Why This Blog is Pro-Union:

From the Houston Chronicle:

Since Oct. 23, janitors have marched in front of office buildings throughout Houston, blocked streets and invaded a Galleria-area office in to bring attention to their cause.

The Service Employees International Union represents about 5,300 janitors who make an average $5.30 an hour and want a boost in pay to $8.50 an hour and health care benefits from the city's five largest cleaning companies.

The strikers have set up a very good website.

These photos are from MyDD:




Think that's bad? It gets worse. Houston Justice for Janitors:

We sat down in the intersection and the horses came immediately. It was really violent. They arrested us, and when we got to jail, we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the medical attention we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who is severely diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started to complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed unconscious on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead. The guard saw it but just kept going through the roll. Susan ran over there and took her pulse while the other inmates were yelling for help, saying we need to call somebody. The medical team strolled over, taking their own sweet time. She was unconscious for like 4 or 5 minutes.

[...]

One of the protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up. She was in a lot of pain.

The guards would tell us: ‘This is what you get for protesting.’ One of them said, ‘Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour? Lots of people make that much.’ The other inmates—there were a lot of prostitutes in there—said that they had never seen the jail this bad.

And Worse. From Pandagon:

A reader who was down in Houston supporting the strikers emailed me about her experiences. She was arrested on Wednesday and this is her story:

I was waiting to be frisked on entering the jail, and I was behind some strippers who were part of a vice sting. While they were getting frisked (legs spread, bending over, hands against the wall) there were pairs of male cops standing around watching in the most digusting way you can imagine (and I’m sure you can imagine). Nudging each other, making comments, standing with their legs spread and their arms crossed. When I got frisked, the officer pulled my shirt up high, yanked my breasts out of my bra, and then left the shirt up while she did my bottom half. Humiliating. Horrible. A nice little show for the disgusting pigs who were watching like they were still at the strip club.

Ezra Klein points out that bail was set at $888,888.00 for people who make $5.50 an hour. This in a state where a murderer had bail set at $30,000.00.

Perspective: Kill another human being and you can avoid waiting in jail for your trial for the equivilent of a brand new BMW 328i.

Organize a protest demanding a living wage and health benefits for the people that clean up after your sloppy ass and it takes the equivilent of this to get you out of jail:


A 4,000+ square foot, 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath, two story Mediterranean style McMansion in Houston. Oh, and it's on a golf course. Wanna bet that the dirt that gets tracked into the clubhouse on $300 golf shoes is cleaned up by janitors making peanuts and working without health care?

Take a minute and do something to help.

Houston Janitors Strike Violence Unions Organized Labor

Labor Day?

Harold Meyerson has a great Op-Ed piece for the Washington Post today:

Labor Day is almost upon us, and like some of my fellow graybeards, I can, if I concentrate, actually remember what it was that this holiday once celebrated. Something about America being the land of broadly shared prosperity. Something about America being the first nation in human history that had a middle-class majority, where parents had every reason to think their children would fare even better than they had.

The young may be understandably incredulous, but the Great Compression, as economists call it, was the single most important social fact in our country in the decades after World War II. From 1947 through 1973, American productivity rose by a whopping 104 percent, and median family income rose by the very same 104 percent. More Americans bought homes and new cars and sent their kids to college than ever before. In ways more difficult to quantify, the mass prosperity fostered a generosity of spirit: The civil rights revolution and the Marshall Plan both emanated from an America in which most people were imbued with a sense of economic security.

[...]

Ours is the age of the Great Upward Redistribution. The median hourly wage for Americans has declined by 2 percent since 2003, though productivity has been rising handsomely. Last year, according to figures released just yesterday by the Census Bureau, wages for men declined by 1.8 percent and for women by 1.3 percent.

As a remarkable story by Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt in Monday's New York Times makes abundantly clear, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of gross domestic product since 1947, when the government began measuring such things. Corporate profits, by contrast, have risen to their highest share of the GDP since the mid-'60s -- a gain that has come chiefly at the expense of American workers.

Go read the whole thing, it's very good.

I can from a union family. I am unabashedly pro-union. That's one of the reasons I haven't shopped at a Wal*Mart since 2003.

Mr. Meyerson points out an interesting fact about Wal-Mart in his piece: "Of Wal-Mart's 10 top suppliers in 1994, four have filed bankruptcies." Think about that. Due to their own policies, Wal*Mart forces 40% of its suppliers out of business. I grew up near Hershey Pennsylvania, home of Hershey Chocolate. I remember a story that got some play locally explaining that Hershey had to make some change to satisfy Wal-Mart's demands because Wal*Mart made up 40% of Hershey's distribution or some such thing. Hershey didn't want to do it, but they had no choice. No business can absorb having almost half of its distribution disappear overnight.

I don't want to let this post turn into an anti-Wal*Mart screed, so I'll move on.

When Bush came to power, there were analysts who said that movement Conservatives were going to work to undo the '60s and move America back into the 'good old days' of the oh-so idealized 1950s. Evidently, they weren't generous enough in scope. It seems that Conservative's real goal is the 1920s.

Unbridled capitalism, efforts to constitutionally ban things that certain religious groups find offensive (gay marriage is the new Demon Rum) and the exploitation of workers by a elite ruling class that holds a vast majority of the nation's wealth and resources.

We know Bush and his cronies aren't big on history, but I am. Will Bushtowns be the new Hoovervilles?

Labor Unions Wal-Mart Gilded Age

The Power of Unions

The Duluth News Tribune reports that labor unions in Wisconsin are working to defeat the gay marriage ban currently being considered there.

Labor unions are joining forces to fight a proposed ban on gay marriage and civil unions in what could become a powerful force in the Nov. 7 referendum.

The groups, representing employees ranging from teachers to prison workers, say they are worried the amendment will take away their ability to bargain for benefits such as health insurance for the domestic partners of gay and straight employees.

They are making donations, organizing volunteers and educating their members as part of their attempts to make Wisconsin the first state to defeat a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

It's about time that the left got itself together. After spending too many years as a loose collection of single issue advocates, the Democratic Party has realized that if we're going to be successful, we need to actively support all Progressive goals.

Wisconsin's largest teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, gave $25,000 to a group fighting the ban. Other unions also gave amounts between $1,000 and $5,000. WEAC's President, Stan Johnson, acknowledged the fact that support by the organizations doesn't mean every union worker will vote against the ban. Still, the idea that these bigoted efforts to drive the Republican Base will affect everybody is an important one. Perhaps some people that aren't motivated to go to the polls to vote against the ban by altruism will make the effort to go vote to protect their own interests.

I predict that we'll start to see Gay Marriage Bans fail in the coming years. I wish I could say that this would be a reflection of changing attitudes in America. That's probably a part of the reason, but the biggest reason will be that all the 'low hanging fruit' has already been picked. Alabama, Kansas, and other deep red states have the bans. As homobigots work to spread their hate to more Progressive states, they'll have less success.

Watch for the GOP to trot out 'Gay adoption' or 'Gay parenting' as the new fronts in their campaign of hate.

Wisconsin Unions Gay Marriage

Union Busting Kills Miners

The New York Times:

The Kentucky mine where five men were killed in an explosion on Saturday had been cited at least 41 times in the last five years for failing to clean up coal dust properly, which can lead to explosions, according to federal records.

State officials and mining experts said the reach of the blast, which was felt more than 5,000 feet from its estimated point of origin, seemed to indicate that coal dust was a major factor.

Federal regulators had cited Kentucky Darby LLC, the operator of the mine, three times this month, and at least 38 other times since 2001, for not cleaning up coal dust and other combustible materials, according to federal records. While federal investigators continued to study the cause of the explosion at the mine, relatives of the miners voiced frustration over a report that the miners' air packs had not worked.

My family came from Wales, which produced the coal that made England's industrial revolution world wide empire possible. My great grandfather, who I was lucky enough to meet, left the mines of Wales for a better life in America, not wanting his sons to only see the light of day one day a week. He came to Pennsylvania and began work in American mines. When he had saved some money he sent for his wife and children. My Great Grandmother wrote back that she wouldn't come if he was working in mines. He got a job in a steel mill. The Unions made sure that he was relatively safe and well paid. I am where I am today, with a profession and a college degree, because of Unions.

That's why I think that it's a travesty that the New York Times wouldn't tell me if the mine in Kentucky was Unionized. I had to go all the way to the Google cache from the Charleston, West Virginia Gazette-Mail to find out that it wasn't.

Union Busting Kills Miners

The explosion was caused by coal dust that, by government regulation, should have been contained. The rescue breathers that were supposed to provide an hour of clean air provided only 5 minutes.

These are the reasons that Unions are necessary. This was not some isolated incident. 41 safety violations? With no advocate, the miners were at the mercy of Kentucky Darby LLC. Look where it got them. Republicanism, with it's abhorrence of organized labor, kills workers.

Kentucky Darby LLC Unions Organized Labor Republicans