U.S. Labor News Roundup

For the week of April 29, 2013

Fight for May Day’s Two Traditions

Since 2006, May Day in the United States has come to mean immigrants’ rights. That was the year millions of people marched to stop a bill that would have made undocumented immigrants felons.

Many took the day off work to march—making that May Day the largest political strike in U.S. history.

May Day began in 1886 as a fight for the eight-hour day.

Today the eight-hour day is under assault from both ends. Some of us work terrible amounts of overtime, willingly or not, and others can’t get enough hours to live on. Everywhere, management demands “flexibility” to change hours every day or every week, with little notice to the worker.

At least we get paid for extra hours, for now—but Republicans have just introduced a bill that would let employers replace time-and-a-half overtime pay with time-and-a-half “compensatory time.”

At UPS, which has the largest union contract in the private sector, some Teamster drivers have been agitating for a mandatory work-day of no more than 9.5 hours; 12 hours is not unusual for them.

In retail and fast food, meanwhile, management has workers on just-in-time non-schedules where they seldom get eight hours a day. Companies use software that predicts customer traffic based on the weather and other factors, and makes last-minute schedule changes in increments as small as 15 minutes.

A survey of 436 New York retail workers found that 70 percent didn’t know their schedules more than a week ahead of time and only 17 percent had a set schedule.

The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is likely to make the short-hours problem worse. Starting in January, it will require employers to grant health benefits to those who work 30 hours or more. Some employers are already cutting hours to 29.

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Long hours, short hours, and variable schedules make it harder for workers to take collective action. How do you call an after-shift meeting if no one’s shift is the same—or if the work-day is so long that folks can’t wait to get home?

At the first May Day, in 1886, immigrant workers were at the forefront of the fight for decent hours. Today, many run from one part-time job to another. They have many reasons to support the original May Day slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!”

Adidas Agrees to Pay Garment Workers What They’re Owed

The PT Kizone garment workers in Indonesia have reached a historic agreement with Adidas. They’re going to receive the severance pay that they’re legally owed.

All it took was an international campaign that engaged workers, students, and activists from around the world.

For two years the 2,700 former workers of PT Kizone, which made apparel for Adidas, Nike, and the Dallas Cowboys, insisted that Adidas pay them the $1.8 million they were owed under Indonesian law.

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) decided to confront Adidas through the “Badidas” campaign. They worked with groups in Germany, where Adidas is from. They staged a protest outside every major Adidas store in the U.K. In the U.S., they leafleted at basketball games where Adidas-sponsored teams were playing and confronted its celebrity spokesperson, Selena Gomez.

Most important, they got 17 universities to stop buying sweatshirts and caps from Adidas—the largest college boycott ever.

Back in Indonesia, the workers took their protests to Adidas offices, the German embassy, and the courts. They came to the U.S. to speak at campus rallies and meet with administrators.

Now Adidas, one of the two largest sportswear brands in the world, has been forced to acknowledge it cannot walk away when its contractors cheat workers.