On the picket line

Food service workers picket Wall St.

Hundreds of cafeteria and food service workers took their campaign for higher wages and improved benefits to two Wall Street financial institutions on March 5. Chanting, “Who’s in the kitchen? We don’t know. Aramark has got to go!” the workers rallied first at the Bank of New York and then marched to the Goldman Sachs headquarters.

Aramark is refusing to negotiate decent contracts with UNITE HERE, which represents about 20,000 Aramark employees nationally, including about 4,000 in the New York City area. The company had sales of $12.4 billion last year. Not only is Goldman Sachs a client of Aramark, it’s also a part owner.

“There is no greater example of income inequality in American society than the Goldman Sachs cafeteria,” union President Bruce S. Raynor told the New York Times. (March 6) The average compensation for GS employees, including executives, was $660,000 in 2007, while cafeteria employees were paid about $21,000. That means GS staff made 31.4 times more than the cafeteria workers.

UNITE HERE represents about 30 percent of Aramark’s 165,000 hourly workers in the U.S. and Canada. Violence has escalated against Aramark workers who went on strike at Seneca College’s Markham campus, outside of Toronto, on March 10. To support those workers, sign a petition at www.unitehere.org.

Immigrant workers sue Gulf Coast firm

A group of immigrant workers from India and the United Arab Emirates have filed a class action suit against Signal International for luring them with false promises of permanent-resident status. They are also suing to stop being forced to live in rundown, unsanitary barracks and threatened for protesting.

The 500 welders and pipefitters, employed at the oil rig repair and construction company in Pascagoula, Miss., and Orange, Texas, were brought to the U.S. under the government’s temporary guest worker program in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

On March 6, about 100 of these workers walked off the job, holding picket signs reading “I Am A Man” and singing “We Shall Overcome” in the tradition of the civil rights movement. (Workday Minnesota, March 11)

At a rally in New Orleans on March 10, workers and their lawyers said the workers had given up their life savings and paid up to $20,000 in immigration and travel fees after being assured that Signal would help them become permanent residents. The Southern Poverty Law Center and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice are just two of the groups helping the workers.

President Bush has proposed expanding the federal temporary guest worker program as one way to allow immigrants to work “legally” in this country. However, in the 1940s and 1950s the program refused to pay thousands of Mexican workers the wages they’d earned.

SF longshore and postal workers to protest war on May Day

To show their opposition to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, delegates at the International Longshore & Warehouse Union’s annual meeting voted overwhelmingly to stop work during the day shift on May 1 at every West Coast port. The resolution also called for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East. (union press release, March 4)

Under the slogan “No peace, no work holiday,” the ILWU resolution also called on other unions, in addition to the AFL-CIO and Change to Win Coalition, to participate in similar events on May Day. In response to that appeal, the 2,700 members of Letter Carriers Branch 214 in San Francisco voted unanimously to observe two minutes of silence in all carrier stations at 8:15 a.m. on May 1 “in honor of International Workers Day and in solidarity with the ILWU stop-work action.” (union press release, March 6)

The ILWU has a long, proud history of opposing war. It was one of the first unions to call for an end to the Iraq war on May 1, 2003. Other anti-war actions have included Local 10 refusing to load bombs destined for the military dictatorship in Chile in 1978 and military cargo to the Salvadoran military dictatorship in 1981.

It’s important to note that the ILWU’s current contract expires on July 1 of this year.

Job discrimination complaints rise

Federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose a whopping 9 percent in 2007 alone. That’s the biggest annual increase since the early 1990s.

Data released on March 5 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission showed that accusations based on race, retaliation and sex were the most frequent forms of discrimination, with 82,792 complaints filed from Oct. 1, 2006, to Sept. 30, 2007, compared with 75,768 in budget year 2006. (New York Times, March 6)