Lawrence Cafeteria Workers Seek Fair Treatment

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Courtesy of Catholic Labor Network member Jeremy DaCruz

In the City of Lawrence, Massachusetts, a city famous for its labor struggles, cafeteria workers receive wages barely above the state minimum wage. Over 100 years ago, immigrant women fought for higher wages and better working conditions. Now, the mostly immigrant women who make sure that the students of Lawrence, Massachusetts are well fed find themselves facing rising inflation, a crippling workload, and low wages.

During their last wage negotiation, the Lawrence Public Schools Cafeteria Workers (SEIU Local 3) picketed outside the School District office and won historic raises. However, given that their wages started from such a low point, they still struggle to make ends meet. Coupled with the fact that staffing ratios are still below their pre-pandemic levels, the Cafeteria Workers feel abused and disrespected.

When the Cafeteria Workers discovered that the Lunch Aides at the smaller City of Lawrence Public Schools recently negotiated a stipend for maintaining ServeSafe certification, the Cafeteria Workers asked the district to extend the same stipend to them as they must maintain the same certification and do essentially the same work. The School District has, so far, refused. In response, the Cafeteria Workers have organized a petition and asked community members for their support.

Catholic Social Teaching states that “[t]he provision of wages and other benefits sufficient to support a family in dignity is a basic necessity to prevent this exploitation of workers.” (Economic Justice for All, 103) The Cafeteria Workers ask that Lawrence Public Schools recognize this “basic necessity” and pay the Cafeteria Workers fairly, starting with the ServeSafe Certification stipend.

If you want to express your support for the Cafeteria Workers, please send an email to the Interim Superintendent Juan Rodriguez ([email protected]) asking that the ServeSafe stipend be extended to the Cafeteria Workers.

Corporate Lawlessness

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Study finds Unfair Labor Practice Charges in 4 out of 10 of Union Elections

Until 1935, workers who wanted a union usually had to strike to get it. It was a recipe for perpetual industrial conflict. That’s why legislators passed the Wagner Act, providing an orderly way to adjust workplace disputes. Employers were forbidden to retaliate against workers for exercising their right to organize. When a group of workers wanted union representation, they could file for a workplace election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). If a majority vote in favor of joining a union, the employer was legally required bargain in good faith with the union the workers had chosen. In theory, the Wagner Act vindicated the rights of workers while offering a path to industrial peace.

In theory, that is. The system only workers if management, which runs the workplace, adheres to the law.

When management violates the law – for instance, by firing or punishing a worker for supporting the union, or for failing to bargain in good faith with a union representing a majority of workers – the workers and their union file an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charge with the NLRB. The Economic Policy Institute recently examined NLRB election data and ULP charges for the past few years. In a shocking but not surprising finding, they discovered that a ULP was filed in nearly 4 out of 10 NLRB elections.

What’s gone wrong? The short answer is that the penalties for violating the Wagner Act are negligible. One would hope that civic duty alone would oblige all employers to honor the law, but for a substantial minority, that’s not the case. Too many corporations are prepared to break the law in order to break a union organizing drive. They look at firing a union supporter not as criminal behavior but as an investment in remaining union-free. It’s hardly surprising that union membership has dropped from about one in three American workers in the 1950s to one in ten today.

Barring an unlikely civic reform among American business leaders, the only way to restore the balance between labor and management is a thorough reform of American labor law – starting with punitive damages for employers who retaliate against union supporters.

 

Workers at Two More Catholic Institutions Move to Unionize

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In their 1986 pastoral letter Economic Justice for All, America’s Catholic Bishops reaffirmed the right of workers to organize – and noted that employees of Catholic institutions, like any other, enjoy this right. In recent reports, workers at two Catholic institutions are doing just that. Nurses at Ascension Via Christi St. Joseph Hospital in Kansas have filed with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. If successful they would join their brothers and sisters at Ascension Via St. Francis who recently voted for representation by National Nurses United (NNU). Meanwhile, a majority of the Resident Assistants at Fordham University have signed cards seeking representation by the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 153, which already represents Fordham office employees.

Workers at more than 600 Catholic hospitals, colleges, schools and other institutions already enjoy union representation. Are any in your Diocese? Check out the Catholic Labor Network’s annual Gaudium et Spes Labor Report to find out!

Davenport Deacon on CNH Strike

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In January, after 8 grueling months on the picket line, UAW members in Burlington IA (and Racine WI) settled their strike against Case New Holland (CNH), a manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment. Deacon Kent Ferris, Director of Social Action in the Diocese of Davenport, accompanied the workers in their long struggle for a fair contract. Ferris recently explained to CLN how he got involved:

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 18, 2022, my son and I traveled to Burlington, Iowa, at the invitation of a local parishioner labor leader. I was asked to share briefly my reason for supporting striking workers and to provide an invocation for the rally. Over 1000 United Auto Workers at the Burlington factory and one in Racine, Wisconsin, had been on strike since May when their six year contract expired. I cited salient points from the USCCB document, Economic Justice for All. The invocation included reference to the inherent dignity of each person and acknowledging the importance workers have for their families and in turn a strong community.  Following the gathering at the labor hall, we joined with supporters in walking to the plant where workers had been since the beginning of the months long strike. It was a cold, blustery December afternoon, but the spirits were high amongst the supporters.

Generations have known of the strong Church commitment to supporting workers by way of the Catholic labor movement, one that stresses that the economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy. I was attempting to convey that message to the striking workers that day. I was also attempting to model the commitment to that teaching to the next generation that day as well.

Thanks for your witness, Deacon Kent!

Unions and Nonprofits

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Several unions have stepped up organizing nonprofit employees. These unions are usually targeting workers at progressive research and advocacy organizations. It makes sense, because such workers are often union-sympathetic already. It’s often also assumed that such organizations will be more labor-friendly than for-profit enterprises. Sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not.

Yesterday I hit the streets with members of OPEIU Local 2 who represent staff at the environmental organization Defenders of Wildlife, protesting in front of the nonprofit’s headquarters. Why were they there? They were in town for National Labor Relations Board proceedings. When the workers began organizing, management responded by unlawfully firing one of the union activists, Erica Prather (pictured). At the last moment, the two sides reached a settlement on this and other Unfair Labor Practice charges, but the two sides still seem to be a long way from a first contract.

This is not unique to progressive nonprofits. The Catholic Labor Network has repeatedly witnessed the same thing in Church-run organizations. Despite a clear and consistent Church teaching on the right of workers to organize in unions, administrators at Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions seldom welcome union organizing among their staff – and often fight to prevent them from doing so.

Ordered to different ends, for-profit and non-profit organizations are very different in important ways. However, managers at both types of institutions exercise power in the workplace, and that power is constrained when workers come together in a union to negotiate the terms of their employment. Not surprisingly, managers are seldom enthusiastic about ceding some of their power to employees, regardless of the type of organization they are leading.

But workers deserve a voice on the job, whether they work for a nonprofit or for-profit institution. Please keep the Defenders of Wildlife staff in your prayers as they fight for a first contract, as well as those workers at Catholic institutions who aspire to a voice in the workplace.

Alphabet Workers Union Responds to Google Layoffs

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A guest contribution from CLN member Stephen McMurtry

On Friday, 20 January, Google parent company Alphabet announced that it would cut 6% of its workforce, or 12,000 employees. Alphabet was one of the last of the big tech corporations to do so: Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon had already fired over 10,000 workers each, and tech companies broadly have cut almost 250,000 positions since the start of 2022. Thousands of now-former Google employees in the United States woke up to find that they could not log into their corporate laptops—access had been cut in the middle of the night. The workers were promised generous severance, but they were not allowed to say goodbye to coworkers or even enter their offices for at least 60 days.

Alphabet is the only large tech company that has a company-wide union for corporate workers, the pre-majority Alphabet Workers Union—Communications Workers of America (AWU—CWA). The union does not represent most workers—with some exceptions—as it has chosen a pre-majority organizing model, in which workers publicly form a union and commit to building power to win over majorities of their coworkers.

The week after the layoffs were announced, our union sprang into action: we hosted a mass Zoom meeting with over 1,500 attendees and then followed up with in-person actions at Google offices around the country. Workers—many for the first time—tabled, held information sessions, and even threw a 500-person goodbye party for their fired coworkers at the Cambridge, MA office.

The following week, union members kept up the pressure by rallying outside of Google’s New York City office while executives were touting the layoffs in their Q4 earnings call. In conjunction with the layoff response at Google proper, groups of Alphabet subcontractors organizing with AWU—CWA conducted their own actions. “Raters” who tune Google’s search algorithm delivered a petition to Google’s Mountain View headquarters demanding that they be paid the $15/hr that Google promises to its subcontracted “extended workforce” but which these workers do not receive. At the end of the week, workers who help run the YouTube Music service went on ULP strike after their contractor, Cognizant, ordered them to return to the office after they filed for recognition with AWU—CWA.

There is a lot of work to be done before every Alphabet worker has adequate layoff protections, just wages, and a voice on the job, and we the workers of AWU—CWA will keep fighting to show our coworkers why they need to stand together in their union.

FMLA Turns 30

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But when will the US join the world and assure PAID family leave?

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is now 30 years old. The FMLA allows workers to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to greet the birth or adoption of a child or to tend to a personal or family health emergency. By centering family needs and calling on enterprises to accommodate them, FMLA represented an important step toward a more human economic model.

But FMLA was only one step. Because FMLA only covers firms with 50 or more employees, half of the private sector workforce is excluded from its protections. And while FMLA guarantees that workers can recover their jobs after their unpaid leave, many low-income workers can’t afford to take time off. That’s why every other developed democracy offers PAID family leave to new parents. Will the US ever follow suit?

Several states and the District of Columbia already have done this. Just last year, the Catholic Labor Network joined a successful campaign to pass paid family and medical leave in the state of Maryland. In most cases, the state has funded the benefit through a very small payroll tax that included contributions from both employer and employee. It’s an ingenious solution: by spreading the cost across the entire workforce, no individual enterprise takes an inordinate economic hit.

But only a federal law can make paid family leave universally accessible. It’s high time for our nation to catch up with the rest of the world in recognizing that family comes first. FMLA was an important first step, but it’s time for America to adopt paid family and medical leave for our nation’s workers.

Catholic Labor Network Annual Conference

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On Saturday Jan. 28, the Catholic Labor Network was able to hold its first Annual Conference since COVID struck. Dozens of workers, clergy and lay Church leaders came together to reflect on the events of 2022 and lift up Catholic Social Teaching on labor and work. The event was held in conjunction with the Catholic Social Ministry Gathering (CSMG), a larger event bringing together Catholic social justice activists sponsored by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development.

One panel at the Conference focused on the Church and worker justice. Ingrid Delgado of the USCCB offered a wrap-up of the legislative efforts to improve working conditions in 2022, such as the Pregnant Workers’ Fairness Act. Jeffry Korgen discussed CLN participation in the synod process, and Michael Loconto of the Boston Labor Guild situated labor arbitration in the framework of Catholic Social Teaching.

A second panel reflected on labor struggles supported by the CLN in 2022. Participants heard testimony from several workers, including nurses who successfully won their fight for a union in two Catholic hospitals, and food service workers employed by multinational Sodexo who are organizing with UNITE HERE. The panel also explored the victory achieved by Washington DC’s domestic workers, who won a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights in 2022.

The Conference concluded with a report by the CLN’s Aimee Mayer on events in Nashville and a keynote address by Fr. Tim Graff [pictured], who discussed his work as Labor Liaison for Cardinal Joseph Tobin in the Archdiocese of Newark.

The Catholic Labor Network thanks our union sponsors who made the conference possible! They were UNITE HERE, IAM, UAW, UFCW, LIUNA, APWU, USW, UNITE HERE Locals 11 and 450, AFSCME Council 31, the Baltimore-Washington Building Trades, the Federation of Catholic Teachers (OPEIU), and the New York City and Sabine, TX Central Labor Councils.

Nurses Union Fighting to Improve Patient Care Nationwide

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Ordinarily when we think of labor unions and their activity, we focus on their ability to secure better wages and benefits for their members. This is a critically important function of collective bargaining but hardly exhausts what unions do. Workers generally want to do their jobs well – indeed they are often more concerned about the quality of their craft than management, which is focused primarily on the bottom line.

We saw an example of this last Thursday when National Nurses United (NNU) led actions in front of hospitals across the country – public and private, Catholic and secular, for-profit and non-profit – to draw attention to a staffing crisis in American hospitals.

The nurses contend that patient care is being undermined by a shortage of nurses on duty in the nation’s ERs, and for years have called for staffing ratios limiting the number of patients assigned to each nurse. NNU regularly makes staffing ratios the centerpiece of its bargaining demands – it was staffing ratios that brought 7,000 NNU nurses out on strike in New York City a few weeks ago, and that dominated bargaining for 12,000 NNU nurses in Minnesota last September. The union persuaded California legislators to enact staffing ratios in law in 1999 and is pursuing safe staffing laws in other states.

Seeing a union taking action for the common good rather than narrowly focused on economic gains for its members may be surprising for some, but it should not be for Catholics. Historically the Church has seen unions as successors to the medieval guilds. The guilds served to establish prices and work rules in their trades, to be sure, but they were also created to preserve standards of quality and practice in their craft. As Pope Leo XIII noted in Rerum Novarum, the guilds “were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art [49].” Clearly the Holy Father was hoping that the “workingmen’s unions” that he praised in the modern industrial economy would continue to do so. Nurses advocating for safe staffing ratios fall in this tradition.

Hospital administrators often object that they are doing their best and are struggling to hire and retain nurses as it is. Solving the problem may well entail offering nurses improved wages and benefits – after all, that’s how the market usually resolves labor shortages. But the nurses have made a sound and important choice – instead of leading with their economic demands, they have prioritized the issue of staffing ratios. Now they are trying to start a national conversation on the topic. Will we listen?

Breakthrough for Immigrant Workers

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This month witnessed a breakthrough for labor law enforcement, one that specifically addresses the exploitation of immigrant workers. On January 13, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a guidance document on worksite immigration enforcement. The guidance describes how DHS, on a case-by-case basis, will temporarily forgo deportation proceedings against witnesses in important labor and employment law actions.

How would this work? Take the example of an undocumented immigrant who has worked 50 hours a week for an American custodial company for a year, but the company never paid her or her coworkers time and a half for overtime. If she should file a complaint with the Department of Labor, DOL investigators who needed her as a witness could request that DHS defer any deportation proceedings for up to two years as they pursued the case. She could even apply for work authorization during this period.

There’s a clear need for such a policy. Law-abiding enterprises can’t compete fairly with companies that cut corners by paying less than the minimum wage, fail to pay overtime, operate hazardous workplaces or deny workers the right to organize in unions. And when scofflaw firms get away with such behavior, they lower the standards for all workers. We have a strong public interest in seeing these laws enforced; witnesses who come forward are performing a public service.

Too often such unethical employers get away with these crimes by targeting undocumented workers, knowing that they will be hesitant to file a complaint out of fear of deportation. (When the Catholic Labor Network documented extensive wage theft in the Washington DC construction sector, many of the workers who told us about unpaid overtime said they were reluctant to make a complaint because of their immigration status.) But we need these witnesses to come forward. By offering deferred action or parole in acknowledgment to their contribution to the case, the DOL makes it more likely that even undocumented workers will stand up and report workplace violations.

Undocumented workers who report illegal labor exploitation are doing a service to the community. A temporary deferral of deportation proceedings is a price worth paying to obtain their testimony and secure justice for all workers.