Which Side Are You On?

I saw the movie "Harlan County, USA" this weekend. I recommend it very highly. It is about the 1973 Coal workers strike.

During a previous strike in the same county, Florence Reece - the wife of a striking worker, wrote the song "Which Side Are You On?" and I think it may be the greatest song ever written.

Mrs. Reece sings a few verses of it on the movie, and many people have done versions of it since.

Here are some:

Pete Seeger


Dropkick Murphy's


Natalie Merchant (w/ Mrs. Reece in the beginning)


Billy Bragg


The Washington Squares


Movie Trailer:

More on Vegas - Worker's Paradise

I started a thought here. Some more below (hat tip to the Chief):

According to "The Coffee Pot Wars," an essay by Annette Bernhardt, Laura Dresser and Eric Hatton in the new Russell Sage Foundation study of low-wage work, the median hourly wage of the American hotel dishwasher in 2000 was $7.45 -- a little better than the housekeeper's $7.09. Even luxury hotels seldom pay their low-end employees much more than the minimum wage. And while wages have stagnated, hours have declined, from 40 a week for low-end hotel workers in 1960 to 31 in 2000. At one hotel they studied, the authors concluded that 60 percent of the kitchen staff held down two jobs.

Garcia holds just one, but his hourly wage at the Luxor is $11.86 -- $4 higher than the industry average. He is paid for 40 hours every week, even if the company actually needs him for fewer. He has family health insurance paid for entirely by his employer. He has a defined-benefit pension. He has three weeks of vacation every year, which he likes to spend hunting in Canada.

Far from a life of quiet desperation, Garcia's seems full of noisy exaltation. On the evening I visit him, three grandchildren are careening around his house, a six-bedroom home built in 1988. Garcia's next-door neighbors are an attorney, a minister and, over the back fence, an air-conditioning mechanic. A legion of his fellow hotel workers inhabits the surrounding blocks.

How did this happen?

Something is right with this picture, so right that in an America where Wal-Mart and a thousand other unnatural shocks drive working-class living standards downward, we can scarcely account for it. The picture is incomprehensible unless you understand the role that a union -- Culinary Workers Local 226, the Las Vegas local of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE) -- has played in the lives of its 48,000 members, their families and the city as a whole.

Local 226 is probably the largest -- and surely the most remarkable -- local union in the United States. While most unions have been shrinking or struggling to hold their own over the past several decades, and while hotel union membership has declined from 16 percent of the hotel workforce in 1983 to 12 percent in 2000, Local 226 has grown by 30,000 members since its low point in 1988. It has done that by organizing virtually every hotel on the Vegas Strip, so that roughly 90 percent of the jobs in the city's major hotels are unionized. Considering that Nevada is a right-to-work state where employees can work in unionized workplaces without joining the union, this is a breathtaking achievement.

The key is "union density" -- the unionized share of total jobs in a local occupation or industry. The authors of the Russell Sage study conclude that hourly wages in the hotel industry are $3 higher in cities with high union density than they are in ones where it's low. Even in unionized cities, however, the authors write that the union effect is minimal on work schedules or career ladders for such dead-end jobs as housekeeping. "This industry doesn't focus on mobility," one hotel executive told Bernhardt, Dresser and Hatton. "We've done a really poor job of recognizing talent and building our own."

Anyway, read it all.

Las Vegas - Worker's Paradise?

In case you were wondering why there is so much to-do about the Las Vegas Culinary Workers endorsement, the NYTimes cover it here:

My sister was a waitress back east, with two kids and no insurance,? said D. Taylor, a leader of the culinary union. ?She came out here and not only earned a living wage, but got a good health care package for her family."

At the Culinary Training Academy, people learn how to cook, how to make beds, how to speak the language and understand American civics. They also learn how to made a vodka martini and how to cook a white wine reduction sauce ? courtesy of Sterling Burpee, the charismatic chef lured away from one of the Strip?s newest casinos, Wynn Las Vegas. There?s a private chartered school on site, a day care center, and a classroom that processed 25 percent of the new citizens in Nevada last year. It's a sort of Ellis Island for the new service economy.
...
The culinary union long ago made its peace with most of the casinos. And now the casinos work with the union to train all the bartenders, cooks and porters they need to keep the illusion machine running in palaces without daylight or clocks.

Another good reason to watch Heroes...

Creator, writer and producer Tim Kring is on the picket line with the Writers strike:

Tim Kring, a producer and writer of the NBC hit “Heroes,” said he had to revise the ending of the show’s 11th episode on the chance that it might be the last one to air this season.

“Fortunately we were able to hustle back,” Kring said from a picket line in an effort to shut down the show. “The audience won’t be left in a lurch.”

Also, guess who doesn't hire union:

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” doesn’t employ union writers and will continue uninterrupted.

"Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid"

From MSNBC:

Wal-Mart and unions unite on health care
Retailer, other big employers aim for ‘quality, affordable’ coverage

Executives from Wal-Mart and three other large U.S. employers on Wednesday joined union leaders in calling for “quality, affordable” health care for every American by 2012.

However, they did not propose any specific policies to achieve this goal, or commit to spending any extra money in the near-term to provide health coverage to more workers.

Joining Wal-Mart Stores Inc. CEO Lee Scott and Service Employees International Union leader Andrew Stern at a Washington press conference were top executives from Intel Corp., AT&T Inc. and Kelly Services Inc., a temporary staffing agency.
...
The partnership of business and union leaders laid out four main goals, including universal health-care coverage for all Americans and boosting the value of every U.S. dollar spent on health care. The business and union leaders’ coalition, dubbed “Better Health Care Together,” pledged to convene a national summit by the end of May to recruit others from the private sector, labor, government and non-profits.

However:

(Walmart's) Scott said Wednesday he would not withhold financial support from lawmakers and candidates who oppose universal health care. WakeUpWalMart spokesman Chris Kofinis called that stance “hypocritical,” pointing out that Scott blamed politics as the main reason the nation lacked universal health care.

The Automakers have also called for universal healthcare in meetings with the White House.

If you are against this, you are against history's current path. This is a fight that we can and will win. It is nice to see Wal-Mart aboard

I'm still not shopping there, however.

In Peoria, Bush Celebrates the End of the American Middle Class

The story that is not being told about Bush's visit to Peoria:

"There is a balance that must be struck,” Caterpillar group president Douglas Oberhelman told The New York Times, “between being competitive and being middle class.”

That is from a February 26, 2006 story in the New York Times (I blogged it here and here).

Remember this when you hear that:

Bush is touting Peoria-based Caterpillar as an example of how his administration's trade agreements and tax breaks can boost global sales and create jobs for U.S. workers.

What he is really saying is that by selling out real middle-class supporting jobs, Caterpillar can:

... net about $9 billion in sales outside of North America in 2006, when revenues of about $41.5 billion netted profits that topped $3.5 billion -- both company records.

Where is the extra profit coming from?

Highly profitable Caterpillar Tractor, for instance, now offers its new hires just $22 an hour in wages and benefits, half what it pays its more senior employees.

and:

After more than a decade of failed strikes and job actions — mainly in Illinois, where Caterpillar has its biggest factories — the U.A.W. reluctantly accepted a two-tier contract that provides for significantly lower wages and benefits for newly hired employees. The new second tier is as much as $20 an hour below the cost of employing Mr. Doty, 50, and a dwindling band of other veterans.

Bush is in Peoria today... Celebrating that community winning the race to the bottom, and the end of the American Middle Class.

And the $3.5 billion profit it netted his supporters.

Greg Baise, president and CEO of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, disagreed, calling Caterpillar the perfect stop ahead of Bush's economic address.

“Cat has had a very strong run the last few years. If there was a symbol of industrial might in America, I think they represent that as much as anyone,” Baise said.

Unfortuantely, he is correct.