Liberté Locke, a Starbucks Workers Union organizer, writes about how violence at work and in our personal lives are similar, how domestic abusers and bosses use the same techniques of control and that we need to fight both.
TRIGGER WARNING: sexual violence
I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed. When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”
The Seattle Solidarity Network in front of a business they were able to shut down when its owner refused to pay a former employee money she was owed.
Seattle recently joined San Francisco, Austin, Kansas City and Denver in making wage theft — bosses cheating workers out of their earned pay — a criminal offense, and rightfully so. Across the country, employers big and small are not paying minimum wage and overtime, or they are forcing people to work off the clock or during their breaks. Others are stealing tips or making illegal deductions from paychecks. Many bosses take advantage of undocumented immigrants, using the threat of arrest and deportation to simply not pay them at all.
A 2009 study by the National Employment Law Project estimated that two-thirds of low-wage workers in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles were denied full payment for their work.
The passage of the Seattle wage theft ordinance can only help working people. Groups like Casa Latina, a local workers center and immigrant rights organization, worked hard for the law to be passed. At a time when so many of us are struggling economically, we need every possible tool to assist regular people.
But, like any theft, wage theft is already illegal.
Jimmy John’s Workers Union- Industrial Workers of the World Contacts: Max Specktor, 612-250-7309, Erik Forman 612-598-6205
June 3, 2011
Minnesota Department of Health Reports
MINNEAPOLIS- Two months after Jimmy John’s fired six workers for blowing the whistle on a company practice of forcing sandwich-makers to work while sick, the IWW Jimmy John’s Workers Union has released Minnesota Department of Health documents today revealing eight outbreaks of food borne illness at franchises across the Twin Cities area in the past five years, seven of which were due to employees working while sick at the chain.
The release of the documents seriously erodes the credibility of Minneapolis franchise owner Mike Mulligan who had previously claimed to reporters and employees that, “the company has made more than 6 million sandwiches during its nearly 10 years in business—and no one’s ever gotten sick from eating one.”
Two of the outbreaks, both caused by sick employees, were at the Mulligans’ stores.
(CNN) — Let’s be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United States is not the place to work.
Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world — much less than what people in many other countries receive. And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.
Some U.S. companies don’t like employees taking off more than one week at a time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they’re lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains.
“I really would like to take a real, decent vacation and travel somewhere, but it’s almost impossible to take a long vacation and to be out of contact,” said Don Brock, a software engineer who lives in suburban Washington. “I dream of taking a cruise or a trip to Europe, but I can’t imagine getting away for so long.”
The running joke at Brock’s company is that a vacation just means you work from somewhere else.
So he takes one or two days off at a time and loses some vacation each year.
Only 57% of U.S. workers use up all of the days they’re entitled to, compared with 89% of workers in France, a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
Brock’s last long holiday was more than 10 years ago, when he took a two-week drive across the country.
NEW YORK — The number of workplace-related deaths and injuries decreased slightly in 2009 according to the nation’s largest labor union, but that’s not because of any significant changes in safety regulations. Instead, the loss of jobs due to the recession has simply kept many employees away from the most harmful workplaces.
“You can’t suffer workplace mortality if you’re not working,” said Bill Kojola, an industrial hygienist at AFL-CIO and one of the authors of the report. Many of the most deadly industries — construction, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing — were among the most decimated in the past several years. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, economic factors played a major role in the decline of workplace deaths.
In 2009, 4,340 workers were killed on the job, a decrease of 874 deaths from the 2008 figure. And occupational diseases caused by exposure to toxic substances are responsible for an estimated 50,000 deaths each year, according to the report. The data, compiled from the BLS and published annually by the AFL-CIO, is preliminary, and the total number of deaths is expected to increase slightly when more complete data is released later in the spring. The report estimates the true number of workplace related injuries — reported and unreported — to fall between 8 and 12 million per year.
In terms of a percentage of total work related deaths per year, construction had the highest share at 19%.
Since the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed in 1970, workplace safety and health conditions have steadily improved — the year the act was signed, 13,800 workers were killed on the job. But, the report reads, “too many workers remain at serious risk of injury, illness or death.” For this, the report lays heavy blame on the Bush administration for “eight years of neglect and inaction” that “seriously eroded safety and health protections.”
“The Obama administration,” the introduction to the report reads, “has returned OSHA and the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to their mission to protect workers’ safety and health.”
But some experts say the AFL-CIO’s assessment may be too generous to the current administration.
“We are still waiting for the Obama administration to propose a substantive health or safety standard,” said Celeste Monforton, an assistant research professor at George Washington University’s School of Public Health and Health Services who was previously employed as a policy analyst at OSHA. “So the facts don’t really support what the AFL-CIO is saying. I think [Obama and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] have good intentions, but it can’t just be an intention. It has to be an action.”
The Obama administration has taken certain small steps to increase workplace health and safety, such as increasing funding for OSHA and hiring additional inspectors. Still, the report cautions, at its current staffing and inspection levels, it would take federal OSHA 129 years to inspect each workplace in its jurisdiction just once.
Mercedes Herrerra is a 39-year-old Mexican immigrant living in Houston, Texas. Working primarily for staffing agencies, she first started cleaning houses and sports facilities in 1996. Paid meager wages, working long hours and travelling some distance to get to new job sites, her staffing agency charged her as much as $100 per week for gloves and cleaning supplies.
As if the massive charges for basic cleaning supplies weren’t enough, her employers found other ways to skim more cash off of her hard work.
“She was never paid for overtime. Her employers would tell her, “There is no overtime. After 40 hours you work for someone else.”
The study found that nearly 70% of workers surveyed had experienced some type of pay violation within the previous week. Of those, the average worker lost $51 out of an average weekly earnings of $339, or nearly 15% of annual wages. For the workers who partook in the study, this meant an average annual loss of $2,634 – no small sum when you’re living on $17,616 a year.
In all, it was estimated that in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles alone, $2.9 billion in wages had been stolen from workers within a years time.
In response to the crisis, organizations have used two general approaches to help stem the tide of wage theft.
The first approach emphasizes legislative action and social service. It calls for political leaders to crack down on employers who break the law, and for union leadership to fulfill their role as mediator between worker and owner. Advocates of this approach prefer protesting through so-called “proper channels.”
The second approach contends that the established political system is partly to blame for the mess in the first place. They argue that in order for us to effectively confront the problem of wage theft in the United States, we will need workers to fight their bosses themselves, instead of relying on either politicians or social service providers. This approach is known as “Direct Action.”
Proper Channels:
When asked the question “how can we fight wage theft?” Executive Director of Interfaith Worker Justice (IWJ), Kim Bobo answered:
“We need a strong union movement. We need a strong network of social services and grassroots organizations. And we need a strong Department of Labor that enforces labor laws.”
Speaking about her new book Wage Theft, she emphasizes, “I have four chapters on how we can strengthen the Labor Department.”
Bobo continued, “we need a secretary of labor who cares about wage theft and who can make it a priority… Most important, we need more cops on the job. There are 750 investigators for 130 million workers in the country… I believe we need to quadruple that staff.”
“Finally,” she concludes, “we need to have meaningful punishments. If you steal wages from workers, there needs to be consequences…”
The interview from which these quotes were taken wrongly emphasizes, this author believes, the role of politicians and service providers in fighting wage theft today.
Crews continued to work on stopping the leaking Deep Sea Horizon this week, with limited success. The new cap over the leak is capturing around 10,000 barrels of oil per day, but scientists are conflicted as to how much more is still escaping.
It has been over a month since the leaking oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and spewing thousands of barrels of oil into the ocean around it.
Job Losses and Unsafe Working Conditions:
The gulf oil spill is not only an environmental catastrophe, but an economic disaster as well. Naturally, working people will take the brunt of both on their own shoulders.
The Louisianna Oil and Gas Association estimates that Obama’s moratorium on new drilling contracts and an outright halt of drilling on 33 already operating rigs could put as many 75,000 people out of work. For every rig halted, up to 1,400 jobs are at risk.
Younger workers on the rigs are especially vulnerable. “”If we see a good deck hand with good initiative who’s got promise,” says oil rig manager Pat Matte in an interview with the Huffpost, “we talk them into going into debt, buying a house, buying a car, so they have to stay.” In this way, generation after generation of oil workers is forced to stay in the trade.
“We get them into debt. Now all our best hands are scared to death. They got a new family, new kids, just bought a car or motorcycle and we talked them into all this stuff, and they’re scared to death of losing everything. What have I done, being a supervisor who’s supposed to be teaching these boys how to live the rest of their lives?”
On top of management’s scam to bring young workers into debt, the job naturally attracts high school graduates and dropouts. Without having to go to college, young workers can enter into the industry and immediately start making good money.
Those working in the shrimp and fishing industry in the gulf are finding themselves jobless as well.
Shrimper Billy Delacruz signed up to participate in BP’s program to employ local fishers to assist in the oil clean-up efforts.
As the oil spreads further out from the rig, shrimp boats and fisherman are forced to close down their business and begin running clean-up operations at a fraction of the pay they would otherwise be recieving.
Workers helping with the cleanup, moreover, are being exposed daily to extremely dangerous chemicals.
The Los angelas Times reported that Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-La.) has recently called on the federal government to open up mobile medical clinics to deal with workers’ increasing health problems.
Workers like George Jackson, a local fisherman who has been forced to work on cleanup crews in the Gulf since the fishing industry has been closed, have reported severe chemical burns, dizziness and lightheadedness while on the job.
“As he was laying containment booms Sunday, he said, a dark substance floating on the water made his eyes burn.
“I ain’t never run on anything like this,” Jackson said. Within seconds, he said, his head started hurting and he became nauseated.”
The EPA’s website has warned coastal residents as far as 50 miles from the oil leak that ”[Some] of these chemicals may cause short-lived effects like headache, eye, nose and throat irritation, or nausea.”
BP, however, has not only refused to issue respirators to workers, but has actual forbid respirators from being used on certain job sites. Neither have they distributed gloves, suits, or any other kind of protective gear to many fisherman.
George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fishermen’s Assn, argues that the company is not protecting workers in order to avoid ciminal liability. “[If] they give us that type of equipment then they admit there are health hazards.”
Marine toxicologist Riki Ott, who studied the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska, remarked that this tragedy was just “deja vu.”
“What we saw with Exxon Valdez was a parallel track — sick animals and sick people. Harbor seals were looking like they were drunk and dying … and autopsies showed brain lesions.…What are we exposing these poor fishermen to?”
Eva Rowe’s parents were among the 15 who died that day in Texas City.
“A worker who actually worked at the plant collapsed to the floor crying, telling me he was so sorry that he couldn’t find my parents, that he’d been looking for them since the explosion happened. So then I knew,” she recalled.
“My parents were my best friends, they’re all I had. My life ended that day. BP ruined my life. It ended my life. That day I had to start all over.”
After several high-profile work accidents in the U.S. over the past several months, we are faced again with the tragic deaths of 11 workers on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Deepwater Horizon, a semi-submersible drilling rig off the southern coast of the U.S. caught fire two weeks ago, killing 11 workers and leading to a massive environmental catastrophe.
A congressional committee has been created to investigate the failure of a “blowout preventer” on the rig, as well as other pieces of safety equipment which seem to have failed.
The investigation will have to uncover who is responsible for the disaster. There are three companies which have operated on the rig – BP, which bankrolled the exploration; Transocean, which owned and operated the vessel; and Halliburton, which did cement work on the ocean floor.
It should come as no surprise that the company bankrolling this disaster, BP spent $3,650,000 in lobbying expenses in 2006 alone, no doubt to influence regulations. The company is one of the largest oil corporations in the world.
According to Beyond Petroleum (formerly British Petroleum, or BP), the rig was drilling 18,000 feet down to get to pockets of gas and oil under pressure when it caught fire.
The rig reportedly lacked a last-ditch safety valve, an “acoustic switch,” that could have potentially averted the massive oil spill. Such safety mechanisms are common in many oil rich countries around the world, but are not mandated in the U.S. because of their high cost.
A History of Neglect:
This is not the first time BP has had a catastrophic breakdown at one of its facilities. The company has a history of unsafe work conditions and environmental problems, largely due to cost cutting measures a congressional committee once described as “draconian.”
In 2006, BP pleaded guilty to felony charges after an explosion at their facility in Texas City, Texas, killed 15 workers and injured 170 others.
Carolyn Merritt, chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, told reporters while investigating the Texas explosion that:
“[These] things do not have to happen. They are preventable. They are predictable, and people do not have to die because they’re earning a living,”
She was right. Investigators at the sight found problems everywhere:
“There were three key pieces of instrumentation that were actually supposed to be repaired that were not repaired. And the management knew this… They authorized the startup [of the machinery which exploded] knowing that these three pieces of equipment were not properly working.”
Despite Bp’s own rules to the contrary, they had parked trailers full of workers in an open area right next to the broken machinery. At the mandatory safety meeting that morning, management didn’t once mention the dangerous procedure that would soon be taking place.
One worker, scared for his safety, wrote his supervisor: “the equipment is in dangerous condition and this is not taken seriously.” Another wrote “this place is set up for a catastrophic failure.”
But management in London didn’t listen, and the company flourished as a result. BP made a profit of $19 billion that year.
Nearly a year afterwards, the company again faced controversy when it was discovered that one of their pipelines had leaked nearly 4,800 barrels of oil into the Alaskan wilderness. The leak was caused by the company’s refusal to check its expansive pipelines in Prudhoe Bay.
In a leaked memo, inspection and quality-assurance specialist Bill Herasymiuk warned BP’s corrosion, inspection, and chemical team warned of an impending “catastrophe” if practices in the company were not changed.
Sure enough, four years after it was instructed to inspect it, BP found that a six-mile length of pipeline was corroded.
Political Fallout:
Despite repeated oil disasters of catastrophic proportions, regulation has remained lax. It should come as no surprise that the company bankrolling this disaster, BP, spent $3,650,000 in lobbying expenses in 2006 alone, no doubt to influence regulations. The company is one of the largest oil corporations in the world.
The lobbying has paid off. As it stands today, BP’s economic liability in this catastrophic event remains capped at a mere $75 million, thanks to the Oil Pollution Act.
The Act was passed in 1990, in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and enjoyed broad Republican and Democratic support.
Indeed, Democrats have done little better than Republicans in standing up for either workers rights or environmental restoration, despite the widespread support they receive from progressive organizations.
This disaster, however, couldn’t have highlighted the futility of supporting the democrats anymore than it has. The catastrophe comes only weeks after Obama announced he would expand offshore drilling, despite repeated campaign promises that he would maintain a ban on the destructive practice.
In response to the explosion, an embarrassed Obama backtracked and suspended the approval process for new wells off of the coast of Virginia, “so that information from the ongoing review of outer continental shelf safety issues that the President has directed can be appropriately considered.”
“But,” comments Steve Hargreaves of CNN, “leases for new oil wells were not expected for at least a year, whereas the investigation should wrap up in months.”
“Thursday’s announcement is the first time the Obama administration has actually put the brakes on a plan to open up more areas of the country to offshore drilling.
“Obama has supported increased drilling in the past, and just a month ago opened up a few new areas for drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, off the East Coast and in Alaska.”
and how to be like daddy and bring home a big pay.
Now don’t you believe them my boy, that story’s a lie -
remember the disaster at the Mannington mine
Where 78 miners were buried alive
Cos’ of unsafe conditions your daddy died.”
Hazel Dickens – 1968
This week, 25 miners lost their lives in a mine explosion at the Performance Coal Co. in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The explosion was the worst mining disaster in over two decades, if you don’t count the 10,000 who have died from black lung in the past decade.
Rescue workers are still working around the clock to find an additional 4 miners who are still missing.
The news comes only days after five workers died at an oil refinery in Anacortes, Washington.
Massey Energy Co., the company which owns the mine, is no stranger to mining disasters. The company has been cited for hundreds of mine safety violations in recent years, and last month, they were fined three times for ventilation problems which may have led to this disaster.
In March alone, the Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the company’s Upper Big Branch mine, where the disaster took place, for 53 safety violations.
These violations have come at a high price for the workers. In 2008, one of Massey’s subsidiary companies paid the largest settlement in the history of the coal industry. They plead guilty to safety violations that killed two miners in a fire, who suffocated and died partly as a result of the company removing needed ventilation controls.
At the Upper Big Branch Mine in Raleigh County, conditions were far worse. In an interview with the New York Times, miners told reporters that in the two months preceeding the disaster, workers had been evacuated three times because of dangerously high methane levels.
Andrew Tyler, an electrician who worked at the Upper Big Branch said “no one will say this who works at that mine, but everyone knows that it has been dangerous for years.”
Although it is still unclear what exactly led to the explosion, Kevin Stricklin of the Mine Safety and Health Administration said of the disaster: “something went very wrong here. All explosions are preventable. It’s just making sure you have things in place to keep one from occurring.”
Regulation of the Mines:
It was long known by regulators and workers alike that the conditions of the UBB mine were hazardous. Hundreds upon hundreds of violations had been found by inspectors, and workers were being evacuated monthly because of dangerously high methane levels.
As it turned out, the company’s chief executive, Don L. Blankenship, was writing memo’s to his staff to ignore the warnings. A 2005 memo which has resurfaced as a result of the disaster appears to encourage his deep mine superintendents to “run coal” at any cost:
“If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal.”
Indeed, the Mining Industry, in particular Massey Energy Co., has done everything in its power to flaunt safety, environmental and health regulations.
To do so, mining companies have joined together in an effort to appeal as many violations as they can,as fast as they can. In so doing, they are, as Representative George Miller of California said, “[rendering] the federal efforts to hold mine operators accountable meaningless.”
Their strategy is simply to overwhelm regulators with appeals.
The strategy is working. One in four citations issued against coal mines are now appealed. The result is an overflow of 18,000 appeals waiting to be reviewed and $210 million in contested penalties.
But simply overwhelming regulators isn’t their only tactic. Mr. Blankenship also spent millions of dollars in a campaign to elect Chief Justice Brent D. Benjamin to the West Virginia Supreme Court. In return, the Chief Justice twice helped throw out $50 million cases against Massey Co., leading the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that from now on, judges must dismiss themselves from cases involving people who have spent large amounts of cash in their elections.
Further inquiries have been launched into a series of photographs released in 2008 showing Mr. Blankenship dining on the French Riviera with another court justice. The photographs were taken while several other cases were being heard by the judge, all involving Massey Co.
According to the National Institute on Money in State Politics, Mr. Blankenship has also contributed more than $100,000 to political campaigns in West Virginia. Associates of the company, as well as its political action committee, have spent an additional $307,000 on federal candidates.
Conclusions:
It’s a simple fact of life in our economy that to own and run a successful business, you have to prioritize profit. That priority, however, is going to have different effects on different industries.
To the Barista in the downtown coffee shop, it’s going to mean precarious scheduling.
To the farm laborer, it’s going to mean more ICE raids.
And to the coal miner, it’s going to mean increased safety risks.
Business owners must prioritize profit. Mr. Blankenship, the owner of Massey Co., demonstrates for us with great clarity the kind of sociopath that the business world sometimes creates – a man so consumed with the desire to “run more coal,” that he will sacrifice 25 lives.
Large business owners like Blankenship, moreover, are more than capable of taking on both the courts and the regulators. He quite literally owns the judges who oversee his cases, and his political contributions all but guarantee tolerable legislation.
Blankenship, far from being an exception in the business world, is one of many business owners with a callous disregard for the lives of their workers.
So long as we operate in an economy based on profit instead of on human needs, we will continue to suffer these disasters, like the miners, from one generation to the next.
Hazel Dickens put it better than I could when she sang:
“How can God forgive you, you do know what you’ve done?
I was raped by a boyfriend on August 18th, 2006. The very next day I held back tears while I lied to a stranger over the phone about why I was unavailable to go in that day for a second interview for a job that I desperately needed. When I hung up the phone I saw a new text message. It was from him. “It’s not over. It will never be over between us…”
This is not the first time BP has had a catastrophic breakdown at one of its facilities. The company has a history of unsafe work conditions and environmental problems, largely due to cost cutting measures a congressional committee once described as “draconian.”
This week, 25 miners lost their lives in a mine explosion at the Performance Coal Co. in Raleigh County, West Virginia. The explosion was the worst mining disaster in over two decades, if you don’t count the 
