John Edwards Joins the Hotel Workers

Thank you, John Edwards, for sacrificing so much for the hotel workers!

I have faith that you called for the repeal of Taft-Hartley, an absolute boycott of scab operations, and an end to the SFPD's role as enforcer for the hotel bosses.

With the presidential race drawing to a close it is clear that the Democrats are running scared (fearful of losing to Bush) because their party has up to now virtually ignored the needs of the working poor.

A handshake from John Edwards is a significant reminder that the Democratic Party cannot win with corporate money alone-- and in the end must defer to the people who actually elect them.

The workers striking at the Argent and elsewhere should understand the handshake for what it really is-- a token that will help the Kerry-Edwards campaign get some juice in their home stretch. Don't forget that Kerry took Edwards as his running mate after being rebuffed by Republican Senator John McCain. Edwards achieved national prominence with his "Two Americas" speech.

Don't forget that the workers have the juice-- and Kerry-Edwards need it.

Just as we saw in the Newsom vs. Gonzalez mayoral race-- the Democrats pull out all the stops at the last minute by flying in heavy hitters for symbolic purposes. Just be sure that you get what you demand-- and not just a warm feeling.

Good luck Mr. Edwards! Good luck strikers! Good luck San Francisco!

A start is a start-- even if it is late in the game.

Disclaimer: I am voting for Nader-- the real friend to workers in America.

What an insult this is really. Where has John Edwards been the last 20 years? Where has Kerry been as workers have faced attack after attack?

Most workers know this is nothing but an attempt to win votes and appear to be on our side when in fact he's not. What is sickening is an insult like this is not exposed by the Union officials.

Newsome does this regularly in Bayview Hunters Point, but refuses to actively listen to the community. Photo-Ops are not helping marginalized people.

John Edwards grew up in a household of textile workers, and has been behind UNITE's organizing drives in North Carolina for years. And also for the record, he never busted his own employees for trying to organize a union - unlike the other 2 parties' candidates.

Interestingly-- Ralph Nader preferred that John Kerry pick John Edwards as his running mate because Edwards was superior to other candidates Kerry considered choosing earlier in the year (includuing Republican Senator John McCain!). Edwards lambasted his opponents in the primaries, particularly with his speech about "Two Americas". Since having been chosen to run with Kerry, Edwards has been kept virtually under wraps-- a potential liability to Kerry because his persona and popularity threaten to outshine Kerry. It seems that the campaign prefers to use him as their point responder to political fires like the Hotel Workers strike to keep the illusion alive that the Democratic Party is pro-Labor. Nothing could be further from the truth: Like the Republican Party, the Democratic Party is a party beholden to corporate interests-- and it is arguably more insidious than the Republican Party because it wins union support with token promises that are easily broken even in power (to be blamed on Republican intransigence or other excuses). To understand how the Democratic Party abuses the people's trust read Ralph Nader's vice-presidential running mate's Avocado Declaration at : http://www.avocadoeducationproject.org/avocado.shtml)

Here is what Ralph Nader has said about John Edwards (Letter June 22, 2004, September 3, 2004, and a pre-Labor Day press release September 6, 2004).

June 22, 2004

John Kerry
John Kerry for President, Inc.
901 15th Street, NW, Suite 700
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Senator Kerry:

I want to urge you to select Senator John Edwards as your vice presidential candidate. He has already gone through a primary campaign and has his rhythm and oratory (the two Americas speech) all well honed. After a slow start, Senator Edwards closed fast and has won praise from the media. As you know, Presidential candidates reach a tiny fraction of voters directly. The vast majority of voters can only be reached by the mass media.

There is another reason for choosing Senator Edwards. One of the pillars (the other two being civil rights and civil liberties) of our democracy – the civil justice system – is under severe attack by the corporate supremacists who wish to deny wrongfully injured or defrauded people from having their full day in court or even a partial day in court. Senator Edwards can stand up for the millions of Americans who suffer these harms and costs every year.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

*****

September 3, 2004

Senator John Edwards
Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.
P.O. Box 34640
Washington, DC 20043

Dear Senator Edwards:

When are you going to stand up and defend our civil justice system from the vicious, corporatist, insurance industry battering by their mouth pieces, George W. Bush, Bill Frist et al., day after day? Hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans are injured, made sick or lose their lives by corporate recklessness, deception and cover-up every year. Why can't John Edwards and John Kerry stand up for these defenseless people against the wrongdoers, their lobbies and their insurance industry profiteers?

The truth must be told. The lies must be exposed. The doors to our courts must be kept open. Our judges and juries must not have their hands tied. People should have their full day in court. This is the American way, since our forebearers fought King George III in 1776, and our founders gave us our constitutional right to trial by jury. Speak and speak expansively about this pillar of our democracy.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

*****
Nader on Workers and Labor:

September 6, 2004 press release

Labor Day: A Call for Rights for Working People

Washington, DC: The Nader/Camejo Campaign joins Paul Tobias of Workplace Fairness in calling for a civil rights movement for workers. Under current law, a worker's freedom is subordinated to employer property rights.

The general rule of law for employees is employment at will: an employee can be fired for any reason, no reason, or a bad reason, without recourse. Workers gained rights in the early twentieth century when the union movement developed, with workers joining together to bargain with employers. But that movement was stalled by laws that put up barriers to workers' joining together in a union. The civil rights movement for workers should seek a Bill of Rights for Workers, including the right to organize a union and the right to earn a living wage for all full-time workers.

America’s working men and women have been abandoned by the corporate-dominated two-party system. The evidence is everywhere. The percentage of union members in the private economy has dropped below ten percent, the lowest in over sixty years. At the heart of this decline are labor laws which throw insurmountable barriers before organizing efforts. A professional class of public relations consultants and lawyers has evolved to counsel employers on ways to take full advantage of the Taft-Hartley Act in fendeng off organizing efforts. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) gives employers plenty of ways to prevent workers from exercising their supposed right of freedom of association.

The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 makes it extremely difficult for employees to organize unions and should be repealed. Among the key provisions of Taft-Hartley:

* Taft-Hartley authorizes states to enact so-called 'right-to-work' laws. These laws undermine workers' ability to build effective unions by creating a free-rider problem—workers can enjoy the benefits of union membership in a workplace without actually joining the union or paying union dues. Right-to-work laws increase employer leverage in resisting unions by enabling them to benefit from free riders. Vastly decreased union membership follows, dramatically diminishing the unions' bargaining power.
* Taft-Hartley outlaws the closed shop, which required that persons join the union before being eligible for employment with the unionized employer (still permitted are provisions that require any member of a bargaining unit to pay a portion of dues to that union).
* Taft-Hartley defines “employee” for purposes such as excluding supervisors and independent contractors. This diminishes the pool of workers eligible to be unionized. The exclusion of supervisors from union organizing activity facilitates their use by management as a buffering “front line” in anti-organizing efforts.
* Taft-Hartley permits employers to petition for a union certification election, thus undermining the ability of workers and unions to control the timing of these elections during the sensitive organizing stage, invariably forcing an election before the union is ready to hold one.
* Taft-Hartley requires that election hearings on matters of dispute be held before a union recognition election, thus delaying the election. Delay generally benefits management, giving the employer time to coerce workers.
* Taft-Hartley establishes the “right” of management to campaign against a union organizing drive, thereby scuttling the principle of employer neutrality.
* Taft-Hartley prohibits secondary boycotts—directed to encourage neutral employers to pressure the employer with which the union has a dispute. Secondary boycotts had been one of organized labor’s most potent tools for organizing, negotiating, and dispute settlement.

The president needs to appoint federal judges who are supportive of the rights of workers, not those judges who summarily dismiss employee claims, who narrowly read the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), or who do not allow punitive damages. Efforts to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, to create explicit employer neutrality, and even to make modest reforms such as card check voting have been abandoned by the two-party system, with few exceptions among legislators. This systemic failure to enforce labor rights allows for retaliatory firings of organizers and even those who vote to unionize in secret elections.

With the demise of union influence, almost every aspect of workers’ rights is given short shrift. The minimum wage has been allowed to languish far behind inflation as executive pay skyrockets. The gap between the wages of now two-job (or more) working families and wealth of the privileged widens, even as worker productivity rises. The average worker takes home takes home $517 per week, while the average CEO of the largest companies takes home $155,769 per week. The gap between workers and large companies is now greater than 300-to-1. In 1982 the gap was 42-to-1. Over 45 million workers – one in three – do not make a living wage, namely under $10 per hour gross. This is insufficient for an individual to live on and certainly not enough for a family. Nader/Camejo advocates immediately increasing the minimum wage to $8 per hour, from its current $5.25 per hour. Two years after that increase, Nader/Camejo advocates a $10 per hour living wage.

The battle for a living family wage and battles to repair the workers compensation systems to secure the rights of injured workers to treatment and re-training are fought without the steadfast support of most unions or major political parties. Universal health care, available in nearly all democracies, languishes as a movement in this country for lack of power by organized labor within the American political system. Finally, the Enron scandal showed the need for employees to be allowed to diversify their stock holdings in 401(k) accounts and the need for employees to sue under ERISA for breach of fiduciary duty when employers deliberately deceive employees in matters that will affect anticipated benefits. Where employee rights are at the pleasure of management, management takes care of its own.

The marginalization of organized labor and its agenda for working people within our corporate-dominated political process is in sharp contrast to Western Europe. There unionization is industry -wide and not within a single company. The political support enjoyed by labor results in statutory rights available to union member and non union member alike. A month’s paid vacation, longer sick, maternity and family leave and of course health care that is entirely portable are benefits taken for granted in other Western capitalist economic systems. Landmark legislation in 2000 prohibited companies within the European Union from discriminating against workers based on their age, disability, sexual orientation, religion in addition to racial and sex discrimination.

With every election, unions are pressed to donate and get out the vote to protect the political status quo. Yet the same candidates whom unions seek to reelect stand by passively (or actively support), trade agreements which allow vast outsourcing of skilled jobs to third world countries where labor laws are much less protective if they exist at all.

How then can working Americans transform the landscape?

One idea is to view labor rights as civil rights. Suppose workers enjoyed the same rights to form or join a union as they enjoy for other forms of discrimination? If workers seeking to unionize could sue under the Civil Rights Act of 1991 (instead of depending on existing unions to press for remedies before toothless federal agencies) they could secure:

* Compensatory damages, not just back pay, but damages for serious humiliation or grave emotional distress.
* Punitive damages, to send a message to outlaw employers that behave contemptuously, whether it is Microsoft or a big city sweatshop.
* Injunctive relief, including temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions so that employers can be in court defending themselves, or at least in depositions, within days or weeks of an unlawful firing.
* Legal fees, not only to give employers an incentive to settle but to empower individuals to bring their own law suits, even start their own organizing drive ,and to enlist the private bar as a new army of organizers.

For the first time every citizen would be empowered to go out and push the cause of dignity and fair pay at work.

A Worker’s Bill of Rights is needed because the rights of worker’s have been on the decline. It is time to reverse that trend and begin to give workers—the backbone of the US economy—the rights they deserve. Among the items that should be included in a Worker’s Bill of Rights are:

* Workers need to be given a living wage – not a minimum wage.
* Access to health care and unilateral reductions in medical benefits should not be allowed.
* A pension plan should be included for employees and pensions for current employees and retirees should not be allowed to be reduced unilaterally.
* Employers should not be able to avoid these benefits by hiring “temporary workers” or “independent contractors.”
* The privacy of employees need to be protected, e.g. the monitoring of employee email.
* When downsizing of a company is necessary, employees need to be given adequate notice and sufficient severance pay.
* The pernicious dominant employment law of “employment at will” that allows for an employee to be fired for any reason, no reason or a bad reason needs to be replaced with an employee’s bill of rights.

When it struck down Alabama’s debt peonage law in Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911), the United States Supreme Court wrote that the purpose of the Thirteenth Amendment was not simply to eliminate slavery, but “to make labor free by prohibiting that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit without the rights to organize, strike, boycott, and picket.” (at 241) Early labor law, notably, the Norris-LaGuardia Act, was grounded in this Constitutional imperative and the guarantees of speech and association flowing from the First Amendment. During the New Deal worker freedoms under the Thirteenth Amendment diminished when the U.S. Supreme Court made the Commerce Clause dominant. This interpretation even turned the pro-worker Wagner Act into a law that gave the government power to eliminate strikes. The Commerce Clause put the needs of business first—asking whether labor organizing encumbers the free flow of business—and led to the federal government having the power to intrude into union organizing, as well as in disputes between labor and business on the side of business to keep commerce moving. An entirely new initiative must be undertaken to ground freedoms of speech, association and an effective freedom of labor on firm constitutional grounds.

The restoration and expansion of the rights of workers are timeless principles about basic human rights, fairness and justice.

From Information Clearing House:

37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty

Americans have always believed that hard work will bring rewards, but vast numbers now cannot meet their bills even with two or three jobs. More than one in 10 citizens live below the poverty line, and the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening

By Paul Harris in Kentucky

02/19/06 "The Observer" -- -- The flickering television in Candy Lumpkins's trailer blared out The Bold and the Beautiful. It was a fantasy daytime soap vision of American life with little relevance to the reality of this impoverished corner of Kentucky.

The Lumpkins live at the definition of the back of beyond, in a hollow at the top of a valley at the end of a long and muddy dirt road. It is strewn with litter. Packs of stray dogs prowl around, barking at strangers. There is no telephone and since their pump broke two weeks ago Candy has collected water from nearby springs. Oblivious to it all, her five-year-old daughter Amy runs barefoot on a wooden porch frozen by a midwinter chill.

It is a vision of deep and abiding poverty. Yet the Lumpkins are not alone in their plight. They are just the negative side of the American equation. America does have vast, wealthy suburbs, huge shopping malls and a busy middle class, but it also has vast numbers of poor, struggling to make it in a low-wage economy with minimal government help.

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit's streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

Under President George W Bush an extra 5.4 million have slipped below the poverty line. Yet they are not a story of the unemployed or the destitute. Most have jobs. Many have two. Amos Lumpkins has work and his children go to school. But the economy, stripped of worker benefits like healthcare, is having trouble providing good wages.

Even families with two working parents are often one slice of bad luck - a medical bill or factory closure - away from disaster. The minimum wage of $5.15 (£2.95) an hour has not risen since 1997 and, adjusted for inflation, is at its lowest since 1956. The gap between the haves and the have-nots looms wider than ever. Faced with rising poverty rates, Bush's trillion-dollar federal budget recently raised massive amounts of defence spending for the war in Iraq and slashed billions from welfare programmes.

For a brief moment last year in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina brought America's poor into the spotlight. Poverty seemed on the government's agenda. That spotlight has now been turned off. 'I had hoped Katrina would have changed things more. It hasn't,' says Cynthia Duncan, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire.

Oklahoma is in America's heartland. Tulsa looks like picture-book Middle America. Yet there is hunger here. When it comes to the most malnourished poor in America, Oklahoma is ahead of any other state. It should be impossible to go hungry here. But it is not. Just ask those gathered at a food handout last week. They are a cross section of society: black, white, young couples, pensioners and the middle-aged. A few are out of work or retired, everyone else has jobs.

They are people like Freda Lee, 33, who has two jobs, as a marketer and a cashier. She has come to the nondescript Loaves and Fishes building - flanked ironically by a Burger King and a McDonald's - to collect food for herself and three sons. 'America is meant to be free. What's free?' she laughs. 'All we can do is pay off the basics.'

Or they are people like Tammy Reinbold, 37. She works part-time and her husband works full-time. They have two children yet rely on the food handouts. 'The church is all we have to fall back on,' she says. She is right. When government help is being cut and wages are insufficient, churches often fill the gap. The needy gather to receive food boxes. They listen to a preacher for half an hour on the literal truth of the Bible. Then he asks them if they want to be born again. Three women put up their hands.

But why are some Tulsans hungry?

Many believe it is the changing face of the US economy. Tulsa has been devastated by job losses. Big-name firms like WorldCom, Williams Energy and CitGo have closed or moved, costing the city about 24,000 jobs. Now Wal-Mart embodies the new American job market: low wages, few benefits.

Well-paid work only goes to the university-educated. Many others who just complete high school face a bleak future. In Texas more than a third of students entering public high schools now drop out. These people are entering the fragile world of the working poor, where each day is a mere step away from tragedy. Some of those tragedies in Tulsa end up in the care of Steve Whitaker, a pastor who runs a homeless mission in the shadow of a freeway overpass.

Each day the homeless and the drug addicted gather here, looking for a bed for the night. Some also want a fresh chance. They are men like Mark Schloss whose disaster was being left by his first wife. The former Wal-Mart manager entered a world of drug addiction and alcoholism until he wound up with Whitaker. Now he is back on track, sporting a silver ring that says Faith, Hope, Love. 'Without this place I would be in prison or dead,' he says. But Whitaker equates saving lives with saving souls. Those entering the mission's rehabilitation programme are drilled in Bible studies and Christianity. At 6ft 5in and with a black belt in karate, Whitaker's Christianity is muscular both literally and figuratively. 'People need God in their lives,' he says.

These are mean streets. Tulsa is a city divided like the country. Inside a building run by Whitaker's staff in northern Tulsa a group of 'latch-key kids' are taking Bible classes after school while they wait for parents to pick them up. One of them is Taylor Finley, aged nine. Wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on the front, she dreams of travel. 'I want to have fun in a new place, a new country,' she says. Taylor wants to see the world outside Oklahoma. But at the moment she cannot even see her own neighbourhood. The centre in which she waits for mom was built without windows on its ground floor. It was the only way to keep out bullets from the gangs outside.

During the 2004 election the only politician to address poverty directly was John Edwards, whose campaign theme was 'Two Americas'. He was derided by Republicans for doing down the country and - after John Kerry picked him as his Democratic running mate - the rhetoric softened in the heat of the campaign.

But, in fact, Edwards was right. While 45.8 million Americans lack any health insurance, the top 20 per cent of earners take over half the national income. At the same time the bottom 20 per cent took home just 3.4 per cent. Whitaker put the figures into simple English. 'The poor have got poorer and the rich have got richer,' he said.

Dealing with poverty is not a viable political issue in America. It jars with a cultural sense that the poor bring things upon themselves and that every American is born with the same chances in life. It also runs counter to the strong anti-government current in modern American politics. Yet the problem will not disappear. 'There is a real sense of impending crisis, but political leaders have little motivation to address this growing divide,' Cynthia Duncan says.

There is little doubt which side of America's divide the hills of east Kentucky fall on. Driving through the wooded Appalachian valleys is a lesson in poverty. The mountains have never been rich. Times now are as tough as they have ever been. Trailer homes are the norm. Every so often a lofty mansion looms into view, a sign of prosperity linked to the coal mines or the logging firms that are the only industries in the region. Everyone else lives on the margins, grabbing work where they can. The biggest cash crop is illicitly grown marijuana.

Save The Children works here. Though the charity is usually associated with earthquakes in Pakistan or famine in Africa, it runs an extensive programme in east Kentucky. It includes a novel scheme enlisting teams of 'foster grandparents' to tackle the shocking child illiteracy rates and thus eventually hit poverty itself.

The problem is acute. At Jone's Fork school, a team of indomitable grannies arrive each day to read with the children. The scheme has two benefits: it helps the children struggle out of poverty and pays the pensioners a small wage. 'This has been a lifesaver for me and I feel as if the children would just fall through the cracks without us,' says Erma Owens. It has offered dramatic help to some. One group of children are doing so well in the scheme that their teacher, Loretta Shepherd, has postponed retirement in order to stand by them. 'It renewed me to have these kids,' she said.

Certainly Renae Sturgill sees the changes in her children. She too lives in deep poverty. Though she attends college and her husband has a job, the Sturgill trailer sits amid a clutter of abandoned cars. Money is scarce. But now her kids are in the reading scheme and she has seen how they have changed. Especially eight-year-old Zach. He's hard to control at times, but he has come to love school. 'Zach likes reading now. I know it's going to be real important for him,' Renae says. Zach is shy and won't speak much about his achievements. But Genny Waddell, who co-ordinates family welfare at Jone's Fork, is immensely proud. 'Now Zach reads because he wants to. He really fought to get where he is,' she says.

In America, to be poor is a stigma. In a country which celebrates individuality and the goal of giving everyone an equal opportunity to make it big, those in poverty are often blamed for their own situation. Experience on the ground does little to bear that out. When people are working two jobs at a time and still failing to earn enough to feed their families, it seems impossible to call them lazy or selfish. There seems to be a failure in the system, not the poor themselves.

It is an impression backed up by many of those mired in poverty in Oklahoma and Kentucky. Few asked for handouts. Many asked for decent wages. 'It is unfair. I am working all the time and so what have I done wrong?' says Freda Lee. But the economy does not seem to be allowing people to make a decent living. It condemns the poor to stay put, fighting against seemingly impossible odds or to pull up sticks and try somewhere else.

In Tulsa, Tammy Reinbold and her family are moving to Texas as soon as they save the money for enough petrol. It could take several months. 'I've been in Tulsa 12 years and I just gotta try somewhere else,' she says.

Savethechildren.org

From Tom Joad to Roseanne

In a country that prides itself on a culture of rugged individualism, hard work and self-sufficiency, it is no surprise that poverty and the poor do not have a central place in America's cultural psyche.

But in art, films and books American poverty has sometimes been portrayed with searing honesty. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath, which was made into a John Ford movie, is the most famous example. It was an unflinching account of the travails of a poor Oklahoma family forced to flee the Dust Bowl during the 1930s Depression. Its portrait of Tom Joad and his family's life on the road as they sought work was a nod to wider issues of social justice in America.

Another ground-breaking work of that time was John Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a non-fiction book about time spent among poor white farmers in the Deep South. It practically disappeared upon its first publication in 1940 but in the Sixties was hailed as a masterpiece. In mainstream American culture, poverty often lurks in the background. Or it is portrayed - as in Sergio Leone's crime epic Once Upon A Time In America - as the basis for a tale of rags to riches.

One notable, yet often overlooked, exception was the great success of the sitcom Roseanne. The show depicted the realities of working-class Middle American life with a grit and humour that is a world away from the usual sitcom settings in a sunlit suburbia, most often in New York or California. The biggest sitcoms of the past decade - Friends, Frasier or Will and Grace - all deal with aspirational middle-class foibles that have little relevance to America's millions of working poor.

An America divided

· There are 37 million Americans living below the poverty line. That figure has increased by five million since President George W. Bush came to power.

· The United States has 269 billionaires, the highest number in the world.

· Almost a quarter of all black Americans live below the poverty line; 22 per cent of Hispanics fall below it. But for whites the figure is just 8.6 per cent.

· There are 46 million Americans without health insurance.

· There are 82,000 homeless people in Los Angeles alone.

· In 2004 the poorest community in America was Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Unemployment is over 80 per cent, 69 per cent of people live in poverty and male life expectancy is 57 years. In the Western hemisphere only Haiti has a lower number.

· The richest town in America is Rancho Santa Fe in California. Average incomes are more than $100,000 a year; the average house price is $1.7m.