On the picket line

Equal Pay Day spotlights discrimination

Even though it’s been 50 years since the Equal Pay Act was passed, working women in the U.S. are paid on average 80 cents for every dollar men make. But it’s even lower for women of color: 70 cents for African-American women and 60 cents for Latinas. Women’s groups have designated April 12 as Equal Pay Day to draw attention to this form of racist and sexist discrimination. The Labor Department reports that the average, full-time, woman worker gets $150 less in her weekly paycheck, which amounts to $8,000 less over the whole year and $380,000 less over her lifetime. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research has released a new fact sheet showing that women have lower median earnings than men in 107 out of 111 occupations, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the workers in the 10 lowest-paid jobs. “Pay discrimination is ... undermining the economic security of American families,” said Lisa Maatz of the American Association of University Women. “[We need] to educate the public about this pernicious problem and show women they will not be alone in confronting it.” (afl-cio blog, April 12)

D.C. unionists dog Gov. Walker

“Wherever [Gov.] Scott Walker goes, he needs to know that we’re going to be there waiting for him,” said Technical Employees union President Greg Junemann, at a demonstration outside the U.S. Capitol during the April 14 hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While Republican committee members (half of whom have received donations from the right-wing Koch brothers) fawned over Gov. Walker, and Democratic committee members got him to admit to his anti-union politics, protesters outside were chanting, “Hey, Walker, you can’t hide, we can see your corporate side!” National Nurses United, whose members at the Washington Hospital Center are still battling for a contract, called the protest. “What corporate America is trying to do to unions is unfair, unjust and unnecessary, and we can’t tolerate it,” Vicki Carroll, a labor and delivery nurse at WHC, told Union City! (Metro D.C. AFL-CIO online newsletter, April 15)

Grocery workers rally to save D.C.-area jobs

When the Food Marketing Institute — the lobbying arm of the food industry — met at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Capitol Hill on March 30, hundreds of D.C. grocery workers, shoppers and community allies rallied to defend union jobs. Dutch-owned megacorporation Royal Ahold, its subsidiary GiantFood and its grocery supplier C&S Grocers are colluding to destroy hundreds of union jobs in the D.C. area as Giant outsources its warehouse operations to C&S Grocers. Members of Teamsters Local 863 in New Jersey recently lost their jobs after C&S shut down all major warehouses in that area. Though C&S claimed it was due to financial troubles, the corporation actually made nearly $40 billion last year. The workers say Ahold, Giant and C&S are also lobbying against legislation that grants sick leave to workers and extends workers’ rights. “[Ahold] — on a global basis — is attempting to destroy the economic standing of workers wherever they do business with no consideration whatsoever to the workers or the communities they live in,” said Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 President Tom McNutt, who pledged to “stand and fight” with the workers. (Union City!, March 31)

Workers’ compensation lags behind productivity

Are you working harder but find your paycheck doesn’t stretch as far? A new study by the Economic Policy Institute explains why: The wages of all working people have stagnated or decreased even though they are producing more. While compensation between 1989 and 2010 grew modestly at 20.5 percent for public workers and even less at 17.9 percent for workers in the private sector, productivity of both grew more than three times that to a whopping 62.5 percent. That exposes the ruling class’s latest tactic of trying to pit private-sector workers against those in the public sector. As a class, all workers are overworked and underpaid as part of the ruling class’s ruthless war against the workers. (afl-cio blog, March 10)