After nine months of organizing a grassroots campaign to recover their salaries and educate the immigrant community about their rights as workers, a group of Latino immigrant workers have recovered their salaries that had been unjustly denied them by a cleaning company that subcontracted with Boston area restaurant chain Legal Sea Food.
More than 30 immigrant workers employed by different subcontracting companies to clean in the Cheesecake Factory and Legal Sea Food restaurants were paid with bad checks or not paid at all for regular and overtime hours worked. “The workers are eager to continue the campaign to recover all of their wages, as only one company has agreed to pay so far and there are still workers who have had their rights violated,” stated Yessenia Alfaro, Organizing Director of the Chelsea Collaborative and board member of the Massachusetts Jobs with Justice.
“The violation of labor rights is a systemic problem affecting all workers in this country and immigrant workers are even more vulnerable to this exploitation,” said Patricia Montes, Centro Presente’s Executive Director. “The Department of Labor must invest resources into the enforcement
When security officers at the Philadelphia Museum of Art rallied against a recent roll-back of their $0.25/hr raise, they never guessed that their efforts would become an example in the nationwide debate over the Employee Free Choice Act. That’s what happened after an article by Sarah Jaffe appeared on the website of The Nation Magazine.
The guards hope that the arrival of the museum’s new director, Timothy Rub, will prompt workplace improvements. Thus far, they have they tried to communicate with Mr. Rub via written letters and phone calls. Their requests remain unanswered, so the guards decided to translate their message into a language sympathetic to the ears of the museum leaders: art. Today, the film entitled “Welcoming Change: A Message To Timothy Rub,” directed by David Stuart Randle from local media organization Media Mobilizing Project, will be released on the internet and will premier on screen at 4205 Chestnut St at 6:30 pm. The film will also be mailed to 100 local churches.
The security guards, with the help of Philadelphia JwJ, began organizing in 2007 in
Workers and community leaders in Dallas, TX and Pontiac, MI came together on August 18th to voice their concerns about the proposed merger between Pulte Homes and Centex Corporation. The merger would make it the largest home building company in the U.S.
The protests were organized as part of the “Building Justice” partnership between the Painters and Allied Trades union (IUPAT), the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA), the AFL-CIO, Pulte homeowners, community members, and elected officials to improve conditions at Pulte developments. Unions and community members are concerned about Pulte’s use of so-called “non-traditional” loans and about reports of sub-par working conditions.
North Texas Jobs with Justice was proud to join the Sheet Metal Workers, Painters, Laborers, and Ironworkers for a protest outside the Centex Construction Company’s stockholder meeting in Dallas.
Today, Speed Matters released the third annual report on Internet Speeds in America – and U.S. connection speeds have not improved significantly in the past year. The results of the report are based on the last-mile connection speed of over 413,000 Internet users who took the online test between May 2008 and May 2009.
The state of broadband adoption and deployment in the United States is poor, according to the report:
Only 20 percent of those who took the test have Internet speeds in the range of the top-ranked countries – South Korea, Japan and Sweden. 18 percent do not even meet the FCC definition for current-generation broadband: an always-on Internet connection of at least 768 kbps downstream.
Not only does the United States rank 15th in the industrialized world in Internet speed, it is virtually the only industrialized country without a national high-speed Internet policy. CWA says the government invests relatively less on telecommunications than most other major countries. Consumers are charged more for slower speeds, and current high-speed networks don’t even reach millions of American households.
Job creation, rural development, telemedicine, distance learning, even solutions to global warming all rely on truly high-speed universal networks. This year, the Internet Connection Slow? Speed Matters.
Members of Massachusetts JwJ JwJ got ready to protest Whole Foods over CEO John Mackey’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, The Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare, in which he argues against any government involvement in health care and advocates for health care reforms that emphasize “personal choices.” Stay tuned for more coverage as JwJ & others continue to put the pressure on this week.
In August of 2008, the Central Indiana Jobs with Justice chapter had a critical decision to make: whether or not to seemingly abandon our long time health care reform partners and H.R. 676 and join the national Health Care for America Now Campaign (HCAN), and position ourselves to become part of the largest coalition ever to take on health care reform. But a secondary question lingered too: Could Central Indiana JwJ position itself to become the largest social justice coalition in Indiana?
This decision came about at an interesting time, before the election that turned Indiana “blue” for the first time since 1964. With a limited number of progressive groups in the state, and a history scattered with part-time staff support, the organization decided to join HCAN and launched a state-wide campaign for health care reform.
Fast-forward eight months to a very different situation. Today JwJ leaders wonder how they could not be involved at this critical juncture. More than 22 organizers have been deployed to Indiana by liberal groups and unions with the conservative groups’ count unknown. There have been rallies, candle light vigils, town hall meetings, conference calls, street theatre
On Saturday, August 15, hundreds of people converged on a U.S. Senator’s Town Hall meeting in Rutland, Vermont, with healthcare reform on their minds. Despite the fact that Rutland had seen a 200-person-strong “Tea Party” rally less than two months before, and that various right-wing radio stations has been ceaselessly promoting the event for weeks, this event turned out very differently from town hall meetings held elsewhere in the country in recent weeks, where Democratic representatives and senators were largely cowed by large, well-organized and disruptive crowds. Instead, the audience, physical space, and media coverage of this town meeting, and a similar one held later in the day in the town of Arlington, were dominated by the red placards and t-shirts of the “Healthcare Is a Human Right” campaign of the Vermont Workers’ Center/Jobs with Justice.
Anti-reform speakers got their share of time at the microphone but were unable to be disruptive because of the large Workers’ Center mobilization, and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders — a long-time supporter of a single-payer, national healthcare plan — remained in control of the room, challenging the
The Kentucky Social Forum, held at Berea College the weekend of July 31 to August 2, is the first statewide social forum to be held in the United States. The purpose of the forum was to build strong relationships among those who work to serve the diverse needs of Kentuckians within the state. The forum, organized by Attica Scott, the Coordinator of Kentucky Jobs with Justice in Louisville, marked the first time in United States history a initiative of this nature has been made to collaboratively create a statewide agenda that will urge human rights to become a priority in future national and State legislation. The forum addressed a variety of issues that affect the Commonwealth, including health care costs and energy.
Because Kentucky is one of the poorest states in the nation, the organizers of the event felt that it was necessary to organize the KSF to create an opportunity for organizers around the state to coordinate with other activists
A sampling of what Jobs with Justice coalitions are working on this week.
JwJ coalitions across the country continued to engage in the health care debate. Central Indiana Jobs with Justice is forming a local grassroots group of activists to respond to the attacks on health insurance reform. Stay tuned next week for a more detailed account of the work they are doing.
The debate over the Employee Free Choice Act is going to heat up in the next few weeks. In Philadelphia, there is an effort underway that stands out as an example of why we need to pass this critical labor law reform.
A group of AlliedBarton security officers have been struggling since 2005 to win better wages and benefits. Over the years they have used innovative direct-action strategies to win union level wages at the University of Pennsylvania and paid sick days at Temple University, Drexel University and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Despite these victories, they have watched as their hard fought gains have been eroded by their employer. For example, on Labor Day last year, the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced that they would give the security guards three days of paid sick leave. The very next week, after the news cameras had gone away, the new benefit was clarified. Workers were eligible to have up to three days of paid sick leave. In order to get that level of benefit, they had to have been employed, full time, at the same property for three years. In fact, less than 1/3 of the guards
After nine months of organizing a grassroots campaign to recover their salaries and educate the immigrant community about their rights as workers, a group of Latino immigrant workers have recovered their salaries that had been unjustly denied them by a cleaning company that subcontracted with Boston area restaurant chain Legal Sea Food.
Alternet reported on the campaign being forged by the UE and supported by Jobs with Justice targeting 
The debate over the Employee Free Choice Act is going to heat up in the next few weeks. In Philadelphia, there is an effort underway that stands out as an example of why we need to pass this critical labor law reform.