Blog
Workers at an Olivet International warehouse in Mira Loma, CA, a key facility for Walmart’s luggage production, went on a two-day strike last week to protest against extreme intimidation, spying and retaliation, as well as exposure to unsafe working conditions. Among the workers’ concerns of dangerous working conditions were blocked fire exits, pitch black work spaces, frequent falling towers of boxes, and lack of access to water and sanitary bathrooms. Workers also raised compensation concerns during their strike--the majority of workers at the Olivet warehouse are paid less than $200 a week, denied full-time positions, and receive no health benefits.
In solidarity with the striking workers and directed by New Labor, the Center for Popular Democracy and the Center for Third World Organizing hand-delivered a letter urging Olivet International to respond to workers’ concerns of unsafe working conditions, extremely low wages and intimidation at their Mira Loma warehouse. The letter demanded Olivet stop illegally retaliating against workers and allow the strikers to return to work.
On Friday morning, WWU reported that every striker successfully returned to work. Workers won national attention, international support and spoke directly to Walmart about retaliation and unsafe working conditions. We congratulate the striking workers and their families for bravely walking out of the job and demanding fair workplace conditions.
CPD and the Workers Defense Project recently launched a collaboration to develop organizing to scale in Texas. WDP has successfully built up a member base of over 1,000 workers in Austin, TX and is expanding its membership to Dallas.
Each year, WDP serves thousands of individuals through its wage claim and injury work, workers’ rights education, ESL, leadership, and computer classes. WDP is now looking to “scale-up” to organize more workers and win even more victories while solidifying its current leadership and member base. Together, CPD and WDP are refining WDP's programs to expand membership participation, retention and growth, and to develop new leaders. We are working to create an organizational structure and management systems to foster WDP's growth and support the organization's goal to be a powerful voice for workers in a historically anti-worker state.
An element of this strategy will be to leverage the legalization process, if immigration reform is enacted, as a vehicle for building the membership and capacity of WDP. In particular, CPD is working with WDP to develop an ambitious, multi-state project that will facilitate access to non-predatory legal and financial services for thousands of immigrant families, generate significant new revenue streams for the community-based organizations that serve them, including WDP, and build capacity and infrastructure for the field of immigrant worker organizing. Through this project, CPD will coordinate and support partners such as WDP to build direct services capacity and leverage technology to meet the immediate need for naturalization-related information and services, simultaneously helping build organizing and organizational capacity.
Hit by the worst housing crisis in decades, Richmond, CA became the first city in the nation to announce that it is moving forward with a plan to reduce mortgage principals for local homeowners in order to help families avoid foreclosure and eviction. As explained by the New York Times today, the City of Richmond's goal is to reduce families’ monthly mortgage payments and inject needed cash into the local economy.
Last night, municipal leaders in Richmond mailed letters to banks offering to purchase the mortgages at fair market value if the banks will sell voluntarily and expressing their willingness to use eminent domain to make compulsory purchases of the mortgages if necessary.
If you’d like to express support for this effort, we encourage you to sign this petition calling on the banks to accept the City of Richmond’s offer and sell the mortgages back to the community.
The City of Richmond's move is the result of a year-long campaign by homeowners in the Home Defenders League and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Homeowners in Richmond, a diverse working class city north of Berkeley, have mobilized to win affordable principal reduction; because Wall Street banks have been unresponsive, they have convinced their government to develop a local solution.
The Center for Popular Democracy is providing support to the Home Defenders League’s nationwide campaign, which is now moving forward in cities from New Jersey to Washington and California to New York. CPD is offering legal and policy support and, through Local Progress, helping to connect local elected officials with one another and with community-based organizations that are pushing for a resolution to the foreclosure crisis that protects homeowners and strengthens the economy. You can learn more about this solution by visiting the Local Progress website.
And, again, if you support reducing the principal on working-class families’ mortgages, please sign and share this petition calling on Wall Street banks to do right by Richmond families.
Congratulations to our good friends at Take Action MN, for the tremendous success of their legislative campaigns this session. From becoming the 12th state to legalize gay marriage to creating a new health care exchange free of insurance industry conflicts of interest, Minnesota has enacted raft of new progressive policies that reflect the growing needs of a diverse population. This year’s legislative session has also passed important racial and economic justice measures such as “ban the box” legislation that opens up access to employment for individuals convicted of a crime and moves the state one step forward to closing the racial jobs gap. With the hard work of Take Action MN and other organizations such as SEIU Local 26, Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha, ISAIAH, and many others, citizens in Minnesota will also see fairer taxation by closing corporate tax loopholes. And that was just one legislative session! Congratulations Take Action MN, you’re an inspiration.
We congratulate our partners—Junta for Progress Action, SEIU Local 32BJ, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Connecticut Immigrant Rights Alliance and many others—on the passage of the Connecticut TRUST Act (HB6659) in the state legislature on May 22, 2013. The state’s House and Senate unanimously supported this historic legislation, which prohibits all local and state law enforcement and the state’s judicial marshals from detaining immigrants at the request of federal immigration authorities, with some exceptions. When the Governor signs this legislation, Connecticut will become the first state in the country to adopt the TRUST Act, protecting thousands of Connecticut families from being torn apart by needless detentions and deportations.
CPD worked closely with partners in Connecticut to develop the campaign strategy and policy, and to create advocacy materials to help move the bill through committee and to passage. This victory comes at a time when, at the federal level, lawmakers are arguing for heightened border security and increased enforcement as a precursor to creating a pathway to citizenship for 11 million people. With the passage of the TRUST Act, Connecticut is rejecting this approach and showing the country that aggressive, punitive enforcement strategies have no place in a just and humane reform of immigration policy.
The national movement to guarantee paid sick days to workers won a major victory yesterday, when the New York City Council overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto in a 47-4 vote and enacted the Earned Sick Time Act. The legislation, passed with what the New York Times called “a raw display of political muscle” by a broad coalition of labor, community and advocacy organizations, gives 3.4 million private sector workers in New York City the legal right to take 5 sick days every year to care for themselves or their ailing family members. Of these workers, 1.4 million were not previously entitled to any sick time by the terms of their employment agreements – and for them this law will represent a meaningful improvement in their quality of life.
Center for Popular Democracy played a central role in the victory, helping to negotiate the compromise that ensured sufficient political support for passage and then working with City Council attorneys to draft the final bill. As part of a broad and robust political coalition, CPD helped mobilize pressure on the City Council, designed key elements of the legislation to ensure that workers will actually be able to exercise their right to sick time off without fear of retaliation, and helped advance a procedural strategy to free the bill from committee purgatory and bring it to the floor for a vote.
As a result of the coalition’s persistence, 1 million workers will now, for the first time, be able to take paid time off when they need it. Another 400,000 will, for the first time, be able to take (unpaid) time off without fear of losing their jobs. And 2 million other workers who already had sick time will benefit from a new labor standard that gives them security and additional bargaining power in their workplace.
Last month, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley signed historic legislation providing Maryland workers a critical new legal tool—a wage lien—to recover their wages when they have not been paid what they earned. Maryland joins a handful of states to provide workers this key provision.
The Public Justice Center and key allies drove the campaign to draft and win passage of this historic bill—a victory that will serve as a model for states across the country. Early technical and strategy support from the Center for Popular Democracy helped ensure the bill’s passage this year.
The victory is critical for the hundreds of thousands of low-income workers in Maryland who do not receive minimum wage or overtime and lose about 15% of their annual earnings to wage theft by unscrupulous employers. The new wage lien provides workers the option of “freezing” the employer’s assets before filing a court action—a step that dramatically increases the likelihood the worker will actually recover what she or he is owed. Congratulations to the PJC and thank you to all the partner organization that helped make this victory happen.
Working with Comunidad Unida del Lehigh Valley, CPD coordinated a rally with Allentown, PA Mayor Ed Pawlowski, City Council President Julio Guridy, and Lehigh Valley clergy and community members urging legislators to take federal action on comprehensive immigration reform.
Nearly 100 individuals gathered at Allentown City Hall to demand Senators Bob Casey and Pat Toomey vote in favor of the Senate’s immigration bill, which would create a pathway to citizenship for many undocumented immigrants living in the United States.
“I think it’s critical for our American economy, I think it’s critical for our city, I think it’s critical for the country as a whole to get behind comprehensive immigration reform that has a path to citizenship,” said Mayor Pawlowski.
Rally participants also called upon Congressman Charlie Dent, Republican Representative for PA’s 15th District, to vote for comprehensive – not piecemeal – immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship if and when the Senate bill reaches the House.
“The piecemeal immigration bills currently being proposed in the House are cruel and totally miss the point,” said Councilman Guridy. “…These bills don’t even offer immigrants a path to citizenship. Today we’re calling on our Congressmen to vocally support the Senate’s comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship, which a clear majority of Pennsylvanians support."
Click here to see a video of the rally.
Earlier this month, National Domestic Workers Alliance and CPD held a weeklong retreat that kicked off an 18 month program called the Basebuilders Innovation Group (Get BIG!) to bolster the organizing capacity and internal infrastructure of NDWA affiliates and create the foundation from which they can increase the scale of their organizing.
Throughout the week, CPD and NDWA guided selected NDWA affiliates through a variety of organizing models, brought together organizers for training and to learn with one another, and provided critical resources and technology infrastructure such as a text message alert system and database to support affiliates. CPD led discussions around the pending immigration reform and how groups could use this moment to not only provide information and services but also to increase the size of their base. CPD also helped the groups think about how they could use technology to help them manage and organize the large numbers of people that could be seeking their assistance once immigration reform passes.
CPD will continue to be a core partner on the project in the coming months, working with NDWA and its affiliates to evaluate the base-building opportunities emerging from immigration reform and develop the technological capacity and internal workflows to serve the thousands of new individuals who will be coming to affiliates’ doors seeking assistance related to legalization; and, ultimately, leverage new technologies and systems to connect thousands of immigrants and workers to the NDWA membership, wrap-around services and advocacy efforts.
Earlier this week, the New York City Council committed $500,000 to pilot a universal deportation defense system for immigrant New Yorkers who are facing removal and cannot afford a lawyer. The funding commitment is a direct response to advocacy by CPD and our partners, the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, as part of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project (“NYIFUP”) – a campaign to guarantee counsel for immigrants facing deportation statewide. This funding is a critical first step for NYIFUP's long-term success providing free counsel to individuals at risk of deportation across New York State. It also makes New York City the first place in the country to commit to providing counsel to immigrants facing deportation.
We are optimistic that this initial grant will help unlock funds from other sources—either to expand the pilot’s coverage or to implement the full system further down the line. We can't wait to share what we learn through this pilot project and make the case for a larger program.
