NSEA takes stand on vouchers, charter schools
The fact is that charter schools are not meeting the need they were created to fill—including to serve as lab schools to develop new teaching techniques—and many are failing their students and...
The fact is that charter schools are not meeting the need they were created to fill—including to serve as lab schools to develop new teaching techniques—and many are failing their students and families, while squandering taxpayer dollars.
Read the full article here.
Epic Charter School Fail Exposed
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...
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.
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California Eminent Domain Isn't Government Run Amok
To judge from the disparaging reaction to its plan to use eminent domain to cope with underwater homes, you'd think the city leaders of Richmond, California, had proposed an outrageous and...
To judge from the disparaging reaction to its plan to use eminent domain to cope with underwater homes, you'd think the city leaders of Richmond, California, had proposed an outrageous and unprecedented distortion of state power.
Filing suit against Richmond, BlackRock Inc., Pacific Investment Management Co. and other plaintiffs alleged that the city's proposal amounts to an “unconstitutional application of eminent domain” and a “brazen scheme.” The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that it was considering ceasingto do business in municipalities that pursue this course. Media coverage generally echoed the plaintiffs’ take. USA Today’s headline summed up the conventional wisdom, declaring that Richmond “runs amok with eminent domain.”
In fact, the city's plan relies not on a novel use of eminent domain but on one endorsed by the conservative Supreme Court of 1935. And although there is a long history of excessive use of eminent domain, Richmond's plan has no place in it. Richmond's plan is to seize 624 mortgages valued at more than the homes for which they were written. Relying on a private intermediary, the city would compensate the investor holding a mortgage at a price reflecting the home's current value rather than an inflated bubble value. The city would then sell a more modest loan to the homeowner. Richmond hopes this will induce residents to remain in their homes and pay their mortgages and property taxes. Proponents of the plan also point out that this probably will lower the risk of default, protecting investors holding the mortgages.
Nonetheless, the big players in the bond markets are angry that they’re being forced to accede to the demands of a small city in California. Before they fight city hall, the plaintiffs should appreciate that use of eminent domain to seize intangible assets like mortgages has a solid history. Federal courts have long sanctioned the taking of everything from shares of stock to contract rights, insurance policies and even hunting rights.
But mortgages? Yes. Consider a famous Supreme Court case from the Great Depression. During that crisis, banks foreclosed on farmers who fell behind on their mortgage payments. In response, Congress passed the Farm Bankruptcy Act granting farmers five years to negotiate a reduction in the principal of their loans. Farmers were entitled to buy the property at the current appraised value, even if it fell short of the value attached to the original mortgage.
Then, as now, banks didn’t like the policy and went to court, arguing that it violated their property rights, as guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment. In May 1935, the Supreme Court overturned the law in a unanimous decision, the first of several such rulings that made the court into a conservative counterweight to the New Deal. Nevertheless, in the final paragraph of its decision, the court laid out an alternative course for just the kind of remedy the Farm Bankruptcy Act had sought.
Justice Louis Brandeis observed, "If the public interest requires, and permits, the taking of property of individual mortgagees in order to relieve the necessities of individual mortgagors, resort must be had to proceedings by eminent domain.”
In effect, the court stated that if the government wished to modify loans, it could only do so via an eminent domain proceeding of precisely the sort now being contemplated in Richmond. Brandeis didn’t think this a particularly controversial point; he made no effort to defend it or explain his reasoning because it was an established doctrine.
And so it remains today: Intangible assets have again and again been deemed fair game for eminent domain proceedings, so long as “just compensation” is given. In California, the state Supreme Court has taken a similar stance: A decision in 2008, for example, affirmed longstanding precedent that the state’s eminent domain law “authorizes the taking of intangible property.”
None of this is to suggest that eminent domain hasn’t been abused. In the postwar era, however, its victims have not been investors but poor, black, inner city residents.
The case that opened the door to mass evictions and confiscations was Berman v. Parker, decided by the Supreme Court in 1954. In it, a black department store owner in the District of Columbia sued to stop an eminent domain proceeding against his profitable business, which had the misfortune of being situated in an area designated as blighted.
The court rejected Berman’s protest, defining eminent domain in remarkably broad terms. If the public interest demanded that his property be torn down with less desirable properties to rescue an entire neighborhood from blight, it ruled, there was nothing Berman could do. His store was soon reduced to rubble. While many urban planners celebrated the decision, Harvard Law School Professor Charles Haar was more prescient, noting that the ruling “may cause a lot of trouble some day.”
This was an understatement: in the ensuing years, municipalities across the country used and abused their powers to confiscate the property of poor, often black residents, rarely giving “just compensation.” Entire, thriving neighborhoods vanished before the wrecking ball, destroying communities and leaving behind gaping holes in the urban fabric that remain eyesores in many cities today.
This didn’t end with the 1960s. In 2005, the Supreme Court handed down its controversial decision in Kelo v. City of New London. The case grew out of efforts by New London, Connecticut, to use eminent domain to evict working-class residents from a neighborhood in the hopes of handing the land to a private developer who promised to attract more affluent residents with a mixed-use project. The court ruled in favor of the city, vastly expanding the powers of eminent domain. The project foundered during the financial crisis and today remains a series of vacant lots, monuments to an extreme vision of eminent domain.
These are examples of eminent domain “run amok.” Yet to listen to the hysterical denunciations of the Richmond plan, a proposal to bring 624 mortgages in line with market prices is the epitome of eminent domain abuse. History suggests otherwise.
Source:
Reporte revela robo de salario sistemático en NY
NUEVA YORK — Un estimado de 2.1 millones de neoyorquinos son víctimas de robo de salario al año, lo que implica una suma de $3.2 mil millones en pagos y beneficios, según el reporte “...
NUEVA YORK — Un estimado de 2.1 millones de neoyorquinos son víctimas de robo de salario al año, lo que implica una suma de $3.2 mil millones en pagos y beneficios, según el reporte “By a Thousand Cuts: The Complex Face of Wage Theft in New York” delCenter for Popular Democracy Action (CPDA).
El estudio, calificado como el más completo desde 2009 por organizaciones defensoras de los derechos de los trabajadores, se fundamenta en entrevistas a expertos, quejas de víctimas de robo de salario, resultados de investigaciones recientes y estadísticas de los sindicatos más representativos.
Los hallazgos del CPDA sugieren que los empleadores recurren a métodos difíciles de detectar, probar y erradicar, como minutos no registrados en los relojes del lugar de trabajo, una deducción del 5% por cada propina y salarios por debajo del mínimo.
Un análisis de las estadísticas más recientes –diciembre de 2014- del Departamento de Trabajo de Estados Unidos (USDOL) encontró que en 2013, unos 12.700 trabajadores del estado de Nueva York recibieron un total de $23 millones en reembolsos por salarios robados, lo que representasólo el 2% del total de $1 mil millones en salarios robados para ese año.
Los autores del reporte, que estudiaron 11 casos específicos de trabajadores, encontraron que el estado de Nueva York pierde hasta $20 millones por semana en violaciones cometidas por empleadores que no pagan el sueldo mínimo.
Los trabajadores más vulnerables son aquellos que trabajan frecuentemente jornadas de más de 40 horas a la semana. Según la ley, los empleadores deben pagar una hora y media por cada hora extra luego de las 40 horas a la semana, pero en 2010 el 77% de los trabajadores de bajos ingresos no recibieron esta compensación, según un estudio del National Employment Law Project (NELP) citado por los autores.
El mexicano Ángel Rebollero (53), quien en octubre de 2014 alzó la voz por mejores condiciones de trabajo en Vegas Auto Spa, en Park Slope, contó que por casi una década no recibió el pago mandatario por las horas extras trabajadas.
“Los trabajadores inmigrantes somos los más expuestos a empleadores inescrupulosos, pero nuestras victorias laborales demuestran que unidos podemos cambiar las condiciones indignas en el lugar de trabajo”, comentó. “Muchos fuimos amenazados con la deportación. El miedo puede hacernos callar, pero no siempre estaremos en las sombras sufriendo el abuso”.
El reporte de la CPDA encontró que los empleadores comúnmente recurren a la intimidación, acoso, represalias y falsificación de récords de pago para perpetrar un robo de salario sistemático. Otro método común es la clasificación errónea de sus empleados como contratistas independientes, a fin de evitar el pago de impuestos sobre la nómina de sus empleados.
El Servicio de Impuestos Internos (IRS) estima que los empleadores clasifican erróneamente a millones de empleados cada año en el país, evitando en promedio cerca de $4.000 en impuestos federales por cada trabajador.
El CPDA advirtió de la reincidencia en las violaciones de las leyes laborales como un factor difícil de erradicar en la lucha por los derechos de los trabajadores. En los últimos cinco años, el USDOL ha registrado cerca de 400 casos de robo de salarios en el estado de Nueva York, en los cuales el empleador reincidió en las infracciones de las leyes que protegen a los empleados más vulnerables.
Entre los casos que analiza el reporte destaca el de los “carwasheros” de Vegas Auto Spa, quienes estuvieron expuestos a condiciones inseguras de trabajo y robo de salario.
Source: El Diario
Death Cab for Cutie, Jim James, more protest Donald Trump with new songs
Death Cab for Cutie, Jim James, more protest Donald Trump with new songs
Death Cab for Cutie
After writer Dave Eggers attended a Donald Trump rally this past June, he realized now would be a good time for the “resurrection of the...
Death Cab for Cutie
After writer Dave Eggers attended a Donald Trump rally this past June, he realized now would be a good time for the “resurrection of the political protest song.” So he called up some artists, including Jim James and Aimee Mann, who wrote tracks for a project that would later become a playlist titled 30 Days, 30 Songs. That playlist, touted as being “written and recorded by musicians for a Trump-free America” launched Monday with Death Cab for Cutie’s “Million Dollar Loan.”
“From Woody Guthrie to Public Enemy, we know that songs can change minds, and particularly now, we need to motivate voters to stand against bigotry, sexism, hatred and ignorance,” Eggers said in a statement.
Eggers launched the playlist — available on Spotify and Apple Music — Oct. 10, 30 days before election day. Thao Nguyen, clipping., and Bhi Bhiman, among others, also contributed tracks, along with R.E.M., who offered up a never-before-released live song for the compilation.
A new track will debut at noon ET each day up until Nov. 8, and all proceeds will go toward the Center for Popular Democracy. Hear Death Cab’s entry below.
BY ARIANA BACLE
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What Arne Duncan Wrought
Last Friday, after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his resignation as of the end of 2015, I heard ...
Last Friday, after U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his resignation as of the end of 2015, I heard President Barack Obama's assessment of him: “Arne’s done more to bring our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st century than anybody else.” It is worth considering carefully what the president’s words mean in the context of the priorities, programs and operation of Duncan’s Department of Education.
In a recent and very moving New Yorker piece about the significance of the closure of New York’s storied Jamaica High School, his alma mater, Jelani Cobb considers education reform in the context of history:
Like "busing" and "integration," the language of today’s reformers often serves as a euphemism for poverty mitigation, the implicit goal that American education has fitfully attempted to achieve sinceBrown v. Board of Education. Both busing and school closure recognize the educational obstacles that concentrated poverty creates. But busing recognized a combination of unjust history and policy as complicit in educational failure. In the ideology of school closure, though, the lines of responsibility — of blame, really — run inward. It’s not society that has failed in this perspective. It’s the schools ... The onus shifted, and public policy followed. The current language of education reform emphasizes racial "achievement gaps" and "underperforming schools" but also tends to approach education as if history had never happened. Integration was a flawed strategy, but it recognized the ties between racial history and educational outcomes.
School policy ripped out of time and history: In many ways that is Arne Duncan’s gift to us. School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity; a Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight; the substitution of the consultant-driven, win-lose methodology of philanthropy for formula-driven government policy; school policy that favors social innovation, one charter at a time.
Such policies are definitely a break from the past. Whether they promise better opportunity for the majority of our nation’s children, and especially our poorest children, is a very different question.
School policy focused on disparities in test scores instead of disparities in opportunity.
Here is what a Congressional Equity and Excellence Commission charged in 2013, five years into Duncan’s tenure as Education Secretary:
The common situation in America is that schools in poor communities spend less per pupil — and often many thousands of dollars less per pupil — than schools in nearby affluent communities ... This is arguably the most important equity-related variable in American schooling today. Let’s be honest: We are also an outlier in how many of our children are growing up in poverty. Our poverty rate for school-age children — currently more than 22 percent — is twice the OECD average and nearly four times that of leading countries such as Finland.
Arne Duncan’s signature policies ignore these realities. While many of Duncan’s programs have conditioned receipt of federal dollars on states’ complying with his favored policies, none of Duncan’s conditions involved closing opportunity gaps. To qualify for a Race to the Top grant, a state had to remove any statutory cap on the authorization of new charter schools, and to win a No Child Left Behind waiver, a state had to agree to evaluate teachers based on students’ test scores. But Duncan’s policies never conditioned receipt of federal dollars on states’ remedying school funding inequity. Even programs like School Improvement Grants for the lowest scoring 5 percent of American schools have emphasized school closure and privatization but have not addressed the root problem of poverty in the communities where children’s scores are low.
A Department of Education obsessed with data-driven accountability for teachers but preferring “game-changing” innovation for itself and paying inadequate attention to oversight.
The nation faces an epidemic of teacher shortages and despair among professionals who feel devalued as states rush to implement the teacher-rating policies they adopted to win their No Child Left Behind waivers from the federal government. Even as evidence continues to demonstrate that students’ test scores correlate more closely with family income than any other factor, and as scholars declare that students’ test scores are unreliable for evaluating teachers, Duncan’s policies have unrelentingly driven state governments to create policy that has contributed to widespread blaming of the teachers who serve in our nation’s poorest communities.
However, Duncan’s Department of Education has been far less attentive to accountability for its own programs. In June, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools — a coalition of national organizations made up of the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Educational Justice, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Center for Popular Democracy, Gamaliel, Journey for Justice Alliance, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign and Service Employees International Union — asked Secretary Duncan to establish a moratorium on federal support for new charter schools until the Department improves its own oversight of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, which is responsible for the federal Charter School Program. The Alliance to Reclaim our Schools cites formal audits from 2010 and 2012 in which the Department’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG) “raised concerns about transparency and competency in the administration of the federal Charter Schools Program.” The OIG’s 2012 audit, the members of the Alliance explain, discovered that the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement and the State Education Agencies, which disburse the majority of the federal funds, are ill-equipped to keep adequate records or put in place even minimal oversight.
Most recently, just last week, the Department of Education awarded $249 million to seven states and the District of Columbia for expanding charter schools, with the largest of those grants, $71 million, awarded to Ohio, despite the fact that protracted Ohio legislative debate all year has failed to produce regulations for an out-of-control, for-profit group of online charter schools or to improve Ohio’s oversight of what are too often unethical or incompetent charter school sponsors. The U.S. Department of Education made its grant last week even though Ohio’s legislature is known to have been influenced by political contributions from the owners of for-profit charter schools.
The substitution of the consultant-driven, win-lose methodology of philanthropy for formula-driven government policy.
Title I is the federal civil rights program created in 1965 as the centerpiece of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to equalize opportunity by sending federal money to schools serving a large number or high concentration of very poor children. The Title I formula has been a primary tool for equalizing educational opportunity as a civil right for every child. In 2009, however, Arne Duncan’s Department of Education began spending some Title I funds outside the formula program for competitions like Race to the Top. Because one-time grants cannot cover ongoing operations, school districts have used the money for technology or staff development but have hesitated to reduce class size or hire teachers. For example, an evaluation determined that consultants and grant writers collected 35 percent of School Improvement Grant Funds spent in Colorado between 2010 and 2012. Another serious problem with the federal competitive grant programs is that races with winners always have losers. Redirecting funds away from the Title I Formula and into competitive grants under Duncan’s leadership drove federal funds to a few winning states and created a host of losing states — and millions of children who lost out.
School policy that favors social innovation, one charter at a time.
Public education in the United States has historically been driven by a philosophy of expanding systemic inclusion. Over time public policy has been devised to require that schools address the needs of all children as a civil right. The policies that followed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education,for example, were designed to address past injustices that derived from racial segregation and poverty. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act protected the rights of children with special needs. The policies of Arne Duncan’s Department of Education have instead favored a strategy of social innovation through the establishment of charter schools. The idea is that committed individuals, with grants from the government, design schools that will serve a few children, with the innovation injected back into the public schools. There is considerable evidence that many charters — especially the huge for-profit charter chains — have not innovated, that a philosophy of social innovation through charters (that serve about 6 percent of our nation’s 50 million children today) fails to consider the scale of our education challenges, that whatever innovation there has been has not spread widely, that charters have served primarily the children of parents who know how to play the school choice game, that considerable money from charter schools has flowed into private profits, and that the growth of charters in many city school districts has sucked out money and promising children and left students with serious disabilities, English language learners and the very poorest children including homeless children behind in what are becoming public school districts of last resort.
'One of The Most Basic, Promised Rights of Our Democracy'
At the very end of the 19th century, John Dewey wrote: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children ... Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up can society by any chance be true to itself.”
A hundred years later, Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-MN) told the students at Teachers College, Columbia University: “That all citizens will be given an equal start through a sound education is one of the most basic, promised rights of our democracy. Our chronic refusal as a nation to guarantee that right for all children ... is rooted in a kind of moral blindness, or at least a failure of moral imagination. ... It is a failure which threatens our future as a nation of citizens called to a common purpose … tied to one another by a common bond.”
In December 2010, just two years into Duncan’s tenure as Secretary of Education, I heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson indict Duncan’s education policies for abandoning the very idea of American public education that Dewey and Wellstone had described so eloquently: “There are those who would make the case for ‘a race to the top’ for those who can run. But ‘lift from the bottom’ is the moral imperative because it includes everybody.”
If, as President Obama says, Arne Duncan has “brought our educational system, sometimes kicking and screaming, into the 21st century,” I hope we will stop to reconsider. Has our society decided to strive for innovation and to abandon universal provision of services and equality of opportunity as overarching goals? And have we become satisfied to blame the teachers in our poorest communities instead of ourselves for the vast injustices that appear at school in the guise of the achievement gaps?
Source: Alternet
Needed — a regional employee scheduling law
"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...
"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
Dreamers exigen “Dream Act” y replican a Kelly: “no somos flojos”
Dreamers exigen “Dream Act” y replican a Kelly: “no somos flojos”
En el marco de un día de acción nacional a favor del Dream Act, más de 500 activistas exigieron este miércoles que el Congreso apruebe la medida, y condenaron al jefe de Gabinete de la Casa...
En el marco de un día de acción nacional a favor del Dream Act, más de 500 activistas exigieron este miércoles que el Congreso apruebe la medida, y condenaron al jefe de Gabinete de la Casa Blanca, John Kelly, por sugerir que algunos jóvenes indocumentados no se apuntaron al “DACA” de 2012 por “flojos”.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
Hundreds of Activists Occupy the Capitol to Stop Trumpcare
Hundreds of activists from around the country descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to protest the GOP's latest assault on health care and the Affordable Care Act. As Donald Trump and Mitch...
Hundreds of activists from around the country descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to protest the GOP's latest assault on health care and the Affordable Care Act. As Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell spent hours twisting senators' arms over lunch and secret meetings trying to whip up votes, nearly 300 Americans, including doctors, nurses, home health aides, and people with chronic conditions, occupied Republican senators' officers, demanding that their elected officials kill the Better Care Reconciliation Act and support a single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care system.
Read the full article here.
Scott Walker Pushes Through “Right-to-Work” Law — and Labor Takes Another Hit
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...
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.”
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7 days ago
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