Unions

Workers to get thousands in unpaid holiday leave

Unions
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Unison just won a major legal victory for care workers:

The Court of Justice of the European Union, in what has been called the Lock case, has ruled that a worker’s statutory annual leave pay should include commission payments if these routinely make up part of their pay.

Unison says the judgment has important implications for all workers whose pay includes supplements, such as commission and bonuses.

It will have a particular impact on those doing shift work, sleepovers or overtime in the care sector, or support staff working in residential care.

The court ruling means that routinely earned extra money should be included when calculating holiday pay.

You want unions with that burger?

Activism, Poverty, Unions, US politics
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A new wave of labour militancy has begun in the least organised sectors of the American economy:

Back in June 2012, eight immigrant workers peeling crawfish under sweatshop conditions for C.J.’s Seafood (then a Walmart supplier) went on strike in Louisiana. They stayed out for weeks, demanding an end to forced labor, wage theft, and other unfair labor practices—and they won. Following up on the C.J.’s workers’ successful action, Walmart warehouse workers in California and Illinois walked out in September, calling for improved workplace safety and a fair wage. A month later, Walmart associates walked out at 28 stores in twelve cities. The strikes marked the first time in history that Walmart retail workers had ever gone on strike, and were quickly followed by more strikes and demonstrations on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.

Why this, why now? Because increasingly, mcJobs are the future and if that’s the case, workers need to be paid a proper living wage:

Lousy jobs at fast-food joints and retail stores have been around for a long time. Sam Walton (of Walmart) and Ray Kroc (of McDonald’s) designed their business models around underpaying their employees. But experts have always brushed off calls to improve these jobs, arguing that they were stepping-stones—summer jobs for teenagers; flexible, part-time jobs for moms; or extra-cash jobs for retirees. It didn’t matter that the jobs paid low wages and offered little opportunity for advancement because they weren’t designed to support a family or be a career.

But, as good jobs have steadily disappeared over the past three decades, these rationalizations are starting to sound pretty tired. A recent report by Catherine Ruetschlin at the think-tank Demos shows that more than 90% of retail workers are over the age of 20 and that, for the vast majority, this is their full-time, long-term occupation. Labor researchers Stephanie Luce and Naoki Fujita paint a similar picture in a study of New York City-area retail workers. According to their survey, the median age of retail workers in New York is 24 years and the average retail worker has been working in the industry for five years.

Victory to the public sector workers

Crisis? What Crisis?, Life under Capitalism, Tories, UK politics, Unions
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Today public sector workers in the UK are on strike. According to a BBC poll,
the majority of the British public supports them:

An opinion poll commissioned by BBC News suggests 61% of people believe public sector workers are justified in going on strike over pension changes.

[…]

Younger people, it also suggests, are considerably more supportive of the strikes than pensioners; almost four in five 18 to 24-year-olds back the action, a little under half of over-65s do.

Half a million public sector jobs have already been lost and the ConDem government yesterday confirmed that more cuts were coming, which may mean another 300,000 people losing their jobs as the UK is to cut its way to becoming a growth orientated export driven economy. Those workers who haven’t lost their jobs have to swallow pay freezes (extended by two years of below inflation salary growth yesterday), less pension and having to work longer to get their pension (brought forward yesterday). These are all cuts supposedly driven by the government’s desire to bring down Britain’s debt, yet what was also revealed yesterday was that it’ll have to borrow up to 100 billion in the next few years, or more than 30 billion over what needed to be borrowed in Labour’s plans until 2014 if their policies had been maintained…

Instead these and other ineffectual crisis measures (certain tax cuts, less protection for workers against being fired, undosweiter) are ideologically driven, a wish list of their pals in the City. These measures are not intended to solve the crisis, but to get a bigger share of the country’s wealth to the one percent, while everybody else suffers. It’s simply fat cats stuffing their pockets. The public workers strike is the next major act of resistance against this agenda, after protests earlier this year by other affected groups, including an earleir union led day of protest in March for which half a million people turned up.

Student labourers lured under false pretences? Just Hershey

Activism, Life under Capitalism, Unions, US politics
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So you’re a foreign student wanting to come to the United States through a summer visa programme, to both work and travel, get a bit of cultural exchange going? Sounds perfect doesn’t it, until you realise it means you spent your summer packing chocolates in boxes, for less money than it cost you to get there. Well, some of the students fooled this way aren’t taking it anymore:

PALMYRA, Pa. — Hundreds of foreign students, waving their fists and shouting defiantly in many languages, walked off their jobs on Wednesday at a plant here that packs Hershey’s chocolates, saying a summer program that was supposed to be a cultural exchange had instead turned them into underpaid labor.

The students, from countries including China, Nigeria, Romania and Ukraine, came to the United States through a long-established State Department summer visa program that allows them to work for two months and then travel. They said they were expecting to practice their English, make some money and learn what life is like in the United States.

In a way, they did. About 400 foreign students were put to work lifting heavy boxes and packing Reese’s candies, Kit-Kats and Almond Joys on a fast-moving production line, many of them on a night shift. After paycheck deductions for fees associated with the program and for their rent, students said at a rally in front of the huge packing plant that many of them were not earning nearly enough to recover what they had spent in their home countries to obtain their visas.

[…]

Ms. Ozer and other students said they were paid $8.35 an hour. After fees are deducted from her paychecks as well as $400 a month for rent, she said, she often takes home less than $200 a week. “We are supposed to be here for cultural exchange and education, but we are just cheap laborers,” Ms. Ozer said.

Added exploitation bonus: the cheap labour Hershey (and I’m sure other companies too) get through this programme means they don’t need to hire expensive American workers whom you can’t nickel and dime with dodgy fees…

(Via Avedon.)