The labor movement needs to fight harder for justice for gig workers
Jason Pramas
A Home in the Digital World
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AS LABOR SECRETARY, WILL MARTY WALSH REPRESENT ALL WORKERS?
Or just unionized construction workers… and the corporations that fund the Democrats
CLOSE ALL THE SCHOOLS NOW
Act today to prevent a coronavirus explosion
GIVE MA JOURNALISM COMMISSION SEATS TO WORKING JOURNALISTS
This week, I joined fellow journalists, journalism educators, and members of the public at large in testifying on a bill to form a Mass journalism commission that is currently before […]
PIZZA BARONS LAY OFF 1,100: PAPA GINO’S & D’ANGELO WORKERS NEED TO ORGANIZE FOR JUSTICE
November 7, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
Mainstream press coverage of mass layoffs like Sunday’s shutdown of almost 100 Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo fast food restaurants generally looks upon such tragic events through a glass, darkly. Because journalism in the service of the rich and powerful is a poor reflection of reality when it comes to all things labor. Which is why early reportage in major news media typically involves simple transcription of executives’ rationales for such precipitous decisions. Rather than immediate investigation of the massive damage done to the lives of, in this case, more than 1,100 area workers summarily terminated with no official warning of any kind, according to the Boston Globe.
True to form, PGHC Holdings Inc., the Dedham-based parent company of both brands, has excuses at the ready for credulous reporters. None of which explain why it’s acceptable to treat its workforce—the people that built the company and kept it running through good times and bad—like so much garbage. But that’s fine and dandy, yes? Given that few journalists ever seem particularly concerned about the human cost of mass layoffs. It’s just assumed (and sometimes stated) that “the market” will take care of everything. Such “disruption” is “good for the economy,” doncha know. And if some hapless working poor people lose their apartments, lose custody of their children, go hungry, and end up on the streets, then that’s their fault for not being “competitive” enough and getting more degrees. Or something. Not the fault of the company that put them there.
In any event, according to the Boston Business Journal, PGHC released a statement on Monday explaining “that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. [The company] also announced that it had reached an agreement in principle to be sold to a portfolio company of Wynnchurch Capital, a private equity firm that has offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto.”
“Private equity firms,” according to a major 2014 investigation by the New York Times, “now manage $3.5 trillion in assets. The firms overseeing these funds borrow money or raise it from investors to buy troubled or inefficient companies. Then they try to turn the companies around and sell at a profit.” Ironically, some of the largest investors in such firms are public sector pension funds. Whose unionized members have no idea what their money is being used for—thanks to byzantine and opaque agreements between their pension funds and firms like Wynnchurch that aim to keep them and the public at large in the dark about buyouts like the tentative PGHC deal.
The details that are visible are disturbing enough. According to Boston Globe business columnist Jon Chesto, PGHC “[c]hief financial officer Corey Wendland pointed to one big reason for his company’s need for more dough: minimum-wage increases across many of its markets, combined with higher health insurance expenses.”
You read that right. One of the executives directly responsible for destroying the lives of hundreds of working-class families in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire is blaming legislation that’s gradually raising minimum wages in three of those states (minus, sadly, the Granite State) to levels that they should have been at over a decade back for his company’s crisis. Not corporate mismanagement or malfeasance.
It’s basically all the fault of those darned unions and other labor advocates for pushing higher wage floors that still don’t even allow many workers to make ends meet once enacted. Massachusetts, for example, will go from the abysmal $11 an hour rate mandated by 2017 to a somewhat less abysmal $15 an hour over five years starting in January. For readers who think that wage is too high, try living on $15 an hour most anywhere in southern New England right now—assuming you get 40 hours work a week, which many Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo workers didn’t—and see how you do.
Naturally, since laid-off PGHC workers weren’t unionized, they had nothing and no one to protect them when the corporate ax fell over the weekend. Even the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act that provides extended unemployment and retraining benefits to victims of a narrow range of mass layoffs may not apply here. Although, as with area NECCO workers who were also laid off en masse this year with no notice, it may be worth trying a class action lawsuit to demand WARN coverage anyway. But with most of the affected PGHC workers making minimum wage, they have next to nothing saved to see them through the difficult period they now face. While the unemployment they may not all qualify for will definitely not be enough to live on until they find new jobs, given their low pay rate. So, it will even harder for them to mount such a suit than it has been for the NECCO crew.
A D’Angelo manager who writes under the nom de plume C.D. Madeira took a job at another company about three months ago and agreed to provide an insider’s perspective on the layoff crisis to me in an interview. Unsurprisingly, Madeira says that PGHC was not a decent employer even before its recent action.
“I worked for D’Angelo for two and a half years as a manager. They treated us like trash, the minimum wage employees worse. Management was paid as little as possible while required to work 50 hours a week and often much much more. More often than not they required us to work that extra off the clock so as not to skew their labor information. They refused to repair restaurants even when it was a danger to employees and customers.
“Basically, I’m glad I don’t work there anymore and that I got out before this happened, but I know many people who are now out of a job.
“They closed nearly 100 locations, between the Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo brands, leaving over 1,000 people without jobs and without notice. No severance pay. No PTO [paid time off] payout. Nothing. People went to work assuming they would have a job and they were turned away. Those who had jobs were given calls throughout the day to tell them to close up shop permanently. They were told they could apply at other corporate locations for consideration for rehire.”
Not that laid-off PGHC workers are exactly taking the situation lying down. Many have plastered the Papa Gino’s Facebook page with angry messages. Leading the parent company to respond on the page with another statement, “While we regret the rather abrupt closures, we are currently undergoing major updates to better serve our guests and ask for your patience as we make these changes. As New England’s local pizzeria since 1961, we are still standing strong and will be relaunching our restaurants, introducing improvements for the benefit of all of our guests.”
Madeira doesn’t buy it: “I saw the breakdown of the conference call they had with the general managers who remain. Basically they’re painting this as, ‘Well, now that we have all these underperforming restaurants out of the way, we can totally renovate the remaining locations!’ Many stores they closed were not underperforming. Also they’ve known about this sale for months. They were talking about putting the brand up for sale a couple of months before I left. So this has been in the works for well long enough to have warned people.
“They’ve always been shady. Papa Gino’s originally bought the D’Angelo brand to try and save itself but instead ended up dragging it down completely from what I heard from old-time employees.”
This is the testimony that the public has not yet heard in the local press. And it’s infuriating, if not much of a shock to anyone who has worked in low-wage sectors like fast food before.
The question now is: What can laid-off Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo workers do to get some simple justice? PGHC executives responsible for major social dislocation across our region thanks to the layoffs will be fine. They’ve got golden parachutes. PGHC shareholders will make some money in the sale to buyout firm Wynnchurch Capital. Wynnchurch will make plenty of money by reviving the Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo brands and selling them to the highest bidder, and/or by dumping the buyout debt on the company and making millions in “consulting” fees whether the company succeeds or tanks, and/or by gutting company assets for cash.
But what about the workers?
All I can say is what I say in pretty much every article I write about labor issues: Workers need to stand and fight. Wherever we are. Whatever our situation.
So, for the remaining Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo workers, you all need to unionize. To make sure you have at least the protection of a union contract in the likely event of more layoffs. And better wages, benefits, and working conditions while you all are still employed there. It won’t be easy. But you can be sure that at least two or three major unions—I’m guessing UNITEHERE, SEIU, and possibly UAW—are eager to get in touch with you. I recommend you work with the union that will give you the best service (in the form of staff dedicated to your group) and the most autonomy.
And for the laid-off Papa Gino’s and D’Angelo workers? You, too, need to organize. Get together. Talk things over. Get advice from some experienced union leaders and pro bono representation from some labor lawyers. Maybe find a way to sue your former bosses or the new owners for redress under the WARN Act or some other applicable law. Build community support the way Market Basket workers did a few years ago. Explain why it’s not acceptable for large companies to treat people the way PGHC treated you—and even less acceptable for government at all levels to let them get away with it. Raise money and awareness. Formulate demands. For severance pay. For extended unemployment benefits. For retraining. For damages. For whatever you all need to be made whole. Stay in close touch with your former colleagues as they try to strengthen their position.
Then figure out how to win some justice… together.
Fortunately, a Facebook page has been started to do just that. Called, fittingly, Papa Gino’s Workers’ Reparations. Here’s a short link for PGHC workers reading in print: tiny.cc/papajustice/. Check it out. And best of luck to all of you.
FROM INJURY TO ACTION: A LABOR DAY REMEMBRANCE (PART III)
October 10, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
In parts one (DigBoston, Vol. 20, Iss. 36, p. 6) and two (DigBoston, Vol. 20, Iss. 40, p. 6), I discussed how working a temp factory job at Belden Electronics on assignment for Manpower for several weeks in early 1989 in Vermont led to my sustaining a sudden and permanent spinal injury while walking to my car just after my last shift. And how I drove myself one-handed through a snowstorm on country roads in the middle of the night to an emergency room—only to receive substandard care as a poor person. Leading me to make the mistake of letting cheaper chiropractors hurt me more over the next six years. In this final installment, I review my turn to labor activism on behalf of myself… and workers in bad jobs everywhere.
I recovered from my spinal injury within a few months. To the point where I wasn’t hurting all of the time. Just some of the time. Yet, as with other life-changing experiences before and since, I wasn’t the same afterward. Physically or psychologically. I was left with the sense that anything could happen to me at any time. Something I had known intellectually before getting hurt, but literally knew in my bones going forward.
Regardless, once it was clear I wasn’t going to be entirely disabled, I resolved to move ahead with my life. Which took some time. But by the summer of 1990, I had returned to Boston from Vermont, I was dating the woman who later became my wife, and I had founded New Liberation News Service (NLNS)—the international wire I would run for the next couple of years.
Journalism had gone from being an occasional thing for me to a regular thing. Unfortunately, NLNS was a small nonprofit serving the left-wing campus press, the remnant of the ’60s underground press, and some larger community media outlets. Most of which were too broke to pay much for the news packets my service was producing for them. Thus, I wasn’t able to make ends meet doing it for very long. And by 1991, I was temping again on the side.
No more manual labor for me, though. That was over, given my damaged vertebrae. This time any temp assignments I took had to make use of my writing, editing, and research skills—which I had developed over the previous few years, despite not having a college degree… and not getting one until 2006.
After a number of short assignments, I found a long-term editing gig via a jobs bulletin board at MIT that anyone in the know could just walk up to and use. Faxon Research Services, a now-defunct database company, contracted me through a temp agency. It was March 1992.
Over the months, I did well enough at the assignment that I was granted my own office and more responsibilities. I also helped the other NLNS staffer of the time to get a similar gig at Faxon. He, too, started getting more responsibility at the office. Soon, I was being groomed for a full-time job by one vice president. He was being groomed by another vice president. The two vice presidents were at odds with each other. My vice president lost the inter-departmental war. And my temp contract was ended in December 1992. Just like that.
Because that’s how temp jobs, and indeed most forms of contingent employment function. Employers want the freedom to use workers’ labor when they need it and to get rid of them the moment they don’t. While paying the lowest wages possible. Saving labor costs and increasing profits in the process.
Faxon assumed that, like every other temp, I was just going to take the injustice of losing my shot at a long-term full-time job lying down.
But not that time. And I would never accept injustice at any gig ever again. I had learned one key lesson from getting badly injured from the Manpower temp job at Belden Electronics three years previous: If I was treated unfairly in the workplace, I was going to fight. And keep fighting until I won some kind of redress.
So, I did something that temps aren’t supposed to do: I applied for unemployment. Because temp agencies and the employers that contract them use such arrangements in part to play the same “neither company is your employer” game that Manpower and Belden played when I got a spinal injury on Belden property.
However, I realized that I had been at this temp gig full-time for nine months and figured I had a chance of convincing the Mass unemployment department of the period that I was a Faxon employee in fact even if I was officially a temp at an agency that played so small a role in the gig in question that I can’t even remember its name.
My initial unemployment filing was rejected. And I appealed it. And testified to an unemployment department official. And won my unemployment. A small victory, true. But an important one for me, and possibly for other temps in similar situations in the years after me. Faxon didn’t fight the ruling. I got my money.
Fortunately, I didn’t need the unemployment payments for long. Back in February 1992, writing as I did not just for NLNS, but also for other publications, I had a chance to join a labor union in my trade. Not the traditional union I had dreamt of helping organize at Belden Electronics prior to—and certainly after—my injury. It was called the National Writers Union/United Auto Workers Local 1981. A small but trailblazing formation experimenting with organizing any of several types of contingent writers—with a constituency of freelance journalists, book authors, and technical writers.
I immediately got active in the Boston “unit” of the local. Was elected as a delegate to the national convention in the summer of 1992. Was the youngest candidate for a open vice president’s seat. Lost, but not too badly. And won enough notoriety in the Boston branch that they hired me as their half-time director in December.
My fight for justice for myself and millions of other people in temp, part-time, day labor, contract, independent contractor, migrant, and many other kinds of bad unstable contingent jobs besides took off from there. In 1993, I joined the New Directions Movement democracy caucus within the rapidly shrinking but still super-bureaucratic and timid United Auto Workers union, and learned a great deal about how all those purposely precarious employment arrangements were being used by employers to crush labor.
In 1994, I started the small national publication As We Are: The Magazine for Working Young People. In 1995, I wrote an article in its third number about the attempt by the radical union Industrial Workers of the World to start a Temp Workers Union, and began actively looking for a way to start a general labor organization for contingent workers. In 1996—just after I published the fourth As We Are, folded the magazine for lack of funds, and took a long-term temp assignment with 3M’s advertising division as a front desk person—I helped launch the Organizing Committee for a Massachusetts Employees Association (OCMEA) with Citizens for Participation in Political Action. A group that straddled the line between the left wing of the Democratic Party and socialists just to their left in the Commonwealth. In January 1997, I quit the 3M assignment a few days before being serendipitously hired by Tim Costello of Northeast Action as the half-time assistant organizer of his Project on Contingent Work there. We rolled the OCMEA effort into our new project and also helped start a nationwide network of similar contingent worker organizing projects called the National Alliance for Fair Employment later that year.
In June 1998, I left the National Writers Union gig—having helped build the Boston branch’s membership from just over 200 members to over 700 members in my six-year tenure—and took one final long-term half-time temp editor assignment through Editorial Services of New England at Lycos, a competitor of Yahoo and other early commercial search engines on the World Wide Web. I organized a shadow union of over 25 fellow temp editors— which won pay parity for men and women on the assignment—before leaving to help Costello break away from Northeast Action and begin raising money to form our own independent contingent workers’ organization in September 1998.
Finally, in January 1999, we had the funding to found the Campaign on Contingent Work (CCW), the extremely innovative labor organizing network that did much to help workers in bad jobs in Massachusetts over the six years of its existence.
That year we also expanded the national contingent organizing group into Canada to form the North American Alliance for Fair Employment (NAFFE)—which was also based in Boston. Ultimately, Costello was the coordinator of that group and I was coordinator of CCW. And in 2003, during conversations with the CEO of Manpower about a temp industry code of conduct that NAFFE had drafted, Costello started telling him the story of my injury on a Manpower assignment. The CEO cut him off a few sentences in and said, “Forklift?” And Costello said, “Yes.” And the CEO apparently said that years after my injury, so many workers had been hurt driving forklifts in Manpower temp jobs that there had been some kind of settlement with them and the company had instituted reforms. I never bothered to verify the tale. But I don’t doubt its veracity.
Because employers can only push workers so far before we start to push back. And I’ve written this series for one reason: to encourage readers in bad jobs in the (now rather old) “new economy” to push back. To fight where you stand. To stop accepting unstable gigs with no benefits for low pay. To start demanding a better deal. Together with your fellow workers. And to keep demanding it. Until we live in a world where no one will ever have to work a bad job. Or get permanently injured the way I did.
Check out part one of “From Injury to Action” here and part two here.
Apparent Horizon—winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best Political Column award—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.
FROM INJURY TO ACTION: A LABOR DAY REMEMBRANCE (PART II)
October 3, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
In part one (DigBoston, Vol. 20, Iss. 36, p. 6), I related how working a temp factory job at Belden Electronics on assignment for Manpower for several weeks in early 1989 in Vermont led to my sustaining a sudden and permanent spinal injury while walking to my car just after my last shift. At the conclusion of that narrative, I was standing in agony in an empty parking lot outside an empty factory in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. My left arm was essentially paralyzed. I was completely alone.
I staggered the remaining distance to my car. Struggled to get the keys out of my left pants pocket with my good right arm. Unlocked the door. Opened it. Tumbled into the driver’s seat. Pulled the shoulder belt over my numb left arm. Waves of pain coursed through my body. Got the car started.
“Can’t pass out,” I told myself, “Don’t have much gas left, and once it’s gone, the heat goes. I can get hypothermia before anyone notices me in here. Could die.”
It was hard to hold my head upright enough to drive, but I managed it. Harder still was getting the car in gear and then driving stick with only my right arm. In a snowstorm. In the middle of the night. Drifting each time my hand was on the stick. Nearly braking into a spin each time I approached top speed in a gear while my hand was on the steering wheel. Nearly stalling whenever I downshifted. And, yeah, that busted second gear I mentioned in part one? That was a real problem. It was tricky enough jumping from first to third gear and back when I wasn’t injured. Doing it while badly hurt and trying to drive one-handed on dangerously icy roads for the roughly half hour I figured it would take me to get from Essex Junction to the emergency room at the big Medical Center Hospital of Vermont in Burlington? That was just asking to get put out of my misery the hard way.
But that was what I set out to do. Why? Not sure. I was fairly lucid, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. Still, not much was open after 9 pm in the rural suburbs of Burlington in the late 1980s. Especially with the snow falling harder with each passing minute. My recollection is that, given the route I was taking, the first gas station that was likely to be open was close enough to the hospital that I might as well drive the full distance myself and skip an ambulance ride I couldn’t afford. And I hadn’t lived in the area long enough to know if there were any emergency rooms closer to my location.
The other problem I faced was the the hypnotizing effect of my headlights reflecting off snowflakes as I drove down unlit back roads. To avoid accidentally getting confused, losing the road, and slamming into something solid, I stayed mostly in first gear. So it took longer to get to my destination. Maybe 45 minutes. Fortunately, I encountered little traffic on the way. And made it to the emergency room.
There I got treated the way people without insurance get treated all the time in America. Like dirt. I sat in the waiting room for over an hour. The bored resident that eventually saw me gave me a cursory examination and sent me for an X-ray. More accurate MRIs weren’t yet common and certainly wouldn’t have been given to patients without coverage at that time. I spent the next couple of hours in an emergency room bay. There was a heroin epidemic in Vermont in that period, so I was offered no pain killers in case I was just another junkie “drug seeker” trying to pull a fast one on the staff for a quick opiate fix.
Finally, the resident returned, and told me that I had dislocated two vertebrae. He gave me a few Tylenol, told me to put heat on my injury, rest for a few days, and see a general practitioner if my arm function didn’t fully return. I was not admitted for more tests or observation. I was not offered stronger pain meds. I was incredulous, but could do nothing. Naturally, I didn’t pay the medical bill when it arrived.
I shuffled back to my car and drove the mile to my apartment. Down the quite steep and icy hill from the University of Vermont campus where the hospital was located to the Old North End. Still one-handed, although I was getting some feeling back in my left arm by that time. At least the snow had let up.
It was 5 am. I got the front door open. Closed it. Got a glass of water. Took some Tylenol. Went to my room. Shut that door. Collapsed onto my futon on the floor of my dingy place that was cheap even by the standards of Burlington in that era. Slept fitfully.
Woke a few hours later to the first day of my new life as a bona fide member of the walking wounded.
It should go without saying that in the days to come both Belden Electronics and the temp service they used to hire me, Manpower, refused to accept responsibility for my injury. Neither company even informed me of my workers’ compensation rights. And I was too young and inexperienced to know much about labor law on my own. So, I proceeded with no money for medical treatment.
Surrounded, as I was, by wide-eyed hippies of the type that Vermont is justifiably infamous for producing, I was strongly encouraged to drop the idea of seeking help from “Western medicine” and seek assistance from one or more of the profusion of “holistic healers” that littered the hills and valleys of my temporarily adopted state like so many locusts. I went with the modality that most closely mimicked actual scientific medicine: chiropractic. Because, you know, its practitioners like to wear white coats and pretend they’re doctors. Regardless of whether they’re in the small minority of their colleagues that restrict their practice to scientifically proven treatments, or the majority that does not.
Unaware that a) with rest and some physical therapy my injury would probably heal to a tolerable baseline on its own within a few weeks, and b) that the neck twisting employed by less scrupulous chiropractors when “treating” injuries like mine carried a very real risk of inducing a life-ending stroke, I gamely allowed to a succession of chiropractors to twist my neck really fast until its vertebrae cracked. In addition to a fairly random grab bag of similar “treatments.” First once a week and later once a month for the next six years. At $30 a visit to start—up to about $60 a visit by the time I realized my trust in chiropractors was misplaced and stopped letting such charlatans violate my person—the price was significantly cheaper than any medical care I thought I could get without insurance.
So, despite feeling worse after every session than I felt when I walked in, I kept it up for far too long. Which was the goal of too many chiropractors. Whatever brings you in their door, they aim to keep you coming back regularly for the rest of your life. Assuming they don’t inadvertently end it. Or merely hurt you badly. As happened when my last chiropractor decided to try electro-muscular stimulation near my head and my vision exploded into whiteness, which faded for an unknown amount of time until I awoke with my face on the quack’s chest. Weak. Somewhat confused. And very angry. I walked out and never came back.
But five years later—over 11 years after the initial injury—I discovered that more damage had been done to my spine. No doubt in part from such ungentle and unschooled ministrations. A story for another day.
Check out part one of “From Injury to Action” here and part three here… and for more information on why chiropractic is best avoided, check out the Science-Based Medicine blog (sciencebasedmedicine.org/category/chiropractic/) and the older Chirobase (chirobase.org).
Apparent Horizon—winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best Political Column award—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.
FROM INJURY TO ACTION: A LABOR DAY REMEMBRANCE (PART I)
September 5, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
Every once and a while, I move slightly differently than usual. Maybe I shift position too fast. Maybe I pick up something a bit too heavy. Maybe I’m sitting askew for just a bit too long. Whatever the cause, one second I’m fine… and the next, my old spinal injury flares up. It’s that fast. Pain radiates outward from my core to my extremities.
It traces a burning track to the tips of my fingers. I am aware of exactly where each nerve runs back to damaged vertebrae. And there is nothing much I can do in the way of palliative care but let the latest flare-up run its course. I mean, sure, I can do light exercise. I can do some special stretches learned over years of occasional physical therapy. I can use ice, then heat, then ice again. Then I can rest. And start over again the next day.
With luck, after a week or three, whatever inflammation I caused calms down. The pain comes with decreasing regularity. And then I return to my “normal” state. The state that has made me unable to do manual labor for many many years. And unable to drive in recent years. If my friends or family need help moving, I can’t do it. If anyone needs me to jump in a car and pick them up, they have to ask someone else.
As I type these words on Labor Day, I have just had such a flare-up. Which is, it must be said, kind of ironic. Yesterday, I sat texting someone in a marginally different posture than usual… and bang, I’m hurt again. So it hurts to type. A lot. But I’m pushing through anyway. Like I always do. Like I’ve done for decades.
Because I was first injured directly after leaving the last shift of a job in late March 1989. But it was not an actual job. It had neither security, nor benefits, nor decent wages. It was certainly labor, though.
The incident occurred at the conclusion of an eight-week temp assignment for Manpower—then, as now, one of the largest so-called “staffing agencies” in the world. The company I worked for—yet didn’t work for—was Belden Electronics. The plant in question was in Essex Junction, Vermont. I had moved up to the Green Mountain State the previous year and was never able to find a decent “job job” in the two years I lived there. Or in several years before or after my “mountain sojourn.” Like many other members of my generation coming of age in the 1980s, I was discovering that the “good jobs” my parents’ generation and their parents’ generation had enjoyed after WWII were already becoming a thing of the past. The late ’80s recession under the first Bush presidency only made things worse.
Prior to the factory gig, the temp assignments I had gotten were shorter term. And I wanted something that lasted for longer than a week at a time. The better to pay my rent and keep my car on the road. So when Manpower offered the Belden assignment, I took it. It was swing shift, and I’d be working from 3 pm to midnight, Monday through Friday. I was a night owl, and that allowed me to do other things I was doing in Vermont at that point in my life. I was told I’d be driving a forklift—which I thought sounded interesting. I was 22 years old.
So one fine afternoon in early February 1989, I coaxed my old car with manual transmission and a busted second gear I couldn’t afford to fix into driving the half-hour from Burlington’s more or less urban sprawl into the deep woods where some genius had thought it was a good idea to drop an industrial park. Snow was piled 10 feet deep on either side of the country roads as I pulled into a large parking lot outside the commodious Belden facility for the first time.
Inside, I was given a quick tour of the factory floor, break room, and bathrooms. Then I was “trained” to drive two kinds of electric forklifts for a total of three hours. One of which involved watching a video. The other two of which involved a manger running me through my paces on actual equipment at speeds much lower than I was going to be expected to drive in the coming weeks. Then I was sent out onto the floor to start work. I received the rest of my training, such as it was, from the guy whose job I was helping eliminate. After working there eight years, he was to be replaced by temps like me.
He was a devout Mormon. Many folks don’t realize it, but Mormon church founder Joseph Smith was born in Vermont in the early 1800s. So there are more of that flock about on the starboard side of Lake Champlain than one might think. My trainer and his wife were doing their level best to increase that flock, too. So he had several children. And that was why Belden let him stay on after using me to render his job redundant. He was allowed to work on a machine station, after being forced to accept a pay cut. To make ends meet, he had already started a second job as a janitor at his Mormon temple. Yet despite all this adversity, he never said an unkind word to me—the guy who was to be the first in a series of temps to work his old job—or anyone else in the plant.
He was, in fact, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met in my life. Toward the end of my brief tenure at Belden, he gave me a Book of Mormon that he and his family had inscribed with their best wishes. I read it, and discussed it with him. Explained that I was still searching for a spiritual home, but was honored and humbled by his gift. Then went back to work.
And what was that work? Well, the factory made wire for electronics companies—including the nearby IBM works. The wire was then spooled. And the spools ranged in size. From little ones that might weigh 10 pounds each. To huge ones that weighed 1000 pounds or more. I am 5’6”, and at the time I weighed 132 pounds soaking wet. My job was to lift or roll those wire spools onto the tines of either of my forklifts—the fast one (which I loved) or the slow one. And take them from station to station, machine to machine, where the wire went through the various stages of its processing.
All that lifting and pushing of spools took its toll on me in the brief time I was there, but my body seemed to handle the stress ok. After all, I was young and bouncy. But I didn’t realize that, in the absence of proper training or safety equipment, I wasn’t doing anything correctly. Not to say that I wasn’t a good worker. People from management on down were quite decent to me, as far as it went. I was, however, putting a great deal of strain on my spine.
Meanwhile, I was essentially participating in the forced speedup of a nonunion factory by corporate management who were trying to increase profits by cutting labor costs. Driving from station to station, I got to talk to lots of workers—many of whom, like my trainer, had been there for years. They were very stressed out and unhappy. They were working harder and longer for less money with worse benefits. And I began to wonder why they couldn’t unionize.
I didn’t know much about unions. Though I was aware that the only recourse working people have on a bad job is to start one. So I actually tried to get a longer-term contract with Belden in hopes of being able to try to do just that.
But there was no way they were going to hire a temp they were using to keep their longer-term workers off-balance. And at the end of March, I worked that fateful last shift. Shortly after midnight, I said my goodbyes—taking a few minutes to fill out whatever paperwork Belden and Manpower needed me to complete on the way.
By the time I walked out the plant door with the remaining manager, everyone was gone. There was no third shift at that time, so the parking lot was already empty. The manager’s car was parked next to the plant, and he drove off straight away. The door had locked behind me, and there was no one in sight. Except for a lone car in the middle distance that I hadn’t noticed. Which started up unexpectedly, causing me to snap my head to the right to see whose it was.
And then I heard a sickening crack. Followed by a massive wave of pain—emanating from my spine—that coursed through my body from head to toe. And then I realized my left arm wouldn’t move.
I was only halfway to my car. There was no one around. In the middle of a large parking lot. In the middle of the night. In the middle of the woods. On a freezing Vermont night many years before cell phones became common. A light snow was falling.
I was completely alone.
Part II coming soon…
Apparent Horizon—winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia’s 2018 Best Political Column award—is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.
‘DON’T MOURN, ORGANIZE!’
Why Janus might actually be good for the American labor movement
July 3, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
The Supreme Court issued a decision last week that will have profound consequences for American working people. In Janus v. AFSCME, the court overturned a 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, that allowed public sector unions—like the National Education Association, the American Federation of Government Employees, and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—to charge government workers who refused to become members a “fair share” fee to defray the expense of representing them.
According to the Atlantic, “Until now, 22 states had in place a so-called ‘fair share’ provision, which required people represented by unions who did not choose to be members of these unions to pay fees to cover the cost of the unions’ collective bargaining activities. By contrast, 28 states were so-called ‘right-to-work’ states, and barred employers from including ‘fair share’ requirements in employment contracts.”
Private sector unions—although most large unions these days like Service Employees International Union represent both private and public sector workers—are also not allowed to collect “fair share” or “agency” fees in right-to-work states. The thing that makes this ruling so pernicious is that it expands that right-to-work mandate to cover public sector unions nationwide.
The understandable view of the majority of labor supporters is that Janus is a disaster for American unionism. Bankrolled by a rogues’ gallery of right-wing donors, its passage virtually guaranteed by the replacement of conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia with another conservative, Neil Gorsuch, the decision is certainly going to have a negative impact on public sector unions. Which comprise the largest wing of the US labor movement of 2018. Private sector unions having already been beaten back by endless attacks from corporations over the last 50 years.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the union membership rate of public sector workers (34.4 percent) continued to be more than five times higher than that of private sector workers (6.5 percent) in 2017. With only 10.7 percent of American jobs unionized overall, and public sector union members outnumbering private sector union members since 2009.
This low “union density” rate is no accident, as big business wants to eliminate unions as an impediment to their endless drive for profit. Since unions have the strongest track record of any institution in our society of keeping the pressure on employers and government for higher wages, better benefits, and more spending on government programs that benefit working families. Just the sorts of things that lower corporate profits.
But public sector unions have been better protected than private sector unions—organizing jobs that are generally directly funded by government at all levels. This has made them a primary target of the right wing—for whom giving unionized government workers a better deal over decades is tantamount to using public funds to expand the government.
Also, public sector unions—like most other unions—provide tens of millions of dollars to the Democrats every election cycle, and most of the ground troops the Dems need to run successful election campaigns in many districts.
For those reasons, right-wing strategists have been looking for ways to get rid of public sector unions since they rose to prominence in the mid-20th century. Even more than the private sector unions they’ve had an easier time busting. And Janus moved them a long way toward that goal by cutting into union bottom lines.
How? Fair share fees add up. Eliminating them for public sector unions nationwide will cut millions of dollars from their budgets. Effectively slashing the amount of money they can spend on organizing new workers and plumping up Democratic Party coffers. Even though the Aboud decision dictated that fair share fees could only be spent on “collective bargaining” costs—basically, providing nonunion government workers the same services provided to union members—not on political activity.
No surprise, then, that many union leaders and boosters think this is the worst anti-labor decision by the court in decades.
However, there’s a minority view on the left wing of labor—where I have always situated myself as a longtime union member and activist—that says that the Janus decision may actually save American unions. Why? Two reasons.
First, because the more money that American unions have raised from members and nonmembers alike, the more they have tended to bureaucratize. And become top-heavy with high-paid staffers and elected officials that have become culturally distant from those same members.
Because union leaders making secure six-figure salaries with generous benefits have very little in common with members making typical union wages. They are also more likely to be college educated than union members are. A phenomenon that’s been growing (ironically) since the radical campus movements of the 1960s produced a generation of student activists who entered union jobs—and staff positions— in an effort to push them to the left politically. After the communists, socialists, and anarchists who actually built many unions through titanic workplaces struggles between the turn of the last century and the 1940s were pushed out of them during the anti-left “witch hunts” of the McCarthy Era.
Today’s union leaders therefore are not like the leaders of those earlier struggles. They’re often more comfortable with the college-educated corporate and government leadership sitting across from them at the bargaining table than they are with their own members. And they’ve tended to replace militant grassroots organizing on behalf of the entire working class with narrow bargaining for minor contractual gains for the shrinking number of members they represent. Such leaders make tough-sounding noises when it’s time to get a new contract with an employer or during big election campaigns. Yet they’re actually quite timid compared to their predecessors—who were often on the front lines of literal street battles with police and the National Guard or in jail on trumped-up charges when union activity was deemed illegal by courts stacked with pro-corporate elites.
Second, as this timidity in an era of renewed vicious corporate assaults against labor has contributed to declining union membership rolls as a percentage of the growing population, union leaders have turned to spending larger and larger sums of money on the Democratic Party. In a mostly vain attempt to purchase political clout they no longer have in the streets or at the ballot box. Even as the Democrats have moved steadily to the right since the 1970s, and become more and more beholden to corporations. Which still makes the Republican hard right angry enough to fight for court decisions like Janus, since the now slavishly pro-corporate Democrats are insufficiently capitalist by their lights. And, more to the point, since the Republicans have a strong desire to rule—a “will to power,” one might say—and any force that opposes them is an enemy that must be defeated. An attitude that hapless Dem leaders have definitely adopted to anyone to their left, including the social democratic pro-union left of their own party. But have failed to adopt to the Repubs and the outright fascists on their right.
So, Janus might be just what’s needed to cause a rebirth of the labor movement. It eliminates a big chunk of the money that union leaders have to spend on the Democrats—who have done little more than take that money and spit on union workers since the neoliberals of the Clinton administration took over party leadership.
It also will force the unions to cut staff. Including top staff. Which will definitely dump good leaders as well as bad ones, and that’s a drag. But it might very well help with the other big problem American unions have—a lack of internal democracy. Like other bureaucracies, too many unions have come to vest too much power in their top echelons. And leave their members out in the cold. Which is another factor that has led to union leaders making bad political decisions. Like backing pro-corporate Hillary Clinton over pro-labor Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Budget cuts caused by Janus could cause more power to be vested in union memberships’ hands. Leading to more victories like the one won recently by unionized teachers in West Virginia—who organized massive wildcat strikes over the protests of their own leadership. And won big while lighting a fire that has spread to teachers in other “red” states like Oklahoma and Arizona. States that are, among other bad things, right-to-work states.
However things play out, moribund American union leadership has been in need of a wakeup call for decades. And if Janus is what it takes to shake them out of their torpor, then so be it.
In any case, as storied labor martyr Joe Hill once said, “Don’t mourn, organize!” But don’t expect to win gains in the workplace and at the ballot box without a real fight—and without unions controlled by their members top to bottom.
Apparent Horizon is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.
TOWNIE: WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND
Or how tax breaks for fat cats relate to a defeat for Harvard management rats
April 26, 2018
BY JASON PRAMAS @JASONPRAMAS
“Opportunity” for the few
Gov. Charlie Baker submitted paperwork to the US Department of Treasury last week, according to the Republican, asking the federal government to consider 138 tracts in dozens of Massachusetts communities for inclusion in the new “Opportunity Zones” program—passed in December as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping tax reform legislation.
As the name implies, each opportunity zone is a low-income area of an American city or town. According to Next City, acceptance to the program makes such areas eligible to receive investment from “Opportunity Funds”—which are to be certified by the treasury department. The funds “will be required to invest at least 90 percent of their investment dollars into businesses or properties located in designated Opportunity Zones,” and the initiative “allows investors to defer some of their taxes on capital gains in exchange for investing some of their accumulated wealth into the opportunity zones.”
This week, MetroWest Daily News looked at tracts chosen for the program in Framingham and Marlborough. In Framingham, “City officials nominated a pair of contiguous neighborhoods on the southeast side of the city, which has struggled to rebound from the decline of manufacturing and the legacy of environmental contamination in the area.”
One of those tracts is particularly interesting because it contains “a significant amount of industrial land, including the state prison and the former General Motors plant, which is now the site of Adesa, the vehicle auction house.” And thus encapsulates everything that’s wrong with neoliberalism—the return to 19th-century dog-eat-dog capitalism in which private interest must always outweigh any possible public good.
Which is germane to this discussion because the opportunity zone scheme was cooked up by a “bipartisan” (read “neoliberal”) think tank called the Economic Innovation Group—led by a who’s who of Silicon Valley movers and shakers, according to the Los Angeles Times. Napster founder Sean Parker, former Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot, and a rogue’s gallery of major West Coast venture capital investment house leaders are all part of the organization’s “founders circle.”
So it’s absolutely no surprise that the program is essentially yet another tax break for the rich. In a federal tax regime that’s now replete with them—especially after Trump’s ungentle ministrations. More problematic, however, is the fact that the so-called opportunity zones give the rich and powerful even more control over economic development in areas already impoverished by the rich and powerful.
Which brings us back to the Framingham tract in question. It houses MCI-Framingham, a medium-security women’s prison with a population that includes a majority of nonviolent offenders. Most of whom are from working-class families, and most of whom would not be there if the state and federal government put less money into the “prison-industrial complex” and more money into guaranteeing economic opportunity for those families.
It is also home to the former General Motors plant. Which once employed as many as 5,000 workers in high-paying jobs unionized with the United Auto Workers. Just the kind of jobs that increasingly downwardly mobile working-class families need, if they want to avoid turning to crime to make ends meet.
According to the New York Times, the last 2,100 workers were laid off from the GM plant in 1989. And the working families of Framingham and environs have never really recovered since then. Because pols and CEOs and policy wonks can talk all they want about Massachusetts having recovered from the Great Recession of 10 years back. They can claim we’ve achieved “full employment.” But the jobs that working people have been able to get since the destruction of the Bay State’s largely unionized industrial base between the 1950s and the 1990s are not nearly as good as the ones that were lost.
Gone also is the social—and therefore political—solidarity that once enabled the local working class to defend and maintain the improvements they won on the job for decades.
In its place, we have programs like the “opportunity zones” that help the rich find new and exciting ways to get richer. But that don’t mandate the creation of good jobs for working families, or provide for the democratic control of new enterprises that are created by the people that work in them.
Furthermore, as Next City points out, “Opportunity funds could end up raising too much capital without enough deals in the designated census tracts, blunting the impact per tax dollar lost, or they could end up without enough capital raised to make a discernible difference.”
Seems likely that the new program will go the way of a similar neoliberal program from the Clinton era: “Empowerment Zones.” Which never produced gains for poor communities that could be tied to the program. Instead lining the pockets of legions of contractors and investors along the way.
Harvard University grad union victory
In light of the loss of 5,000 good jobs unionized with the UAW at GM Framingham decades back, it’s extremely ironic that 5,000 graduate assistants at Harvard University just successfully unionized with—you guessed it—the UAW. Big congrats to all concerned.
The labor campaign was absolutely necessary because the same neoliberal system that purposely depresses working-class wages and benefits worldwide to increase corporate profits also hurts grad assistants. Harvard is a large employer, and—nonprofit or not—like most large employers it always strives to save money on staffing costs. So it makes perfect sense that a union that was decimated by decades of assaults from auto industry tycoons should get vengeance of a sort by unionizing grad assistants at a ruling-class university that continues to help spearhead the corporate drive to crush global labor power. Grad assistants that—together with various kinds of adjunct faculty—get overused by fully corporatized university management to avoid increasing the ranks of more expensive (and far more powerful) tenured faculty.
Naturally, being a teaching or research assistant for a few years is not the same kind of job as the ones lost at GM Framingham. And the fortunes of people with advanced degrees from an elite school are typically much different than those of auto workers that often only had high school degrees. But beyond the improvements that grad assistants will see in their working lives during their short time at Harvard, and the bump that the labor movement will get from their very public victory, here’s hoping that the students will learn to feel genuine solidarity with working families the world over. And move into their professional lives with the determination to help undo the grievous damage that too many of their predecessors did, and continue to do, to the billions of people who don’t control the commanding heights of politics and the economy.
Townie (a worm’s eye view of the Mass power structure) is syndicated by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is BINJ’s network director, and executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Copyright 2018 Jason Pramas. Licensed for use by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and media outlets in its network.