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
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National Immigrant Solidarity Network/AFGJ
National Immigrant Solidarity Network
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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@...
=======================================================
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)
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Capelli <webmaster@...>
To: gregoryabutler <gregoryabutler@...>
Sent: Mon, Mar 19, 2012 3:09 pm
Subject: NLRB Vote Reminder
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.
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."
- - - 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. - - -
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.
-----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.
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
-----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
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.
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.
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 butradical
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 developersgave 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
compensationand 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
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.
-----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.
--
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.
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.
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.
-----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.
--
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.
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.
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.
-----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
1stas 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:
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.
-----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 Rally ►
12 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
pmPeoples 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 Center4021 69th St in Queens
Take the #7 to the 69th Street stop
Sat., April
28Fiesta 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 onBe part of the 99%
May 1
pickets
visit mayday2012
Know Your Rights & Skill
Workshops throughout the
day organized by
the Occupy Wall Street Movement
------ 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.
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, in1971, 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 unionpart 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
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
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(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/
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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 unionworkers – 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
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
-----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
No subscription needed. Where possible, please no file
attachments. Send using TO: (not BCC:). Announcements of any
in-person events that are primarily about advocacy for progressive social
change will be approved for distribution promptly.
But please also enter announcements at NY Activist Calendar:
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.
-----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
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.
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.
-----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.
CITY WIDE MOBILIZATION NEEDED TO STOP CON-ED SCABS!
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!
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
-----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:
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
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:
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.
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.
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Dear Brothers and Sisters:
