Dear friends,
There’s a lot going on! Surely you’ve seen some headlines. As a student of the long view, I want to celebrate some good organizing:
Jon Stewart, who has devoted a lot of time working with veterans and 9/11 first responders to secure health care benefits, remarked:
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a situation where people who have already given so much had to fight so hard to get so little. I hope we learned a lesson.
We know that most justice work starts small, which is why we attend to the green shoots of local efforts.
An organization in Oakland, CA, Planting Justice, is doing everything right, from what I can tell. They’re hiring folks who have been incarcerated and paying them a living wage, supplying food to the community for free, planting fruit trees in people’s yards, and working with the Indigenous Ohlone people to return their land and lease it from them.
Planting Justice has also installed hundreds and hundreds of edible gardens throughout East Oakland and they offer classes for young people.
Odessa Kelly, a Black lesbian, former college basketball player, and seeeeeerious community activist is running for Congress in Tennessee. There is no Democratic primary, so she will face off against Republican Congressman Mark Green in a freshly-gerrymandered district.
After 14 years working in a local community center, Kelly has spent the last seven years as an advocate and an organizer to address systemic problems like poverty, over-policing, and violence.
[Kelly] got especially interested in labor issues and co-founded the advocacy coalition Stand Up Nashville in 2016. She has since been credited with a couple of big labor wins, including a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) that would guarantee the city’s new Major League Soccer stadium would come with substantial community investments.
Kelly’s race is a long-shot and she’s committed to sustained organizing. She represents a real choice for voters and the staunch refusal to leave a seat in Congress uncontested.
Support the sustained organizing of the Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, who are supporting Odessa Kelly!
Note: The original four Congressional squad members, plus Cori Bush, are all Justice Democrats. Ilhan Omar won her primary last night!
In addition to the pandemic conditions, numerous other factors have collided to create what labor experts call a perfect storm for organizing. The U.S. has seen four decades of stagnant wages. Companies that already had healthy profits before the pandemic made even more money after lockdowns. And there are lots of jobs available without enough applicants to fill them.
There are now 209 unionized Starbucks stores in the US; the first stores were unionized in December 2021.
Starbucks is set to raise wages to a national minimum of $15/hr, with longevity increases for workers who with two years or more than five years with the company. The problem is that while it certainly appears that the raises are a response to union organizing, the company is withholding increases from unionized stores.
Ridiculously, Starbucks argues that once a store is unionized, it cannot change pay or benefits without collective bargaining.
Catherine Creighton, director of Cornell University’s Industrial and Labor Relations School in Buffalo, New York, said the law requires companies to give a union notice of a new benefit and the opportunity to bargain over it. But she said that, “if the union says they have no objection, then the employer can absolutely give them that benefit.”
If you buy swag from Starbucks Workers United, all proceeds support the organizing.
Following an investigation by the NYC’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), Chipotle reached a $20 million settlement with employees who had been denied sick leave and timely notice of scheduled work shifts, which are required by law.
[The] investigation found that Chipotle did not give employees advance notice of their work schedules, required employees to work extra time without their advanced consent, did not properly compensate workers for schedule changes, did not offer available shifts to current employees before hiring new employees, and did not allow employees to use accrued safe and sick leave.
Around 13,000 people who worked at Chipotle between November 2017 and April 2022 are eligible for additional compensation of $50 per week, according to the DCWP commissioner.
In addition to the settlement, Chipotle must pay a fine of $1 million to the city.
There are a few interesting rulings in answer to some long-term struggle:
The ruling could have broad implications in New York City, where real estate firms frequently cite minimum-income requirements when denying applicants with housing vouchers that pay their entire rent.
Agents, brokers and landlords also often steer applicants with vouchers away from certain rentals, flat-out reject them or stop taking their calls—a practice known as “ghosting.”
The city’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) has found that discrimination due to applicants’ source of income — housing vouchers from the city, state, or federal government — is the most common housing complaint in NYC. But there are too few staff investigating these complaints.
Let the mayor know that you want to see more enforcement to prevent housing discrimination.
Housing Rights Initiative has been pursuing a lawsuit against multiple real estate companies that are accused of source of income (SOI) discrimination. HRI’s President remarked:
“New York City must be tough on real estate crime. The best city in the country shouldn’t have the worst homelessness crisis in the country.”
Support Housing Rights Initiative.
We want to believe that Trump’s comeuppance is coming. The FBI seizure of documents from Mar-a-Lago seems like a promising development. If it can be proved that he violated that Presidential Records Act, Trump would be barred from holding office.
One of the U.S. Supreme Court’s justifications for shamefully upholding the Muslim Ban was that a waiver process existed to ensure that people were not being unjustly denied entry into the U.S. Through the Emami lawsuit, a group of Muslim Ban victims who were denied such waivers—despite their chronic medical conditions, prolonged family separations and significant business interests—challenged the Trump administration’s claim that a functional visa waiver process existed. These victims continued to have their visa applications wrongfully stalled or rejected under the Biden administration.
Last week, a judge’s ruled in Emami v. Blinken that the Federal government must not require with the victims to restart the visa application process. A new process must be worked out, in cooperation with the folks whose applications were rejected or stalled.
I just came back from a sobering visit to see my mom. The memory care facility where she now resides is understaffed. The shortage of care workers means that they rely on workers from an agency to fill in when their staff is sick and when there is high turnover (always). This affects the quality of care and the relationships with the folks they care for.
The good news is that organizing works. The last action today was inspired by an email I received from José Hernandez, a community organizer working with NY Caring Majority’s Fair Pay for Home Care campaign.
There’s a bill before the NYC city council that would require folks who rely on round-the-clock home care to either forego overnight care or move into a nursing home against their wishes.
[Int 0175-2022] would set the maximum working hours that an employer may assign to a home care aide. The hours would be limited to 12 hours for any one shift, or within any 24 hours period, and 50 hours within a week. A home care aide could be assigned additional hours in the event of an emergency.
Agencies would be subject to fines from the city when personal assistants (PA) work more than 12 hours per day, work 12 hours on consecutive days, or work more than 50 hours in a week.
José explained how the bill would affect care recipients and caregivers:
This will cause agencies to turn away live-in cases and jeopardize their contract with DOH and, tragically, New York City’s own Human Resources Administration (HRA).
No other workforce is told by the government they are not allowed to work overtime. This bill in fact would make it illegal for personal assistants, who are predominantly Black and LatinX women, from working overtime, even though many rely on overtime pay to be able to pay their rent and put food on their table for their children. Meanwhile, New York City spent $750 million to cover overtime pay for the NYPD last year.
There is a severe shortage of care workers, who generally do not earn a living wage. This ill-advised legislation will create further hardship for workers and deepen the shortage that affects people with disabilities, older folks, and their families.
Contact your councilmember to vote NO on Int 0175-2022 to protect care workers and care recipients.
To be clear, I want care workers to earn a living wage, so that overtime is a real choice. You will be hearing more about the fight for Fair Pay for Home Care in the coming months.
with love,
L