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Merri Ansara, Boston:  I wonder if someone from CCDS wants to view this film-- Women of Steel--when it is shown next week at the UMass Labor Center, and then see if it should be shown in the CCDS labor circles.  

Photo: James Campbell, presente! A founding leader of CCDS, whose memorial was held this summer in South Carolina. Buy his memorial book HERE.

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Oct 14, 2021 - For 12 years, Liz Shuler was No 2 to Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, the main union federation in the US, but after Trumka’s unexpected death in August, Shuler became its first-ever female president at a time that organized labor in the US faces deep problems – and extraordinary opportunities.

Many union members are hoping that Shuler, a well-liked, hard-working 51-year-old, will figure out how to capitalize on those opportunities. Public approval for organized labor in the US has climbed to its highest level in more than 50 years, as many young workers are flocking into unions and millions of overstressed, underpaid frontline workers are impatient to improve their lot.

"The biggest challenge that labor faces is whether we’re ready for the opportunities in front of us,” said April Sims, secretary-treasurer of the Washington State Labor Council, a federation of that state’s unions. “Union favorability is at a long-time high. We’ve learned from Covid how much our society and economy depend on workers. We probably have the most pro-labor president since FDR. The challenge for us as a labor movement is, are we able to take advantage of this moment?”

At the same time, Shuler – and all of US labor – face some daunting obstacles.

A mere 6% of private-sector workers are in unions, the lowest level in a century. The Republican party is intent on weakening unions, and most US corporations – led by behemoths Amazon and Walmart – are fiercely opposed to unionization.

Among many union leaders, there is an eagerness, sometimes bordering on desperation, to reverse labor’s decades-long decline. “My cry for 30 years is our biggest challenge is that collective bargaining has been systematically rubbed out – private-sector collective bargaining now covers just 6% of workers, having dropped from 30,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America and now chair of Our Revolution, a progressive group spun out of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. “I think Liz Shuler and the AFL-CIO have to be almost singularly focused on that.”

There are many encouraging stories of workers pushing to unionize, Cohen said, pointing, for example, to Starbucks employees in Buffalo. Shuler will undoubtedly back these efforts, Cohen said, but he said she needs to press the nation’s unions to do more to support and expand organizing.

Bill Fletcher Jr, a former AFL-CIO education director and now executive editor of Global African Worker, said labor leaders need to see that unions are often using timeworn strategies to fight the last war. The field of battle has changed vastly for labor, Fletcher said. There are far more gig workers, tech workers, and immigrant workers; corporations have grown more sophisticated in battling unions, and young workers are showing more interest in unionizing than in decades.

“That’s what Liz Shuler and other labor leaders have to think about,” Fletcher said. “This is a completely different labor movement and what does that mean for the AFL-CIO?”

To help labor win on today’s new battlefield, Fletcher said the AFL-CIO and its member unions should marshal large amounts of resources to ensure some breakthrough victories – perhaps some big organizing wins in the south. That would create momentum and optimism and inspire more workers to turn to unions. Fletcher also called on Shuler to push for labor to do far more large-scale organizing, to unionize thousands of workers at a time.

After Trumka died on August 5, a few union leaders floated the idea of electing a caretaker AFL-CIO president until the federation holds its convention next June. Some who backed the caretaker idea voiced concern that Shuler was not inspiring or visionary enough at a time labor could use lots more visibility and inspiration. Some leaders also voiced concern that Schuler, unlike Trumka – who once headed the United Mine Workers – had never led a union or a strike. Before becoming the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, Shuler was an assistant to the president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

But many union presidents brushed those concerns aside when they overwhelmingly elected Schuler on 20 August to fill Trumka’s term through June. Many labor leaders like Shuler, respect her hard work, and believe that she can bring people together. Moreover, many felt there shouldn’t be a divisive leadership fight right after Trumka died.

“Liz was a very effective second to Trumka,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. As secretary-treasurer, Shuler oversaw the federation’s finances and its outreach program to young workers.

“People trust her because they know she will listen before she acts,” Weingarten said. “There’s a great amount of trust because of her collaborative nature. She doesn’t see collaboration as kumbaya. She sees collaboration as a way to move a very disparate federation.” ...Read More

By Molly Osberg

Oct 15, 2021 - The final affront to Helen Yin was the signage. It’s not like customers read signs anyway, the former bartender said, but at least you could point to one as proof that the person pouring the beer wasn’t personally making the rules. Yin worked in bars and restaurants for 15 years, until last month. Management at the “lucrative bartending gig” she’d had for three years in New York wanted customers to feel normal during the pandemic, so Yin’s bosses wouldn’t hang signs reminding patrons to wear a mask. When Yin realized that she would soon likely be required to verify a customer’s health records, she found other work.

“There’s so much onus on the staff to quell disruptive customers,” she said. “Service industry folks have had to do like six different jobs during this time.” 

Early in the pandemic, customers were grateful, polite. Yin said they tipped excessively until about eight months in. “You could just see the tips get lower and the expectation for service the same as before,” she said.

“At some point, the staff just quit trying to police people” over mask mandates and distances between customers. Bar patrons were going to do whatever they wanted anyway, she reasoned. “And if I say no, you’re not going to tip me.” A lot of the people at the brewpub where she’d been working were making $10 an hour.

Yin found another job outside of the service industry in mid-September. “It just became too much emotional demand, and unrealistic expectations from the consumer, and from your bosses, without any compensation for the added job roles we had to do,” she said.

The so-called Great Resignation, triggered last April when four million workers abandoned their posts, continues to eviscerate the Department of Labor’s existing records. In a report released this week, the agency found that in August, 4.3 million American workers quit their jobs. Over the summer, the corporate world, animated by the idea that its white-collar employees were burning out following the trauma of Covid-19, rebranded vacations as retention measures. They introduced “wellness weeks” and “rest and refuel Fridays” and, in the case of Marriott International, gave their employees a couple extra days off. Naturally those perks applied mostly to the office workers who’d spent the last year and a half working from home and not to Marriott’s hotel staff, the kinds of hospitality workers who were suddenly furloughed last spring and then watched their CEOs lobby the federal government for some of the $2 trillion stimulus package without bringing workers back. The uncertainty took a massive psychological toll on those workers, and if they did return to work, they were likely to be hassled and mistreated by guests.

The unconscionable abuse of hospitality workers is a well-documented pandemic trend, even as those workers are key to letting the country return to “normal.” And normal now depends, in many places, on those workers’ ability to keep customers from spreading a deadly disease. As the mayor of New Orleans said when she introduced vaccine and Covid test mandates for indoor activities this summer, “We really have no choice, this situation is dire.”

According to the recent data from the Labor Department, around 900,000 of the people who left their jobs in August worked in service. They were the people staffing hotels, working counters, and tending bar, acting as conduits between customers and the public health mandates imposed by states and cities; how effectively staff managed those mandates was what kept their employers open for business. The latest numbers mean that about three out of every five people working these jobs quit.

One line of thinking about this situation, most likely to come from a manager, is that expanded unemployment benefits seduced a fundamentally lazy populace. Another interpretation is that people have reacted with reasonable fear to the spread of the delta variant: Across industries, more workers quit in areas where Covid-19 spiked.

But surveys of front-of-house workers have found that a broad majority invoke customer behavior as a reason to abandon their posts or switch jobs, behavior that’s likely fueled by pandemic-related changes to the experience of being served. In high-profile incidents over the last months, patrons have assaulted and killed service workers over public health mandates.

Restaurants in states without vaccine mandates who have barred the unvaccinated from dining indoors find themselves overwhelmed by bad reviews; in Massachusetts, patrons were such assholes to a café’s staff that the restaurant simply briefly shut down. The week San Francisco imposed a vaccine mandate for indoor dining, an industry group found more than half of its members reported at least one incident related to their attempts to enforce it. “We told our members, we are not police officers,” said Laurie Thomas, the executive director of the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, which performed the survey. “Will there be fake cards? For sure, people are going to do that. But we can only do the best that we can.” ...Read More

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