Portside

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

The Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched Nathan Schneider to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. Schneider states that "A popular mantra among sharing-economy boosters has been "sharing is the new owning." What I found is the opposite." Given concerns about the sharing economy, Schneider examined cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and more.

“Non-competes (agreements) create a Balkanized labor force where you’re not a sandwich maker, but either a Jimmy John’s or Subway sandwich maker. Workers, in other words, are being forced to pledge fealty to companies that can still fire them at will. The payoff, of course, is that workers who, practically-speaking, can’t switch jobs are workers who can’t ask for raises.”

Campaigns for social control of capital look different from social democratic movements that began in the 1870s and endured through the mid-1960s. Thus many underestimate the significance of the Occupy Movement, the mobilization of domestic workers, immigrants, restaurant and fast food workers, home healthcare workers, self-employed women workers, tomato pickers or the landless. Nonetheless, we should recognize that these campaigns all challenge capital.

Zephyr Teachout and the Working Families Party plan to release a report entitled "Corruption in Education: The Hedge Fund Takeover of New York's Schools." The Working Families Party endorsed Governor Cuomo but now it plans to fight him on policy issues. A Cuomo source accuses them of supporting the teachers union.

Food service workers at Harvard are members of UNITE-HERE Local 26. After two years, they earn $21.73 per hour on average, while for many years the DoubleTree hotel in Cambridge owned by the university non-union housekeepers earned only about $15 an hour. Last year, housekeepers at the hotel mounted a push to join Local 26 as well. Hilton, which owns the DoubleTree chain bumped salaries to $18 an hour— but has so far managed to avoid a unionized workforce.

Fast food workers plan another nationwide strike on December 4. Ricky Eisenberg provides some background on the campaign.

Hundreds of Los Angeles teachers have been put on leave and in limbo. It’s been called “teacher jail,” and it’s not far off from the “rubber rooms” New York City tabloids have made famous. In both places, the tactic is used to scapegoat teachers and unions.

Twenty years after the first living-wage law was passed in Baltimore, the campaign’s lead organizer warns that the model has been watered down.

Wal-Mart, Target, Macy's, Radio Shack and other retailers are requiring their low-paid workers to report. Why? There is nothing essential about buying gewgaws, gizmos and garments from these mass marketers of consumer excess that warrant them forcing their employees to give up their family meals on this one day of Thanksgiving.