Winnipeg Wobbly

This is an important notice to all those interested in getting involved with the I.W.W.  We have moved our regular meeting date from the second Thursday of each month to the second Friday of each month, still at 5:30.

We look forward to seeing you out next month and to build the One Big Union for radical change!

While we don't celebrate MLK Day in Canada, it's important to recognize the contributions to human freedom and the struggle against oppression that his memory represents and the important victory in Starbucks of getting this day recognized by the boss.


Honoring MLK Day
Union Victory at Starbucks

By DANIEL GROSS

Three years ago, union baristas at Starbucks made a simple demand of the world's largest coffee chain: respect the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. by paying baristas the same time-and-one-half holiday premium that you pay on six other federal holidays. It was an emotional and symbolic demand to make for two reasons. Many baristas are deeply inspired by Dr. King's legacy on racial equality, and King was murdered while supporting sanitation workers who were on strike for the very right to form a union. This is the same struggle facing millions of Americans today who desire union membership but are denied by the prospect of relentless union-busting and terribly flawed labor laws. Calling for holiday pay on MLK Day also made sense for workers' pocket books- with the low wages and inadequate work hours that Starbucks offers, holiday compensation is certainly welcomed to help make ends meet.

Starbucks' treatment of MLK Day as a second-class holiday was particularly hypocritical. The company and its billionaire CEO Howard Schultz pay an incredible amount of lip-service to the idea of "embracing diversity." Yet, their lack of respect for Dr. King's holiday was typical of the company's real orientation towards racial equality. For example, Starbucks employees of color are disproportionately represented in the lowest-paid entry-level jobs at the company, and while the company brands its coffee as ethically-sourced, farmworkers in the Global South growing coffee for Starbucks find themselves living in grinding poverty on the low prices that the coffee giant insists on paying.

Given the empty nature of Starbucks' commitment to "embracing diversity", the company was put into a difficult position when the IWW Starbucks Workers Union (SWU) called on it to honor Dr. King's holiday starting in 2008. The company had never spoken publicly about its substandard treatment of MLK Day. When the Union made Starbucks' MLK Day policy public, the company was faced with two options, neither of which it liked: a) refuse to pay the premium and allow a glaring hypocrisy to fester in the public arena, or b) pay the premium and concede an important victory to the SWU which it is fighting tooth and nail to delegitimize and to destroy.

For three full years, the company chose the former approach and resisted. The SWU's campaign forced the company for the first time to discuss publicly its denial of holiday pay on MLK Day and offer a defense for the indefensible. Starbucks argued that the policy was justifiable in light of the (abysmally low) prevailing standards of the food service sector. It's interesting that when Starbucks markets itself to prospective workers and prices products for its customers, it's fanatical about distinguishing itself from its fast food competitors. But the Burger Kings and the Taco Bells of the world are where Starbucks runs for safety to cover up the huge gap between the company's public relations hype and the reality on the ground for baristas.

In response to the company's refusal to meet its demand, the SWU along with Industrial Workers of the World members around the country embarked on a determined effort to win time-and-one-half holiday pay for every worker that does a shift on MLK Day. Shop floor actions, pickets, rallies, massive e-mail actions, as well as creative media advocacy started takings its toll on the company. But instead of doing the right thing and ending the second-class status of MLK Day, the company chose more rhetoric- statements about its respect for MLK and promoting volunteer service unrelated to social or economic justice on his holiday. That's the strategy of big business, the corporate non-profits, and the mainstream media: divorce Dr. King from his powerful actions for economic justice, racial equality, and peace in favor of a generic, non-confrontational charity model of "change" or "service".

The elites don't want us to know that the workers King was supporting during those fateful days in Memphis weren't hosting a charity car wash, they were withholding their labor and demonstrating against a violent, racist government that was denying them the very right to freely associate in the form of a labor union. They don't want us to know that King spoke out passionately for a living wage and against so-called right-to-work laws. They don't want us to recall Dr. King's words on the relationship between racism and union-busting: "...the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth."

As Starbucks and its public relations firm Edelman ruthlessly carry out a large-scale anti-union operation, they certainly don't want baristas to associate MLK Day with Dr. King's positive view on labor unions:

"The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress....The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome."

Baristas persevered and continued carrying out creative and energetic actions year-after-year. After three years of struggle, Starbucks finally conceded to the Union's demand and informed workers in November that the company will pay the holiday premium to employees who work this Monday and every Martin Luther King Day. It's a moving and emotional victory for the Union to be able to honor Dr. King's legacy in our own modest way.

While there is still a long way to go to win good jobs at Starbucks, the victory is significant for the tens of thousands of Starbucks employees who will end up with some well-deserved additional money on their paychecks. And it's a great win for the solidarity unionism organizing model where rank & file workers organize their own unions and lead their own campaigns around workplace justice issues. Other fast food workers are following suit. IWW workers at the Jimmy John's sandwich chain in Minnesota initiated a demand this holiday season for a time-and-one-half premium on Christmas Eve and New Year's Day.

By one estimate, the holiday wage premium on MLK Day means Starbucks will pay something in the neighborhood of an additional one million dollars to employees each year. While a million dollars a year might not sound like a lot for a large corporation like Starbucks, it's a tremendous figure to win for a grassroots labor organization forging an innovative path to justice in the massive and unorganized fast food sector.

In these times of economic hardship and escalating attacks on workers' rights, I hope we can all pause on Dr. King's holiday to assess how we can honor his true legacy of movement action for social justice and the ultimate sacrifice he made to rise up in solidarity with the striking sanitation workers of Memphis. No one will do it for us, least of all the corporate executives and their social responsibility rhetoric. Another world is inevitable; if we do the hard work together to achieve it.

Daniel Gross is a former Starbucks barista and a member of the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, online at www.StarbucksUnion.org. He is the co-author with Staughton Lynd of "Labor Law for the Rank and Filer: Building Solidarity While Steering Clear of the Law" and "Solidarity Unionism at Starbucks," (artwork by Tom Keough), both available at www.pmpress.org.

From the blog section of our friends at New Socialist Group.  There are some good ideas presented, and one must note that the IWW practices allot of perceptions in this piece, especially when it comes to union education, the IWW's Organizer Training program is something to look towards as a positive example. It's very much based in the struggles that workers have faced organizing primarily low-wage service sector workers. The OT program is one of the best things to come out of the IWW recently, which has pushed the IWW as well as broader working class organization forward.

Re-publication here does not necessarily imply political endorsement of NSG or the  analysis of this piece.

A Movement in Trouble and a Perspective for Change 




By David Camfield

The fall of 2010 saw millions of private and public sector workers and students in France take to the streets, walk out on strike and blockade roads and oil refineries.
The central focus of this highly-popular, weeks-long movement was the attack by President Nicolas Sarkozy's government on the country's public pension system. However, it also opposed the unjust policies of a government led by what many call a "president of the rich."

For weeks the top officials of France's array of union federations remained united in support of mass protests. Many grassroots union activists and the most militant union officials did what they could to broaden and escalate direct action. The protests and strikes didn't manage to stop the attack on pensions. But the outcome wasn't a defeat because the movement inflicted a lot of political damage on the government and strengthened the working-class movement.

The contrast with the workers' movement in Canada and Quebec today is glaring. Unions here are in trouble. There's no evidence that unions here are becoming more capable of building a mass movement against governments that make ordinary people pay for the global economic crisis.

It is true that the number of unionized workers hasn't been shrinking and that the decline in overall union density (the percentage of workers who are unionized) has been slow in recent years. This is not as bad as the situation in the US, where both union numbers and density have been falling for years. Union institutions remain generally stable, though some unions have lost large numbers of members and therefore income (for example, job losses reduced the CAW's membership from 265 000 in 2005 to 225 000 in 2009). This relative stability has contributed to complacency in some quarters about the state of unions in Canada and Quebec.

Statement by German anarcho-syndicalist union FAU on the situation of temporary employment in Germany and recent developments between unions and employers' organisations.


Abolish temporary work! Campaign from FAU-IWA

Since social-democrat and green politicians broke down all restrictions on temporary employment in 2003, the number of people paid by temporary work agencies increased from 300.000 to 900.000 in 2010. Many of them have been forced by legal employment agencies to offer themselves to the slave-traders. Temporary workers earn 30% less than their colleagues. Collective labour agreements, as those which have been negotiated by the Christian unions umbrella association for temporary work and personnel-service-agencies CGZP (Tarifgemeinschaft Christlicher Gewerkschaften für Zeitarbeit und Personalserviceagenturen) are crucially responsible for that. Now, the federal German labour court (BAG) rendered CGZP's labour agreements ineffective. No labour contract signed by the CGZP unions is valid any longer.

Legitimate Claim on “Equal Pay”
Each contract signed between CGZP unions and employer's organizations, such as AMP (Arbeitgeberverband Mittelständischer Personaldienstleister) or BDV (Bundesverband Deutscher Dienstleistungsunternehmen e.V.), are generally ineffective now. All temporary workers, who have been paid by CGZP contracts so far, have a legitimate claim to receive the money lost by these contracts over the last three years. They can also legitimately claim for all bonuses and extra pays which have been paid to their colleges as there is a German labour law which prohibits different treatments of worker's in the same company.

Lower courts in Berlin and Berlin-Brandenburg have already neutralized CGZP contracts. CGZP's appeal on a point of law that followed has now been turned away by Germany's federal court. In an official press release, the court justifies its decision by arguing that labour contracts can only be negotiated by a union which has the legitimate ability to do so. Due to several criteria, the CGZP has not.

200,000-300,000 Temporary Workers hope for back pay
When ineffective CGZP labour contracts have been used, each temporary worker needs to be back paid for the time he worked under these conditions. He needs not be treated different from other workers. According to German labour law on the transfer of personnel (AÜG) §10 (4), workers can now demand repayment from the temporary work agency they work for. The sum is adjusted on comparable employees working for the company which lent the temporary worker.

As each CGZP contract has been rendered ineffective, each limitation period is ineffective too. Conclusively workers can demand repayment for the last three years. Temporary workers should immediately check their contracts for links to CGZP labour agreements and lodge an action if necessary.

Bad Tricks
Since January 01, 2010 there exist other fake-unions like the CGZP. The CGM, DHV and GÖD did also sign labour agreements for temporary work. If these agreements are affected by the court's actual decision remains unknown so far. Their contracts remain probably untouched by the decision.

CGZP and DGB
The Christian union negotiated labour agreements with 1600 companies which are members of the employer's organizations AMP and BVD and with some smaller organizations. 200.000 to 300.000 workers work under their condition. In 2008, there have been 1.383 CGZP's union members, while there have been 800.000 temporary workers at all. 500.000 temporary workers are not affected by CGZP labour agreements but by deals negotiated between Germany's big union umbrella association DGB and the slave-trading employer's organizations iGZ (Interessenverband Deutscher Zeitarbeitsunternehmen) and BZA (Bundesverband Zeitarbeit). The DGB unions labour agreements are slightly better than those of CGZP: some cent more. But there are only a few temporary workers inside DGB anyway.

Minimum Wage – the Solution?
The federal German labour court's decision on CGZP labour agreements does not affect members of the DGB. This year, the union renewed its labour agreements guaranteeing dumping wages. So there is no reason for the DGB unions and its bureaucrats to applaud the actual judicial decision. After the renewing of its labour agreements, DGB cannot put pressure on the temporary work industry for “equal pay” and “equal treatment”. Their labour agreements are valid for the rest of time. Now DGB claims minimum wages for temporary workers, trying to compensate their own mistakes. But legally enacted minimum wages for temporary workers will always undercut wages and conditions of regularly employed workers. This is the opposite of equal pay. It is just another name for mass discrimination.

The FAU unions say: commercial slave-trading is a crime and temporary work needs to be abolished now.
For more information see (German): www.leiharbeit-abschaffen.de