History in a Hat

The thrift store near my house has always functioned as a sort of sociological laboratory. Since this latest economic recession the place has been packed to the rafters with customers—during the previous boom period the parking lot was half empty; these days they double-park to get inside.

Most of the customers of this thrift store are poor. The remainder are folks like me, looking for interesting junk. Americans throw away a lot of perfectly good merchandise. There are practically new jackets, shirts and other clothes here, not to mention complete sets of dishes, television sets and beds. Come Christmas you will find entire families here searching for decorations and toys for their children. Most of these people have jobs of some sort—they just don’t make enough money to buy new goods.

Interestingly, many Europeans shop here. Scandinavians, Germans and the English are amazed at the things we consider used up. They bring home clothing mainly, and shoes if they can get them. No duty to be paid on used jackets, you know.

On my way out of the store my eye fell on the hat rack and then upon a cap whose emblem took me back many years in an instant. The cap’s front read “Local P-9 Austin MN.” Nobody who was a unionist during the eighties can forget that union local, or its long struggle to the death.

P-9’s unsanctioned strike was as much a blow against traditional unionism as it was against the employer, Hormel. The local soldiered bravely on through the long months, but was simply starved out in the end. The story of that strike is the story of organized labor during the Reagan years, a story of attack and struggle and defeat, though surely the P-9 story is its saddest chapter, sadder by far than even the tale of the PATCO air traffic controllers.

Its history has been written by many others. I recall sitting in graduate labor studies classes at Rutgers where P-9 strikers and their families appeared to tell their story. At that point they were nearing the end, and not so much expecting to win as to go down fighting. We put on a benefit night for them at a local tavern, donating the proceeds to what they called a strike fund, but which was really just gas money for them to make another stop along the underground railroad of friendly unions, to get a hearing, make their mark before the storm blew their candle out.

Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich called in the National Guard to protect the replacement workers who took the places of the P-9 strikers. With that the game effectively ended. The era of decent wages in meatpacking was gone. The industry learned many lessons: to relocate into states that were less friendly to unions; to hire recent immigrants, legal and otherwise, who were desperate for jobs and who feared the loss of work more than the loss of rights, dignity, fingers or even life.

And so I am now in possession of this bit of wearable history. The cap is a bit worn and it smells of honest sweat. I will keep it to remind myself of that struggle. Has it really been twenty-five years?

http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/85hormelp9.html

Michael McGrorty

Kim Bobo: Wage Theft in America

My colleague Kim Bobo has written a book about our common line of work. Entitled Wage Theft in America, the book reveals the scope and impact of illegal wage cheating that goes on all around us, most of it undetected and unaddressed. Ms. Bobo doesn’t know that we share a trade, and I’m sure she wishes as I do that we could be doing something else for a living.

Yet here we are, having spent much of our lives trying hold back a river of wage stealing with a bucket and sponge. Ms. Bobo runs an organization called Interfaith Worker Justice, which has been active in the field for years. I have worked for the U.S. Department of Labor, and for various unions or labor/management organizations in the construction trades since 1988. Over that span of time I have interviewed thousands of workers, filed just as many claims with state and federal agencies, and occasionally—when the stars aligned—brought a few workers the wages they were supposed to have been paid in the first place.

Bobo’s book is hard reading even for somebody jaded by this work. Even so, Wage Theft is a strong reminder that there are good people out there who believe in the law and in the right of working people to their own money. It is beyond sad that such things go on year after year; worse yet that our government considers the situation to be relatively unimportant: we send people to prison for embezzling $5,000 from a bank, but when an employer steals millions from workers by denying them overtime wages, we let him pay back a fraction of what’s owed and continue business as before.

If you don’t think wage theft is a serious problem, understand that I have been able to make a good living detecting it for years. Business is always good. Wage cheating is as rare as salt in the ocean.

Last week I filed a series of complaints against a construction contractor who seems to have some relationship problems with a couple dozen of his workers. He has systematically deprived them of overtime pay, forcing them to work Saturday without compensation as well as failing to pay for extra hours worked each day. This company gave its workers regular lectures about being “team players” and let them know the consequences of failing to make the team. While working on state and federally-funded projects, the company also misclassified skilled trades workers as laborers in order to pay them at lower rates.

Workers who complained about working for free were fired; others were promised their pay later (without overtime) or simply not paid at all. Workers who spoke to a union organizer about the overtime problem were also terminated. The company has a little policy about traveling workers: when they go from job to job in the middle of the day, the company doesn’t pay them for the hours. Neither is the firm real good about letting workers have a lunch or required bathroom breaks. It seems that they’ve also failed to pay taxes of any sort on the unreported hours. The firm’s apprenticeship program is a fraud and a scam. Many a hopeful lad has entered only to find himself untrained and unemployable at the end, used only for fetch-and-carry work.

A quick tally of the included offenses against state and federal laws turns up half a dozen distinct violations of the law. Some of these I’ve referred directly to enforcement agencies, others will be dealt with through my firm’s attorneys. If we are lucky—if the winds of enforcement blow our way and we manage to get a good accounting from all the agencies—some of the workers of this firm will get a portion of the wages they worked for. Undoubtedly many will not. Perhaps there will be some compensation for those unjustly terminated. That is the way of the law and of the current state of enforcement. If things go as they often do, cases will be fumbled or dropped outright, perhaps some statements confused—maybe the company will hire a high-priced attorney who will stonewall the government side—and I will have to hold one of those delightful meetings wherein I inform a crowd of unemployed workers that they aren’t going to get their wages. If you have never done that and want to see what it’s like I can take you to the next one. There will be a next one; if not with this case then with others.

If you want to know how corporate America treats its workers, you can go to the appendix of Bobo’s book and see how many billion-dollar firms cheated their people out of the minimum wage and 40-hour overtime. [After a scan of the columns the millions begin to dull the mind.] The firms in the listing (and these are only the ones made public) are companies we all deal with every day of our lives. If we found that State Farm Insurance or our local grocery store ripped us off for a hundred dollars, we’d be furious. State Farm was made to pay $135 million in back wages; Safeway, Albertsons and Ralph’s supermarkets paid their janitors over $22 million in back wages and it doesn’t raise an eyebrow. We have somehow come to think that wage cheating is just a clever business practice, something like the careful scheming that puts an asset in a more favorable tax category. If you lose the game you just write a check for the difference and move on. Nobody goes to prison—when was the last time you read of some corporate chieftain doing jail time for wage theft?

Kim Bobo’s prescription for change includes substantial alteration in the structure of government agencies and in the treatment of cases under the law. She is on the right track there, but the road to that utopia will be long and rough. I think the main benefit of this book comes in the form of a shift in terminology. Bobo refuses to speak the technical lingo of the law in describing the failure to pay wages. She calls it theft, robbery, stealing. Which it undoubtedly is to the millions of affected workers. The adoption of those designations will be a substantial move away from the current complacency and toward the better world that Bobo wants all of us to live in.

This book is unpleasant reading because it is the unvarnished truth. Buy a copy and be thankful there are such in the world as Kim Bobo.

Michael McGrorty

Cash for American Workers, Not for the UAW

Here's something from the New York Times about the Cash for Clunkers program. Note that of the top ten new cars bought, five were manufactured in the U.S. and seven of ten in North America. Almost all the manufacturers were Japanese or Korean, but their workers were here. These workers were not UAW except for workers who produced the Ford Escape and the Toyota Corolla. Practically all the workers who produced the top ten traded-in cars were UAW.

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The Transportation Department revealed that the Ford Explorer topped the list of most traded-in clunkers, while the Toyota Corolla was the most popular car purchased through the program, followed by the Honda Civic. The top 10 traded-in vehicles were American brands and 8 of the top 10 purchased vehicles were foreign brands.

Here are the full lists:

Top 10 New Vehicles Purchased [I've added place of actual production]

1. Toyota Corolla (Fremont, California)
2. Honda Civic (Ohio and Canada)
3. Toyota Camry (Kentucky, Indiana)
4. Ford Focus (Hermosillo, Mexico)
5. Hyundai Elantra (Korea)
6. Nissan Versa (Mexico)
7. Toyota Prius (Japan)
8. Honda Accord (Ohio)
9. Honda Fit (Japan, Indonesia)
10. Ford Escape FWD (Missouri)

Top 10 Trade-in Vehicles

1. Ford Explorer 4WD
2. Ford F150 Pickup 2WD
3. Jeep Grand Cherokee 4WD
4. Ford Explorer 2WD
5. Dodge Caravan/Grand Caravan 2WD
6. Jeep Cherokee 4WD
7. Chevrolet Blazer 4WD
8. Chevrolet C1500 Pickup 2WD
9. Ford F150 Pickup 4WD
10. Ford Windstar FWD Van

end of article
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What this shows is that America's workers are making desirable cars, though the American car manufacturers are behind the curve, as they were during the gas crisis of the seventies. And that the future of the UAW, already bleak, is looking grimmer with each new car purchase. The union, saddled with a tremendous burden of retired members and their benefits, finds itself today with more history than future unless it can force a happier conclusion on this set of marketplace facts.

Michael McGrorty