Remembering Chavez and the Delano Grape Strike

There are moments in any movement that people can point to as ones that changed history. And 50 years ago today, labor giant Cesar Chavez was the catalyst for one of those.

At a church in the Central Valley of California on Sept. 16, 1965, the father of U.S. farmworker organizing cajoled Latino pickers to join Filipino grape workers and strike against area table and wine grape growers to protest years of low pay and poor conditions. It was the beginning of the five-year Delano Grape Strike and Boycott, which is discussed in the video above.

The effort went far beyond the fields of the Golden State, as United Farmer Workers  (UFW) -- a member of the Change to Win labor coalition like the Teamsters -- detailed:

Hundreds of grape strikers traveled across the U.S. and Canada, telling their stories and organizing mass support for the grape boycott. The strikers were joined by thousands of supporters who helped tirelessly organize the boycott.

... The boycott connected middle-class families in big cities with poor farm worker families in the California vineyards. Millions stopped eating grapes. At dinner tables across the country, parents gave children a simple, powerful lesson in social justice. 

By 1970, the grape boycott was a complete success. Table grape growers at long last signed their first union contracts, granting workers better pay, benefits, and protections.

There were other battles along the way. But Chavez was a great union and civil rights leader whose influence and importance has lingered well beyond his death in 1993.

Today, the union movement again sits at the precipice of great change. Growing income inequality has left many workers struggling with low wages -- not enough to support their families. The Teamsters, UFW and all unions have a role to play to ensure that everyday Americans receive a fair wage.

Union Strong, America Stronger!

Breaking: Poverty wage protesters taking over Union Station (VIDEO)

View more videos at: http://nbcwashington.com.
(UPDATES with new DETAILS in grafs 5-12)

Cries of "No Justice, No Peace" are filling the cavernous Union Station in downtown Washington, D.C., as federal workers protesting their poverty wages are joined by their supporters.

Teamsters are among the supporters who marched through the historic rail station. Some wore t-shirts saying, "We are on strike for a Good Jobs Nation." Some held signs with the message, "Sierra Club Stands With Workers." Protesters briefly confronted police as television cameras rolled.

Federal workers, among the 2 million employed by contractors who earn less than $12 an hour, are on strike for the day. They aren't just rallying at Union Station. They're also picketing in front of the National Air and Space Museum, the Old Post Office and the Ronald Reagan Trade Center.

It's the sixth one-day strike by low-wage workers in recent months. Fast-food and retail employees have walked off the job in New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis and Milwaukee to protest poverty-level wages. The Teamsters support these actions through its affiliation with the Change to Win labor federation.&nbsp

Holding signs that said “Strike to Survive,” the protesters marched into Union Station and picketed throughout the  building. They paraded through the large basement food court where many of the strikers work. At one point, protestors staged a brief sit-in while a banner that read “Strike for a Living Wage” floated to the top of a large dome ceiling, held up by a several dozen balloons. Workers spoke through a megaphone and told their stories of struggling on poverty wages while toiling in the nation’s vast low-wage economy that includes some 2 million federally contracted workers.

Demonstrators chanted “Si, se puede” (Yes, we can), “Can’t survive on $7.25,” and “No justice, no pizza” as they headed back to the front of the station where a rally was held. Representatives of DC’s faith community opened the rally. With the crowd’s hands in the air, Rev. Whit Hutchinson said,

These are the hands with which nothing else works. We are here to remind employers, Congress and President Obama that this city, this country depends on your working hands.

Vilma Martinez, who has worked as a janitor at Union Station for 19 years, told the diverse crowd about her struggles earning just $8.75 an hour with no benefits and a serious medical condition. Justin, a 22-year old local who works at FYE in Union Station said he makes $8.50 an hour and works 17 to 28 hours a week. He is not eligible for health benefits.

It’s not fair. I’m asking Obama to help us. Keep your promise to make change.

Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota addressed the rally, pledging his support and advocacy for the workers on Capitol Hill:

This country demands better pay. Your action today comes on the heels of fast food workers who have struck in New York and Chicago. They demand a living wage, paid leave, and benefits. We call on President Obama to sign an executive order to stop federal contractors from paying less than a livable wage.

The rally was closed out by Rev. Graylan Hagler, a mainstay figure in DC’s activist community for workers’ rights. Hagler gave a fiery speech drawing parallels to sharecropping and demanding that the “federally-funded sweatshop economy” be overturned. After the rally, a contingent of protestors and workers marched to Capitol Hill for a hearing organized by the Progressive Caucus to discuss the issue of low-wage workers providing services on behalf of the federal government.

Good Jobs Nation is asking President Obama to sign an executive order requiring federal contractors to pay living wages. You can sign the petition here.

We're also hearing this about today's action:

A flash mob will occur around 530 eastern. You don't wanna miss it.

Stay tuned.

Another Wal-Mart strike in Okla.

Since you can't depend on the mainstream media to do much else than regurgitate gaffes and poll numbers, it can take a while to find out what's going on in the world. We just learned that Wal-Mart workers in Oklahoma walked off the job on Sunday.

The Huffington Post reports,

On Sunday evening, a band of renegade Walmart employees in Sapulpa, Okla., left work to protest without the aid of national labor groups. Stirred by what they saw on the news, Jeffrey Landry, David Gibbs and Nathan Beck stood outside in the vast parking lot of their Supercenter with homemade signs, beckoning cars to honk. 

Unlike last week's strikers, who were nearly all members of the union-backed worker organization OUR Walmart, the Oklahomans had no outside assistance putting together their action. 

"I saw what was happening at stores in Dallas and around the country, and I did my research," said Landry, 34, whose homemade sign protested workers' hours being cut. Landry said Walmart slashed his hours a month ago after he involved a regional HR manager in a workplace dispute over department placement. 

"They're trying to prove they're in charge by silencing me," said Landry, a father of three who earns $8.65 an hour and has worked at Walmart for two and a half years. 

The tiny group of protesters, who also made an appearance outside the store on Monday, originally planned to include 10 employees in their action. At the last minute, seven of the potential protesters backed out, Landry said. "A lot of workers came to the door and watched us, shaking their heads and saying, 'I don't want to lose my job,'" he said.

Check out this video of the protesting workers describing conditions at Wal-Mart.

Nelson Lichtenstein at Dissent Magazine says the recent lightning strikes could portend an important victory for Wal-Mart workers.

Since Wal-Mart has such control over the U.S. economy, it could be a victory for all workers. Wal-Mart
warehouse workers (employed by Wal-Mart contractors) walked out with the help of Warehouse Workers for Justice, which is affiliated with the United Electrical Workers and Warehouse Workers United, which is backed by the Teamsters' Change to Win Federation. OUR Wal-Mart and UFCW lawyers are supporting the retail strikers.

Lichtenstein:

...for every company employee fearless enough to participate in one of the sidewalk rallies, there were dozens who kept their heads down, stayed on the job but who silently endorsed the protest. That is the way it has always been when social movements get their start.

But this is what has to happen, he says:

OUR Walmart organizers and UFCW lawyers must therefore defend and protect those brave workers who stuck their necks out in order to construct a new sense of solidarity, one that has the potential to subvert the corporation’s faux communitarianism. If they can prevent such retaliation and make it safe for workers to remain members of OUR Walmart, talk among themselves, and participate in even the most minimal degree of “concerted activity,” then a huge victory indeed will have been won.

 Follow what's going  on at OUR Wal-Mart here and at Warehouse Workers United here.

Teamsters fight banksters' risky business

Wanna know why mega-bankster JPMorgan Chase can make stupidly risky trades that threaten the stability of the global economy?

Apparently it's because their oversight of risk management couldn't suck enough. The bank's risk management committee consists of a museum head who also oversaw AIG, the grandson of a billionaire and the CEO of a company that makes flight controls and work boots.

The billionaire's grandson, James Crown, is the only one with any Wall Street experience. That was 25 years ago.

Bloomberg News has the story. The two other amateur risk managers on JPMorgan's committee are Ellen Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International Inc. Reports Bloomberg:

JPMorgan, with $1.13 trillion of deposits, is the only one of the six largest U.S. lenders that doesn’t have a former banker, regulator or finance professor on its risk committee.

Futter joined AIG's board after the company's CEO donated $36.5 million to the museum but resigned before AIG took a $182.3 billion bailout from you and me the federal government.  Futter received personal loans from JPMorgan and $245K last year for her bush league work on the board.

Crown was paid $300,000 for failing to oversee JPMorgan's risk management activities, though he doesn't need it. His grandfather was a billionaire. Those 1 percenters gotta stick together.

Cote's company, Honeywell, also got loans and financial advice from JPMorgan.

The Teamsters, through our Change to Win federation and CTW Investment Group, are fighting JPMorgan's lax oversight of risk. After all, it's the kind of thing that could bring down the economy  -- again. Reports Reuters,

A labor-backed investor group critical of JPMorgan Chase & Co's corporate governance said the bank has failed to address concerns over its risk oversight and it will try to rally other shareholders for changes after a $2 billion trading loss. 

CtW Investment Group, which advises labor pension funds holding what it said are 6 million shares in JPMorgan, has advocated for risk governance changes there for more than a year. The risk policy committee of the bank's board lacks the expertise to understand risks the bank is taking...

It's a tough job, but someone who's qualified has got to do it.

Chamber, Bank of America spy targets speak out

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's plan to run an undercover smear campaign against its critics (including the Teamsters' federation, Change to Win) received little attention in the mainstream media. That is unsurprising, as the concerns of working people don't interest corporate-owned newspapers and television networks. (And they wonder why they're dying.)

The Chamber wasn't happy that its critics pointed out its true political agenda: making it easier for multinationals to ship jobs overseas and destabilize working families by lowering their wages. (The Chamber, by the way, gets support from the union-busting billionaire Koch brothers.)

The dirty tricks story got plenty of buzz, though, in the blogosphere, tech media and alternative news outlets. firedoglake, for example, interviewed one of the targets:

Brad Friedman is the co-founder of the group VelvetRevolution.us, which created StopTheChamber.com, which is unaffiliated to the union-led US Chamber Watch effort. ...“We created this campaign calling these guys out for the creeps and the criminals that they are,” Friedman said. “What’s amazing is, US Chamber watch is affiliated with unions, they have some funding. We don’t. We’re a citizens group, period. We raise 5 or 10 bucks wherever we can.”

“But these guys” in the Chamber of Commerce, he continued, “the money they were playing with is our fucking tax money. They’re funded by corporations like AIG and Bank of America who received billions in bailout dollars, and Exxon-Mobil with billions in tax subsidies. They take that money and use it to attack private citizens and private organizations for having the temerity to stand up and say, you guys are wrong. We’re fighting against how our own tax dollars are being spent against us.”

...Last year Fox News ran a story about StopTheChamber.com claiming that they put a bounty on the head of Chamber CEO Tom Donohue. “Like clockwork we received hundreds of death threats,” said Friedman. “The article came out of the blue, so somebody clearly tipped off Fox News. We don’t have direct evidence, but it’s interesting.”

Another target is journalist Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald was spied on by the same private security companies used by the same lobbying firm hired by the Chamber to run its smear campaign. In this case, the companies were hired by Bank of America because WikiLeaks claimed to have damaging information about the bank, and Greenwald (a constitutional lawyer) defended WikiLeaks.

Greenwald makes a convincing case in Salon that the lesson here is the frightening power of corporations aligned with the government to destroy individuals. He writes:

...this should be taken seriously...As creepy and odious as this is, there's nothing unusual about these kinds of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to learn about it this time because of Anonymous' hacking. That a similar scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is self-evidently pernicious; that it's being so freely and casually proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how common this is....

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power....it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

Well said, brothers.

Today's Teamster News 10/01/10

Joe Hansen Takes Helm at Change to Win Wall Street Journal ...Joe Hansen, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, will head the federation of four labor unions ... (t)he federation also ... elected Teamsters President Jim Hoffa as secretary-treasurer...

Congress leaves with unfinished business Washington Post ...Unable to get support from any Senate Republicans, Democrats couldn't push through a ... provision that Democrats said would limit the outsourcing of jobs abroad...

China's Manufacturing Growing Wall Street Journal ...Chinese growth remains robust...

Road Safety Laws Slow to Take Hold Washington Post ...years can pass before anything is done ...

Holders Reject Proposal By Hertz Wall Street Journal ...Dollar Thrifty Automotive Group Inc. shareholders on Thursday threw out an agreed $1.54 billion buyout by Hertz...

Austerity plans cloud global jobs recovery: ILO Agence France-Press ...The UN labour agency said Friday that employment in many countries would only return to pre-crisis levels in 2015 ... as austerity programmes aggravate job losses...

Links 08/12/10

Employers Moving Slowly to Fill Jobs Wall Street Journal ...Even as jobs remain scarce, employers are being unusually slow to fill positions—a problematic trend at a time when 4.3% of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months.


Troubles Abroad Adds to Worries for US Economy New York Times ...While the economy is growing again, it is growing too slowly to create many jobs or to increase household incomes.

U.S. Plans More Aid for Jobless Homeowners New York Times ...the Obama administration on Wednesday pumped $3 billion into programs intended to stop the unemployed from losing their homes.

Turnaround Continues at G.M. With Strong Quarter New York Times ...The quarterly profit marked G.M.’s strongest financial performance since 2004...

Union Official To Leave Two Posts New York Times ...Anna Burger announced Wednesday that she was retiring from her positions as secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union and chairwoman of Change to Win.


Survey: Workers Concerned About Social Security’s Future U.S. News & World Report