In July 2009, 136 Stella D’oro workers, members of the Bakery, Tobacco, Confectionary, and Grain Millers Local 50 returned to work after an 11-month strike to maintain family-supporting wages and health care.
On the day they returned, Brynwood Parters, the private equity firm that currently owns the 78-year-old Stella D’oro brand, announced their intention to shutter the plant in 90 days.
On September 8, Brynwood announced that it had reached a deal to sell Stella D’oro to Lance, Inc., a North Carolina-based food manufacturer that owns numerous other brands such as Archway cookies. The deal will not be finalized until October. Please act now to save good jobs!
More details about the struggle
On August 13, 2008, 136 members of Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union Local 50, employed at the historic Stella D’Oro plant in the Bronx, went on strike to defend their family-supporting wages and benefits.
Stella D’oro’s owner, CT-based private equity firm Brynwood Partners, was demanding wage cuts of up to 25% and unaffordable health care
More than 200 people gathered in front of Wells Fargo in downtown Chicago yesterday to hold them accountable for their corporate crimes. Protestors demanded justice for the workers at Quad City Die Casting and an end to evictions and foreclosures.
Quad City Die Casting was forced to close after Wells Fargo cut off operating credit to the company. Since the plant closure, UE Local 1174 has filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board because Wells Fargo has denied payment of $200,000 in back-pay and benefits owed to workers. Deb Johann of UE Local 1174 said:
“Wells Fargo first ends financing, forcing our company to close, and now they won’t pay us what we are owed by law. To us, our vacation, insurance and wages mean everything to our families. But to Wells Fargo it’s pennies, not even a blip in their billions. Yet they choose to cheat us out of what we have earned. And to think we helped them out when they needed it!”
Protestors also demanded that Wells Fargo stop home foreclosures and tenant evictions from foreclosed rental properties. Wells
People gathered at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in DC yesterday to protest a meeting of the Financial Services Roundtable (FSR), a lobbying group of the US’s top financial institutions. Protestors staged a mock trial of the FSR to try them for their criminal use of taxpayer’s TARP money from last year’s bailout to enrich themselves instead of putting money back into the economy to help end the recession.
The Financial Services Roundtable is a group of 90 companies in the finance and insurance industry who received an estimated $213.8 billion in taxpayer funds as a part of the bail-out. The FSR spent $43.9 million on lobbying from 2000-2008. They have lobbied Congress to:
oppose accountability for TARP recipients
oppose solutions to the housing crisis
oppose basic consumer protections
oppose the Employee Free Choice Act
Thursday’s protest and mock trial was organized by National JwJ, DC JwJ, and SEIU and included participants from the Teamsters, AFSCME, CWA, Americans for Financial Reform, and other union and community groups.
Belva Davis is facing eviction from her Detroit area home, despite her attempts to pay her mortgage. Deb Johann lost her job and had months of her vacation pay stolen from her, when Quad City Die Casting abruptly shuttered its Moline, IL plant. She and her co-workers are also owed thousands of dollars in health care.
They are only two among tens of thousands of victims of corporate crime. The culprit? Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo and its Wachovia subsidiary received $25 Billion in “TARP” bailout money, not to mention far more subsidy from the Federal Reserve, supposedly to extend credit and keep our economy going during this economic crisis.
Instead, Wells Fargo and the rest of the big “Bailout Bandits” (Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase – you can read more about their corporate crimes here) reduced their lending, increased foreclosures and are paying huge executive bonuses while:
foreclosing and evicting tens of thousands of people
pushing people out of jobs when companies close for lack of credit
charging obscene overdraft fees
spending millions lobbying against reforms of the financial system and a recovery for the rest of us (health care,
One year ago Jobs with Justice, a coalition of labor and community organizations, took to the streets to oppose the Bush Administration’s bailout of Wall Street’s banks and other financial institutions. We warned against transferring public money to private banks through Bush’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) without some level of public ownership and control. But the TARP passed as is, entrusting the banks to put money back into the economy and help put the brakes on the recession.
Instead, these corporate criminals stole our money.
The banks said they needed taxpayer money to continue lending and to keep the economy running, yet they refuse to extend credit to viable companies like Hartmarx and Republic Windows and Doors. They are forcing small businesses to close and costing thousands of workers their jobs. Today, unemployment stands at 9.7%.
Mortgage lenders have failed to work with homeowners to curtail foreclosures, even those who qualify for refinancing. Today, nearly 1 in 25 homes is in foreclosure.
So what have the banks spent our taxpayer dollars on? Over the last year, we’ve watched one corporate scandal after another unfold. The bailed-out financial industry has paid outrageous executive salaries and bonuses, thrown
On August 31 all 100 housekeepers at Hyatt’s three Boston area hotels were fired. They were given their last paychecks, told to clean out their lockers and leave. Some had worked for Hyatt for more than 20 years.
The housekeepers had been told they were training workers who would be filling in for vacations, but they had in fact been training their replacements. Upon being fired, they were immediately replaced by workers from an out-of-state subcontractor Hyatt brought in which will pay workers $8/hour with no benefits.
Last night, more than 400 people, including members of Massachusetts JwJ and UNITE HERE Local 26 gathered outside the Hyatt Regency Boston to demand that they give workers their jobs back. Several state and local politicians attended the rally, and Mayor Menino issued a statement in support of the workers. Stay tuned for updates on this story.
One of the main road blocks that workers face to exercising their rights on the job is the powerful and frightening coercive power that an employer has over an employee.
Imagine an election in which the party in power could force you to attend mandatory meetings to tell you why you should not vote for the other party. Imagine the party in power could also make you lose your job, and harass your neighbors who support the opposition party. The party in power could bring in professional campaigners (lawyers and anti-union consultants) to help them win their election. They were guaranteed access to the voters every day leading up to the election — but the opposition party could only campaign in secret and when their volunteers happened to catch other voters at home. Let’s say that the party in power could also sit you down, all by yourself, and interrogate you to see how you intended on voting?
Sounds pretty intimidating, huh? Well these are the troubles that the security guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art are bound to face in the next thirty days as they try to form a union.
Yesterday, hundreds of community, faith, student leaders came to Washington to tell their elected officials why they support the Employee Free Choice Act. Jobs with Justice activists from Pennsylvania, Missouri, Maine and Indiana joined others in a jam-packed 36 hours of training and lobbying.
Participants were welcomed Wednesday night by outgoing AFL-CIO president John Sweeney. On Thursday morning, Senator Harkin addressed the crowd with heart-felt remarks about his family’s life-long commitment to unions and workers’ issues. Harkin, who was just named Chairman of the House Education Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, brought a bittersweet message to the activists. “We will win strong labor law reform,” Harkin said, “but it may not happen this year.” Senator Harkin explained that health care would likely dominate the legislative calendar for the remainder of the year, but assured folks that the Employee Free Choice Act would immediately follow.
With the appointment of Harkin to lead the HELP Committee and President Obama’s Labor Day address reconfirming his support for the Bill, activists were energized to go out and meet with their Senators and Congressional Representatives. You can see
Our Day of Action JUST started – we need your help! Do your part to fight greedy CEOs and corporate lobbyists who are trying to kill the Employee Free Choice Act.
Soaring health care costs. Foreclosures on the rise. An uncertain future. And now, a so-called “jobless recovery.”
How did this happen? For years, we tried trickle-down economics. And it was a miserable failure. That’s why hundreds of state leaders are in Washington DC TODAY, fighting for the Employee Free Choice Act – so workers can fix our economy from the bottom up.
When more folks can negotiate for better wages, health care, and working conditions by joining a union, things get better for all of us. That’s what this bill is all about.
Will you back up local leaders on Capitol Hill today?
Over 300 state leaders who support the Employee Free Choice Act are on-the-ground today, meeting with their members of Congress in support of the Employee Free Choice
Jobs with Justice was one of 521 organizations that signed an open letter to Obama criticizing the Presidents inactivity on immigration reform. The letter demands the “immediate termination” of the 287(g) program which allows local law enforcement agencies to essentially act as proxies for federal agents who investigate, apprehend, transport, and detain people who are suspected of being undocumented.
The national debate on health care continues to be front-and-center, and JwJ coalitions remain engaged on the ground.
St. Joseph Valley Project/JwJ in South Bend, Indiana went out to show their support for health reform when the so-called “Patients First National Bus Tour” came to town.
Security Guards at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, after 