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Welcome to The American Prospect's weekly newsletter highlighting the best reporting and latest developments in the labor movement.
(Compiled by Justin Miller-Edited by Harold Meyerson)
The thirst for political drama in the nascent 2016 campaign is insatiable-and Vice President Joe Biden's very public hemming and hawing over whether to jump into the Democratic field is an irresistible story line for Beltway insiders. He's rumored to be announcing his decision in the coming days. So what does this mean for the labor movement?
Well, Biden already appears to be indulging in some courtship of union leadership. Late last week, he reportedly had a personal call with Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Firefighters, a politically important union that publicly withheld a nomination from Hillary Clinton. Schaitberger apparently made clear that if Biden were to get in, his union would fully back his candidacy.
Still, Biden's potential quest for labor support is already fragmented by Clinton, who has garnered several endorsements from unions representing millions of workers, and Bernie Sanders, who's won the endorsement of the National Nurses Union. As Stephen Collinson reports for CNN, Biden's trade position could be a deal-breaker within the Democratic field and in the labor movement. In light of Clinton's recent opposition to the TPP trade deal, Biden, who was instrumental in its passage, will likely face a great deal of scrutiny from uncommitted unions. Biden's stance is particularly damaging to him among unions that might be thought his natural base-industrial unions like the Steelworkers, who still have many thousands of white male members with whom Biden shares cultural affinities. Clinton has already won the backing of the Machinists and some building trades unions that might otherwise seem likely to go for Joe.
In the crucial early caucus state and labor bastion (concentrated largely in Las Vegas) of Nevada, organized labor is treading lightly. As Michael Mishak writes for National Journal, union members hold no small amount of resentment at a Democratic Party that has done little for them on immigration reform, and at an administration bent on imposing a "Cadillac tax" on members' health coverage. (Culinary Local 226, the union that represents 55,000 employees at Vegas's mega-hotels, has particular reason to be incensed: Their international, UNITE HERE, gave crucial early backing to Obama in 2008, yet has gotten nowhere in its efforts to keep the administration from trying to fund Obamacare on its members' backs.) Moreover, the Nevada labor movement is reeling from political disarray after a statewide Republican surge in 2014. "Will the state be another Ohio, where union members swarmed to the polls to fight anti-labor legislation and lifted Democrats," Mishak asks, "or another Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker and his curbs on collective bargaining remain, despite a labor-backed recall effort?"
Within the echelons of the American private university system, grad students are ramping up efforts to get unionized. Following the lead of New York University grad students, who recently became the first to unionize (they voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW), students at other elite (i.e., with big endowments) universities rallied last week to push administrations to recognize their right to collective bargaining. For Al-Jazeera America, Ned Reskinoff reports: "Grievances vary across departments and campuses, but graduate student campaigners said their core concerns included what they described as inadequate benefits and the threat of arbitrary firings."
Car-wash owners in New York City are suing the city over new rules that they contend illegally favor unionization. Under new regulations aimed at combatting wage theft, car-wash shops are required to post a $150,000 surety bond while union shops only need to post a $30,000 bond, under the empirically sound theory that union shops have dispute resolution processes and other shops don't. Business owners say this creates an unfair incentive to engage in collective bargaining and creates burdensome costs. Prospect editor Harold Meyerson reported on a similar car-wash organizing strategy in Los Angeles that has had some notable successes in improving working conditions.
Elsewhere in Gotham, nine Papa John's pizza restaurants have admitted to wage and overtime violations and will dole out $500,000 to 250 workers to settle a state investigation.
In Oregon, the state's labor department issued an advisory opinion last week stating that Uber drivers are employees, not, as the ride-sharing company claims, independent contractors. As the Portland Tribune reports, this could potentially force businesses in the industry to pay its drivers a minimum wage or provide access to other benefits. This is the latest in a string of legal woes for Uber-most notably a massive class-action lawsuit from drivers in California who argue that they have been misclassified.
Many Los Angeles charter-school teachers could soon see a clear path to unionization. In an unprecedented move, the California labor oversight board with jurisdiction over public employees filed an injunction to prohibit Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, which operates 27 campuses, from interfering with attempts to unionize its teachers. For more on unionization efforts at charter schools across the country (including Alliance's), read Rachel Cohen's feature investigation.
In a moment of high courage, Republican presidential hopeful Senator Marco Rubio admitted last week that workers cannot survive on $10 or $11 an hour. Does this mean that he thinks the minimum wage should be higher than that? Of course not! He is confident that the country's job fairies are going to sprinkle the economy with their fairy high-paying-job dust and create tons of jobs that allow workers to make a living. Why has no one else thought of that?!
Stand Up Ohio, a worker advocacy group, is pressuring state officials to raise the minimum wage to $10 an hour in 2017, and to $12 an hour by 2021. They are also calling to abolish the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.
Meanwhile, a circuit judge in Missouri has struck down St. Louis's new $11 minimum wage, ruling that it was void and noncompliant with state law. St. Louis's push to raise its minimum wage has sparked a contentious statewide debate over whether or not a municipality has the authority to set its own wage levels different from the state minimum.
Yet another front has opened up in the nationwide Fight for $15 movement. Increasingly, students are now calling on universities to increase wages for student work-study jobs to $15 an hour. Following University of Washington's decision to raise its wage floor to $15, Lydia DePillis reports for The Washington Post that student-workers at nearly 20 other schools also are pushing for raises for their part-time work.
After announcing that it would raise its minimum wage to $10 an hour and invest more in new technology, Walmart is now complaining that its profit forecasts are diminishing. The business lobby is jumping all over this, saying that this is definitive proof that enormous profit margins and living wages just aren't symbiotic. More dispassionate retail analysts have noted that Wal-Mart was overdue to upgrade its workforce and technology if it hoped to keep up with Amazon, Costco and other competitors.
And news in the campaign to raise the wage for the largest number of low-paid workers:
The union-led effort to get a $15 minimum wage on the ballot in California for 2016 attained the required amount of signatures 110 days before the deadline. Polling has shown that 68 percent of California voters would back such a measure.
About a year after San Francisco passed the first fair scheduling law in the country, progressives in Minneapolis unveiled an effort to win an even stronger scheduling law in their town-in addition to winning wage theft protections, paid sick leave, and a minimum wage hike, possibly even to $15. However, as Peter Callaghan explains for MinnPost, the ambitious campaign has hit a political roadblock. Details from the proposed scheduling ordinance-two week notice and "predictability pay" for late changes-quickly drew the ire of the local business lobby. The Minnesota Business Partnership, which represents 80 businesses (including Target and U.S. Bancorp), wrote a letter to Mayor Betsy Hodges contending that such a law would be unworkable for most businesses and would force them out of the city. Soon after, Hodges announced that fair scheduling was off the table-for now at least. This has angered her progressive allies and left unclear what the path forward looks like for the broader campaign, though Hodges has reaffirmed her commitment to enacting paid sick leave.
As NPR reports, paid sick leave has exploded as a progressive policy measure aimed at helping low-wage workers. And according to a recent survey, half of all food workers go to work sick because they have no other choice.
Tidbits
For many low-wage workers, even the Affordable Care Act isn't all that affordable.
New York State is bolstering its Task Force to Combat Worker Exploitation.
Can members-only unions make organizing in hostile environments easier?
At The Prospect…
Despite earning early endorsements from the nation's two largest teachers unions, Rachel Cohen explains that it's still unclear just what Hillary Clinton will do for public education. Read more…
From our fall issue, the latest example of the downsides of the sharing economy: Steven Hill documents how Airbnb has led landlords to kick out tenants and turn buildings into what essentially amount to illegal hotels. Read more…
