Low-paid workers stage another mass 1-day walkout April 14. Low-paid workers, fast-food workers, retail workers, adjunct professors, health-care workers and others from coast to coast staged another one-day walkout on April 14, again demanding “$15 and a union.”
The protests attracted hundreds of thousands of people in 320 cities, organizers said, including unionists who back the low-paid workers. The protests — especially against McDonald’s — spread to the Philippines and Brazil. Protesters again called attention to the fact that millions of U.S. workers are both underpaid and lack the best way to better themselves: union contracts. Hospital workers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were the newest participants. They won National Labor Relations Board rulings backing their right to organize, almost a year ago, but the hospital refuses to follow the law and recognize and bargain with the Service Employees, whom the workers voted for.
Months of Verizon stonewalling, concession demands force 39,000 unionists to strike. Ten months after the contract between Verizon and the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the corporation’s giveback demands in times of prosperity forced workers to strike the telecom giant from Maine through Virginia on April 13.
“Verizon made $39 billion in profits over the last three years — and $1.8 billion a month in profits over the first three months of 2016 — but the company is still insisting on givebacks that would devastate our jobs,” the unions said in a joint statement, stressing that they launched the job action very reluctantly.
Among Verizon’s regressive demands were the unlimited right to shutter call centers and move those jobs to Mexico and the Philippines.
“We’re standing up for working families and standing up to Verizon’s corporate greed,” said CWA District 1 Vice President Dennis Trainor, whose area covers New England, New Jersey and New York. “If a hugely profitable corporation like Verizon can destroy the good family-supporting jobs of highly skilled workers, then no worker in America will be safe from this corporate race to the bottom.”
Marches, sit-ins, arrests highlight pro-democracy demonstrations in Washington.
Daily marches, frequent sit-ins and 400 arrests — just on the first day — highlighted a week of labor-supported pro-democracy demonstrations in Washington, D.C., in mid-April.
The events, organized by Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening, two separate coalitions with similar goals, aimed at forcing the GOP-run Congress to get big business and big donor money out of politics, to restore the strength of the Voting Rights Act and to return power to U.S. citizens, not corporate special interests, organizers said.
The protests were supported by, among others, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union president Stuart Appelbaum, the AFL-CIO, longtime labor activist Bill Fletcher, Pride@Work’s New York-Long Island affiliate, UNITE HERE Local 23, and RWDSU’s presence on the movement’s coordinating committee.
“The American people won’t take this anymore!” said Democracy Spring co-organizer Kai Newkirk through a megaphone before being arrested at Capitol Hill. “We’re going to end this corruption! This is just the beginning! Join us!”
News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper