| NYC Wobblies and Allies to Rally on M17
By SWU 
May 14, 2007
NYC Wobblies and Allies to Rally on M17 Day of Action for Starbucks Workers
Submitted by SWU on Tue, 05/08/2007 - 9:52pm.
The IWW IU 460/640 District Council (NYC) will join working people around the world in solidarity with Starbucks employees and coffee farmers struggling for a better world. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend:
New York Rally for Starbucks Workers Union Global Day of Action
Outside Starbucks on the east side of Union Square (15th St. and 4th Ave.)
5:30 p.m. on May 17, 2007
Check out the global call to action for M17
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Coffee Break 'Top Employer' Starbucks Has a Crack in Its Image
By David Segal - Washington Post Staff Writer 
May 12, 2007
Four years ago, when he first donned a green apron at the Starbucks at Madison Avenue and 36th Street, Daniel Gross must have looked like any other scruffy college grad in need of a paycheck and a shave. Within a few months, though, it was clear that this Los Angeles native with the perpetual stubble was something very different: the Norma Rae of the Caramel Macchiato.
Soon after he started, Gross and some fellow baristas began to meet at each other's homes to gripe about their jobs. The pace was exhausting, the store chronically understaffed and, under Starbucks's "flexible" scheduling rules, the number of hours they worked could change week to week, leaving them unsure of how much they would earn.
Gross didn't look for a different employer. He climbed on the espresso bar waving a placard that read "UNION" -- metaphorically speaking.
Today, the Starbucks Workers Union, such as it is, is affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World and claims a "critical mass" of members at nine stores in four states, including a store in Rockville, Md. The group won't release membership numbers, but given that Starbucks has 9,401 stores in the United States and more than 128,000 "partners," as employees are known, we're not exactly talking about a massive groundswell. And to the extent that any union campaign is also a public relations battle, the fight has yet to put even a ding in Starbucks's corporate halo.
Sure, consumers chafe at the prices and the annoying argot of "venti," "grande" and "tall." Yes, others lament the way these drearily standardized outlets have become our national cafe. (Check out the variety and style of coffee culture in Europe and have a good cry.) We cut the company some slack, though, because we're addicted to the coffee and because the Seattle-based giant appears to take a reasoned, benevolent approach to everything from its staff to its Fair Trade-certified beans. Even the bottled water -- it's called Ethos -- seems enlightened.
But Gross, now a 28-year-old, third-year law student at Fordham, says that Starbucks's retail-megachain-with-a-soul image is largely a sham.
"Apparently it's true that if you repeat a lie enough times, it will resonate," he says one recent afternoon in a cafeteria at Fordham. "In my opinion, when it comes to its message about its employees, this company has the greatest PR machine in the business."
That PR machine, at least as it was represented on the phone, is a very polite and patient woman named Valerie O'Neil. "We respect the right of our partners to organize," she explains, adding that 86 percent of Starbucks workers described themselves in a survey as "very satisfied" with their jobs. If the idea of a union has failed to catch on, in her account, it's because few people at Starbucks are interested in joining.
Gross has a different theory about why his team has not yet achieved its goals, described on its Web site as better pay, guaranteed hours, an end to understaffing and a safer workplace. It's because, he says, Starbucks is actively -- and at times illegally -- thwarting them.
He cites the National Labor Relations Board, which has accused Starbucks of fighting dirty against the SWU by using bribery, interrogations and threats of retaliation. Most recently, it ruled on March 30 that Starbucks broke the law 30 times as it tried to push back against Gross and his fellow travelers. The company was accused of threatening to fire baristas who support the cause.
Starbucks denies all the accusations and plans to challenge them in court, including a claim that Starbucks illegally fired two workers -- one of them Daniel Gross. A picket to protest those firings, and raise the profile of the cause, took place last night at Dupont Circle, at the store at 1501 Connecticut Ave. NW.
"They said I threatened a district manager," says Gross, guffawing at the memory. This was in July of last year. "We were on a picket line, outside of a store, for a guy named Evan, whom they'd threatened to fire. And this manager came by and I said, 'Don't fire Evan, that would be a mistake, that would be a mistaken decision.' " A few weeks later, after what was described as an internal investigation, a Starbucks manager showed Gross the door. He took his sweet time walking through it, Gross recalls, shaking hands with co-workers and formally saying goodbye.
"I think they correctly perceived," he says of Starbucks executives, "that they hadn't seen the last of me."
* * *
The home of the cinnamon dolce latte seems an improbable hothouse for a workers' revolution. So it is with any fast-food shop. Workers in that sector don't generally expect a career there. Who cares what your third-year wage increase will be if you plan to stick around for only six months?
Still, Starbucks, of all places -- it regularly shows up in Fortune's list of "100 Top Employers to Work For" issue, and it claims to spend more on health care for employees than on coffee. Chairman Howard Schultz trumpets the company's values whenever he turns up on TV, which is often.
"We want to lead with our heart, we want to do the right thing," he told Charlie Rose in a recent interview.
In Gross's opinion, this is Starbucks at its self-mythologizing worst. He offered his considerably dimmer view of the company last week during a sort of insider's tour of a store. He hadn't set foot in a Starbucks in a while, largely because the IWW is boycotting the place. But he didn't buy anything. He just watched and critiqued. At one point, "Mambo Italiano" by Rosemary Clooney played in the store.
"Oh my God, that song," Gross moaned, like a man who'd heard it 7,000 times. "I thought they'd gotten rid of it."
Gross has the intensity of a true believer, leavened by an almost nonstop, toothy smile. He was uneasy enough being the focus of this story to refuse to be photographed without other union members in the shot, and he declined to say much about his upbringing, except that his grandfather drove a liquor truck in the Bronx and was in the Teamsters union.
"His pension allowed him to live his final years with dignity," Gross says. "Look at my generation. Millions of people in the service industry, a part of the economy untouched by the labor movement."
He leaned against the wall with all the espresso machines. "The key in retail is absolute control over the employee," he went on. "They've got rules for everything. The iced teas get 10 shakes. Not nine. Not eight. Before you hand it to the customer, 10 shakes. They're terrified a union will come in and say 'Nine shakes is enough.' "
Gross and others announced in 2004 their intention to unionize through the IWW, an organization known for militancy during its heyday in the '20s. This might seem an unlikely choice -- the union is tiny these days -- but the Wobblies, as they're known, allowed Gross and his comrades to negotiate directly with Starbucks, and didn't require certification votes at each store that would bestow upon the group official status in the eyes of the company.
The company has never considered any of the nine stores in question to be actual union shops. Official or not, though, Starbucks seemed eager to stop this union concept before it gained momentum. Its efforts led to litigation, which in 2006 culminated with the company signing a consent decree in which it promised it wouldn't threaten union supporters with negative performance reviews or transfers to other stores. Nor would it create the impression that "union activities are under surveillance."
Given this saga, and the more recent NLRB findings, Gross says that what bothers him most is the gap between what the company is and what everyone believes it to be. Case in point: It's Starbucks policy to offer health-care coverage to any employee who puts in at least 240 hours per quarter. Sounds great. But just 42 percent of employees are covered through the company, according to figures provided by Starbucks. Wal-Mart actually does better -- it covers 46 percent of its employees.
One reason that Starbucks insures fewer employees than Wal-Mart, Gross says, is because it lags the Bentonville behemoth in one other surprising area. Wal-Mart has taken a lot of grief for allegedly trying to boost the percentage of its workforce in part-time positions -- a move that reduces benefits costs. It'll never catch Starbucks. One hundred percent of its baristas -- and shift supervisors, too -- are part-timers.
O'Neil, the Starbucks spokeswoman, says the "part-time" designation is a matter of semantics as far as the workers are concerned, since it doesn't affect hourly wages -- you work a 40-hour week, you get paid for 40 hours, regardless of what you're called. As for the health-care issue, she said that many employees declined coverage because they're in a parent's or spouse's plan or -- here it comes -- they're covered by a second job. The more important figure, she argued, is 91 percent, which is the portion of employees covered, one way or another. That includes Medicaid, the federal insurance program for poor people.
Members of the SWU contend that requiring all baristas to work part time not only keeps down the company health care costs, it hands vast leverage to managers, who can punish those who complain by scheduling them for fewer hours. They also say that working too many hours is high on the company's list of no-nos.
"I once worked 43 hours in a week," says Seth Deitz, a union member in the Rockville store, "and my boss disciplined me. She was like, 'Don't do that again.' "
Ben Reinhart was dismissed from his barista gig at a Gaithersburg Starbucks about five years ago. Today he works for a construction company, but joined the tiny protest at Dupont Circle last evening.
"You couldn't get any kind of strict schedule," he recalled of his time at Starbucks. "You had to compete with fellow workers for hours, and this led to a horrible environment."
The all-part-time barista force might, in fact, be one of the secrets to Starbucks's success, but for reasons that the SWU doesn't talk much about. In interviews with about 20 employees, most said they were quite pleased with their jobs, and one guy crowed about the health-care benefits, which cost him $36 a month. (The majority of baristas wouldn't talk; the company instructs employees not to speak to the media.) Most made about $9 an hour.
Either because the wages are so low or because a full-time position isn't in the cards, nobody who spoke said they intend a career behind the steam nozzle.
When grievances were voiced, they were not exactly the kind that send workers to the ramparts.
"I hate this apron," said a woman who declined to give her name. "I like wearing nice stuff."
Maybe low expectations are exactly what a Starbucks employee ought to have. Perhaps the point of a job there, as at any quick-service franchise, is to offer people an entry-level rung on the employment ladder, or a stopgap measure while studying for a graduate degree. There may be very few people who look at the Frappuccino blender the way that Gross's grandfather looked at his truck.
Gross is unmoved. "This is the direction the economy is heading," he says with a shrug. And it's a part of the economy he intends to rejoin. Once a lawyer, he plans to work for a public interest law firm. But one of his many goals is to force Starbucks to put him back on the payroll. So if all goes according to plan, in a few months Gross will be a rather exotic specimen in the labor market -- a barista with a law degree.
"They fired me illegally," he said, smiling but totally serious, "and I want my job back."
Special correspondent Chris Richards contributed to this story from Washington.
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Tenement guides learn from history, form union
By Julie Shapiro and Alyssa Giachino 
May 09, 2007
SOURCE http://www.thevillager.com/villager_210/tenementguideslearn.html
Tenement guides learn from history, form union
By / The Villager / May 9 -15, 2007
After years of educating tourists on the importance of unions,
workers at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum are taking their own
advice.
Last Wednesday, a group of per diem workers met with museum
management to demand recognition of their union, U.A.W. Local 2110.
They requested a card count, in which a neutral third party would
verify that a majority of workers have signed cards declaring their
desire to have union representation.
The workers' complaints include conditions endemic to the original
tenements: extreme temperatures and cramped rooms. The workers want
pay increases, benefits, guaranteed hours and improved breaks.
"We teach civic lessons about workers who unionized in the Lower East
Side," said Tal Bar-Zemer, a costumed tour guide at the museum,
located at 97 Orchard St. "We felt the union would be a really
wonderful thing, especially given the historical lessons that [the
museum] teaches."
Bar-Zemer, 23, represents "Victoria," a member of a Sephardic Jewish
family who lived in the building around 1916. She piles on a
shirtwaist, a petticoat and skirt and sometimes a pinafore and spends
the day orienting visitors on the advantages and pitfalls of life in
the tenements around the turn of the century.
The air conditioner in the apartment has been broken since last
summer, and the room is poorly heated in the winter, Bar-Zemer said.
Between tour groups she often gets a break, though she has to be "on
call" and in costume at all times.
H.R. Britton, a tour guide who leads up to six tours a day at the
museum — though not in costume — said the lack of air conditioning is
especially hard on the costumed interpreters who are in an enclosed
space for up to eight hours.
"The girl that's in there in a wig and three petticoats is sweltering
to the point of nausea," he said. "We're at the front lines of the
museum, but we're the lowest on the totem pole."
Britton said leading tours for groups ranging from third-graders to
retirees requires a lot of skill in both storytelling and crowd
management.
"It's a complex story that we tell," he said. "We have to weave these
narratives together."
Last Thursday, the Tenement Museum released a statement in response
to the meeting with the union.
"We have indicated in the past that we would recognize any union that
establishes itself as the choice of a majority of our employees in an
appropriate unit," the statement reads. "We believe the [National
Labor Relations Board] is the agency that can best determine that
issue through a secret ballot election by our employees."
Daniel Arnheim, the museum's director of public relations and
marketing, declined to explain the statement or answer questions,
saying only, "We have issued a statement. That's as far as we're
willing to go."
The museum has 40 per diem workers — who work on a flexible schedule
and are paid for the days they work. Nearly all of them have joined
the union, said Eden Schulz, recording secretary of Local 2110.
The museum's statement means that the administration will not
cooperate with a card count to establish the union, Schulz said. The
museum's choice to involve the National Labor Relations Board will
make the process lengthy and expensive, she said.
"If the boss was really interested in recognizing the union and being
fair about it, there's no reason not to agree to a card check," Schulz
said. "It's disappointing…. This is really the direction that
anti-union employers go."
"Especially at the Tenement Museum, which has a real understanding of
labor history, we're hoping they would understand where we're coming
from and would agree to take a more progressive route," Schulz said.
The National Labor Relations Board process can take years, which
unions argue gives employers the advantage by allowing them to
intimidate workers and threaten them into voting against unionization.
Bipartisan legislation in Congress seeks to simplify the process by
certifying the union once a majority of workers have signed card
authorizations, rather than using a ballot election.
"The only reason bosses like to go to the N.L.R.B. is because it buys
them time," Schulz said. "People already expressed their desire for
the union by signing cards. People want an impact on their jobs right
now."
Britton is surprised that management is resistant to the staff forming a union.
"I find it really ironic," he said. "You lionized the unions, but you
don't want one under your roof. How does that square with the peoples'
lives you eulogize?
"It hurts me to see a lack of integrity like that," Britton said,
"Especially at a museum whose mission I love."
Schulz is not certain of the union's next action, but she is
confident that the union can find ways to pressure the museum, if
necessary.
"A lot of people who make donations to the museum would be very
sympathetic to what we're doing," she said. U.A.W. Local 2110
represents technical, office and professional workers, including those
at Columbia University, New York University, the Museum of Modern Art
and the New-York Historical Society.
City Councilmember Alan Gerson, who is an honorary trustee of the
Tenement Museum, said through a spokesman that he supports the
workers' right to organize.
"It's between the workers and the museum to figure it out, and we
hope that they do," he said.
Bar-Zemer described the meeting between workers and management as
"apprehensive," at times tense and at times friendly. The management
seemed surprised but positive, and Bar-Zemer hopes for a favorable
outcome.
"We are the face of the museum," she said. "To have them not
recognize our union would be really antithetical to everything that
the museum stands for."
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Truckers and Wobblies Come Together in May 1 Inauguration of Workers' Hall
By Marcos Meconi 
May 07, 2007
The Gilberto Soto Workers Center Opens in Elizabeth New Jersey
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Elizabeth, NJ. On May 1st, a New York delegation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), commonly known as the “Wobblies”, traveled to Elizabeth, NJ to co-sponsor the opening of the Gilberto Soto Workers Center. The Wobblies came together with a group of owner-operator truck drivers, who, by law, are regarded as small businessmen and not allowed to unionize. The Center was created to provide a space for the truckers to organize and address their needs. It is named after Teamster organizer Gilberto Soto from El Salvador, who was assassinated during a visit home in 2004.
IWW organizer Billy Randall likened the contractual situation of the owner-operators to the sharecropping system that existed in the south: “The drivers are identified legally as independent owner-operators. This prevents them, as ‘independent businessmen’, from joining a union and negotiating rate changes and their benefits. We intend to challenge that.”
The problem is that these are not small businessmen. According to Marco Rodriguez, another driver, “they offer to pay you, say, 70% of the total. But you never know what the total is!” In this way, what may sound like a very convenient deal and hardly a reason to complain, can in fact, be the opposite.
Truckers make about $1950 a month, according to Delmer Melara, an owner operator. Another driver, Luis Alvarez, pointed out that truckers’ wages have not gone up in 20 years. “A two-bedroom apartment used to cost $250 a month. Now it’s $1500. I have six kids. People think truckers make good money, but in reality, I can barely make a living.”
Cesar Vargas, Secretary General of the Gilberto Soto Workers Center, pointed out, “This July will mark a record number of 4.000.000 containers being brought in and out the New York City area through New Jersey. 80% of the drivers that move that cargo have no health insurance.”
Louis Martí, a transportation worker present at the event, is living proof of that fact. Mr. Martí has had part of his left leg amputated due to a late prognosis of diabetes. Mr. Martí told how at first he paid for his doctor visits out of his own pocket. “But later on, I had to stop, you know how it is. I have no health insurance.” A prosthetic limb would cost him up to $5000, doctors told him.
Another issue that came up consistently amongst the drivers is harassment at the ports. Drivers complain that the harassment comes from members of the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), the union of the port workers. The most common way of harassment, they say, is being subject to long unnecessary delays, which make them waste time and money (they are not paid hourly). Luis Alvarez went as far as denouncing the Teamsters for being complicit with the ILA members in their mistreatment. But Christina Montario, a Teamster representative, thought Mr.Alvarez was mistaken. “He must’ve confused whoever harassed him with someone else. The Teamsters support these drivers. Gilberto Soto was a Teamster.”
Mayra Soto, sister of Gilberto Soto, was happy to see the work of her brother was alive and well in the creation of the Workers’ Center. “This is what he fought for. This is his legacy.”
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Wobblies Organize Brooklyn Warehouses
By Caitlin Esch 
May 05, 2007
In 1903, when Japanese and Mexican immigrant workers wanted to unionize in California, the American Federation of Labor denied them a union charter, refusing to work with non-whites. The Industrial Workers of the World, on the other hand, embraced workers of all colors, as long as they were a little “red.” At less than $4 an hour, some Mexican workers in Brooklyn today earn little more than they would have in 1903—and these workers are again turning to the IWW.
On March 10, in the sparsely inhabited industrial graveyard that straddles the borough divide between Brooklyn and Queens, 15 to 20 people picketed outside EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus, a food distribution warehouse, to protest labor abuses. EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus employs about 25 workers and is the largest of five food distribution warehouses in the area where workers are trying to unionize. The others—Amersino, Giant Big Apple Beer, Top City and Handyfat—employ about 65 workers total.
IWW organizer and do-rag bestyled Billy Randel explains that the point of the small picket, far from the eyes of the public, is to remind the owner, one Mr. Lester Wen, that he is being watched. Randel elaborates, “This warehouse is really bad. It’s one of the worst. When we first came in here about a year ago, workers were working 60 to 70 hours for around $350 a week.”
José Vaquero, a Mexican laborer in his 50s, says he made even less than that at Handyfat, a nearby warehouse in Brooklyn. Vaquero was employed at the warehouse for 12 years before allegedly being fired for his involvement in the IWW. “I was making about $280 a week, working about 60 hours. And the work was physically exhausting.”
Bert Picard, an IWW organizer, said the firing of Vaquero was “gratuitously evil.” He recounts, “After José was fired, he picketed in front of the warehouse with six other guys and Dennis Ho (the owner) called the cops. Six cars came and Ho insisted that the picketers were illegal and tried to get the cops to deport them. That’s just kicking a man in the teeth when he’s down.”
In June of 2005, immigrant laborers from Brooklyn warehouse Amersino approached the community group, Make the Road by Walking, and together they filed a Department of Labor back wage claim requesting compensation for hours worked at below minimum wage and unpaid overtime. Juan Antonio Rodriguez, 23, was one of those laborers. “We went to a (Make the Road by Walking) meeting because we knew the general labor laws of this country and we knew that (Amersino) was breaking them.”
Rodriguez and others met Billy Randel and Bert Picard at the Make the Road meeting, and together they started to unionize workers at Amersino. The movement grew and four other warehouses joined the effort. There are currently about 50 laborers throughout the five warehouses involved in the union.
When Rodriguez started working at Amersino a year and a half ago, he was paid approximately $4 an hour. He usually worked from 5:30 am to 5:30 pm and if he was five or 10 minutes late, he was penalized a $5-10 fee. There were no schedules, no job security, no vacations, no sick days, and no overtime.
Rodriguez says he was fired for joining the IWW in an attempt by the owner to discourage union activity. After he and five others were fired, the IWW filed a complaint against Amersino with the National Labor Relations Board. Almost a year later, on March 7, 2006, the NLRB ordered Amersino owner, Henry Wang, to reinstate Rodriguez and pay thousands of dollars in back wages.
Pedro Campos, 28, was an employee at Handyfat for seven out of the last ten years, until he was fired three months ago. Before workers started unionizing, he was paid $270 a week for 60 hours of labor. “Conditions were bad,” he says, “They yelled at us and said horrible racist things. We didn’t have vacations, we didn’t have sick days and they paid us less than minimum wage. We worked very hard there, moving one-hundred pound cargoes of rice and soy sauce.”
In December, Handyfat owner, Dennis Ho, locked out his employees and demanded they submit I-9 employment eligibility forms. I-9 forms are supposed to be submitted within 72-hours of hire. The fact that Ho did not ask for the I-9 forms until, in some cases, a decade after hire suggests he was using the employment eligibility forms as an intimidation tactic to discourage undocumented workers from unionizing.
“Even though employees don’t always have proper papers, they aren’t afraid of unionizing,” says Campos. “We want respect.”
This kind of treatment is far from rare. A new report released in December 2006 by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU estimates that 13% of all New York City workers were paid below minimum wage in 2005. The report continues: “Half of day laborers surveyed in 2003 experienced non-payment of wages—that is, they were not paid at all.”
Says IWW organizer Bert Picard, “$4 an hour is the norm. Vacation and paid holidays don’t exist. It’s flagrant. It’s like, law? What law? The Department of Labor certainly doesn’t enforce the laws. We bring these cases to the Department of Labor on a silver platter and they sit on them for a year. If there’s no union behind them, the workers get ignored, and the owners know that. They have complete impunity…EZ-Supply workers were in the dark (as to the status of their case) for a year. And then (the workers) called up and found out that the owner had settled over six months ago and was supposed to pay them back wages.”
“People are used to it. It is what we have come to expect,” Rodriguez concurs.
Picard explains that warehouses often illegally pay employees by the week, instead of by the hour, thereby forcing workers to work unlimited and indefinite hours. “If they don’t finish a delivery, they won’t have a job tomorrow. So they stay late and finish the delivery.”
The Brennan Center report states that, “While New York’s economy has changed the (Department of Labor’s) strategies and resources have failed to keep pace.” The report explains that the Department of Labor “has insufficient investigators to address a tremendous backlog of individual complaints—it has approximately 120 investigators on board, compared to more than eight million workers in the state.”
Robert M. Lillpopp, spokesman for the Department of Labor, responded by saying, “We continue to be as aggressive as possible when we pursue violations. When we get tips, we investigate.” In fact, the Department of Labor has collected more back wages in recent years than in the past. The New York Times reported that over $10 million were collected in back wages in 2005, a figure 36% greater than the year before. Although clearly an improvement from 2004, many say it is still not enough. Picard estimates that the five warehouses alone owe millions in back wages.
Just how common are immigrant unions? According to the AFL-CIO President John Sweeny, only about 13% of all workers in the U.S., including immigrants, are unionized. And while the National Labor Relations Act was passed in 1936 to protect unionizing workers from being fired, the AFL-CIO estimates that about a third of organizing campaigns result in the dismissal of those involved. Businesses today are doing their best to prevent workers from unionizing—and for undocumented immigrants with a lot to lose, the risks of forming a union are sometimes too severe.
“The people who work (at Amersino) have a little bit of fear about organizing,” says Rodriguez. “They have families to support so they need to work. They don’t want to be fired but they want things to get better. It’s not so easy to find good work in this country.”
Yet another obstacle to unionizing efforts, Picard postulates, is the possibility that the warehouse owners have formed their own organization. “Now, this is complete conjecture,” he qualifies, “but I think there is an owners’ association or some group that convinced EZ-Supply that they couldn’t recognize the union because it will hurt business across the board if they do.”
Picard says that EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus was ready to negotiate with IWW before abruptly going back on its word. The union fought back by striking and convincing restaurants to buy from other warehouses, but to no avail. “It just doesn’t make sense. (Wen) is losing money. Who’s compensating him? Who’s paying him? We feel there is something happening on a larger scale and the Department of Labor doesn’t want to deal with this.”
As the first warehouse to unionize, Handyfat workers saw some early successes. Six employees joined the union and entered into constructive dialog with the owner, Dennis Ho. In January 2006, Handyfat agreed to pay workers fair wages and require fewer hours. Although this initial goodwill did not last, Joel, a longtime Handyfat employee, got his first paid vacation in 12 years, which he took immediately.
In November 2006, EZ-Supply/Sunrise Plus owner Lester Wen agreed to recognize the union as well, and negotiated with the IWW for improved conditions. But one month later, Wen recanted and stepped up threats against union members. He fired 13 workers after the IWW served him with a federal complaint. Handyfat was also served papers and subsequently fired any employees suspected of unionizing.
Most recently, on March 13, 2007, a lawsuit was filed in federal court by the IWW for $812,000 worth of back wages owed by Amersino.
Workers at the five warehouses are in the throes of a potentially historic moment. They follow in the footsteps of Starbucks workers who have also unionized with the IWW in New York City. Picard reflects, “This is part of a larger movement. People are unionizing all over. There are worker centers across the country. But it’s hard not to lose faith sometimes. I think this thing has to grow more before it starts to have an impact. And the Labor Board system is broken.”
“We, the IWW, are interested in rekindling an institutional presence,” he says. “I blame the other labor unions for letting it get to this point. We were so busy protecting what we have that we didn’t notice how bad things were getting. My wife and I worked in a factory in the 70s. We had a health care plan. We had vacation time and sick days. We considered it a sweatshop at the time, but we had benefits and only paid $100 a month in rent. If anyone had told me then that labor would get this bad, that people would be working 60-plus hours a week making $4 an hour paying $1200 a month in rent, I would have said you were crazy. What’s next? Working 16 hours a day for $2 an hour?”
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