Labor Notes
By Some items of note from the last week:
1. More than 90% of 62,000 United Food and Commercial Workers in southern California grocery stores voted to authorize a strike because the big chains, who are negotiating as a single unit, are looking to slash their payments into the union health care fund. UFCW workers in this region have a significant history of striking, including a 2 month battle in 2003. Workers hired before 2004 pay nothing into their health care. Now that companies have divested themselves of an ever-increasing amount of their workers health insurance, it’s hardly surprising to see the grocery conglomerates look to do the same. Albertsons at least is already working to hire scabs and no doubt the other chains will do the same. This is a strike worth following, as a union victory would be a real shot in the arm to workers who are losing benefits left and right.
2. Faculty went on strike today at Central Michigan University. The tenure-track faculty are working without a contract and are accusing the administration of bargaining in bad faith. The faculty are accusing the administration of trying to crush union power, paying low wages, and cutting back on health care contributions. A local judge issued a temporary restraining order telling the faculty to go back to work, saying that it is illegal for public employees to strike. I’m unclear about how true this is–perhaps someone with some experience in Michigan can enlighten us, but this seems more along the lines of Mississippi than the home of the UAW. When I was organizing in Tennessee, people tried to say this, but it wasn’t actually true. So I don’t know. This is also a situation that reminds me of one of the problems of university organizing–that the different groups of faculty and teachers are divided up into separate unions, in a way that reminds of the problem with the old AFL craft unions. There seems to be at least 3 unions, tenure-track, contingent, and graduate students. While I understand why there are different unions for faculty and graduate students, contingent faculty, at least with a Ph.D., should be in the faculty union. It really undermines everyone’s power to resist the university administration this way.
3. In one of the most bizarre labor stories I’ve heard in awhile, last week, foreign guestworkers in a Hershey’s factory in Pennsylvania staged a sit-in over their deplorable work conditions. It turns out that some subcontractor was taking foreign students who were accepted into a program where they could work in the U.S. for awhile and then travel around, and exploiting the living hell out of them, turning them into poorly-paid factory labor with no infrastructure to help them. The workers were paid low wages and forced to pay to live in company housing, meaning that some were taking home as little as $40 a week. The students made connections with U.S. activist groups, including Jobs with Justice, and staged a well-publicized action which really embarrassed Hershey. The contractor here was pretty stupid–students are relatively empowered people, especially when these are kids rich enough to have paid the $3000-6000 to join the program. But this gets at a major problem in labor practices–the use of subcontractors. Not only does it mean less oversight of labor conditions, but it also allows the big corporations to claim ignorance of labor practices, whether in U.S. factories or sweatshops abroad. It’s not Wal-Mart’s fault that those Guatemalan workers are beaten or forced to be on birth control, it’s the subcontractor! We totally deplore such activities, though in fact we don’t care so long as we get our plastic crap for very low prices!
The AFL-CIO blog has more on this point.