Salon.com > Labor unions

Restaurant horror show: How waitstaffs are mistreated

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:08:00 +0000

Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville, Ky., was a monument to the power of kitschy sculptures and loud colors. Coverage in magazines like Bon Appetit and from TV personalities like Oprah and Bobby Flay brought tourists, and tourists ate fare like bourbon ball French toast and Hot Brown sandwiches. Weekend mornings, you could count on the place being packed with people whose idea of a good place for brunch involved a collection of ugly lamps and $13 Bloody Marys.

But then in January, a former server named Leila DiFazio accused Lynn’s management of firing her over a new policy that paid servers credit card tips on their paychecks rather than in cash at the end of the night, and required waiters to bring $100 cash to work every day to share tips with untipped staff members. DiFazio refused to comply.

“Bringing in $100 each shift is unrealistic for me because I am [a] single mother of a 2 and a half year-old-boy,” DiFazio wrote on the website of an organization called Kentucky Jobs With Justice, part of the national group Jobs with Justice.

LeBron James might improve your pension

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

John Montgomery Ward was a pioneering baseball star: In 1880, he became the second pitcher ever to hurl a perfect game. Ward was also a lawyer who was the first to recognize that the reserve clause embedded within each contract bound players to the teams that signed them -- and that gave team owners an enormous, inherent advantage over players that lasted for decades.

"In the enactment of the reserve-rule the clubs were probably influenced by three considerations," wrote Ward in a seminal essay titled "Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?" in 1887. "They wished to make the business of base-ball more permanent, they meant to reduce salaries, and they sought to secure a monopoly of the game."

"Chattel" was entirely appropriate because, for much of the 20th century, baseball players and other professional athletes were among the most exploited labor forces in the United States. Team owners dictated artificially low salaries; benefits (pension, medical care and the like) were inadequate. Athletes did not employ agents nor have an organized, certified union to represent their rights, on and off the field.

For unions, size isn’t everything

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 22:26:00 +0000

For those of us in and around the American labor movement, late January is an anxious time. That’s when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its annual report on union membership in the United States — always depressing reading. This year’s report was the worst in recent memory. With only 11.3% of American workers in unions, union density in 2012 reached its lowest level since 1916.

Of course, this decline is but one facet of the global fall in labor’s influence, the relative union strongholds of continental Europe and Scandinavia included. But the U.S. is still the fulcrum of the global economy, so a weak American labor movement is especially bad news for the working classes of all nations.

Friends of labor greeted the news with despair, seizing on the figures as the latest portent of the movement’s seemingly terminal crisis. Labor’s enemies greeted the news with barely concealed glee, and for the same reason. Most disturbingly, attacks on public sector bargaining rights in Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and elsewhere have begun to erode union membership in the public sector, the movement’s last redoubt in the U.S.

Labor mural removed by Maine gov. back on display

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:26:00 +0000

AUGUSTA, Maine (AP) — A mural depicting scenes from Maine's labor history returned to public display Monday, 22 months after the governor set off a political firestorm and spawned a federal lawsuit by ordering it removed.

Gov. Paul LePage caused an uproar in March 2011 when he ordered the mural removed from the Labor Department lobby, claiming it presented a one-sided view that bowed to organized labor and overlooked the contributions of job-creating entrepreneurs.

Beginning Monday, the mural was back on public view in an atrium that serves as the entryway to the Maine State Museum, Maine State Library and Maine State Archives. The space is open to the public six days a week.

Richard Bamforth, of Augusta, was angry when LePage first ordered the mural removed, calling it silly and petty. But he acknowledged the new venue seemed to be more appropriate than a hidden-away state office building.

"This is a much more visually appealing setting, I think," he said as he, his wife and their 19-year-old granddaughter examined the mural in the spacious, well-lit atrium.

The 11-panel mural had been bolted to the walls in the Labor Department building since 2008, when Democratic Gov. John Baldacci was in office. It was created by artist Judy Taylor, of Tremont, using a $60,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Labor.

“Elections shouldn’t exist”: The new war on school boards

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:00:00 +0000

On Election Day 2012, as voters around the country chose between two presidential candidates who both touted policies that would make it easier to fire teachers, voters in Bridgeport, Conn., rebuffed a referendum backed by Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg and the local Democratic Party. By a seven-point margin, Bridgeport rejected city charter changes that would have ended school board elections. It’s the latest round in Bridgeport’s multi-year battle over a below-the-radar front in America’s reform wars: Who should pick school board members – mayors or voters?

“Nobody thinks that a bunch of hedge fund managers from Greenwich are going to make their schools any better,” said Lindsay Farrell, the executive director of the Connecticut Working Families Party, one of the groups that spearheaded the opposition effort. “And the right to vote has been a hard-fought right. So people were reluctant to give it up and didn’t trust who they were being asked to give it up to.”

Right-to-work bill: Michigan just gives up

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:05:00 +0000

If you want to understand why Michigan is going to pass a right-to-work law this week, go to the Grand River Bar & Grill, a tavern on the north side of Chicago. It’s one of a half-dozen Chicago bars designed to appeal to graduates of Michigan State University. Green and white flags hang on the walls, the MSU fight song blares during Spartan basketball games, and there’s even a euchre league, for fans of the countrified form of bridge played in Michigan college dorms.

Fifty percent of Michigan State students now leave the state immediately after graduation. That ratio doubled in the 2000s, which is known in Michigan as “The Lost Decade.” In those 10 years, Michigan dropped from 30th to 35th in the percentage of college graduates, and from 18th to 37th in per capita income. (Michigan was also the only state to lose population in the last census.) The university system’s main function is giving Michigan’s brightest students a credential to get the hell off that jobless peninsula.

Their No. 1 destination is Chicago, the drain where most of the brains in the Midwest end up. (Every Big Ten school is represented by at least one bar there.)