Campaign News

Funding for the research came from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Institute of International Education in collaboration with the Ford Foundation, Center for Popular Democracy, the Suzanne M. Nora Johnson and David G. Johnson Foundation, and the Gap.

Read the full article here.

"Do you know what it’s like working long, erratic hours without knowing day-to-day what your schedule would be? Some of us do. If we haven’t worked in low-wage retail or the service sector, we’re lucky that usually our hard work paid off, and we could advance in our careers.

For low-wage retail and service workers at large corporations, there’s no moving forward. When someone has an “I’ll do anything it takes” attitude, they are not rewarded for their labor, their adaptability or their commitment. Instead, they are often met with the chaos of unpredictable hours.

When people don’t have stable full-time or even part-time hours, they can’t budget or schedule basic things like child care, doctor visits, classes, family time or self care.

Take Cinthia, who works for DB Shoes, one of Emeryville’s numerous corporate retail chains. She works hard to take care of her family, but struggles with not having reliable hours. She juggles appointments for her younger brother, classes and work. When we met her, we asked how much sleep she got the previous night. She said, “Four hours.”

A recent survey conducted by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy and the Center for Popular Democracy found that a staggering 80 percent of retail workers have fluctuating hours from week to week; 68 percent only receive part-time hours; and more than half experience “clopening” shifts — back-to-back closing then opening a few hours later.

Two out of 3 workers surveyed want more hours but can’t get them. Fluctuating hours are considered undesirable by many workers. There are thousands of working people like Cinthia who are run ragged with erratic work schedules that not only have harmful effects on them personally, but on their families and our communities.

Our cities are built on everyone coming together to create a thriving place where people can live, work and play. But when people are not earning enough and have erratic schedules, they don’t have time to invest in our community or local businesses.

San Francisco passed a fair workweek policy, putting the Bay Area at the fair workweek movement’s forefront. Emeryville and San Jose are also considering similar policies to begin to move the entire region toward a more sustainable work model and ensure that people have both higher wages and regular, predictable hours they can count on.

Some of us take our routines for granted. We get up, rush to get everyone out the door, work a single job, come home, eat, go to bed. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. But for too many working people, that kind of stability is a dream. It shouldn’t be — and we can do something about it.

Now that we’ve won a $15 minimum wage across California, we know we need to finish the job and ensure working people have hours they can count on. A regional fair workweek provides hardworking people with the opportunity to work with stable schedules so they can pay the bills, live healthier lives, and contribute more to our communities."

By Dianne Martinez and Ruth Atkin

Source

Salon - March 10, 2014, by Sarah Jaffe - The photos coming out of Madison, Wisconsin, this week have been both heartening and heart-wrenching.

Heartening, to see the Capitol that was the site of the 2011 uprising that kicked off a wave of protests against austerity, injustice and inequality filled once again with protesters chanting, singing, holding signs. To see people who were part of that uprising, like Mandela Barnes, now standing in the Legislature as elected officials, denouncing Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Party’s push for what is popularly known as “right-to-work,” despite having little to do with rights at work. To see a youth-led protest fill the Capitol rotunda with the chant that “Black Lives Matter.”

Heart-wrenching because the labor protests were much smaller than those in 2011, where tens of thousands clogged the Capitol building, slept in hallways and built libraries. Heart-wrenching because all of that uprising then was not enough to stop Scott Walker’s bill taking collective bargaining rights from public sector workers, and has not been enough to keep him from signing the no-rights-at-work bill into law. Heart-wrenching because another unarmed young man, Tony Robinson, is dead and no amount of protest will bring him or the hundreds of other victims of police violence back.

I am writing about these things together not simply because they happened in the span of a few days, but because their histories are deeply linked. As Jennifer Epps-Addison of Wisconsin Jobs Now tells Salon, “This generational poverty that is being inflicted, particularly on the black community in Milwaukee, is a form of state violence that desensitizes the rest of the Wisconsin community to these killings, and makes the rest of our state see a justification in these police murders.”

And what we now call “right-to-work” laws were spread in part by racist rhetoric that exploited already-existing divisions in order to pass laws that took rights away from all working people.

First, I should explain what these laws actually do. Legally, no worker can be forced to join a union. But if a union wins an election to represent the workers in a particular workplace (“shop”), the contract it wins through collective bargaining covers all of the workers in that shop, whether or not they voted for the union or signed up to pay dues to it. Accordingly, the law requires all workers covered by a union contract to pay a “fair share fee” to the union to cover the costs of representing them — not limited only to contract negotiations but also filing grievances and the like. What “right to work” does is give workers the “right” to the gains negotiated by the union without having to contribute anything at all to its costs.

These laws are designed to defund unions, pure and simple. They don’t make organizing impossible — the history of the Culinary Workers, UNITE HERE Local 226 in Nevada, attests to that. But they drain the coffers of unions, limiting their ability to do other political work or engage in organizing workers who don’t yet have a union.

The fact that we refer to these laws as “right-to-work” is one of the most successful branding operations the right has ever run, and labor has struggled to come up with an answer for it. Yet for years these laws were mostly limited to the South and Southwest, where race-baiting (and Red-baiting) had helped them succeed.

Before they were “right-to-work” laws, the name was, if possible, even more Orwellian: “The American Plan,” as Mark Ames notes, not so subtly aligning unions with things un-American, Communist and not white. (Think of people shouting about Obama’s birth certificate, and you’ll get the gist.) But “right-to-work” was the name that stuck, giving a rights-conscious, progressive-sounding name to a bill sold with virulently racist campaigns that promised to uphold “the color line.” Chris Kromm of the Institute for Southern Studies explains:

“Muse and the Christian American Association saw danger. Not only were the unions expanding the bargaining power — and therefore improving the wages and working conditions — of working-class Texans, they also constituted a political threat. The CIO in particular opposed Jim Crow and demanded an end to segregation. Unions were an important political ally to FDR and the New Deal. And always lurking in the shadows was the prospect of a Red Menace, stoked by anti-communist hysteria.”

And as historian Elizabeth Tandy Shermer points out, in some campaigns for these laws, proponents specifically targeted black voters, arguing that union shops kept out black workers and that “right-to-work” would open up jobs for them. (A similar tactic was used in the deregulation of the port trucking industry, where promises of “diversity” were part of a push to turn steady union jobs into poverty-wage “independent contracting” gigs compared to “sharecropping on wheels.”)

The labor movement has been contending for decades with the ramifications of its checkered history on racism. The exclusion of certain workers from New Deal labor protections has come around to haunt labor as more and more jobs now emulate the working conditions of 1940s farmworkers and domestic workers. The fall of Indiana, Michigan and now Wisconsin to “right-to-work” (and the flood of articles misrepresenting just what it is that RTW laws do) should remind us, if we needed the reminder, that legislated inequality will never remain tied to one region or to one kind of worker.

Wisconsin’s 2011 uprising centered around Scott Walker’s successful move to take collective bargaining away from public sector workers (and notably for today’s anti-police-violence movement, allowed cops to keep their rights). The public sector has historically been a place where black workers could get access to decent union jobs that were relatively protected from the racism that they faced in the private sector; the attacks on public-sector union rights were attacks that disproportionately hurt workers of color.

But Walker promised that he didn’t want right-to-work, though many observers figured that to be a line from the get-go, and he managed not only to stave off the recall that the pro-labor movement forced, but to see himself reelected. And now, safe in his second term, he has broken what some workers considered a promise.

The movement, though, continues. On Wednesday, March 11, as part of a national “We Rise” day of action that is slated to include more than 20 events in 16 states, Wisconsin workers and their supporters, organized by groups including the Young, Gifted and Black Coalition, Ferguson to Madison, Youth Empowered in the Struggle, and Wisconsin Jobs Now, will come together to draw connections between attacks on union rights, growing poverty, mass incarceration and state violence. Jennifer Epps-Addison explains,

“This action was planned before the murder of Tony Robinson. The real goal for the action was to lift up the voices of young people, of people of color, of nonunion workers in this movement for economic and racial justice, particularly in light of right to work and the impact of right to work on those communities.”

The death of Tony Robinson has reminded Madison that even liberal cities are built on a history of segregation and denial of rights to their black residents. Wisconsin, Epps-Addison notes, has the highest incarceration rate for black men in the entire country. And, she points out, the systemic divestment from schools and services in communities of color is itself a form of state violence.

That’s why Wednesday’s event, she emphasizes, will not just be a rally. It will include direct actions targeting employers engaged in wage theft and demanding the immediate release of people who are incarcerated simply because they cannot afford to pay fines. “Our march really is on both, on the institutions that perpetuate these systemic problems, the corporations that benefit from them, and Governor Walker himself,” she says.

It will not be an easy fight in Wisconsin or anywhere else — Scott Walker is already trumpeting his victories over union workers as a foreign policy qualification that prepares him to take on ISIS, and Democrats all too often acquiesce to a kinder, gentler version of austerity. But the coming together of movements for justice in the workplace and the home and the streets to demand a comprehensive agenda for a more just state and society is a development worth celebrating even in dark times. There is building going on behind those dramatic photos from the Capitol.

To move forward, Epps-Addison says, “We fundamentally believe we can’t bring back progressive power in Wisconsin by giving people a Republican-like agenda. What we need to do is make our case and build relationships between working-class white folks outstate, between communities of color in Milwaukee, Madison and Racine, to understand that we’re all in this together, and that these forms of institutional classism and racism impact everyone.”

Source

Capital & Main - October 2, 2014, by David Cohen - A $300,000 plane; $861,000 to pay off personal debts and keep open a struggling restaurant. A down payment on a house and an office flush with flat-screen televisions, executive bathrooms and granite counter tops. This isn’t a list of expenditures from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, this represents a small slice of the more than $30 million of taxpayer funds that have been wasted through fraud and abuse in Pennsylvania’s charter schools since they first opened in 1997.

A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy, Integrity in Education, and Action United is blowing the lid off the lack of public oversight at Pennsylvania’s 186 charter schools.

Inadequate audit techniques, insufficient oversight staff and a lack of basic transparency have created a charter system that is ripe for abuse in the Keystone State. But there is hope. The report provides a detailed roadmap for Pennsylvania to create an effective oversight structure and provide meaningful protections that can curtail endemic fraud and waste.

The report calls for an immediate moratorium on new charters until the inadequate oversight system can be replaced with rigorous and transparent oversight. That’s the right first step.

According to the authors, charter school enrollment in the state has doubled three times since 2000 and Pennsylvania’s students, their families and taxpayers cannot afford to lose another $30 million.  Pennsylvania’s students and taxpayers deserve better.

Source