On the picket line

NYS day care workers demand union

Hundreds of child care providers rallied on May 24 outside Gov. George Pataki’s midtown office in New York to demand that he sign legislation that would allow them to join a union and negotiate with the state. The bill was passed unanimously by the State Senate in April after earlier passage in the Assembly by a wide margin.

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said its effort to sign up the day care workers was the union’s biggest organizing campaign since it helped organize paraprofessionals in the late 1960s. The campaign, started last summer, took off immediately “because this predominately female, minority work force is as in need of a union as anyone I’ve ever seen.”

More than 6,000 of the 34,000 child care workers statewide have already signed union cards. A recent study by the Association of Community Organizations to Reform Now found that day care workers earn $19,933 on average a year. They don’t have sick days, health care benefits or pensions. Illinois, Oregon and Washington state already have laws allowing day care workers to organize.

NYC hospital workers win long battle for union

The Office of Collective Bargaining ruled in mid-May that 1,300 coordinating managers in New York City hospitals could be represen ted by Communications Workers Local 1180. One immediate result: the workers will begin receiving overtime pay. The ruling ended a battle dating back to 1994. Local 1180 already represents 2,362 workers in the city’s hospitals.

Immigrant workers sue for back pay

Nine former employees of a Brooklyn supermarket, all immigrants from Central and South America, filed suit in May accusing Bogopa Service Corp. of forcing them to work solely for tips over long hours with no breaks at Food Bazaar. They are suing for $1.56 million in back pay and overtime, including interest.

The workers bagged groceries for 50 to 66 hours a week, earning as little as $100 a week in tips, from 1998 to November 2005. Mem bers of the Urban Justice Center and the National Mobilization Against Sweat shops, which helped the workers bring the lawsuit, said the Food Bazaar case reflects a growing problem of labor abuses in supermarkets and hotels.

SF Labor Council supports full immigrant rights

On May 22 the San Francisco Labor Council voted unanimously to endorse the national statement of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR). This adoption is significant, noted a press release from the Open World Conference of Workers (www.owcinfo.org), because it sends a signal to all members of Congress, as well as the broader immigrant rights movement, that the San Francisco labor movement, including all AFL-CIO and Change to Win affiliates, is fully united in opposition to all so-called “immigration reform” bills currently under consideration by Congress.

The statement affirms, in the words of AFL-CIO Vice President Linda Chavez-Thompson, that immigrant workers “should be recognized as full members of society—permanent residents with full rights ... because to embrace the expansion of temporary guest-worker programs is to embrace the creation of an undemocratic, two-tiered society.”