Fast food strikers
aren't going anywhere, Josh Eidelson reports:
In a Monday interview in her Washington, D.C., office, Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry told Salon that SEIU members “see the fast food workers as standing up for all of us. Because the conditions are exactly the same.” Henry was joined by SEIU assistant to the president for organizing Scott Courtney, who said to expect “a big escalation” from fast food workers in “the next week or 10 days.” Two weeks after one-day strikes by thousands of employees in the growing, non-union, low-wage industry, Courtney said, “I think they’re thinking much bigger, and while the iron’s hot they ought to strike. No pun intended.”
What's the long-term game plan? Well, it's not completely settled, and there are several avenues to improvement in fast food jobs:
A source who took part in a private SEIU meeting with allies last week in Las Vegas said that the union presented two tracks under serious consideration for transforming the industry. First, escalating pressure on fast food corporations – McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s, in particular – with the goal of reaching a joint agreement under which the corporations would cover the costs of improved labor standards in their stores. And second, a legislative push for local living wage laws requiring improved compensation for fast food workers. Because most cities lack the legal authority to mandate higher wages for jobs that aren’t publicly subsidized, that push would involve statewide ballot measures in 2014 to allow cities to hike private sector workers’ wages.
Asked about that account, Courtney – a key strategist in the campaign — characterized the Las Vegas discussions as preliminary and hypothetical. He told Salon that there’s “a whole package of things” that could press the industry to change.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's news in education and labor.
Education
- Philadelphia high school teacher Daniel Ueda doesn't just teach in the classroom during the school day, he oversees an award-winning student robotics team. Here's what he faces thanks to the massive education cuts hitting Philadelphia:
- I am being asked to take a 13% pay cut.
- All funding for robotics programs including teachers’ salaries have been cut.
- The district is seeking the power to move teachers from school to school.
- I am being asked to work a longer work day.
- We have been left with 1 nurse for 2500 students.
- All guidance counselors have been laid off, eliminating opportunities for scholarships and making the college application process virtually impossible for my students.
- I am being asked to switch from Physics to Math, take an additional class, and teach at least three different kinds of classes, all in violation of the current contract and all due to layoffs and budget constraints.
- I am being asked to sacrifice my preparation periods for school operations.
- Schools may not open on Sept. 9th.
- Partial or full union strikes are looming.
- A lawsuit to keep 49 Chicago schools open faces a setback, but presses on.
- Fort Wayne school board votes to disregard Bennett A-F grades.
A fair day's wage
- Will domestic workers finally get minimum wage protections?
- Ban tipping, make more money?
- Caregiving is work, and must be recognized as such, even when it's for a family member.
- A unionist's message to the AFL-CIO: Let's talk about building a movement.
- When we talk about the work-life balance, Sarah Jaffe asks, does "life" just mean more work for women? In a recent New York Times piece, for instance:
[T]he women who did manage some sort of “work-family balance” seemed to have little time for anything else. Many of the former “opt-out” women she spoke with had opted back in, and while these well-off women had slid more or less successfully back into the workforce, they now had new forms of guilt. One woman lamented the loss of travel and shared interests with her husband as she juggled her family responsibilities with her new career. “They spent their evenings on separate floors, she downstairs in the kitchen, on her computer, catching up on the work she missed during her hours of caring for the children; he, upstairs, watching TV alone,” Warner wrote.
Too often, for men there's work and there's leisure, while for women there's work, family (work), and leisure. Against that, Jaffe argues:
A gendered demand for leisure would argue that women's time is as important as men's, whether we are spending it parenting or reading a book or lying on a beach. It would take into account the racialized and classed expectations of different groups of women, and argue that low-income women deserve time off too (and it would argue that they deserve to make enough money to enjoy that time.) It would point out that what is earned vacation for white women is not “laziness” in women of color.
- Mine workers are still fighting Peabody Energy for a fair retirement.
- A judge has ordered a 60-day cooling off period before BART workers can strike, against the wishes of the unions:
John Logan, an assistant professor and director of labor studies at San Francisco State, reports that BART’s negotiating strategy from the beginning has been a classic example of “surface bargaining”–going through the motions of bargaining with no intention of reaching an agreement.
From the beginning, Logan writes, BART has not shown an interest in real bargaining. BART delayed opening negotiations until mid-May instead of April as the unions requested.