Labor Notes

1. Tomorrow Ohio voters go to the polls to decide on the fate of SB-5, the anti-union bill pushed through the Ohio legislature by John Kasich and his Tea=Partying friends. Polls show that it is going to go down to a resounding defeat. However, polls on ballot measures are notoriously unreliable, especially for off-year elections like this one. Both sides are pretty motivated so I’d expect a relatively high turnout for such an election and clearly turnout is going to decide this thing. It’s interesting that Wisconsin was the site of the major protests against anti-union bills, but it’s in Ohio where the successful pushback is likely to happen thanks to the law allowing state voters to turn bills into referendum. In Wisconsin, the chosen fight was the recall elections which did kick two Teabaggers out but kept control of the legislature in Scott Walker’s hands and made the likelihood of a successful recall of Walker less promising. In any case, this will be a big vote. If labor wins, it shows that real momentum in fighting back the class warfare of the Republican Party. A loss would be pretty devastating, emboldening Republicans and showing that labor can’t get the turnout necessary to listen to it.

2. Employees at a Dodge City, Kansas meatpacking plant have voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. This is big news. Meatpackers busted their unions years ago by moving their operations to the rural Plains states and bringing in foreign laborers to toil away from media attention or communities of any size. These plants are extremely dangerous for workers, accidents are common, and death is hardly unknown. Organizers have had to overcome multiple problems, including the little fiefdoms of the packers in these rural communities, the fact that the packers have routinely reported themselves for immigration violations in order to deport workers likely to vote for unions, and a multiplicity of languages. In fact, all literature for the campaign was in English, Spanish, Laotian, and Vietnamese. So this is quite a victory, even if the big battle against National Beef Packing for a contract is forthcoming.

3. Not union-specific, but it’s hardly surprising that young people are growing increasingly desperate given the massively growing wage and asset gap between the old and young. As a person with a net worth well below zero, despite being a college professor in my late 30s, this is very, very frustrating. I’ve made the supposed right decisions, with far greater prospects than my parents ever had. I don’t engage in a lot of frivolous spending (with the exception of making sure I travel somewhere outside the country once a year), and work as hard as I can to not have credit card debt. Nonetheless, I can’t afford even a decent car, not to mention buying a house, saving for retirement outside of what is taken out of my paycheck, or have any kind of savings account. It’s when people realize that playing the game isn’t going to work for them that they start joining movements like Occupy Wall Street.

4. In an all-too-typical story, 60 farmworkers in Washington were stranded in the middle of nowhere when they were bused from Seattle to an farm (an organic farm nonetheless) where they were told they would be paid $25 for 4-5 hours of work, i.e., below the minimum wage. They refused and were left to find their own way back to Seattle. That the farmer works in organics is not surprisingly either. There’s been a lot of tension between farm laborers and organic farmers, particularly over the need for additional hard physical labor to weed ground crops if pesticides are not used. While that’s not the case here, there’s little to no evidence that organic farms treat workers better than conventional farms.

…..Remind me to never bring myself or my life up again in a post. I keep forgetting that the internet is neither a place for subtlety nor for serious discussion about issues. Rather it’s a place to be as big a jerk as possible. As you can tell, I am deeply dismayed that using myself as an example has taken away from the serious issues brought up not only in that link, but the other notes as well.