The presumptive presidential candidates have taken sides in a labor dispute that has engulfed the Bay Area this week–and that reflects the growing income gap that is engulfing our country. While Senator Obama stands with area janitors who are fighting to win a higher standard of living for themselves and their families, Senator McCain is lunching with the CEOs of the multi-billion dollar corporations whose floors the janitors scrub for poverty wages.

Today Obama spoke out against the “unacceptable and ever-growing divide between the wealthiest and poorest among us” that keeps hard-working janitors like Cisco cleaner Maria Lopez making just $11.04 per hour after nine years on the job.

McCain, for his part, embraced that divide yesterday when he attended a campaign fundraiser in Atherton hosted by Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers. The tech industry giant’s sprawling Silicon Valley campus is cleaned by the striking janitors who currently are paid just $23,000 a year–less than one third of what the Center for Economic Policy reports it takes to survive in California.

Some striking workers–on their way to a 600-person, 3-mile “march to close the gap” in Palo Alto–dropped by the fundraiser to call on the two Johns to stop turning a blind eye to the poverty their policies and decisions help to create. When they left, the workers left behind this flyer highlighting a scandalous equation: 10 tickets ($2,300 each) to the fundraiser = 2 tickets for the event’s VIP reception ($25,000 per couple) = 1 year’s salary ($23,000) for a Silicon Valley janitor.

The candidates know what’s at stake in this strike and they’ve made their allegiances clear. I encourage you to learn more and do the same.



~posted by Nadia, SEIU staff

The presumptive presidential candidates have taken sides in a labor dispute that has engulfed the Bay Area this week-and that reflects the income gap that is engulfing our country. While Senator Obama stands with area janitors who are fighting to win a higher standard of living for themselves and their families; Senator McCain is lunching with the CEOs of the multi-billion dollar corporations whose floors the janitors scrub for poverty wages.

Today Obama spoke out against the “unacceptable and ever-growing divide between the wealthiest and poorest among us” that keeps hard-working janitors like Cisco cleaner Maria Lopez making just $11.04 per hour after nine years on the job.

McCain, for his part, embraced that divide yesterday when he attended a campaign fundraiser in Atherton hosted by Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers. The tech industry giant’s sprawling Silicon Valley campus is cleaned by the striking janitors who currently are paid just $23,000 a year-less than one third of what the Center for Economic Policy reports it takes to survive in California.

Some striking workers-on their way to a 600-person, 3-mile “march to close the gap” in Palo Alto-dropped by the fundraiser to call on the two Johns to stop turning a blind eye to the poverty their policies and decisions help to create. When they left, the workers left behind this flyer highlighting a scandalous equation: 10 tickets ($2,300 each) to the fundraiser = 2 tickets for the event’s VIP reception ($25,000 per couple) = 1 year’s salary ($23,000) for a Silicon Valley janitor.

The candidates know what’s at stake in this strike and they’ve made their allegiances clear. I encourage you to learn more and do the same.  

By now you may feel like you’ve heard quite enough of the back-and-forth between SEIU and the CNA over union representation of nurses and healthcare workers in Ohio. You may have also heard that the dispute runs deep and wide and goes back years and across state lines into Nevada, California, Texas and several others, and that the encounters have become more extreme.

And perhaps you’re wondering-why should I care?

If this were just about CNA and SEIU, or even just about a dispute at an isolated hospital in one state, you could move on. The thing is, these struggles are not taking place in a vacuum-and what becomes of them has far-reaching impact that touches us all. At a time when the economy is bad and getting worse, and the number of workers represented by a union in this country is an anemic 12%, labor unions face a choice…and workers everywhere face the consequences.

Unions can fight for turf within the ever-shrinking pool of unionized workers, or we can get back on the offensive by reaching out to help more workers join unions to strengthen the hand of more working families.  

SEIU has been at the forefront of unions doing exactly this since 1996. And the results speak for themselves.  Since 1996, more than 1 million new members have united to join SEIU.  Today SEIU represents 1.9 million workers. These new members range from child care workers to city employees in nonunion right to work states like Texas and Arizona to, significantly, hospital workers.

By contrast, CNA, harking back to old-school craft unionism, has pursued an elitist agenda that not only excludes hospital workers who aren’t registered nurses, it prevents registered nurses who want to join a union other than CNA from doing so simply because it’s not the CNA.

Six days before union elections at nine hospitals in Ohio-one with unprecedented ground rules that resulted from three-plus years of hard work by hospital workers, their community allies, and SEIU to hammer out fair election guidelines with the state’s largest health care system-CNA dropped into the state. CAN organizers ran a fiercely anti-union campaign encouraging workers to “vote no.” Their tactics so poisoned the environment that the elections were cancelled. I won’t go into detail here-it’s all detailed in this timeline: http://www.shameoncna.com/incl…

By disrupting this process, CNA sent an unmistakable message to the hospital industry: if a hospital agrees to a fair organizing process, it will be subjected to outlandish accusations of “company unionism” and “backroom deals.”

The CNA’s actions in Ohio represent a major setback in the labor movement’s efforts to raise the standard of employer conduct in organizing campaigns. And it’s not the first time CAN has used such divisive tactics to poach members from an existing union or otherwise divide workers who are in the process of forming a union. It’s happening in California, Nevada, Texas, and elsewhere.

But why might it matter to you? It should if you (you being a working person, a progressive, a consumer in the American economy, or all 3) because this approach undermines the future of the labor movement. At this time of historic inequality and utter insecurity in the American economy, workers need more than ever the strength in community that comes from being organized at work.

In the healthcare sector alone, there are nine million workers out there who don’t have a union. As boomers age, our healthcare needs grow, and the industry’s identity crisis drags on, healthcare workers united in unions have a crucial role to play.

The same is true for the other industries that employ hundreds of millions of American workers-88% of whom don’t have a voice on the job.

But our ability as workers, progressives, and consumers to sit at the big kids’ table depends on our ability to grow and our ability to work together. On a national scale, we’re living the reality of what happens when a smaller and smaller percentage of workers stand together: corporations get to have a bigger and bigger say in the way things work and who gets what.

But at SEIU, we’re living the reality of what happens when workers-with tremendous courage and at great odds-stand together for the interests of all working people: lives, neighborhoods, cities, and whole industries are transformed for the better.

Experience has taught us the hard lesson that circling the wagons simply doesn’t work. And our progressive sensibilities-our concern for the common good-confirm it.

This struggle matters because it’s not just about CNA or SEIU, or Rose Ann DeMoro or Andy Stern. It’s about the future direction and vitality of the American labor movement-a movement that has the ability to blaze a path to an economy and a society that works for everyone-not just the lucky 12%…or 11…or 10…or 9%…

–posted by Nadia, SEIU staff

Striking for Justice

Today, security officers who protect Kaiser Permanente facilities in California are striking against their employer-Inter-Con Security Systems–which has met every union organizing effort with fierce opposition, jobsite harassment, and continued intimidation and coercion. The post below is written by Rochelle Duran, an Inter-Con security officer in Fremont, California, who is striking with 80 fellow security officers to make her voice heard.

Forty years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his life organizing sanitation workers in Memphis, my colleagues and I are still fighting for justice in the workplace.

Today, security officers who protect Kaiser Permanente facilities in California are striking against our employer-Inter-Con Security Systems-which refuses to give us basic rights and has met every step we have taken to form a union with fierce opposition and jobsite.

We’ve been struggling with Inter-Con for more than two years now.  Instead of honoring the wishes of its employees, Inter-Con responded by unlawfully intimidating and coercing its officers.

At Kaiser, security officers are among the only group of workers who are being denied the right to form a union. Almost all other direct employees or subcontracted workers are protected under Kaiser’s Labor Management Partnership. As a result, you can really see the stark differences in job quality, compensation, and overall staff morale.

I work the graveyard shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. A nurse I work with was recently shocked to discover that I don’t receive differential pay for my late-night hours. I told her, “How could we possibly expect differential pay when we don’t even get a paid sick day or a basic annual wage increase?”

Forty years ago, Dr. King died while standing up for the dignity and human rights of workers.  Today my co-workers and I will share that struggle. We’ll be outside with signs in hand, using the only tools we have to make our voices heard. I pray this time it will pay off. It’s time for Inter-Con to give us a break. And if we can’t convince them to treat us like human beings, it’s time for Kaiser to give us the support we need so we can do our jobs well and be treated with the dignity we have already earned.

For more information on Rochelle’s struggle, go to www.StandforInterConWorkers.org

I work the graveyard shift from 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. A nurse I work with was recently shocked to discover that I don’t receive differential pay for my late-night hours. I told her, “How could we possibly expect differential pay when we don’t even get a paid sick day or a basic annual wage increase?”

Inter-Con won’t even provide security officers with a single paid sick day, which is just crazy in a hospital setting. We’re forced to come to our hospital sites sick-potentially infecting vulnerable patients-because we don’t have any other options. If we don’t show up, it’s not just that we’ll get docked pay-we also risk getting fired. I highly doubt that a measly five days of paid sick leave would break the Inter-Con bank; but I’m more than sure it would improve the services we provide and build loyalty among the staff.

Unfortunately, Inter-Con doesn’t share my sense of pragmatism. In fact, when I went on maternity leave six months ago, they harassed me into returning two weeks before the six weeks of family leave I am legally entitled to was used up. I’d been working at the job for nearly three years, and there was no doubt that I was coming back. But Inter-Con just kept threatening to give away my position, and I was scared. A lost job was the last thing I needed to deal with while juggling the responsibilities of being a mother for the first time.  Of course it wasn’t surprising coming from a company who had told me months before that “they didn’t have positions for pregnant women.”

It still shocks me that as honest workers, we have to fight this hard to get a break and Inter-Con’s only response is to violate our rights. I guess that’s just the way the world is these days. Job security is something you can’t take for granted when you work for a contractor like Inter-Con.

Back when I was out on maternity leave, Inter-Con fired one of my colleagues who had been active in trying to organize a union. Inter-Con said they fired him for his poor language skills- although those skills worked just fine for the three years he had already put in there! He was lucky. Because we’d started working with SEIU, we saw the kind of justice unions can provide. After negotiation and some legal proceedings, my colleague was able to come back to work for Inter-Con in an even higher position than the one they’d fired him from for his “lacking language skills.”

We need more of that kind of justice.

Even though my salary hasn’t budged since I started working at Inter-Con, my life’s changed a lot. I have a six-month old and my family needs me. I suppose I’m just like every other worker in America: I want a job that values my contributions and pays me a livable wage. In the wealthiest country on earth, I just don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Forty years ago, Dr. King died while standing up for the dignity and human rights of workers.  Today my co-workers and I will share that struggle. We’ll be outside with signs in hand, using the only tools we have to make our voices heard. I pray this time it will pay off. It’s time for Inter-Con to give us a break. And if we can’t convince them to treat us like human beings, it’s time for Kaiser to give us the support we need so we can do our jobs well and be treated with the dignity we have already earned.

– Rochelle Duran

For more information on Rochelle’s struggle, go to www.StandforInterConWorkers.org

Rochelle Duran has worked as a security officer at Kaiser Permanente in Fremont, California, for nearly three years. At the same time she fights for justice for her fellow Inter-Con security officers, Rochelle is a full-time student studying to become a probation officer. Outside of work, Rochelle enjoys spending time with her six-month old baby.