCs shared their bosses worldview and, since they were the social base of the MTDC’s leadership, that became the dominant ideology of the new Mason Tenders and its newly chartered flagship citywide local 79.
 
The process would be far more difficult in the District Council of Carpenters, because the company men and carpenter foremen who were the social base of that union’s leadership were loyal to their bosses, the carpentry subcontractors, many of whom had close ties to the Genoveses and other crime families and all of whom to some degree benefited from labor racketeering.
 
The feds had a far weaker social base among the membership to build their drive to clean up the District Council, so the process of breaking gangster control of the union was far more lengthy and difficult than in the Mason Tenders.
 
The government would have similar difficulties in just about every construction union in the city besides the Mason Tenders, for basically the same sociological reasons.
 
One big change imposed by the government was that both the Mason Tenders and the District Council of Carpenters were ordered to set up organizing departments.
 
This was the first serious attempt at union organizing among New York construction workers for almost 75 years.
 
The Mason Tenders had the more aggressive organizing department. It introduced “scabby” the large inflatable rubber rat to its picket lines and the Mason Tenders organizers were able to re unionize the interior demolition and asbestos abatement industries.
 
It helped that the leadership of the Mason Tenders and their organizing staff were on the same page strategically. The leadership’s day to day relationships with the GCs and with the masonry, interior demolition and asbestos abatement subs backed up the work the organizing department was doing to sign up non union contractors and organize jobs.
 
The Carpenters organizing department, while just as aggressive at picketing as the Mason Tenders, wasn’t nearly as successful at organizing. They targeted the sidewalk bridge scaffold industry and apartment building renovation contractors in Harlem, but made little headway and was unable to unionize those firms. They did sign up a large number of contractors who aspired to bid on work in office interior renovation and City of New York municipal construction.
 
This was in large part because, unlike the Mason Tenders, the leadership of the District Council of Carpenters and its locals were working at cross purposes with the work of the organizing department.
 
While the organizing department was targeting non union scaffolding, residential drywall and hirise concrete contractors, a portion of the leadership of the union was letting union scaffolding and residential drywall and concrete contractors violate the union contract by paying company man carpenters cash off the books. Obviously, the organizing department couldn’t raise the standards on one side of the industry while business agents were undercutting those standards on the other side.
 
Beyond that, a huge problem with organizing residential was the fact that the wage scale had gotten so incredibly low in that sector. With skilled labor being paid $ 7 an hour and laborers and helpers being paid as little as $ 4 an hour (a wage so low it was actually illegal) and all these wages being paid off the books with no taxes withheld or benefits paid, any union scale, no matter how much lower than commercial wages, could compete.
 
The organizing departments of the Mason Tenders and the Carpenters did try and lobby the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development to enforce prevailing wages (or at the very least the minimum wage) on their jobsites but with no luck.
 
They were able to get the other major city entity doing housing construction, the NYC Housing Authority, to unionize its jobs, which at that point had become almost entirely scab, which was a major victory in the residential sector.
 
However, since so much of the city’s residential construction was HPD funded, their continued use of scab contractors was a huge and growing problem.
 
It didn’t help matters that, on many union jobs in the privately funded luxury residential sector, a number of union hirise concrete and drywall and ceilings contractors were illegally paying less than union scale to company man carpenters in return for steady work.
 
While the wages these outfits were illegally paying (typically in the $ 25/hr range) weren’t anywhere near as low as what the worst of the scab outfits were paying, they contributed to a general decay of industry standards and created an opening for openly non union contractors to break into the luxury residential new construction sector.
 
By the beginning of the 200s, unionization in the NYC construction industry had fallen to 50%. Of the 100,000 non union workers, 50,000 were paid in cash off the books, with no social security, workers comp, unemployment insurance or disability taxes withheld.
 
Some of these workers made as little as $ 4 an hour – a pay scale so low that some scab contractors actually brought lunch for their workers, because they didn’t make enough to buy their own.
 
These sweatshop conditions were the worst in residential construction, were even on the union side off the books work was rampant, particularly among drywall and hirise concrete subcontractors.
 
It got even worse when the District Council of Carpenters let contractors impose the Request System.
This allowed contractors to run their jobs with crews almost entirely composed of company men (all but the shop steward) unlike the previous system where they had to hire 50% of the crew from the union out of work list.
 
This created a “let’s make a deal” atmosphere in certain parts of the industry – drywall and concrete on the residential side, office furniture and venetian blind installation in office interior work and in all sectors of the scaffold installation industry.
 
Some of the worst offenders among these contractors had ties with the Genovese, Gambino and Di Cavalcante families of cosa nostra. The corruption went all the way to the top – James Murray, the owner of On Par Construction, one of the city’s biggest union drywall contractors, was deep in the mix, as was Joseph Olivieri, the head of the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, the union drywall contractors trade association.
 
The Genovese family captain who controlled Plasterers local 530, the drywall tapers union, convicted racketeer Louis Moscatiello, Sr, was also in the mix, using his son, contractor Louis Jr and his faceman Carmine Mingoia, who served as the puppet president of the union that Louis Sr ran from behind the scenes, to further his racketeering conspiracy.
 
These criminals had played a major role in helping scab and “double breasted” (part union, part scab) contractors break into the luxury residential new construction sector, a major defeat for the New York trades.
 
Along the way, they ripped off a lot of real estate developers, banks and GCs by charging union prices for non union labor.
 
That’s what attracted law enforcement attention to their activities (ripping off construction workers is one thing – cheating rich people is a whole different ballgame!)
 
This triggered several new rounds of federal investigations across the trades (even the squeaky clean Electricians local 3 got probed). The dirtiest union in the city, the Genovese family controlled tapers union Plasterers local 530, was actually removed from the industry and its jurisdiction turned over to Painters local 1974. There was a new round of indictments in the Carpenters Union, ultimately leading to the removal and incarceration of the head of the District Council, Mike Forde. Also, the Request System that had helped some of the dirtier union contractors pay substandard wages on union jobs was dismantled by court order.
 
Even with the arrests and the government interventions in the unions, the damage was done.
 
The damage was even greater since the city was in a luxury real estate boom at the time that union standards were being undermined.
 
Lots of new construction and renovation jobs were popping up all over the Westside, the Lower East Side, Harlem, Downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Coney Island, the South Shore of Staten Island, Long Island City, Flushing, Corona and Elmhurst and much of that work was done scab.
 
Some of the scab developers had gotten really big – Sam Chang (who we met earlier in this article), Dave Walentas and Shaya Boymelgreen – and scab General Contractors like Flintlock (who we were introduced to at the top of this piece), Artimus and Forkosh expanded their operations to do bigger and bigger jobs with all scab labor.
 
This wave of low wage scab work did motivate some construction unions to follow the path of the Carpenters and the Mason Tenders and start getting serious about organizing.
 
Painters District Council 9 and Ironworkers local 361 began putting out scabby the rat and throwing up picket lines across the city too.
 
Electricians local 3 began trying to negotiate market recovery agreements, to get scab contractors to agree to go union but at a lower pay scale – which had been the negotiating strategy that the Mason Tenders and Carpenters had been using for the previous decade.
 
That strategy – along with the picketlines – did get some results. Artimus Construction agreed to go from being all scab to being “double breasted” (part union  part scab). They agreed to use unionized electrical and concrete contractors on some of their hirises, with scab contractors continuing to do the masonry, drywall, woodwork, windows, flooring and plumbing work. In return, the union subs were allowed to pay lower wage rates and to use a higher proportion of lower paid apprentices than would normally be permitted.
 
Shaya Boymelgreen agreed to do one of his bigger jobs – the renovation at 25 Wall Street - with union labor, in return for a 20% lower pay scale for all trades. Sam Chang made similar deals to build some of his hotels union at a reduced pay scale.
 
This gave the leaders of the Building and Construction Trades Council the idea to offer reduced pay scales to ALL residential and hotel developers.
 
That idea was incredibly unpopular among the city’s 100,000 union tradespeople. The only trade that had the opportunity to vote on those concessions, the Electricians, voted it down (they were forced to vote on the deal again and were compelled to accept it – a practice known in labor circles as “vote til you get it right”).
 
However, before any potential gains in unionization could be achieved from these givebacks, the bottom fell out of the market.
 
The real estate bubble melted down in the summer of 2007, causing a nationwide financial crisis.
 
Real estate and construction were hard hit sectors, with many luxury apartment house jobs abandoned in mid build by their developers all over the city.
 
Five years later, many of these buildings still sit abandoned and empty.
 
IV. “WE BUILT THIS CITY – DON’T CUT OUR PAY!”
 
The meltdown generated massive unemployment among construction workers, union and non union. 
 
At the lowest point, roughly 40% of the industry’s workforce was out of work at any given time and even now, joblessness hovers at roughly a third of the NYC construction workforce.
This emboldened real estate developers and General Contractors in the union sector to demand a 20% wage cut and work rule concessions from their workers in the 2011 round of contract negotiations, with the proceeds of the reduction to be passed along up the food chain to the developers and GCs in the form of price cuts by the unionized subcontractors.
 
The Building Trades Employers Association, which represents the interests of the developers and the GCs, threatened to repeal the New York Plan, the agreement they’d had with the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council since 1903 to only use union subcontractors on their jobs.
 
Unlike the Sam Chang, Artimus and Boymelgreen concessions, which, whatever their faults, actually got previously scab work turned union, these concessions would only affect jobs that were already union and wouldn’t turn around a single scab job or organize a single non union tradesperson.
 
Considering the high unemployment in the unions, new organizing had been basically abandoned, because how could the unions expand their membership with thousands of current members on the bench jobless? So any wage reduction on union jobs would simply be a race to the bottom with the scab contractors, rather than a new organizing technique.
 
The NYC Building and Construction Trades Council and most of its affiliates were prepared to make these givebacks, on top of a package of Market Recovery wage concessions they’d already given up two years before. The only holdouts were the Operating Engineers, who refused to reduce the pay or benefits of their most highly skilled and well paid members, the hirise tower crane operators.
 
 The members had a very different view of the concessions.
 
Opposition to the 20% pay cut was immediate and widespread among the local men (tradespeople who worked out of the union hiring halls).
 
What little support their was for the pay concessions was confined to foremen and company men – the minority of union members who are full time employees of contractors.
 
The BTEA attempted to carry out a media campaign to threaten union tradespeople that if they didn’t take the pay cut the developers and GCs would replace them with non union workers.
 
The subway ads, stories planted in newspapers and a 26 point ultimatum didn’t work – despite the high unemployment rate in the unions, workers still refused to support the pay cuts, even with the media blitz.
 
The union subcontractors also quietly opposed BTEA’s 20% pay cut, for their own reasons. If they had been allowed to keep the proceeds of the wage cut (the way they’d been able to profit from the illegal lumping practices they’d carried out back in the day when the Genovese family ran the industry) they would have been all for it.
 
However, having to pass along the pay cuts to the GCs and the clients didn’t help their bottom line, plus lower wages would make it harder to retain quality workers in the industry’s labor force.
 
Painters District Council # 9’s contract expired first (on May Day, 2011 – their contract expiration date is a relic of the union’s Communist leadership during the 1930s and 40s) and, despite the widespread opposition among union painters to the BTEA’s giveback demands, the union rolled over and gave in on just about every demand.
 
The biggest concession involved reducing the pay scale on outer borough residential painting jobs from $ 36/hr to an incredibly low $ 13.25/hr! Basically, they reduced the union pay scale on those jobsites to non union levels.
 
Even on the jobs where the painters kept their union scale, there were major givebacks on work rules, including the gutting of the union’s hiring hall system, granting contractors the right to fire union shop stewards and a “three strikes and you’re out” blacklist system that would allow the employers to get a union painter kicked out of the union if he/she had been fired three times in his/her career.
 
In the wake of DC # 9’s rollover for the Association of Master Painters, the Window and Plate Glass Dealers Association and the Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries, BTEA had pressured subs in other industries to demand similar concessions.
 
They thought it would be easy, but resistance was already starting to bubble up from the jobsites.
 
A group of dissident union carpenters (including this writer) organized a “no 20% pay cut” rally at the BTEA’s annual banquet just a couple of weeks after the concession-ridden Painters DC # 9 contract was signed.
 
Although it was small (only about 250 workers – mostly members of the Painters Union) the rally was a sign of greater resistance yet to come.
 
Despite that warning sign, Wall Ceiling, the Building Contractors Association, the Greater New York Floorcoverers Association, the Cement League and the Hoisting and Scaffolding Trade Association demanded major givebacks from the District Council of Carpenters.
 
On top of the wage and benefit concessions on residential and hotel jobs, they also wanted to bring back the Request System (under a new name, “Full Mobility”) which would allow them to run jobs with all company man crews except for the shop steward. This would almost certainly bring back the practice of contractors in the more marginal and competitive market segments (residential drywall, residential hirise concrete, furniture installation, venetian blind installation and scaffolding) making company men work for cash in return for steady employment.
 
The Cement League and the General Contractors Association also demanded a similar package of deep wage and benefit cuts and work rule givebacks from the lowest paid and hardest working trade in the industry, the concrete laborers represented by the Laborers Union’s Cement Workers District Council.
 
That union should have been a pushover and given in as easily as Painters DC # 9.
 
Unlike the CWDC’s reformed and far more militant counterpart in the Laborers Union, the Mason Tenders District Council, the Cement Workers was a union with an unreformed leadership which still had a reputation of having ties to the Genovese family and other cosa nostra groups.
 
However, between the anger of their members at these concessions and the ever present threat of federal prosecution for labor racketeering hovering over their heads, the CWDC leadership had no choice but to stand up and fight back.
 
They organized wildcat strikes at the two biggest concrete jobs in the city.
 
One was an ordinary hirise hotel and residential construction job, the Carnegie 57 tower on W 57th St and 6th Avenue.
 
The other was a far more high profile job – the new World Trade Center site.
 
Crain’s New York Business, the city’s main trade publication for the business community, predicted that there was no way that the CWDC leadership would ever dare to shut down such a high profile site so associated with the 9/11 terrorist attacks – that would be unpatriotic!
 
Crain’s predicted wrong.
 
The Cement Workers shut the job down, informally, through an unsanctioned wildcat strike that also shut down Carnegie 57. The unofficial picket line was respected by the District Council of Carpenters, Lathers local 46, Operating Engineers locals 14 and 15 and Cement Masons local 780 – all the concrete trades were united and on the street.
 
Four hundred of the Cement Workers 2,000 members walked out at the WTC and Carnegie 57 and another 1,600 carpenters, lathers, operating engineers and masons respected their lines and refused to work.
 
The numbers may have been small relative to the 100,000 union tradespeople in the city, but the significance of the strike far outweighed the number of man days directly lost.
 
This kind of thing is rare in the NYC Building and Construction Trades. The last major craft strike here was the Plumbers strike in 1968 (a racist strike against allowing Blacks and Puerto Ricans to join that union) and the last industrywide all trades strike was almost a century ago, on May Day 1916!
 
Between the cement workers strike, the refusal of the Operating Engineers and the Electricians to take the 20% pay cut and the reluctance of the subcontractors to go to war with the unions over a wage cut that wasn’t even going to go into their pockets, the BTEA’s 20% pay cut and the 26 point ultimatum stalled.
 
In spring 2012, the newly elected reform leadership in the District Council of Carpenters brought the concessionary contracts to a membership vote (the first time the District Council’s membership had been allowed to vote on a contract since 1916).
 
The scaffold carpenters – most of whom are company men -narrowly approved the deal and the rest of the membership rejected it by a two-to-one margin.
 
For all intents and purposes, the 20% giveback deal and the gutting of the union job referral system was dead in the water – at least for the moment
 
V. THEIR CITY…OR OURS?
 
That doesn’t mean that New York City’s 200,000 construction workers are out of the woods yet.
 
Far from it.
 
Roughly a third of the 100,000 union tradespeople are still out of work. Many have been on the bench for months – long enough for their unemployment to be close to running out.
 
On the non union side, unemployment rates are just as high – an even bigger hardship, since roughly 50% of the 100,000 on the scab side of the industry worked off the books for employers that do not pay unemployment insurance premiums, so they get no benefits at all when their out of work.
 
Also, despite the rally at the BTEA dinner and the World Trade Center strike, by and large there was very little organized resistance by the unions to the pay cut.
 
On the contrary, the leadership of the Building and Construction Trades Council initially SUPPORTED the 20% pay cut. The Painters Union actually imposed it on their members in the outer boroughs residential sector, and Lathers local 46 and Plumbers local 1 are trying to impose it on their members in those market segments now.
 
Also, as long as half the industry is non union making low wages off the books, union wages and benefits will always be in jeopardy.
 
To survive, the building trades unions have to get serious about organizing. Yes, that’s easier said than done at a time when a third of the labor force in this business are out of work. However, if we don’t organize now, we’ll only have a larger, stronger and more robust scab sector to deal with when the industry recovers.
 
We need to have a strategic approach to organizing – going after one contractor at a time just isn’t going to do it. We need to organize the entire residential sector on a citywide basis. Contractors and developers are more likely to agree to unionization and the massive labor cost increases that come with it if all of their competitors have to deal with those increased costs and reduced profits at the same time.
 
We also need allies – and no, the developers and the contractors are NOT our friends!
 
We need to reach out to other sections of the organized labor movement , first and foremost the janitors in the Service Employees International Union and the hotel workers in the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union and the delivery drivers and movers in the Teamsters union.
 
They work for the businesspeople who hire our employers, so we have common enemies.
 
We also need to unite with the tenants rights movement – their landlords are our boss’ clients, and the same way they try to cut our pay, they try and gouge their rents.
 
We also should be joining hands with the Occupy Movement – we are part of the 99 Percent that they are fighting for and they oppose the bankers and billionaires who drive union busting and wage cuts in our industry.
 
Some local unions in the New York Building Trades – asbestos and lead abatement workers union Laborers local 78 and commercial movers and art handlers union Teamsters local 814 - have already joined forces with Occupy and the rest of the trades should follow their lead.
 
Our only alternative is a continued race to the bottom.
 
-          commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER
FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”
               Originally published on Thursday, May 24, 2012
               © 2012 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.
 
 

#4750 From: SIUHIN@...
Date: Sun Jul 1, 2012 6:51 am
Subject: Summer 2012 National Immigrant Solidarity Network Monthly News Alert!
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Summer 2012 National Immigrant Solidarity   Network  Monthly News Digest
and
News Alert!

National  Immigrant  Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support  Immigrant  Rights!

URL:   http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail:    Info@...
Information about the Network:    FLYER

Washington D.C.: (202)595-8990
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Send check pay  to:
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National  Immigrant Solidarity  Network
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South Pasadena, CA  91031-0751
(All donations  are tax   deductible)
====================================

Summer  2012  U.S. Immigrant Alert! Newsletter
Published by National Immigrant   Solidarity Network

Dream Come True: Obama Administration Announces Relief  for DREAMers! BUT
SB 1070 Continue, DREAM Still Long Ways to Go !

Please  Our Newsletter:
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Summer12.pdf
[Requires Adobe  Acrobat, to download, go: http://www.adobe.com]

In This Issue:
1)  Dream Come True !
2) Relief for DREAMers
3) Civil Rights Coalition’s  Case Against SB 1070
4) NY court upholds Lynn Steward's 10-year prison  sentence
5) USA Prison Industrial Complex Moves South
6) The Rise of  Asian Americans
7) Vincent Chin
8) Free Legal Clinics for Undocumented  Youth
9) Updates, Please Support NISN! Subscribe the  Newsletter!

Please download our latest newsletter:
http://www.immigrantsolidarity.org/Newsletter/Summer12.pdf

====================================

Dreams  can Come True, Still Long Ways to Go !

Border Angels

The President  just announced that he's going to stop deporting us
DREAMers. We've heard  promises like this before. Now, we need to make this
promise
real. Tell  President Obama and the world that you will be watching to make
sure to not one  more DREAMer gets deported.

Through the Right to Dream campaign, through  actions in Obama campaign
offices, through the cover of TIME magazine, we've  demanded action from the
President, and we've finally built enough power, in  part through the growing
Latino vote, to get it.

It would be easy to stop  here and celebrate the President's words, but
we're 1.2 million deportations  past words at this point. We have to send the
country a message that while we  appreciate the President's announcement
today, we won't stop fighting for change  until we see it.

That's why I need you to tell the President, Congress  and other leaders in
this nation that you stand with me, and millions of  undocumented people
who have become Americans, even if we don't have papers that  recognize us as
such. If you tell them that you stand with us, you'll be sending  a message,
and that you'll continue to fight against every deportation. Tell  them,
now, and tell all your friends to do the same, Presente
http://act.presente.org/sign/withdreamers

====================================

Arizona  Immigration Law Ruling May Mean Boon For Private Prison Business

Chris  Kirkham - Huffington Post
06/25/2012

As the Supreme Court upheld a  central provision of Arizona's controversial
immigration law on Monday -– a  requirement for law enforcement to check
the legal status of suspected  undocumented immigrants -- a powerful corporate
lobby may stand to benefit: the  private prison industry.

For-profit prison companies including  Corrections Corporation of America
and the GEO Group Inc. have capitalized on  the immigration crackdown over
the past decade, now controlling nearly half of  the nation's vast immigrant
detention system. Both companies have more than  doubled revenues from the
business of detaining immigrants since 2005,  collecting hundreds of millions
of dollars in federal contracts with Immigration  and Customs Enforcement.

Some immigration reform advocates and lawyers  have argued that the
upholding of the so-called "show me your papers" portion of  Arizona's SB 1070
may
bring more undocumented immigrants into the web of federal  immigration
enforcement, resulting in increased detentions and  deportations.

"This is really the pointy end of the sword of SB 1070,"  said Ali Noorani,
executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an  immigrants'
rights group. "It provides a real boon, a real growth opportunity  for the
private prison industry in the State of Arizona."

A Corrections  Corporation of America spokesman said that "under
longstanding policy, CCA does  not and has not ever taken positions on or
promoted any
sentencing or detention  legislation." A spokesman for the GEO Group did
not respond to questions. In the  past, CCA officials have stressed that the
federal government, not local law  enforcement, makes the ultimate decision
on which undocumented immigrants should  be detained.

Federal officials attempted to assert their authority in  Arizona on Monday
by rescinding previous agreements with state law enforcement  agencies to
enforce immigration law at a local level. A senior administration  official,
who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity, said Immigration and
Customs Enforcement has formally told agents in Arizona to prioritize only the
most serious violations referred by local law enforcement. Those include
potential undocumented immigrants with a criminal history and repeat border
crossers.

"We will not allow a state to set our enforcement priorities,"  the senior
administration official said.

Yet legal observers argue that  the federal government's talk of
prioritizing certain immigrants is at odds with  the recent drive of President
Barack
Obama's administration to appear tough on  immigration enforcement. The
administration has deported record numbers of  undocumented immigrants,
approaching nearly 400,000 each of the last two years,  and critics have said
the
increased Arizona enforcement could bring more  opportunities for detention
and deportation.

"The main issue here is that  there continues to be a focus on deporting a
lot of people," said Nancy  Morawetz, a professor at the Immigrant Rights
Clinic at New York University's  School of Law. "There's a sort of pride in
the number of people, and a pride in  the number of people who happen to come
in through an arrest, no matter what the  arrest was."

The potential of future litigation remains likely. Arizona  Gov. Jan Brewer
(R), who signed Arizona's immigration law in 2010, noted in a  statement
Monday: "Our critics are already preparing new litigation tactics in  response
to their loss at the Supreme Court, and undoubtedly will allege  inequities
in the implementation of the law."

Corrections Corporation of  America has strong ties in Arizona, operating
three detention centers housing  nearly 2,000 undocumented immigrants in the
state. Dennis DeConcini, a former  Democratic U.S. senator from Arizona,
sits on CCA's board of directors. And  several CCA lobbyists in Phoenix have
worked for or consulted with  Brewer.

Critics have questioned CCA's ties to Arizona's law. As written,  the law
in part mirrors draft model legislation on immigration enforcement  developed
by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of conservative
state legislators and business representatives tied to the drafting of Florida's
  controversial "Stand Your Ground" law.

Until 2010, a CCA senior director,  Laurie Shanblum, sat on the ALEC
executive task force for public safety and  elections, along with state Sen.
Russell Pearce (R), who introduced SB 1070.  Parts of the Arizona law, including
the section upheld by the Supreme Court, are  word-for-word the same as the
ALEC public safety task force's model legislation,  according to a review of
documents posted online by the Center for Media and  Democracy, a
left-leaning advocacy group.

Machak, the CCA spokesman, said  that "any suggested connection between our
company and Arizona's immigration law  is baseless."

Though model language developed by ALEC is similar to the  language in SB
1070, others have taken credit for helping to draft the law,  including
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who worked as an immigration  advisor to
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft during the George W. Bush  presidency.
Kobach has advised other states and towns in developing  immigration-related
legislation, including Alabama.

GEO Group executives  in the past have not disputed that enforcement
efforts like Arizona's  immigration law may have positive impacts on their
business. In a 2010 GEO Group  earnings call after Brewer signed the Arizona
law,
an analyst asked executives  whether the new legislation might affect
business.

Wayne Calabrese, then  the company's chief operating officer, said the law
"certainly indicates a level  of frustration by the public," according to a
transcript of the call. He added:  "I can only believe that the
opportunities at the federal level are going to  continue apace as a result of
what's
happening. ... That to me at least suggests  there's going to be enhanced
opportunities for what we do."
"Private prison  companies are very explicit that they think the growth
area for them is federal  detention, and that means primarily immigration
detention," said Emily Tucker,  director of policy and advocacy for Detention
Watch Network, an immigrants'  rights group. "They're hoping this will mean
more contracts for more detention  beds.

====================================

PEW Research: The Rise  of Asian Americans

[pewsocialtrends.org] Asian Americans are the  highest-income,
best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United  States. They are
more
satisfied than the general public with their lives,  finances and the direction
of the country, and they place more value than other  Americans do on
marriage, parenthood, hard work and career success, according to  a
comprehensive
new nationwide survey by the Pew Research Center.

A  century ago, most Asian Americans were low-skilled, low-wage laborers
crowded  into ethnic enclaves and targets of official discrimination. Today
they are the  most likely of any major racial or ethnic group in America to
live in mixed  neighborhoods and to marry across racial lines. When newly
minted medical school  graduate Priscilla Chan married Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg last month, she  joined the 37% of all recent Asian-American brides
who wed a non-Asian  groom.1

These milestones of economic success and social assimilation have  come to
a group that is still majority immigrant. Nearly three-quarters (74%) of
Asian-American adults were born abroad; of these, about half say they speak
English very well and half say they don’t.

Asians recently passed  Hispanics as the largest group of new immigrants to
the United States. The  educational credentials of these recent arrivals
are striking. More than  six-in-ten (61%) adults ages 25 to 64 who have come
from Asia in recent years  have at least a bachelor’s degree. This is double
the share among recent  non-Asian arrivals, and almost surely makes the
recent Asian arrivals the most  highly educated cohort of immigrants in U.S.
history.

Compared with the  educational attainment of the population in their
country of origin, recent  Asian immigrants also stand out as a select group.
For
example, about 27% of  adults ages 25 to 64 in South Korea and 25% in Japan
have a bachelor’s degree or  more.2 In contrast, nearly 70% of comparably
aged recent immigrants from these  two countries have at least a bachelor’s
degree.

Recent Asian immigrants  are also about three times as likely as recent
immigrants from other parts of  the world to receive their green cards—or
permanent resident status—on the basis  of employer rather than family
sponsorship (though family reunification remains  the most common legal gateway
to the
U.S. for Asian immigrants, as it is for all  immigrants).

The modern immigration wave from Asia is nearly a half  century old and has
pushed the total population of Asian Americans—foreign born  and U.S born,
adults and children—to a record 18.2 million in 2011, or 5.8% of  the total
U.S. population, up from less than 1% in 1965.3 By comparison,  non-Hispanic
whites are 197.5 million and 63.3%, Hispanics 52.0 million and  16.7% and
non-Hispanic blacks 38.3 million and 12.3%.

Asian Americans  trace their roots to any of dozens of countries in the Far
East, Southeast Asia  and the Indian subcontinent. Each country of origin
subgroup has its own unique  history, culture, language, religious beliefs,
economic and demographic traits,  social and political values, and pathways
into America.

But despite often  sizable subgroup differences, Asian Americans are
distinctive as a whole,  especially when compared with all U.S. adults, whom
they
exceed not just in the  share with a college degree (49% vs. 28%), but also
in median annual household  income ($66,000 versus $49,800) and median
household wealth ($83,500 vs.  $68,529).4

They are noteworthy in other ways, too. According to the Pew  Research
Center survey of a nationally representative sample of 3,511 Asian  Americans,
conducted by telephone from Jan. 3 to March 27, 2012, in English and  seven
Asian languages, they are more satisfied than the general public with  their
lives overall (82% vs. 75%), their personal finances (51% vs. 35%) and the
general direction of the country (43% vs. 21%).

They also stand out for  their strong emphasis on family. More than half
(54%) say that having a  successful marriage is one of the most important
things in life; just 34% of all  American adults agree. Two-thirds of
Asian-American adults (67%) say that being  a good parent is one of the most
important
things in life; just 50% of all  adults agree.

Their living arrangements align with these values. They are  more likely
than all American adults to be married (59% vs. 51%); their newborns  are less
likely than all U.S. newborns to have an unmarried mother (16% vs.  41%);
and their children are more likely than all U.S. children to be raised in  a
household with two married parents (80% vs. 63%).

They are more likely  than the general public to live in multi-generational
family households. Some  28% live with at least two adult generations under
the same roof, twice the  share of whites and slightly more than the share
of blacks and Hispanics who  live in such households. U.S. Asians also have
a strong sense of filial respect;  about two-thirds say parents should have
a lot or some influence in choosing  one’s profession (66%) and spouse (61%).

Read More:
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/06/19/the-rise-of-asian-americans/

=====================================================

National    Immigrant Solidarity Network
No Immigrant Bashing! Support  Immigrant   Rights!
webpage:  http://www.ImmigrantSolidarity.org
e-mail:    info@...

New York: (212)330-8172
Los   Angeles:  (213)403-0131
Washington D.C.:  (202)595-8990
Chicago:   (773)942-2268

Please consider  making a donation to the important work  of  National
Immigrant  Solidarity Network

Send check pay  to:
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=======================================================

#4751 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu Jul 5, 2012 3:14 pm
Subject: RACE TO THE BOTTOM Columbia University, the Koch Brothers, New York's real estate billionaires and the attack on construction worker wages
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RACE TO THE BOTTOM
Columbia University, the Koch Brothers, New York’s real estate billionaires and the attack on construction workers wages
 
It takes a certain special kind of arrogance for a university with a $ 6.5 billion endowment to claim that the middle income blue collar workers who build and maintain their Ivy covered towers are “overpaid”.
 
In June 2012, Columbia University actually had the nerve to put forth that bald faced lie about the tradespeople and janitors who construct and service their world class facilities.
 
The university’s Center for Urban Real Estate issued a report attacking prevailing wages. The report was funded by the New York State Association for Affordable Housing (a lobby for real estate developers that use low wage scab contractors to build government subsidized housing) and written by Manhattan Institute-trained anti union ideologue Julia Vitullo-Martin(we’ll meet her again below).
 
It’s actually rather odd to see the normally liberal Columbia University teaming up with the hard right conservative Koch Brothers-funded Manhattan Institute – but union busting makes strange bedfellows sometimes.
 
Columbia and Vitullo-Martin called for the state of New York to lower prevailing wages for workers in the construction industry. They also oppose the extending of prevailing wage protection to construction workers who build government subsidized housing and janitors and security guards working in buildings funded by city subsidies and on properties controlled by the city’s electric and gas utility, Consolidated Edison.  
 
According to this anti union propaganda report, those workers – many of whom earn poverty level wages and get no benefits – are “overpaid”.
 
Vitullo-Martin and the university claim that the road to economic recovery, in the real estate sector and the broader economy, lies through reducing construction and building service worker wages to as low a pay scale as possible.
 
This dovetails nicely with the Manhattan Institute’s broader agenda, which is basically Ronald Reagan-style “trickle down economics”, union busting and elimination of any and all statutory protection of workers’ rights, including prevailing wages.
 
Wait a minute – what exactly are “prevailing wages” anyway?
 
Prevailing wages are based on the average wages paid to workers in each particular construction craft in each particular labor market.
 
New York State passed one of the nation’s first prevailing wage laws in 1894, mandating that all state funded construction jobs be built by workers receiving prevailing wages. The US government passed its prevailing wage law, the Davis Bacon Act, in 1930. Many state and local authorities enacted their own “little Davis Bacon laws” shortly thereafter.
 
 In New York State, for many years, the state and the federal governments have determined Davis Bacon prevailing wages for most crafts based on union wage scales.
 
Columbia University and their hatchet woman Vitullo-Martin argue that, since large segments of the construction industry in New York State and New York City have been deunionized, prevailing wage scales should be reduced to reflect the wage and benefit cuts that have been inflicted on those workers by scab developers and contractors.
 
This would involve a substantial wage cut for construction workers.
 
In the case of this writer’s craft, carpenters, the union scale and prevailing wage for New York City is $46.15/hr (plus benefits). The wage scale paid for carpenters on scab jobs, by contrast, ranges from a high of $25 an hour (and no benefits) on scab commercial jobs to as little as $7 an hour (often paid off the books – with no benefits, of course, not even unemployment or social security) on certain scab jobs.
 
In particular, the contractors employed by the members of the NYS Association for Affordable Housing are often those on the $7/hr off the books end of the compensation scale.
 
Yes, that is very blatantly illegal, since the state and federal minimum wage is $ 7.25/hr.
 
No, neither the city, state nor federal governments have ever done anything to stop these developers and their contractors from blatantly using public funds to pay illegally low wages.
 
The excuse these developers often use to justify the obscenely low wages on their projects is city, state and federal housing subsidy funding is limited, so they have to pay rock bottom wages to maximize the amount of work they can get done with the funding they have.
 
The NYS Association has never lobbied to get those subsidies increased so they could actually pay prevailing wages to the workers who build their buildings.
 
They have demanded, and gotten, an exemption from prevailing wage requirements for their housing construction projects. The NYS Association for Affordable Housing’s member developers have enjoyed that exemption for the past 35 years, an exemption that the legislature extended last year by failing to pass a bill that would have required prevailing wages be paid on their larger development projects.
 
Currently, the association is lobbying to block a new bill that would extend prevailing wages to their industry – the attack on prevailing wages in this report is, without doubt, part of that effort.
 
Columbia University, on the other hand, is not exempt from prevailing wage laws – kind of a big deal since they are currently in the midst of a 20 year long $ 6.3 billion taxpayer funded campus expansion project.
 
That explains their motive for wanting to rollback the wages of building tradespeople.
 
The real estate scholars at Columbia argue that, since the construction industry statewide in New York is 70% non union, prevailing wage-bound employers should be allowed to benefit from the rock bottom wages of the scab sector by reducing their workers pay accordingly.
 
Basically, it’s the logic of the race to the bottom.
 
Columbia University and the NYS Association for Affordable Housing’s attack on prevailing wages is part of a general attack on construction workers standard of living by the real estate industry.
 
The Real Estate Board of New York, a body representing the city’s big time real estate developers (including firms like The Related Companies, SL Green and CB Richard Ellis, who’s CEOs are on the industry advisory board of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, the Center for Urban Real Estate’s parent body) have been demanding a 20% pay and benefit reduction for unionized construction workers for the past 5 years.
 
Needless to say, the real estate moneymen aren’t offering to reduce the extortionately high rents they charge New York City tenants, the highest in the nation, nor are billionaires like Stephen Ross, Stephen Green, Bernard Spitzer, Larry Silverstein, Sheldon Solow or the Zeckendorf brothers planning to reduce their incomes by 20%, or even 2%.
 
These guys expect the workers who made them rich to make all of the sacrifices to bail the real estate industry out of the crisis caused by the collapse of the real estate bubble in 2007.
 
They want to push the compensation of the unionized workers who put up their commercial and luxury residential buildings down to the low wage level of the non union workers who toil for scab-contractor using developers like Shaya Boymelgreen, Dave Walentas, Sam Chang, Ken Haron, Eytan Benjamin and Steven Gaetano.
 
You would think that New York City’s construction unions would be up in arms at this kind of massive attack on their members’ standard of living, a wage scale that these unions had to fight for 109 years to achieve.
 
You would also think that the NYC building trades unions would be even more motivated by the fact that this demand for a pay cut is part of a nationwide attack on middle income union members’ wages.
 
From the 50% pay cut that union autoworkers have endured at GM, Ford and Chrysler to the nationwide attacks on civil service pensions, its currently open season on organized labor, with millionaire governors and media pundits and billionaire CEOs calling $ 40,000 a year workers “overpaid”.
 
The same race to the bottom-type arguments that Columbia and the Manhattan Institute have used here have often been used to justify these pay cuts.
 
When the auto industry was bailed out in 2009, the argument was made far and wide that unionized GM, Ford and Chrysler auto workers were “overpaid” at $ 29/hr plus pension and medical benefits and it was only “fair” to reduce their pay to the level of $ 14/hr non union auto workers at Toyota and Nissan’s US plants and $ 10/hr auto workers at non union auto parts sweatshops in the slums of Detroit.
 
FIAT, Chrysler’s current owner, has actually used the 50% pay cut American union auto workers had to take to bully unionized Italian auto workers to take a pay cut or their jobs will go to the now low wage Chrysler plants in the US!
 
Similar arguments have been made against unionized civil servants in many states, including New York.
 
Since most private sector employers don’t bother to provide pensions or employer paid health coverage the claim is that it’s only “fair” for civil servants to have those benefits taken away from them!
 
Labor needs to draw a line in the sand – it might as well be the New York construction unions, the oldest and (at least at one time) strongest group of local unions in the nation.
 
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
 
Just like the United Auto Workers and the public employee unions did when their members were put under the gun, the building trades have been rolling over in the face of every employer demand for wage and benefit cuts.
 
When REBNY first started making noises about wage cuts for unionized construction workers, the New York City Building and Construction Trades Council immediately set to the task of negotiating pay and benefit reductions with the Building Trades Employers Association (a General Contractors association that is closely allied to the big developers).
 
No attempt was made to attempt to organize worker resistance.  Far from it – the NYCBCTC and the leaders of its affiliated unions began aggressively propagandizing their members that we had to make givebacks on some jobs “to keep our good union contractors competitive with the non union”.
 
Initially, the “Market Recovery” concessions were very limited and were restricted to a few jobsites in lower and midtown Manhattan that, supposedly, would not be built if no concessions were made.
 
The fact that jobsites all over the city, union and scab alike, were being abandoned in mid-build as the real estate market melted down added some credence to that threat.
 
Unfortunately, those limited concessions on just a few sites emboldened the developers and the GCs to demand more concessions on more jobs.
 
Just about every major project got a Project Labor Agreement with special deals on wages and work rules. Columbia University was one of the deep pocketed clients that demanded and got concessions, along with Lincoln Center, Carnegie Tower, the Milford Plaza Hotel, the Metropolitan Museum, Sloan Kettering Hospital, the City University of New York, ABC, Marriot, Sheraton, the Resorts World casino at Aqueduct Racetrack, Fordham University, Queens West, Yankee Stadium, CitiField, the Javits Center, the United Nations, Delta Airlines, the Barclay’s Center, Madison Square Garden, New School University and, last but certainly not least, the new World Trade Center.
 
Even one of the scab developers got in on the act.
 
Sam Chang, a developer who runs franchises of big name hotels built and staffed with cheap non union labor agreed to build some of his sweatshop labor hotels with union  workers – but only if he got a cut rate PLA – while continuing to build the rest of his hotels using non union labor.
 
In for a dime, in for a dollar; the developers and the General Contractors, smelling blood in the water, came back and asked for even more concessions.
 
The next demand was a Market Retention rate on government subsidized housing jobs. Depending on the job the scale was between 20% and 40% less than union scale. Also, contractors were allowed to use large numbers of apprentices – basically because apprentices make less money than journeypeople.
 
The District Council of Carpenters was the first to agree to this lower pay scale although the other trades soon followed along.
 
In 2011, the Building Trades Employers Association, the mouthpiece of the General Contractors, called for an overall 20% pay cut on top of all of these concessions, along with a 26 point ultimatum calling for the elimination of many union work rules (down to and including the requirement that the GCs provide toilets on jobsites).
 
This demand was immediately embraced by the voice of the real estate developers, the Real Estate Board of New York.
 
Unfortunately, it was also embraced by the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council.

The BTEA and the NYCBCTC made plans to aggressively promote the 20% pay cut and the 26 point work rule repeal ultimatum to the city’s 100,000 union tradespeople, through propaganda leaflets stapled to paychecks, subway ads and pro pay cut propaganda stories planted in the newspapers.
 
To further the media propaganda campaign, the Regional Plan Association (a Rockefeller Foundation funded group that promotes the interests of New York real estate developers) had a propaganda report drafted to justify their greed-inspired wage cut demands.
 
The Regional Plan Association went to a far right Koch Brothers-funded think tank, the Manhattan institute, and hired two of its right wing anti union professional ideologues, Julia Vitullo-Martin (the propaganda hack we met above) and Hope Cohen.
 
The two academic labor haters drafted a “study” claiming the only road to economic recovery in the construction industry was massive pay and benefit cuts inflicted on union tradespeople.
 
The Regional Plan Association arranged for the report to be popularized in the New York Times (a paper widely read by the educated middle classes in this region) and the New York Daily News (a publication read by the city’s blue collar and service sector working class, including many construction workers both union and non union).
 
At this point, grassroots resistance began to emerge for the pay cut plan from New York union tradespeople.
 
Despite the lack of any official leadership from the unions, or any other group or caucus, this opposition soon became so widespread that the Building and Construction Trades Council had to abandon its public support for the BTEA/REBNY/Regional Plan Association’s pay cut demands.
 
The General Contractors and the developers continued their campaign, but it was far more difficult once the union leaders could no longer openly support them.
 
At least one union, Painters District Council # 9, completely rolled over to the BTEA. DC 9 gave up rules that protected shop stewards from arbitrary discharge and allowed contractors to blacklist members from union membership if they get fired 3 times. The Painters Union leaders left open the possibility of a pay cut for commercial painters at a future date, but gave up massive pay cuts for residential painters – 20% on jobs in Manhattan and an astounding 67% pay cut for residential painters in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs.
 
They were the outlier – other unions couldn’t go that far, especially once word got around of how deep the DC 9 cutbacks were. Protests organized by union members acting independently of their unions (this writer was one of those members) also made giving in on the 20% very difficult for the union leaders.
 
The leaders of the Cement Workers District Council, a Laborers Union affiliate representing cement workers on hirise construction jobs, found themselves actually having to lead a wildcat strike at the World Trade Center jobsite to block the pay cuts.
 
The District Council of Carpenters, the largest building trades union in NYC – and the union that, other than the Painters, had made the most concessions – actually put the concessionary contract to a one member one vote ballot, the first time union carpenters had been able to vote on a contract in the 162 year history of the union.
 
The Carpenters voted the agreements down by a three to one margin – mainly because the contract also included a plan to gut the union’s Out of Work List job referral system, the means by which 2/3rds of the members of that union get their jobs.
 
That doesn’t mean the concessions are dead – in the months since the carpenters rejected the givebacks local 1 Plumbers and local 46 Lathers have taken major pay cuts and made significant other givebacks.
 
The thing is, since these concessions were so wildly unpopular among the members, why were the leaders of these unions initially so supportive of them?
 
Why didn’t the unions organize any kind of resistance?
 
Considering the political climate in New York, with the large scale anti capitalist protests of Occupy Wall Street being such a part of the fabric of public life in this town for the last year or so, it would have been a perfect time for the Building and Construction Trades Council to stand up and fight back.
 
Why didn’t their leadership do that?
 
To answer those questions, we have to take a look at the history of the New York building trades unions.
 
We have come to think of construction as a good paying middle income job – a perception that, these days, is often at odds with the reality of low paid off the books employment for the low wage immigrant majority of the construction trades workforce.
 
However, prior to the 20th century, construction in New York City was a sweatshop job, done by grossly underpaid superexploited immigrant workers.
 
For the first two centuries of New York’s existence as a city (1625-1827), much of the city’s construction workforce were Black slaves, outright owned by the contractors (or “masters” as the contractors of the day blatantly called themselves). Prior to the triumph of the American Revolution in 1791, most White tradesmen in the city were indentured servants, bound by 7 year contracts to the masters (the abolition of indentured servitude was one of the greatest victories of the revolution for American workers).
 
The abolition of African slavery in New York State in 1827 was a great step forward, for as long as part of the workforce was outright owned by the bosses, worker organization was impossible.
 
However, the building industry remained a low paying occupation with a 6 day workweek and sunrise to sunset working hours Monday through Friday and a “half day”(dawn til noon) on Saturday.
 
These harsh conditions naturally bred worker resistance, with periodic strikes, usually at the beginning of the building season in April. Occasionally the strikes would succeed and raise wages for a time, often the strikes would be broken and their leaders fired and, in some cases, blacklisted from working in their trade in the city.
 
Eventually, after about 25 years of struggle, bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers (the three largest trades in the construction industry of the era) were able to establish more or less permanent unions in Manhattan and Brooklyn (which were still separate cities at that time – New York City didn’t become a 5 borough unified city until 1898).
 
The bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers unions of that era (direct ancestors of the present day NYC District Council of Carpenters, Bricklayers New York local 1 and Plasterers local 262) were led by very militant workers, many of whom were socialists, anarchists or communists.
 
They saw unions as not just a means of raising wages but as a step towards building a “cooperative commonwealth” where workers rather than bankers and businessmen controlled the economy and society.
 
The General Contractors of the day hated unions and did everything they could to resist unionization – including breaking strikes and firing and blacklisting the leaders of these unions.
 
However, it soon became impossible for the GCs to get rid of the unions.
 
 Unions became a permanent part of the industry after another 30 years of craft strikes (called “trade movements”) and construction worker participation in broader all trade nationwide strike waves (the Great Upheaval of 1877 and the nationwide strikes for the 8 hour day on May Day in 1886 and 1890).
 
New York in particular also saw the rise of borough-based Boards of Business Agents that unified construction unions locally. “Business agents” were full time union officials, paid by member dues, replacing the part time volunteers who had led construction unions in prior years.
 
There were now also national craft unions that united each trade and, as building technology changed, new unions emerged in other crafts (electricians, plumbers, iron workers, painters, operating engineers ect) and among unskilled laborers and construction teamster wagon drivers alongside the longstanding unions of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers.
 
The unions had changed too – the business agents , even the ones who shared the radical politics of the volunteer union activists they replaced, tempered their militancy with a desire to make unions a stable part of the industry and to collaborate with the contractors as long as workers were paid decent wages.
 
Also, many of the newer contractors had themselves been union members when they were on their tools, making them far less willing than earlier generations of contractors to go for open unionbusting.
 
Some of the more foresighted contractors saw how they could bring stability to their very competitive and unstable industry and increase the share of building industry profits that went to contractors rather than to bankers and real estate developers by collaborating with the unions.
 
Unions could guarantee labor market stability and prevent upstart contractors from undercutting the wages paid by their more established competitors. This could be the basis for price fixing, where the contractors would agree not to undercharge each other, and even to divide work among themselves rather than competing with and underbidding each other.
 
That last idea happened to be an illegal restraint of trade.
 
However, there were also rising criminal gangs in New York who’d be more than willing to help the contractors regulate both labor unions and inter contractor competition – in return for payoffs which could be passed along to the clients in the form of higher prices.
 
Facing the threat of continued strikes and labor strife and enticed by the promise of the benefits of long term labor/management/organized crime cooperation, the contractors eventually decided that they’d be better off dealing with the unions rather than fighting them.
 
To that end, the contractors associations in the various trades set up an umbrella group, the Building Trades Employers Association (we met them earlier in this article) and in 1903 the BTEA and the NYC Building & Construction Trades Council (an umbrella body the construction unions had formed) signed an agreement called the New York Plan.
 
The New York Plan required all of the General Contractors in the BTEA’s member associations to only hire union labor and to only hire subcontractors that only hired union labor.
 
That agreement unionized virtually the entire construction industry in New York City. To this day, the New York Plan ensures that most of the major commerical construction here is done union, and from 1903 to the late 1970s it also kept most of the apartment house construction here union too.
 
This partnership didn’t go smoothly at first.
 
In 1916, in the midst of a citywide strike wave, the Carpenters and Bricklayers called citywide strikes, fueled by demands by outer borough tradesmen to be paid at the same scale as their counterparts on Manhattan jobsites.
 
Those strikes won on the picketline but were subverted when conservative forces in the Carpenters Union overthrew the District Council of Carpenters elected leadership, replacing it with a gangster run administration (that was the beginning of 78 years of gangster domination of the city’s largest building trades union).
 
With gangsters in power in the District Council of Carpenters, this alliance between union business agents, contractors and the criminal underworld was solidly in place. The unions guaranteed labor peace, the gangsters regulated price competition between contractors and the contractors profited handsomely from this arrangement.
 
This partnership was contested only by a failed 1921 attempt by real estate developers to deunionize the NYC building trades (it failed because the General Contractors and the subcontractors refused to go along).
 
There was a political price for the unions – they were very much the junior partner in this alliance, with little to no room for the unions to have an independent agenda.
 
Longstanding union goals like equal distribution of work were abandoned. Job security, seniority and a union’s right to contest unfair firing – things that other unions were just beginning to fight for in those days – were never established in the construction industry.
 
Instead, the employers could hire and fire as they saw fit. They had a right to play favorites, with steady jobs for some and sporadic employment by the day for the majority. They were also free to discriminate – many trades had an outright ban on the hiring of Black workers, a form of open racial discrimination that the unions actively participated in enforcing.
 
Above all, the once core union ideas of building a construction industry and a society ruled by workers instead of by bosses and bankers was abandoned, totally and absolutely. That goal was replaced with the idea of labor management partnership – a partnership based on labor’s permanent subordination to management, on the job and in the broader society beyond the jobsite.
 
The contractors, by far, were the biggest beneficiaries of this alliance. They got a steady supply of skilled workers, at the modest cost of paying their workers decent wages. With everybody paying the same pay scale, they also didn’t have to worry about their competitors underbidding them by hiring cheap labor.
 
Thanks to the gangsters, the contractors kept construction prices high and limited competition between firms, which helped the contractors take a much larger share of real estate profits then they would have if they had to compete in an unregulated market.
 
As for the workers, as long as there was work to be had, money was good and, as long as a tradesman didn’t challenge the power of the business agents and the wiseguys, he could make a very good living.
 
The alliance was shaken briefly during the 1930s – mainly because half the construction workforce was unemployed. Since the subordination of the unions to the contractors and the mob had been justified to the members by the business agents based on the good paying jobs that resulted, the lack of jobs made that collaboration very unpopular – especially among the less well connected members who got little to no work.
 
This led to a brief upsurge in construction worker radicalism in New York City. A few communists were elected to business agent posts (for a time communists even ran Painters District Council 9), and thanks to renewed worker militancy, the contractors were forced to concede the 7 hour day and the 5 day work week.
 
The renewed prosperity generated by the construction boom during World War II and the even bigger post war building boom made it possible for the contractors, the business agents and the gangsters to bring back the old alliance between unions, bosses and the mafia.
 
Contractors in two sectors – hirise concrete and a recently developed plaster substitute called drywall – actually developed full blown cartels (the “concrete club” and “the wheel”, respectively), where the Genovese family of the mafia determined which contractors were allowed to bid on particular jobs.
 
Contractors who tried to underbid the contractors picked by the Genoveses found themselves having problems with the District Council of Carpenters and the Cement Workers District Council, unions whose leaders were subordinated to that crime family.
 
This labor-management-underworld alliance ruled the construction industry In New York City uncontested into the 1960s.
 
On the labor side, it built up the strongest local labor bodies in the world. However their strength was undermined by their domination by employers and organized crime, an underlying weakness that would begin to be exposed later in that decade.
 
The first cracks in the labor-management-mafia alliance began to appear in 1965, in the form of civil rights protests.
 
Contractors had practiced de facto Jim Crow segregation in the New York building trade for decades. Limited numbers of Black men and Puerto Ricans were allowed to be carpenters in Harlem or mason tenders and demolition laborers. Other than that, contractors in the various trades openly refused to hire qualified men of color to work in the industry.
 
With the rise of the Civil Rights Movement protests, and the federal government’s outlawing of race discrimination in 1965, minority communities refused to accept their blatant exclusion from those jobs.
 
Initially, mainstream civil rights groups like the NAACP carried out peaceful protests, and the City of New York launched a small scale tokenistic integration program at one jobsite, the Hunts Point Market in the South Bronx.
 
However, Plumbers local 2 balked at letting 4 Puerto Ricans and a Black man join their union and called their first citywide strike in 70 years to keep men of color out of their union.
 
That kind of union intransigence in defense of employer racism enraged Black and Latino workers and the civil rights moderates leading the protests were soon displaced by Maoist revolutionary communists
The radical protests escalated to invasions of segregated jobsites in Black and Latino neighborhoods by minority workers (often armed with pipes and baseball bats).
 
This led to the creation of minority construction worker organizations called Coalitions that within a few years spread throughout the city.
 
The Coalitions, with bats and pipes in hand, eventually forced the contractors and the unions to give in on racial segregation and to open the trades to workers of all races, not just White men (although race discrimination in the unions would continue for decades after desegregation).
 
That was only the first crack in the foundation – there would soon be others.
 
The next blow was the destruction of Rent Control.
 
The Rent Control Law had been passed in 1947, in the wake of almost a quarter century of struggles for tenants rights in New York City.
 
The law kept rents low and, alongside the large number of high quality low rent apartments in the NYC Housing Authority’s public housing projects, made it possible for poor and working class people to have decent affordable housing in the city.
 
Real estate developers and bankers hated Rent Control and the projects, because their existence put a limit on the profiteering and rent gouging that the financiers wanted to inflict on their tenants.
 
In 1971, after 24 years of landlord lobbying, Mayor John Lindsay repealed the Rent Control Law. It was replaced with the Rent Stabilization Law. The new law allowed landlords to raise their rents every year, as long as those rent increases were approved by the Rent Guidelines Board, a body appointed by the mayor and made up largely of landlord representatives.
 
Predictably, the RGB has authorized rent increases every year from 1972 to date.
 
Tenants who were already living in their apartments in 1971 were allowed to keep their old Rent Control Law determined rents, as long as their or their heirs continued to live in the apartment.

If the tenants gave up the apartment for any reason, the landlord could raise the rents to the higher levels authorized by the Rent Stabilization Law.
 
This loophole was brutally exploited by landlords.
 
In large areas of Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn, landlords began systematically denying services to tenants to force them to leave, so the apartments could be rented at the new higher rents.
 
Many of those landlords took advantage of a $ 784 million dollar long term low interest loan package offered by the City to landlords looking to renovate old law apartments into luxury apartments, or to tear down the old buildings and replace them with luxury hirise apartment houses.
 
In many areas of Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, Central Brooklyn and Far Rockaway, Queens, landlords went so far as to hire arsonists to burn their buildings down, removing the Rent Control Tenants by outright destroying the buildings.
 
Over 200,000 tenants lost their homes to the fires.
 
None of the landlords went to prison for their crimes against the tenants of the city.
 
The NYC Building and Construction Trades Council supported the Rent Stabilization Law and the $ 784 million in subsidies for luxury housing construction, as did the building service workers unions, locals 32E and 32B-32J of the Service Employees International Union, and the rest of the labor movement.
 
As long as the new buildings were built union and had union supers and porters once they were built, it didn’t matter that this process of “gentrification” hurt the working class as a whole.
 
That labor support for this attack on the working class as a whole would turn around to bite labor in the ass in the summer of 1975.
 
The City’s $ 784 million in luxury housing subsidies, lent out long term at low interest to developers, had been borrowed short term at high interest from a consortium of Wall Street banks.
 
When the loans came due in the spring of 1975, the City didn’t have the money.
 
So, the bankers appointed a junta, called the “Municipal Assistance Corporation” and seized control of the city’s finances in what amounted to a bloodless coup d’état.
 
The bankers demanded, and got, the City to lay off 25% of its workforce – 50,000+ workers - including many in essential services like police, fire, education, health care, garbage collection and mass transit, and to immediately cancel hundreds of construction jobs (literally leaving the buildings abandoned and open to the elements).
 
Resistance from the civil service unions was uncoordinated and sporadic. Firefighters, police officers, sanitation workers and teachers briefly struck, but the transport workers union stayed neutral and the two largest municipal unions, Teamsters local 237 and AFSCME District Council 37, actively helped the bankers carry out their mass layoffs.
 
That was better than the response of the leaders of the private sector unions, including the Building & Construction Trades Council, who did absolutely nothing and let these attacks on the working class of New York City go unresisted (even when union construction jobs were lost).
 
Three years later, in 1978, the newly elected Koch Administration had to make some concessions to the civil service unions – basically, they had to rehire the laid off workers, to keep the city livable. Even then, the rehired city workers often came back to their jobs with lower salaries and pension benefits, with the full support of the municipal union leaders.
 
The Koch Administration also launched an attack directly on the building trades, knowing that they could get away with that because the labor leadership had so passively accepted the attacks of 1975.
 
The City had to rebuild the 50,000+ apartments that had been burned out by the landlords earlier in the decade. However, due to the financial restrictions imposed by the bankers junta MAC, they had to build these units as cheaply as possible.
 
The City’s answer was to have the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD), the newly created city agency overseeing and funding the work, transfer all of the funding for these jobs to not for profit Community Based Organizations.
 
The City’s lawyers claimed that, since the CBOs were, technically, private corporations, they were not bound by city or state Davis Bacon prevailing wage laws.
 
This opened the door to the first large scale deunionization of a major construction market segment in New York City in 75 years.
 
Considering this was coming at a time when construction unions were under attack nationwide, you would think that this would have provoked a major counteroffensive by the NYC building trades.
 
That didn’t happen.
 
The leadership of the building trades, instead of organizing their then 250,000 strong membership to resist this attack, deferred to their “partners” the contractors and the mafia bosses.
 
That was a problem, because the contractors and the mafia were very happy with Mayor Koch’s low wage residential construction program and planned to take full advantage of it, by cutting the wages and benefits of their workers, one way or the other.
 
This was especially true of the two main groups of subcontractors in residential construction, the drywall & ceiling contractors and the hirise concrete contractors.
 
The two drywall contractor associations – the Association of Wall, Ceiling and Carpentry Industries and the Metropolitan Drywall Association – and the Cement League negotiated a contract with the District Council of Carpenters, the largest union in residential construction, calling for a lower renovation wage scale.
 
Parallel to those open legal wage cuts, Vinnie Di Napoli, the Genovese family captain who ran the MDA and owned Inner City Drywall, the largest drywall contractor in the city at the time, imposed a second set of secret illegal wage cuts.
 
Di Napoli began paying some of his company man (full time employee) carpenters based on a lump sum fee instead of an hourly wage, a practice known as “lumping”. It amounted to a pay cut but the District Council did nothing to stop him – basically because, in the Genovese family hierarchy, their union was subordinated to him and his crew.
 
Side by side with this, openly non union contractors began bidding on these inner city renovation jobs, with little to no resistance from the union. This lack of union resistance had a lot to do with the fact that many of these scab contractors were paying protection money to the Genoveses, or one of the other 4 mafia families in the city.
 
Scab contractors that didn’t pay off Di Napoli or one of the other wiseguys did get picketed, often quite violently, and were shut down, or allowed to continue operating if they bribed the right people.
 
The leaders of the Cement Workers, Mason Tenders, Bricklayers, Plasterers & Cement Masons, Teamsters and Operating Engineers all similarly subordinated themselves to the attacks on their members standard of living by the contractors, the wiseguys and the city.
 
The only exception was Drywall Tapers local 1974, a small local of Painters District Council 9 that represented the workers who taped over the joints and screw holes in the drywall installed by the carpenters.
 
Unlike most of the rest of the trades, which were dominated by the Genovese family, Painters District Council 9 was subordinated to the Lucchese family, one of the smaller New York mafia families.
 
The bosses of these two families didn’t necessarily see eye to eye on exactly how to attack construction workers standard of living, nor would the Lucchese bosses get a cut of the extra profits that Genovese family protected contractors would be getting.
 
Also, from the perspective of the members of the tapers union, the concessions they were being asked to give up were much steeper. Not only were they expected to take an official pay cut and be unofficially expected to submit to lumping, they were also going to be asked to work on stilts rather than on ladders or scaffolds.
 
Stilts are a lot more dangerous to work off of than ladders or scaffolds are – but a taper on stilts can work a whole lot faster than one using a ladder or scaffold.
 
So, to stop the stilts, the leaders of the tapers union went on strike in 1978.
 
All the other trades scabbed on them, working behind their picketlines, side by side with the scab tapers recruited by Di Napoli and the other contractors.
 
Worse yet, the Plasterers & Cement Masons union, acting under the direction of Di Napoli and the Genovese family, actually chartered a scab local, Drywall Tapers & Plasterers local 530, to “represent” the scabs!
 
The scab tapers union was run by a Bronx real estate agent named Louis Moscatiello, Sr, a Genovese family captain who, as it happened, had never worked a day in his life as a taper or in any other trade.
 
The legitimate tapers union was unable to hold out and the strike was broken.
 
Meanwhile, while the unions were retreating in the unionized residential sector, the non union sector continued its growth in the face of union weakness.
 
The total construction workforce had been cut from 250,000 to only 200,000, with only 150,000 of them unionized. A quarter of the industry had been deunionized (a big deal in a city that had built 100% union for the previous 75 years) and almost 100,000 union members had been driven out of the union trades.
 
The rise of the Coalitions – a result of longstanding contractor and union racial discrimination – provided an alternative source of labor to the scab contractors, enabling them to man all the new jobs they were getting in residential.
 
Also, the wiseguys who the unions had become so deeply subordinated to were facing a severe threat from city, state and federal investigators.
 
The reason for this was because the real estate developers and the bankers had gotten sick and tired of paying off the Genoveses and the other wiseguys.
 
The gangsters had, for the previous 30 years, extracted a “tribute” (their euphemism for a bribe) of 2% of the total cost of each job, plus the right to place no-show employees on certain jobs and the right to steal “mongo” (scrap metal) from jobsites.
 
Above and beyond that “mob tax” (as the prosecutors would later come to call it) – a longstanding irritation for the developers and the bankers – was Di Napoli’s lumping.
 
The developers and the bankers didn’t mind the open and legal pay cuts. Actually, they welcomed them, since the cost savings got passed on to them through price cuts.
 
They very much did mind the lumping because the contractors and the wiseguys got all that money, which the developers and their bankers thought should go to them.
 
Basically, the billionaires felt like they had been ripped off by the contractors and the gangsters.
 
When rich people get ripped off, or even think they’ve been ripped off, then somebody has got to go to jail.
 
Unfortunately for the building trades, their decades long one sided alliance with the gangsters meant that when the feds came after the mob, they’d come after the unions too. The FBI intervention into the internal affairs of the New York building trades that begins in this era continues to this very day, due to the longstanding mob ties of building trades leaders.
 
The District Council of Carpenters, the biggest and, after the Cement Workers District Council and Plasterers local 530, the most mafia dominated, was the union that suffered the greatest decay.
 
The Carpenters membership fell from 40,000 to 25,000, three District Council officials – including the president of the council, Teddy Maritas - were murdered by the mafia, the DC’s parent union took the Council into trusteeship and half of its locals were disbanded, due to membership loss.
 
The commercial and luxury housing boom in Manhattan in the mid 1980s somewhat concealed the decay, at least for the moment. Virtually all of this work was union, so it was easy to overlook the market areas that had been lost to the scab sector – at least for the moment.
 
Much of the apartment house sector had gone non union in Upper Manhattan and the outer boroughs, but there were so many office buildings and luxury apartment houses going up in Manhattan below 96th St that most of the remaining union members were working steady on those jobs. Some trades, like the Electricians, actually brought in members from out of town to work on these jobs.
 
However, when the real estate bubble burst in 1989, the dimensions of the crisis became very clear.
 
The leaders of the building trades unions didn’t have an answer to this crisis, other than echoing the demands of the developers and the contractors for “more jobs” (with no guarantee that they would necessarily be union jobs).
 
Ninety years of subordination to the bosses and the criminals had robbed the unions of any capacity to develop an independent strategy.
 
Not to mention the fact that a substantial section of union leaders were on the take, and were being paid off to look the other way while the union sector shrank and the scab sector expanded.
 
The latter factor led to government intervention in the two largest, and most corrupt, construction unions in the city, the Mason Tenders District Council and the District Council of Carpenters.
 
The feds had a twofold agenda. On the one hand, they wanted to eliminate the illegal under the table deals where mafia connected contractors illegally paid substandard wages and cheated the developers and the General Contractors out of those labor cost savings. On the other hand, the feds also wanted to legally and openly reduce union wages – with the benefits passed on to the developers and the GCs.
 
This was a low point for the New York building trades.
 
They were down to only 120,000 members and there were over 80,000 non union workers in the industry – some making as little as $ 4 an hour off the books.
 
The only silver lining in this dark cloud was that the new leaderships of the Mason Tenders and the Carpenters ended up setting up organizing departments, the first time that any NYC building trades union had done organizing work in a systematic way since the 1930s.
 
The Mason Tenders had the most success, with the union able to reorganize its asbestos abatement worker and demolition worker jurisdictions, market segments that had been deunionized, with much assistance from the Genoveses, in the 1980s.
 
The MTDC would be the most successfully reformed New York construction union, in large part because its close ties with the GCs that, along with the developers, were the driving force behind intervention by the feds in the industry.
 
In the Carpenters, the close ties between the union leadership and the subcontractors (and the gangsters who stood behind them) made the federal intervention very difficult and made lasting changes hard to come by.
 
Similar problems would be experienced in every other construction union the feds would end up cleaning out.
 
Making matters worse, the City of New York was going out of its way to direct housing funds to developers who used low wage non union labor.
 
The NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development was by far the worst offender. The GCs hired by the not for profit Community Based Organization to build housing with HPD funds tended to be the lowest paying firms available. Carpenters and masons received as little as $ 7 an hour – laborers and helpers often got as little as $ 4/hr. Wages were paid in cash, off the books, with no payroll taxes paid, not even unemployment, workers comp, disability or social security.
 
Blatantly illegal labor practices were being financed with public funds – needless to say, the feds did NOT investigate any of this!
 
This of course created a downward pull on union wages – particularly in hirise luxury residential, the one market segment of residential that had stayed union.
 
This economic pressure was the reason that some mafia connected bricklaying, hirise concrete, drywall & ceilings and drywall taping contractors began to look for ways to illegally pay substandard wages to a portion of their workforce.
 
Some office furniture installation, venetian blind and drywall & ceilings contractors in the office interior renovation sector also began looking for ways to illegally pay substandard wages as well.
 
A commonly used method was called “working for cash”.
 
This often involved a union worker – usually a carpenter, cement worker, bricklayer or drywall taper – would work part of the week for union scale, and part of the week for cash off the books. Some guys had to work the whole week off the books, some other guys worked the regular work week on the books but overtime was all in cash.
 
In return for taking cash, the worker got steady employment (a rare privilege in the construction industry) and, in some cases, a way to evade alimony and child support payments.
 
Often, the GC and the developer were billed as if all of the subcontractor’s workers were getting paid union scale.
 
This systematic undermining of union pay scales happened in the context of a residential apartment house building boom in the early 2000s, centered in Harlem, the West Side and Williamsburg.
 
Most of this development was non union – the few buildings that were built union often had cash contractors who didn’t actually pay the official union scale.
 
The decay of union wage scales set the tone for a general downward mobility, with the scab outfits paying very low wages (in some cases segregated by race – one scab outfit, EMC Construction, paid it’s White carpenters $ 25/hr, it’s Black carpenters $ 15/hr and it’s Latino carpenters $ 11/hr)
 
In June 2001, the District Council of Carpenters made it easier for dirty contractors to pay cash by changing the union’s job referral system, so a contractor could partially evade using the union’s job referral system.
 
This meant that if a carpenter wanted to work steady, instead of sitting home by the phone waiting for a call from the union (which was a lot less likely to come because the union had surrendered control of a lot of the jobs to the contractors), he or she might find that they’d have to work for cash to do so.
 
This made it a lot easier for contractors that hired carpenters to pay cash if they choose to do so. On paper, they still paid the union scale (and billed accordingly) but in the real world they paid a lot less.
 
Preventing this kind of under the table illegal arrangement, and forcing contractors to openly impose their pay cuts and pass the savings up the food chain to the developers and the GCs was precisely why the feds had come into the building trades unions in the first place.
 
This led to a second wave of prosecutions of labor leaders, racketeers and even a few contractors in the New York building trades (again, when rich people get ripped off, somebody has got to get locked up!)
 
Genovese family captain Louis Moscatiello, Sr (the drywall tapers strikebreaker we met earlier in this essay), his son and fellow labor racketeer Louis, Jr, a half dozen drywall taping contractors and the scab tapers union they controlled, Plasterers local 530, were hit with multiple charges.
 
Both Moscatiellos were among those who went to jail (the father ended up dying of natural causes behind bars) and local 530 was kicked out of the industry.
 
The District Council of Carpenters was also hit by multiple prosecutions. DC Executive Secretary Treasurer Mike Forde ended up being one of those who went to jail. A number of other Carpenters Union officials got locked up as well. Also, the head of the biggest carpenter employers association, Association of Wall Ceiling and Carpentry Industries chief Joseph Olivieri, found himself behind bars.
 
A lot of this was due to the testimony of one James Murray. He was the owner of one of the biggest union drywall contractors in the city (and also one of the dirtiest), On-Par Contracting. As is common in racketeering cases, he turned state’s evidence to keep himself out of prison.
 
Unfortunately, alongside this attack on illegal under the table wage cuts (the kind that don’t get passed along up the food chain to the GCs, developers and bankers) were increasing demands that union trades take deep pay cuts, alongside a continued aggressive expansion of the scab sector of the industry.
 
Of the city’s total of 200,000 construction workers, only 100,000 worked union. Of the 100,000 on the scab side, 50,000 were paid off the books, in some cases receiving wages that were below minimum wage with absolutely no benefits, not even social security or unemployment.
 
The residential building boom of the early 2000s was overwhelmingly non union, with the great bulk of lowrise apartment houses built scab (and even some hirises).
 
By the mid 2000s, developers Ken Haron and Eytan Benyamin did agree to build their buildings open shop instead of 100% scab. The concrete, plumbing and electrical were done union, but the drywall, brickwork, windows and interior finish work continued to be done scab.
 
Shaya Boymelgreen consented to build one of his buildings union – but with a special project labor agreement with lower wages.
 
Sam Chang would later make a similar deal – and end up going back on the deal and building scab anyway.
 
As limited as this headway was, it all came to a stop when the housing bubble popped in 2007 and the economy melted down.
 
Jobs that were on the drawing board got cancelled and even some projects that were already in mid build had work stopped and the structures were abandoned.
 
This made organizing very difficult – after all, how can you take in new members if you can’t keep your existing membership employed?
 
Also, this was the climate in which the GCs and the developers on the union side began to demand deep concessions – above all, a 20% pay cut.
 
Initially it was only supposed to cover a few jobs and the excuse was if the developers didn’t get the special market recovery deal, they wouldn’t go forward with building.
 
Later, this generalized into a general demand for industrywide pay cuts, a demand that continues down to this day, with wealthy institutions like Columbia and billionaire developers like Larry Silverstein calling for deep wage and benefit cuts for the skilled workers whose labor makes them rich.
 
As I described at the top of this article, while the general reaction by construction workers has been outrage and stubborn opposition, the leadership of the building trades unions have, at best, put up limited resistance and, more commonly, to actually support the demands of the developers.
 
This is exactly the wrong strategy.
 
We need to fight to preserve what we have, and to attempt to extend our standard of living to the workers in the scab sector, by helping them to fight their bosses and the scab developers.
 
This won’t be easy. However, considering the present political climate of unrest and anticapitalist Occupy protests by underemployed college educated youth, we can, and should, forge alliances to enable us to carry out these struggles.
 
We also can, and should, reach out and jointly struggle with our fellow unionists who also face attacks on their living standards – like public employees, or the currently locked out Con Edison utility workers.
 
We should also reach out to the janitors and other building service workers in the buildings owned by these developers – both the unionized workers in the Hotel Trades Council and local 32bj of the Service Employees International Union and the non union workers (in particular the grossly underpaid workers at Sam Chang’s scab franchise hotels)
 
Bottom line, there is no way that middle income tradespeople should take a pay cut for the benefit of millionaires and billionaires.
 
There’s a slogan that the District Council of Carpenters organizing department uses on its informational picket lines in front of jobsites that don’t pay prevailing wages – “Same Work! Same Pay!”
There was another slogan, chanted by the striking cement workers at the World Trade Center and the workers at the bootleg unofficial protests against the pay cuts – “We Built This City! Don’t Cut Our Pay!”
 
That’s basically what this boils down to – and that simple idea that tradespeople with the same skills doing the same work deserve equal pay could, if presented properly, resonate with workers in other industries, the poor and the middle class.
 
 
 
-          commentary by GREGORY A. BUTLER, LOCAL 157 CARPENTER
FOR GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE
“UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER”
               Originally published on Thursday, July 5, 2012
               © 2012 Gregory A. Butler, all rights reserved.
 

#4752 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Jul 9, 2012 3:10 pm
Subject: Fw: FORWARD EVERYWHERE! PICKET CON ED!
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From: SpewNYC@...
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 10:53:57 -0400 (EDT)
To: <SPEWNYC@...>
Subject: FORWARD EVERYWHERE! PICKET CON ED!

Marty Goodman 7/9
 
Picket Con Ed all day, everyday! Con Ed HQ is at Irving Place and 14th street, one block east of Union Square. Transit workers, wear your TWU shirts or scarves when you go!
 
You can also picket Con Ed locations below 24/7. 
 
Call Emilio Frederick at 718-530-5230 to get Local 1-2's flyers for the public. Give them out at your neighborhood station!

 

125th Street Office, 360 West 125th Street, New York, NY 10027

110th St Yard, 2141 1st Avenue, New York, NY 10029

The Learning Center, 43-82 Vernon Boulevard, Long Island City, NY 11101

Astoria Yard, 31-01 20th Avenue, Astoria, NY 11105

30 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

3rd Ave Yard, 222 1st Street, Brooklyn, NY 11217

Netpune Yard, 1201 Neptune Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11224

College Point Yard, 124-15 31st Avenue, Queens, NY 11354

Hillside office, 88-11 165th Street, Jamaica, NY 11432

Fordham Yard, 448 East Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458

Van Nest Yard, 1601 Bronxdale Avenue, Bronx, NY 10462


#4753 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu Jul 12, 2012 12:57 am
Subject: Fwd: RALLY w/ CON ED STRIKERS Fri 7/13
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-----Original Message-----
From: todd e. + nyprotest listserv <toddeaton@...>
To: *NYPROTEST EVENT ANNOUNCEMENT LISTSERV* <NYPROTEST@...>
Sent: Wed, Jul 11, 2012 4:09 pm
Subject: RALLY w/ CON ED STRIKERS Fri 7/13

Join the Picket Line for Locked Out Con Ed Workers
Friday: All Day Rally in Brooklyn! 30 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 [ nr. Nevins St.;
TRANSIT:  #2, 3, 4, 5 train to Nevins (at Flatbush); B,Q, R to Dekalb (at Flatbush); A, C, G to Hoyt-Schermerhorn; G to Fulton; D, N to Pacific St./Atlantic Av.-Barclays Ctr./Atlantic-Pacific; LIRR to Atlantic Terminal; a zillion buses;
map <http://ow.ly/caShj >; bus map <http://ow.ly/6IMHH > -t.]
                 :::                        :::                        :::


Wed. Jul 11 2012 8:00 AM - 10:00 PM
Van Nest Yard
1601 Bronxdale Avenue Bronx, NY 10462
[ #2, 5 train to Bronx Park East or #6 to Castle Hill Av.
map <http://ow.ly/caRwC >; bus map< http://ow.ly/caRSy> -t.]

Whatever It Takes!
IF WE GO OUT THE LIGHTS GO OUT! For more info text UWUA to 877877

    Tuesday: All Day Rally at 30 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217
    Wednesday: All Day Rally in the Bronx! Van Nest Yard, 1601 Bronxdale Avenue, Bronx, NY 10462
    Friday: All Day Rally in Brooklyn! 30 Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217

http://www.nycga.net/events/event/join-the-picket-line-for-locked-out-con-ed-workers-2/
































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#4754 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Jul 13, 2012 4:33 pm
Subject: Fw: March/Rally for a Fair Contract! Tues, July 17, 4:30pm
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------Original Message------
From: NYC Central Labor Council
To: Gregory A Butler
ReplyTo: info@...
Subject: March/Rally for a Fair Contract!  Tues, July 17, 4:30pm
Sent: Jul 13, 2012 9:49 AM

* *

*NYC LABOR & UWUA 1-2*

*RALLY FOR A FAIR CONTRACT*

*UNION SQUARE *

*TUESDAY, JULY 17 at 5:30pm*

* *

Assemble at the Con Ed HQ Picket Line

At 4 Irving Place *at 4:30 pm*

* *

*MARCH W/ LOCKED-OUT LOCAL 1-2 WORKERS*

*TO UNION SQUARE

*

*This is not a walkout:*

*It's a LOCKOUT!**
**FAIR CONTRACT NOW!!!*

*www.uwua1-2.org/www.nycclc.org*



* *





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#4755 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Mon Jul 16, 2012 8:57 pm
Subject: Fwd: March/Rally for a Fair Contract at Con Edison! Tues, July 17, 4:30pm
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-----Original Message-----
From: NYC Central Labor Council <info@...>
To: GREGORYABUTLER <GREGORYABUTLER@...>
Sent: Mon, Jul 16, 2012 4:08 pm
Subject: March/Rally for a Fair Contract! Tues, July 17, 4:30pm

*NYC LABOR & UWUA 1-2**
RALLY FOR A FAIR CONTRACT*
*
UNION SQUARE*
*TUESDAY, JULY 17 at 5:30pm*
Assemble at the Con Ed HQ Picket Line
At 4 Irving Place at 4:30 pm
MARCH W/ LOCKED-OUT LOCAL 1-2 WORKERS
TO UNION SQUARE This is not a walkout:
It's a LOCKOUT!
FAIR CONTRACT NOW!!!
www.uwua1-2.org [ http://www.uwua1-2.org ]/www.nycclc.org [ http://www.nycclc.org ]
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#4756 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Thu Jul 19, 2012 1:22 am
Subject: RALLY AGAINST BENEFIT CUTS FOR UNION CARPENTERS AT MANUFACTURING WOODWORKING ASSOCIATION CONTRACTORS - ****TOMORROW**** Thursday July 18, 9AM, 1633 Broadway @ 50th St
vinniegangbox
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RALLY!!! 9AM Thursday, July 19, at 1633 Broadway
MWA Arbitration Ruling - Contractors Cut Benefits by $27.94
 
Manufacturing Woodworkers Association (MWA) signatory contractors have unilaterally cut the benefit rate of NYC District Council of Carpenters shop workers and outside installers to $10.94 per hour! Instead of bargaining in good faith to resolve an arbitration dispute-- displaying unbridled contempt for loyal employees-- MWA President Anthony Rizzo (owner of Rimi Woodcraft,) instructed association contractors to cut the hourly fringe benefit rates of ALL shop employees, and outside installers, to $10.94!
 
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? 
 
Just days before the August 5, 2009 arrest of District Council EST Michael Forde, Vice President Denis Sheil, acting without authority, negotiated and signed a specialty agreement on behalf of the DC with Gilbert Displays, Inc. The contract sets a minimum rate for journeymen employees of $21.00 per hour in wages, and $10.94 per hour for each hour worked, capped at 40 hours a week, of total fringe benefits. (The MWA contract rate calls for $27.13 wages and $15.97 benefits for shop workers, and $44.02 wages and $38.88 benefits for outside installers per hour.)
 
The MWA filed an arbitration claim, and a hearing was held on March 16, 2012 at the offices of the American Arbitration Association, 1633 Broadway, in NYC. On May 3, 2012, the arbitrator (Rosemary A. Townley) agreed with the MWA’s position that it should have received the Gilbert rate from August 1, 2009, forward.
 
The MWA has now not only claimed that it is entitled to a refund of tens of millions of dollars paid to the Benefit Funds, but last month it cut the benefit rate paid on all employees to the $10.94 per hour Gilbert benefit rate.
 
RESPONSE FROM THE DISTRICT COUNCIL
 
When questioned at a delegate meeting on June 27, Bilello said: "We are discussing and exploring legal options and strategies which I will not detail tonight." Bilello also said he "will not shut down any MWA jobs, and will continue to negotiate an agreement with the understanding we will not negotiate a wage and benefit rate that is less then our standard contract."
 
A hearing is scheduled before the arbitrator on Thursday, July 19. An informed source reports the Council will "dispute the arbitrator’s decision,” present questions involving the calculation of “damages” caused to MWA employers by the Gilbert agreement, with an opportunity to demonstrate the terrible effect of the arbitrator’s decision on the membership, and possibly have her resolve them.
 
The source also said the Benefit Funds have filed an action in federal court seeking a preliminary injunction.
 
WHAT CAN YOU DO
 
Contact your elected leaders and shop stewards, demand answers and information regarding the MWA action. Notify your business representative immediately if proper wage and benefits are not being paid, and file a grievance against the MWA contractor. If you can, avoid working for any MWA contractor. If you are currently working for an MWA contractor, refuse to work any overtime; this will force MWA contractors to sub the work out to non MWA contractors, who pay the proper wage and benefit rates.
 
Contact the MWA, and signatory contractors-- Rimi Woodcraft, Nordic, EMI, Midhattan, Tobin Woodworking, Somerville, Island Architectural, and others, like Miller-Blaker-- demand they immediately cease attacking their employees!
 
* Meet with affected Carpenters and show your support, in front of the American Arbitration Association offices, 1633 Broadway (between 50th & 51st Streets,) at 9AM Thursday, July 19, before the hearing.
For more info, visit: http://local157.blogspot.com/
 

#4757 From: "a_indabronx" <a_indabronx@...>
Date: Fri Jul 20, 2012 6:12 pm
Subject: New articles from the Portland (OR) Trotskyist Study Group
a_indabronx
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Two new articles by the Portland (Oregon) Trotskyist Study Group have
recently been posted at www.internationalist.org:

Portland "Community Assembly to Create a People's Budget"
Why Negotiating the Bosses' Budget Doesn't Work for Workers
http://www.internationalist.org/portlandpeoplesbudget1207.html

Often in protests you hear the chant, "Workers are under attack, what do
we do? Stand up, fight back." But the question is how, and here there
are big differences. In late May, teachers in Reynolds, Oregon struck
for five days and won; teachers in nearby schools who didn't walk out
got stuck with concessionary contracts. Earlier, a number of labor
unions, community groups, trade unionists and leftists organized a
"Community Assembly to Create a People's Budget."  The notion of a
"participatory" budget process is based on the false concept that "the
people" can all get together, that the solution is more democracy, when
in fact there are fundamental class issues at stake. Suggesting to the
bosses' government how to raise money or what its priorities should be
is a dead end. It's not "our" government but theirs. By accepting budget
"constraints," various sectors try to defend their mouthful of bread.
This sets one group of workers against another and makes them complicit
in cutbacks.  Instead what's needed is a program of demands going beyond
empty reforms in order to turn defensive struggles into a workers
counteroffensive against the collapsing capitalist system.



Labor Must Clean its Own House: For a Class Struggle Opposition in the
Union Movement
http://www.internationalist.org/laborcleanownhouse1207.html

Members of an opposition Reform Slate in United Brotherhood of
Carpenters Local 156 (Oregon and southwestern Washington) were recently
brought up on bogus charges and convicted in a rigged union trial after
twice winning Local elections. Labor militants should protest this
outrage. However, an article by the Workers Action group on this praises
the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959, better known
as the Landrum-Griffin Act. This is dangerously wrong. The LMRDA was
enacted in order break union power. Any government intervention into the
unions, whatever the pretext, should be resisted. Inviting the biggest
gangsters in the world, the U.S. government, to run a union places
control in their hands and union members' rights at their whim. We need
union democracy in order to better fight capital. You can't do that by
appealing to the capitalist state, its laws and courts against our
unions, no matter how rotten the leadership. Class-conscious unionists
in the building trades have from the beginning insisted instead that
labor must clean its own house.

#4758 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Sat Jul 21, 2012 4:23 am
Subject: Fwd: CITY WIDE MOBILIZATION NEEDEDTO STOP CON ED SCABS No Wisconsin in New York! Labor Must Unite and Fight!
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: SpewNYC <SpewNYC@...>
To: SPEWNYC <SPEWNYC@...>; loc-talk <loc-talk@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sat, Jul 21, 2012 12:15 am
Subject: FLYER AT CON ED DEMO

Marty Goodman 7/20
 
The following two-sided flyer was distributed to demonstrators at the Con Ed protest last Tuesday. For the original layout open attachment.
 
Remember, the picket at Con Ed is 24/7 at 14th Street and Irving Place, one block east of Union Square. 
 
*********************************************************************************************************************
 

a “Socialist Action” statement

 
NO WISCONSIN IN NEW YORK!
LABOR MUST UNITE AND FIGHT!
CITY WIDE MOBILIZATION NEEDED TO STOP CON-ED SCABS!
 
 
Text Box: Union T-Shirt got it right, âIf we go out, the lights go out!!â
The 1% criminals have thrown down the gauntlet for New York’s working people: Stop us at Con Ed or have your standard of living run into the ground.
 
If working people lose at Con Ed we are on the road to having jobs like those at Walmart and McDonalds! We must move heaven and earth to stand with the Utility Workers United of America Local 1-2. (UWUA) If you’re a transit worker, in sanitation, a teacher, a Verizon worker, any worker: Their fight is your fight! 
 
Con Ed bloodsuckers, like CEO Kevin Burke, are rolling in dough. Con Ed profits were $1 billion last year. Burke’s salary was $1.1 million in 2010, a 30% raise, plus $9.2 million in benefits and stock options. Con Ed made $5.9 billion since 2008, but none of it was taxed, in fact, it got a $74 million refund in the last three years.  (How big was your tax refund this year?)
 
CEO Burke, and his Con Ed Board of millionaires, want workers to pay 24% more in healthcare costs after four years. The new healthcare rip-off would mean a pay cut after a hyped 10% so-called raise. New hires would be stripped of a fully funded pension and forced into a 401k pension plan, tied to the ups and downs of Wall Street, run by Bernie Madoff style crooks. By design, the new pension plan would create a divided workforce to the delight of Con Ed. When the UWUA refused to go along with these and other outrageous contract concessions, Con Ed locked out 8,500 workers on July 1. Criminal!
 

LABOR SOLIDARITY URGENTLY NEEDED!

 
It is the duty of every trade union member and union official to deepen the struggle against Con Ed. We need more and bigger protests. Jam the streets with hundreds of thousands of union people and supporters and shut it down! We also need thousands to mobilize against Con Ed scabs! (email photos of scabs to scabs@... or call 212-575-4400. For more info go to www.conedripoff.com or www.nysaflcio.org)
 
Demand that your union officials mobilize to the max a struggle in the streets and on the job to defend Con Ed workers! If you’re a union officer or a rank and filer try to get an emergency mass meeting to address the lock out.
 
Where possible, organize car caravans or street corner rallies in your neighborhood. Organize community, church, synagogue or Mosque speak-outs. Each one, teach one! We must build a mighty movement of working people, all unions. There is a solidarity committee that includes Occupy Wall Street in the making – join it!  (email: Labor@...)
 
The struggle should be led by the UWUA, alongside the TWU and Communication Workers of America, who are also without contracts. The three unions could create a mighty, united force in NY for contract justice.
 
Lastly, Con Ed workers themselves need to keep a few things in mind to keep the battle strong:
  • Defend the right to read all contracts in their entirety before you vote! No to biased contract summaries!
  • For a mass meeting of workers to vote on any contract or going back to work!
  • End secret contract negotiations! The workers have a right to know!  UWUA Pres. Farrell told the July 15 rally, “I’m not giving up anything.” Hold him to it!
  • For a mass movement to stop scabs!
 
THE RECENT LESSON OF WISCONSIN
 
The Con Ed criminals have taken a page from Tea Party nuts like Wisconsin Governor, Scott Walker, a Republican who attacked collective bargaining. To defeat the right, AFL-CIO bureaucrats followed the lead of the Democratic Party. But BOTH parties are loyal to the 1%.                     
 
The Democrats halted mass mobilizations of working people, the real source of worker power, and conspired with cops to end the incredible worker occupation of the State Capital building. Calls for a “general strike” of all workers were squashed.
 
The Democrats told workers to stop protesting and instead support Tom Barrett, the Democratic Party candidate for governor in the June recall election. Dems whined about Walker’s huge war chest, but Barrett bragged that he also attacked unions! No surprise, Barrett lost to Walker.
 
Obama, the man of “Hope” and the “99%,” famously did nothing to defeat Walker, except to tweet his support for Barrett at the end of the campaign. He didn’t want to alienate anti-union voters!
 
The incredible outpouring of righteous anger in Wisconsin brought international attention to attacks on working people in the U.S. and
struck fear into the hearts of the 1%. Its defeat emboldened crooks like Con Ed!
 
                                                                       BACK IN NEW YORK CITY
 
The former Democratic candidate for Governor, Carl McCall, is on the “Committee to Save New York,” a key pro-Cuomo, big business outfit. Con Ed gave $250,000 to the Committee and wants political payback. Remember, Cuomo and former Gov. Patterson (Dem) both successfully attacked public worker pensions, with support from Republicans and Democrats.
 
In the NY City Council, Speaker Christine Quinn (Dem), has called on Con Ed to end the lockout but also demanded that Local 1-2 commit suicide by agreeing to a 7-day strike warning sought by management.
 
In 2005, Bill Thompson, former City Comptroller and the last Democrat to run for mayor, similarly warned the TWU. On day one of the transit strike he released a statement calling on the union to return to the table, stabbing the TWU in the back when they needed support. The TWU backed Thompson!
 
                                                         WHAT SOCIALISTS REALLY STAND FOR
 
The politicians, tragically with your union dues, serve Wall St. crooks and want working people to pay for its’ crimes. They only disagree on HOW to make you fork over cash to the 1%. Socialism is all about working people and we say:
  • Make the rich pay for their crisis, not working people! Hell no to union busting! Hell no to all givebacks! 
  • We demand pay raises above inflation, improved healthcare and decent pensions, restore all cuts!
  • Nationalize Con Ed under the control of UWUA workers and consumers! No more fake public utilities!
  • Bail out working people, not bankers! End all wars and occupations now!
  • Stop racist violence! End stop and frisk!
 
Lets open our union halls for giant meetings of workers of every description to vote on a fight back strategy against anti-worker attacks. Lets unite private sector workers, public unions and the unemployed. We should prepare to strike all NYC employers when possible and smash the anti-worker offensive. We need our own party, a fighting Labor Party, run by working people!
 
Capitalism is in a global crisis. The system is basically unstable and undemocratic because the greedy 1% control the resources for themselves, to hell with the rest of us. The 1% pay almost no taxes, cheat workers and stand in line for massive bailouts amounting to trillions of tax dollars.
 
The struggle needs committed fighters that see through the lies and help lead millions into battle. Real socialism is the democratic right of the working majority to run the workplace and all public institutions. It joins political democracy with economic democracy. Socialism takes the profit out of all forms of bigotry and racism. Achieving these goals will take a united struggle of all the workers, the unemployed and the oppressed. Join us! 
 
CONTACT SOCIALIST ACTION: EMAIL SPEWNYC@... OR CALL 212-781-5157. ALSO, FOR MORE INFO GO TO WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG.

1 of 1 File(s)


#4759 From: "Millwright Ron" <millwrightone@...>
Date: Mon Jul 23, 2012 9:07 pm
Subject: Anti - GOP
millwrightone
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Anti - GOP
The unions need to compile a list of bad actor companies that are public. This
company list should include large GOP donors, ALEC members, Chamber of Congress
members, and other companies with anti middle class agendas. Find companies that
donate to anti union congressmen and other causes that are destroying the fabric
of our nation. Once this list is compiled it will be easy to cross reference
what mutual fund, hedge fund, or brokerage firm own shares in these companies.

    Once this list is established the Union needs to sit down with the Goldman
Sachs and other money managers and explain to them they intent to yank every
penny out of that firm if they are invested in any of these names. The Unions
control trillions of dollars in their pension plans. Imagine giving Goldman
Sachs three days to divest in all these companies or write you a check for a
trillion dollars.

Millwright Ron
www.unionmillwright.com

#4760 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Aug 10, 2012 1:23 am
Subject: Fwd: [clnews] The Detroit Newspaper Strike Revisited
vinniegangbox
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-----Original Message-----
From: Admin CLNews <Admin@...>
To: CLNews Members 177 <clnews@...>
Sent: Thu, Aug 9, 2012 9:00 pm
Subject: [clnews] The Detroit Newspaper Strike Revisited


The Broken Table: Tale of A Newspaper Strike That Didn’t End Happily (Like Newsies)

 http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=620
The Broken Table:
The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor

By Chris Rhomberg
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012, 387 pp.
Lately the New York Times has been chronicling the further contraction of the newspaper trade and related job insecurity among print journalists. In a June 4 report, entitled “The Undoing of the Daily,” Times readers learned that the much respected Times-Picayune in New Orleans is not alone in trying to stay afloat by publishing less than once a day. Six other newspapers, in the United States and Canada, have just announced plans to reduce their print schedule and rely on web editions the rest of the time. “Newspaper executives argue that printing and delivering newspapers only on certain days will sharply cut costs while at least preserving some of the paper advertising....”
As the Times notes, “the decision to reduce print papers is usually accompanied by cuts on the newsroom side, as well.” The quality of daily coverage, already eroded due to widespread newsroom downsizing, will further deteriorate for reasons the NYT spells out. “Staff members at The Times-Picayune expect that about one-third of the roughly 140-person newsroom will be cut.” Reporters “have been told that their priorities will shift to writing for the web.” According to one past editor: “They want them to produce more blog posts a day and not worry about putting things together in a more thoughtful package. The Times-Picayune has a sterling tradition of enterprising journalism. That tradition is being thrown under the bus.”
Also part of this unhappy trend are the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, two papers now owned by the Detroit Media Partnership. Since 2010, the News has “printed Monday through Saturday but delivers papers only on Thursday and Friday (with a special section delivered with The Free Press on Sundays).” In the mid-1990s, close coordination between the same two papers—then owned by the Gannett media chain and Knight Ridder, Inc. respectively—laid the groundwork for labor’s biggest media industry defeat in the last several decades. When Detroit newspaper management succeeded in throwing 2,500 employees “under the bus”—by replacing them during a strike—it not only sacrificed the quality of local journalism; it dealt a grievous organizational blow to my own union, the Newspaper Guild/CWA, one of six labor organizations involved in that 583 day ordeal (and years of legal skirmishing thereafter).
An Extreme Case?
In The Broken Table, Fordham University sociology professor Chris Rhomberg provides valuable historical context for this pivotal mid-1990s walkout. The bulk of his book describes the obstacles that strikers faced, how they tried to overcome them, and the consequences of their defeat, locally and nationally. Rhomberg’s in-depth study of the Detroit newspaper strike should be required reading for anyone attempting a newspaper shutdown in the future—or staging a work-stoppage, of any size, in any other venue where the employer has deep pockets, lots of other revenue-producing properties, and the same management-friendly, private-sector labor relations machinery on its side.
By virtue of our steadily declining rate of major job actions, the strike against theDetroit News and Free Press was, as the author notes, “an extreme case.” Some might even view it as an outlier, harking back to an earlier era of no-holds-barred industrial conflict in Detroit. The walkout was “larger than 97 percent—and longer than 99 percent—of all private-sector strikes from 1984 to 2002.” It also involved multiple bargaining units aligning their contract expiration dates and acting simultaneously against a common employer, the Detroit Newspaper Agency. The product of a controversial Justice Department–approved joint-operating agreement, this corporate entity allowed Knight Ridder and Gannett to merge their production, circulation, advertising, accounting, and marketing operations in the city, while maintaining their separate newspaper brands.
Elsewhere in the same industry, a corresponding display of coordination and unity within labor has frequently been thwarted by craft union divisions. In Detroit, the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU) that successfully welded the strikers together covered “white-collar professionals, blue-collar laborers, and skilled crafts-persons”—a relatively rare occupational mix on U.S. picket lines, now and in the past.
Siege Warfare in the Midwest
Yet the Detroit strike remained much a product of recent labor relations trends, well-described by the author, that have become even more pronounced in the last decade of concession bargaining and declining strike activity in the private sector. The Detroit strike settled into the mode of siege warfare familiar to those brave manufacturing workers who tried to resist contract concessions on other Midwestern battlefields in the 1980s and ’90s. As the union-backed alternative newspaper spawned by the strike explained to readers of its inaugural issue, the conflict was never really “about money or even about the number of workers to be bought out or laid off.”
According to the Detroit Sunday Journal, management was demanding or had already implemented “policies that would virtually wipe unions off the playing field by denying representation to hundreds of employees or denying unions the ability to negotiate wages and other substantive issues.” As Detroit Guild attorney Duane Ice told Rhomberg:
"After decades of bargaining nobody could recall any instance when these employers or any other newspapers in Detroit, had bargained to impasse and…basically declared an end to collective bargaining. It meant the unions had no role in the outcome. Basically, an employer could go through the motions, declare impasse, and say, “Well, here are the terms and conditions. We’re done.”
No less than Detroit strikers in the mid-1990s, government employees in Wisconsin realized, last year, where such an employer stance leads. So they acted accordingly, taking to the streets and occupying the state capitol, when their unions were similarly menaced, unexpectedly, by GOP Governor Scott Walker, after fifty years of public-sector contract negotiations in the Badger state. Equivalent bad-faith bargaining (and union-busting intent) triggered a two-week strike by 45,000 Verizon workers not long afterward.
In the talks that have dragged on since that August 2011 walkout, Verizon has continued to seek pay, benefit, and work rule concessions that would roll back many decades of union progress. A management declaration of impasse, whether legal or not, remains a possibility, at which point telephone workers in the Northeast could face the same choice as Detroit newspaper workers seventeen years ago: to accept “posted conditions” or escalate their resistance to those takeaways, on the job, in the community, or back on the picket line.
In Detroit, the path taken to resist labor cost reductions and workplace restructuring was a work stoppage. But it “never fully succeeded in halting the production and distribution of the newspapers,” Rhomberg concludes. Tacitly acknowledging their inability to stop production, union leaders “relied instead on circulation and advertising boycotts and on their legal case” at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Whatever disruption and extra costs they had to endure in Detroit, Gannett and Knight Ridder were both secure in the knowledge that revenue generated by their many other newspapers (both unionized and non-union) would continue to flow their way.
Profiles in Rank-and-File Courage
Rhomberg begins his impressive case study with chapters describing the new structure of newspaper industry ownership and its adverse effects on labor relations within media giants like Gannett, the changing socioeconomic terrain of Detroit as a “union town,” and the “daily miracle” of how a newspaper is produced—a process much changed since the heyday of national unions involved in the strike.
Fortunately, The Broken Table is not just about the larger forces reshaping newspaper workers lives, on the job and in the community. The book also includes memorable sketches of—and well deserved tributes to—strike activists like Michigan Journalism Hall of Famer Susan Watson, a Free Press features writer fired for participating in civil disobedience at the News building on Labor Day weekend in 1996; Barb Ingalls, an auto worker’s wife, who “had never been very involved in her own union before the strike,” but then became a leader in community-labor outreach around the country (work she continues today for anti-war and labor-religion coalitions in Detroit); and Teamster organizer Mike Zielinksi, who enlisted fifty locked-out or fired union members in a Workers Justice Committee that functioned as a “flying squad that could be mobilized on short notice for any kind of action.” (In 1999, Zielinksi was fired himself when, according to Rhomberg, newly elected Teamster president James R. Hoffa decided “to clean house of supporters of his predecessor, Ron Carey, and bring the Detroit struggle to an end.”)
And, finally, there is mailroom worker Ben Solomon, who we meet at the beginning and end of the book. Bloodied but not bowed, he won a rare $2.5 million court judgment against the Detroit newspapers and their municipal government allies for conspiring to deprive him and other strikers of their constitutional rights. During a heavy-handed crackdown on mass picketing at a printing plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, Solomon was pepper-sprayed, clubbed, then maced again and jailed without treatment, in a shocking display of the police brutality experienced, to a lesser degree, by many other strikers.
Rhomberg’s modern-day tale of worker solidarity and personal transformation is no less dramatic or colorful than the storyline of the musical Newsies. Mixing fiction with a few facts about an actual strike a century ago, Newsies has become a hugely popular NYC stage production. It pits Manhattan newsboys against Joseph Pulitzer, a publishing magnate who unilaterally cuts their pay by raising the wholesale cost of their papers. In the course of their work stoppage, the strikers face beatings and arrests by the cops, suffer divisions within their own ranks due to leadership wavering, but succeed in launching a strike paper and gaining the support of their counterparts elsewhere. That labor unity, plus the friendly intervention of Governor Theodore Roosevelt, leads to a favorable settlement with Pulitzer. The strikers reclaim their now more fairly compensated jobs—a Hollywood ending for sure, albeit it on Broadway (and lifted from a twenty-year-old Disney movie by the same name).
An adaptation of The Broken Table, however, is not likely to be seen anytime soon, on stage or screen. Rhomberg’s narrative is more complex and the denouement of the Detroit strike nothing to sing or dance about.
Let Down by the Law
In real-life newspaper strikes, politicians don’t come to your rescue, although many public officials in Michigan were initially persuaded not to grant interviews to newsroom scabs. In February 1997, after nineteen months on the line, the Detroit unions made unconditional offers to return to work. But the News and Free Pressoffered to “take back only a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed,” because they wouldn’t send any of their hired scabs packing. Four months later, an administrative law judge (ALJ) from the NLRB upheld the unions’ claim that the walkout was an unfair labor practice strike. “The judge ordered the companies to reinstate striking workers, displacing, if necessary, the replacement workers and making any strikers not reinstated eligible for back pay.” Two days after that encouraging decision, the AFL-CIO hosted a belated demonstration of national union solidarity with Detroit newspaper employees. More than 60,000 union members marched, rallied, and cheered the latest legal developments.
Unfortunately, the NLRB case appeal procedures are a monument to “justice delayed, justice denied.” The two newspapers refused to comply with the ALJ’s decision and the Labor Board failed to get a federal judge to issue “an interim injunction requiring that all strikers be returned immediately to their jobs” while litigation continued. A year later, in the summer of 1998, the Board in Washington, D.C. unanimously upheld the ALJ’s ruling, setting the stage for a further company appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals. In the meantime, more than 400 former strikers remained locked out or fired (including five of the six local union presidents involved).
$100 million in back pay was riding on the appellate court’s decision. On July 7, 2000, hopes for back pay and reinstatement were dashed when the prior NLRB rulings were overturned. Rhomberg describes what happened next:

"The newspapers refused to take those employees back, and further legal appeals went on for several more years. Finally, most of the individual strike-related civil rights suits were  dismissed or settled out of court.Deprived of their legal leverage, the unions were forced to accept contracts on management’s terms. The last of the six unions settled in December,  2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over….The agreements offered no amnesty provisions for fired strikers, including prominent writers and  columnists who had participated in non-violent civil disobedience."
In one other not legally insignificant footnote to the strike, President George W. Bush named a new chairman to the NLRB in 2002. He chose Robert Battista, the Michigan attorney who served as lead counsel for the News and Free Press in their ultimately successful defense against bad-faith bargaining charges.
As Rhomberg notes, the Detroit newspapers did pay a price for “their scorched earth policy toward the strikers in a community that placed a high value on unionism.” He estimates their direct strike-related losses to be $130 million, because a third of all subscribers walked away too. “Circulation fell at eight times the rate for the industry as a whole between 1995 and 1999, and dozens of veteran journalists left the papers and the city, taking with them years of knowledge and public memory.” In 2005, after nearly seven decades in Detroit, Knight Ridder sold the Free Press to Gannett. The latter then abandoned Detroit too, after unloading both papers on a national suburban newspaper chain called MediaNews Group, Inc. By 2011, MNG had 500,000 fewer readers than the News and Free Press did when the previous owners tamed the unions in 1995.
Some members of the inevitable strike diaspora—union activists who refused or were unable to return to work—“went on to pursue their version of justice in various ways,” Rhomberg reports. Among them are Guild members, Teamsters, printers, and others who remain active to this very day as union newspaper editors or writers, labor organizers, or solidarity campaigners elsewhere.
In 1999, the Sunday Journal—launched as a forty-eight-page weekly tabloid for Detroit readers boycotting the two struck papers—ceased publication. In its first year of operation, the Journal reached peak circulation of 300,000, unprecedented success for a labor-backed strike paper. But as former strikers were called back to the News orFree Press or left town for journalism jobs in other places, the Journal’s coverage shrunk, its circulation declined, union financing was curtailed, and the paper died.
The Journal wasn’t alone in not living to see the paltry contract settlements finally reached in late 2000, under duress and after labor’s disheartening legal defeat. At the better-late-than-never AFL-CIO rally in June 1997, MCNU leader Al Derey brandished a list of more than a dozen strikers—printers, press operators, reporters, and others—who had died from various causes during the first two years of the walkout. To rousing cheers, Derey declared that “not one of them crossed the line!” But “for those and others like them,” Rhomberg sadly notes, “their rights were truly scattered to the winds.”

Steve Early worked as a union organizer and strike coordinator for the Communications Workers of America for twenty-seven years. He has been free-lance contributor to daily newspapers since 1965 and currently belongs to the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG/CWA Local 39521 in San Francisco. He is the author, most recently, of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, from Haymarket Books.
Photo by Erich Ferdinand, 2009, via Flickr creative commons




#4761 From: GREGORYABUTLER@...
Date: Fri Aug 10, 2012 1:25 pm
Subject: Fwd: Saturday - Philly - 11AM - ' Workers Stand for America ' rally
vinniegangbox
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  • Full employment and a living wage.
  • Full participation in the political process.
  • A voice at work.
  • A quality education for all.
  • A secure and healthy future.



  • -----Original Message-----
    From: caroltheartist <caroltheartist@...>
    To: nyprotest <nyprotest@...>
    Cc: toddeaton <toddeaton@...>
    Sent: Fri, Aug 10, 2012 1:10 am
    Subject: Saturday - Philly - 11AM - ' Workers Stand for America ' rally

    Saturday - Philly - 11AM - Workers Stand for America
    Dave Johnson's picture
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    by Dave Johnson | August 9, 2012 - 8:58am
    There is a big rally Saturday in Philadelphia, to begin to "change the conversation" to focus on the needs of working Americans. Read America's Second Bill of Rights, which demands:
    • Full employment and a living wage.
    • Full participation in the political process.
    • A voice at work.
    • A quality education for all.
    • A secure and healthy future.
    You got a problem with that?
    Saturday the Workers Stand for America campaign launches.
    At the rally, participants will be encouraged to sign America’s Second Bill of Rights and then call on lawmakers of both parties to add their signatures of support. It will also be presented to delegates at both the Democratic and Republican conventions and to candidates this fall.
    If you can’t make it, the event will streamed live at www.workersstandforamerica.com. Photos, updates and video from the event will appear in real-time on Facebook here. You can also follow on Twitter with the hash tag #ws4a. Updates will also be available on Pinterest here.
    Click here to add your name to America’s Second Bill of Rights.
    11 a.m. Saturday, August 11, 2012
    Eakins Oval
    26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
    Philadelphia, PA 19130
    We the People want to strengthen our nation, as a beacon of equality, economic opportunity and freedom for all. We hold these rights to be essential to our vision of America and believe that the principles contained therein should guide our government, business leaders, organizations and individuals in our common goal of a just and fair society.
    The Right to Full Employment and a Living Wage:
    All Americans willing and able to work have the right to safe, gainful employment at a fair and livable wage. We call on the public and private sectors to invest in America’s infrastructure and promote industrial development, maintaining job creation as a top policy priority.
    The Right to Full Participation in the Electoral Process:
    Recent initiatives to disenfranchise citizens seek to reduce the rolls of eligible voters and empower money instead of people. We believe these actions constitute an assault on our nation’s democracy and history of heroic struggle against voting restrictions based upon property ownership, religion, race and gender and call for reinforcing our fundamental right to vote.
    The Right to a Voice at Work:
    All workers have the right of freedom of association in the workplace, including the right to collectively bargain with their employer to improve wages, benefits and working conditions.
    The Right to a Quality Education:
    Education is a fundamental bedrock of our democracy, vital to America’s competitive position in the world and the principal means by which citizens empower themselves to participate in our nation's economic and political systems. Quality, affordable education should be universally available from pre-kindergarten to college level, including an expanded use of apprenticeships and specialty skills training to prepare Americans for the workplace.
    The Right to a Secure, Healthy Future:
    Americans have the right to a baseline level of health care, unemployment insurance and retirement security, all of which have been badly eroded by the disruption of the social compact that served the nation well for decades. We call on government and private industry together to confront the issues of declining access to health care especially for children, weakening of unemployment coverage, and inadequate pension plans that undermine the ability of working men and women to retire in dignity, even as Social Security and Medicare are under strain and threatened with cutbacks.
    Click to Download the "Bill of Rights"in Printable PDF format.
    _______


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