The Fight for $15 Is Raising Wages. Now It's Time for Step 2: Unions.

By David Moberg, In These Times

13 October 15

t’s a safe bet that most working people would like a pay raise. They are also often reluctant to ask for one, let alone demand a doubling of their hourly rates. 

Low-wage Americans—the 42 percent of workers making less than $15 an hour—know all too well that they don’t just want more; they need more simply to survive at the lowliest version of the American standard of living. Increasingly, they are pressing their demands more forcefully, possibly inventing a new form of unionism as they persevere, organizers suggest.

This week, as the White House entertains a discussion of “worker voice,” there is new evidence from public opinion polls, legislative proposals, public testimony and activity from Congress to city halls that the fight to empower and properly pay the workers in low-wage service jobs continues to grow.

And increasingly, these workers say, they want and need a union. They also want—and say they are willing to register and to vote for—political candidates who will fight for their needs.

From the beginning, the Fight for $15 has included a demand for the right to form a union without intimidation, but the demand for $15 an hour pay stole the limelight. Now some workers who have been active in the Fight for $15 movement realize they already have an organization, even if it’s not the standard model union.

The National Employment Law Project, a pro-worker advocacy and research group, recently commissioned a survey of low-wage workers that showed strong support for both thrusts of the Fight for $15, including increased interest in registering and voting if their wage and union rights were clearly supported by at least one presidential candidate. 

NELP executive director Chris Owens was impressed by the survey’s findings that half of low-wage workers had heard of the Fight for $15 and that workers were more willing to engage in politics with the right candidate message. “What I feel that’s really different,” she said, “is the heightened awareness that unions could make a difference, and there is also heightened awareness when people see workers like themselves put themselves on the line, take risks for higher wages and a union, there will be more interest in forming unions.”

Sixty-nine percent of low-wage workers favor raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and the same fraction thinks it should be easier for them to form a union, while 72 percent approve of unions in general. That’s a higher approval than among the general public, despite an increase in generic approval of unions revealed in an August Gallup poll to 58 percent, up 5 points from last year. Black workers (87 percent approval) showed the strongest support for unions, followed by young workers (82 percent), then Latinos (79 percent), but strikingly 77 percent of low-wage workers in the South, long considered a region hard to organize, favored unions.

Fight for $15 national organizing director Kendall Fells is impressed not only with the strong interest in a union but also with workers’ sense that they already have a union. “If you’d asked me three years ago before the first strike, I would have been surprised [at the current level of support for a union], but it’s been clear that they already see it [Fight for $15] as their organization and call it a union. Low-wage workers now see belonging to an organization is the way to defend themselves on the job.”

“I would say these workers are already in a union,” he continued. “What will be needed is a mechanism to fund it, once we get McDonald’s to talk, and I think that will happen soon.” McDonald’s is under pressure from workers and governments around the world, he noted, and “they’re going to have to come to the table” to solve their problems. Fells believes that McDonald’s will ultimately see the value of workers being organized as it struggles to dig out of its difficulties.

This is a new form of “21st century unionism,” unlike the unions of the 20th century organized at workplaces from auto plants and steel mills to nursing homes, Fells says. “The tangible difference is the size of the organization, and the scale of the movement. The scale is so broad and varied. Then there is the difference of workers being in the streets, willing to risk their jobs to get what they need, and the gelling of progressive movements around the low-wage workers.”

This new information is part of the message low-wage workers are also delivering around the country in nearly 30 cities this week, starting on Tuesday, before “peoples’ wage boards,” panels of civic or political leaders. They are modeled on the wage boards that Gov. Andrew Cuomo set up earlier this year in accord with New York law to review wage standards for fast food workers in response to workers’ demands. Based on the testimony, he raised the fast food restaurant wages in New York to $15 an hour. While few other states have laws authorizing such official boards, the workers hope their testimony will sway lawmakers to raise minimum wages.

Generally low wage workers participate below average rates in electoral politics, but the survey by Victoria Research found that nearly two-thirds of low-wage workers who had registered to vote would be more likely to cast a ballot if there were a presidential candidate supporting $15 and a union. Among those workers who are not registered, 65 percent said they would be more likely to register and vote for such a candidate.

The battle over low-wage worker unionization has unsurprisingly spilled over into Congress and the campaigns, with the Democratic Party already endorsing a $15 an hour minimum wage for its platform. Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate are promoting legislation that would overturn a recent National Labor Relations Board decision that franchisors, like McDonald’s Corporation, and franchisees are likely to be considered joint employers with responsibility for workers’ wages and treatment on the job. Democrats, like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), are trying to stop the move.

On Tuesday Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), with support from Brown and other progressive Democrats announced introduction of a new Workplace Democracy Act (much less ambitious than Sanders’ previous legislation under the same title and despite its similarities, even less comprehensive than the Employees Free Choice Act that the labor movement had hoped would pass in the early years of the Obama administration). It would permit workers to gain recognition of their union through either a demonstration of majority signing support or through an election, and it would give either labor or management prompt recourse to mediation and then arbitration if the two parties could not reach agreement on a first contract reasonably quickly.

In addition to the deprivation imposed on workers and their families, organizers of low wage workers have argued that big, profitable corporations like Walmart and McDonald’s—the nation’s two largest low-wage employers—have effectively relied on taxpayer subsidies in the form of public safety net programs, from food stamps to Medicaid, public housing aid to childcare, that their employees turn to because they do not earn enough. Yet those companies could afford to provide the wages and benefit packages needed for a decent life, as they do in countries like Denmark and Australia.

A straightforward wage increase to $15 an hour would most directly reduce the public subsidies to compensate for the harm and expense caused by poverty and inequality resulting from big companies paying low wages. But in cases where that may be difficult, supporters of underpaid workers can pursue other strategies. For example, on Wednesday Chicago-area residents from community groups affiliated with National People's Action rallied before the Cook County Board of Commissioners chambers to promote the Cook County Responsible Business Act.

The act would apply to big corporations or groups of franchises that have more than 750 employees in Cook County who earn less than $14.57 an hour, now the “living wage” that businesses servicing contracts with or receiving direct subsidies from the county must pay. Under the Responsible Business Act, they would have to pay a fee to the country for every worker below that level or else pay the living wage. The formula for the fee would work like this: the number of low-wage employees X 750 X the number of dollars below the living wage per year. A company paying 1000 workers $10.57 an hour would thus pay 1,000 X 750 X 4, or $3 million a year to compensate somewhat for expenses they create for the public and to more effectively deal with those problems in the future. Supporters say the bill could raise $500 million over the first four years.

The community groups, using primarily a study of the effects of Walmart’s low wages prepared by the Democratic minority staff of the House Health, Education and Welfare committee, argue that poverty resulting directly from low wages contributes to crime, health problems, and depressed local community economies. They estimate the cost to the county economy is about $1.2 billion a year, including the need for increased public expenses. In addition to compensating county government, the bill would concentrate county spending of the new revenue on pretrial services, housing, family aid, and health care. A poll conducted for the bill’s proponents showed that 38 percent of registered voters strongly supported the Responsible Business Act, and 24 percent supported it somewhat.

On Wednesday, Derrell Odom, 36, father of two, Marine veteran of two tours of duty in Iraq, and an employee of Kentucky Fried Chicken who started working in fast-food restaurants when he was 19, will testify before a “peoples wage board” in Atlanta. “My message to the powers that be,” he says, “is that we can’t survive on $7.25. I have one bedroom in an apartment with three roommates. It’s just a struggle to survive. I often don’t even know where my next meal will come from.”

That is doubly true because his manager often offers him as little as 15 to 20 hours of work. Then, last week, when Odom worked more than 40 hours, the manager forced him to take his overtime hours not with the legally required premium pay, but at the straight rate, transferred to this week’s paycheck. 

Such treatment demoralizes most workers, but not Odom, even as he tries to pay off $7,000 in college loans and help to support his kids. “They want to keep you down, make you think they don’t need you,” he says. “With a union we’ll have someone to make our voices heard.”

The Ungodly, Destructive Power of the Citizens United Decision

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

12 October 15

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as you know, is what Butch Hancock would have come up with, had he composed "Derp Road Song."

hat are the gobshites saying these days?

We have a great deal of fun here with certain elements of the content provided by The New York Times—coughDowdcoughBrookscoughDouthatcough—but there are times in which the NYT reminds us that there is one thing it does better than any other newspaper. It can be The New York Times. Over the weekend, courtesy of a team of three NYT reporters, we had one of those moments.

Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision five years ago.

The sentence there that links the grotesque decision in the Citizens United case to Watergate is both apt and destructive. At its most fundamental core, Watergate was not merely an exercise in unaccountable criminal executive power, though it certainly was that. It also was a campaign-finance scandal. An unaccountable slush fund of millions of dollars was used to finance the break-in and all of the rest of what the late John Mitchell called, "the White House horrors." Almost all of the new legislation that emerged from the wreckage of the Nixon administration concerned campaign finance; there already being laws on the books against burglary, perjury, and obstruction of justice. All of those laws were swept away by the current Supreme Court in 2010.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs. While such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to prosper, too.

At the time that the Supreme Court legalized influence-peddling on a mass scale, we were told that all things would even out because labor unions, Hollywood, and SOROS! The Times investigation thoroughly demolishes that alibi. The decision prompted an oligarchical revolution in how we conduct the processes of democracy in this country, and that revolution has been financed almost completely by—and almost completely for the benefit of— the political right. And, no, I don't believe a bunch of hedge-fund guys are shoveling money at their legislative sublets so that we can all have the opportunity to get rich by inventing the electric fork in our garages.  They are doing so for the same reason the oligarchs of the previous Gilded Age did so – to make sure that the messy business of representative democracy doesn't touch their god-given right to buy the country for themselves, as the Times report goes on to explain.

In marshaling their financial resources chiefly behind Republican candidates, the donors are also serving as a kind of financial check on demographic forces that have been nudging the electorate toward support for the Democratic Party and its economic policies. Two-thirds of Americans support higher taxes on those earning $1 million or more a year, according to a June New York Times/CBS News poll, while six in 10 favor more government intervention to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly seven in 10 favor preserving Social Security and Medicare benefits as they are. Republican candidates have struggled to improve their standing with Hispanic voters, women and African-Americans. But as the campaign unfolds, Republicans are far outpacing Democrats in exploiting the world of "super PACs," which, unlike candidates' own campaigns, can raise unlimited sums from any donor, and which have so far amassed the bulk of the money in the election.

Read the whole thing, as the kidz say. This is the only piece written so far on the 2016 elections that actually matters, because it makes clear and plain the fact that almost everything else written or broadcast on the subject resides in some vague narrative shadowland between fairy tales and theater criticism. And it also is a ringing tribute to the profound wisdom of Justice Anthony Kennedy who, as we never should forget, reassured us that:

"Independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of,quid pro quocorruption."

Now, usually, a major weekend piece in the New York Times would "set the agenda" for all The Sunday Showz. Certainly, that was the case when the previous administration wanted to launch its bullshit through Judith Miller to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Naturally, you would think that what my man Chuck Todd would call a "deep dive" into the plutocratic morass that has been made of our politics would be Topic A for discussion. Let's take a look, shall we?

On CBS, where John Dickerson continues to oil the casters on the chair that once contained former scribe to the court of Louis The Fat, Bob Schieffer, Donald Trump said something silly about guns, and then Ben Carson said something even sillier about guns, and the panel harrumphed a lot about how badly dysfunctional the House of Representatives has become now that it is populated by the people produced by the corrupted system that the Times described. But, somehow, the fact that American politics is sliding towards becoming nothing more than rigged dumbshow never came up.

On ABC, This Week With The Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs hosted "Bobby" Jindal, who said something silly about ISIS and got called on it by old pal Martha Raddatz. There was some prattling about the non-candidacy of Joe Biden, and the roundtable featured the inexcusably employed Mark Halperin, who said that, if Hillary Clinton makes "a mistake" in the debate Tuesday night, that will be "the only story." But, somehow, the fact that American democracy has been turned into a high-class silent auction never came up.

And, finally, on NBC, at the Overlook Hotel where my man Chuck Todd always has been the caretaker, Republican congresscritters Charlie Dent and the aptly named Dave Brat got into a catfight over who was the most conservative conservative in the history of conservative conservatism. (Brat is the know-nothing who helped rid us of Eric Cantor.) Dent was the liberal. But, aha, here came Bernie Sanders:

But here is the difference in political outlook between the president and myself. What I understand is that the power of corporate America, Wall Street, the corporate media is so great that real change to transform our country does not take place unless millions of people begin to stand up and say very loudly and clearly that the United States government has got to represent all of us, and not just the top 1%.

My man Chuck Todd quickly moved onto a discussion of drones, Hillary Clinton, Sanders's possible running mates, and the basic impossibility of Sanders's getting anything done against the oligarchy that's entrenched itself in the institutions of our government through legalized influence-peddling described in the Times. But my man Chuck Todd somehow never made that connection. And the Times investigation never was specifically mentioned on the show at all, but the panel included my man Chuck Todd's new BFF, Hugh Hewitt, and he was allowed to cite a story in the wingnut Washington Beacon that accused Hillary Clinton and Sidney Blumenthal of violating the Intelligence Identities Act, which Hewitt then compared to the outright outing of Valerie Plame. Hewitt then shilled for Ted Cruz specifically because he was able to raise more money than Marco Rubio was in the third quarter. Somehow, the fact that the American experiment has been converted into a kind of alchemy where gold is turned into power never came up. If I were Nick Confessore, Sarah Cohen, and Karen Yourish, the Timesfolk who spent weeks reporting and writing the only story about the 2016 elections that matters, I might wonder if it was time to think about that career in long-haul trucking again.

Have a good holiday. I'm out.