Houston city workers are among the worst paid group of city employers and the 4th largest city. How much do they make? 21% less than workers in other Texas cities and other cities in the United States. You can read all about this here - the Houston Organization of Public Employees (HOPE), is bringing us all the details.
A new study on city worker pay revealed that Houston's city workers make substantially less than ther counterparts in Austin, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio and other large U.S. cities. The study, commissioned by the City of Houston and conducted by the Mercer consulting firm, found that Houston city workers make up to 21 percent less than workers in other Texas and U.S. cities.
HOPE's website is profiling one city worker per week. This week you can read about Arthur Proctor, a Senior Sludge Processor working for one of the sewage treatment plants. There are other links to other profiled workers on the left side of the page...check those out too.
Here's what Arthur is up to:
To the uninitiated, the smell and the heat of the plant are over-powering. But Arthur and his co-workers take it in stride. A fine dust hangs in the air, but few of the workers wear protection.
While the work environment is hot and smelly and the pay is low — Arthur makes just over $15 per hour after working at the plant more than 12 years — the workers at 69th Street are committed to their work and proud of their accomplishments. Their plant and Houston’s 40 other treatment plants help keep Houston’s streams and rivers clean.
Want to learn more about the Houston city workers? Click here.
Who else supports the Houston City Workers? None other than the Democratic Senate candidate, Rick Noriega:
State Rep. Rick Noriega, appearing with low-wage Houston city workers, announced his support for their effort to raise the pay of every Houston public employee to at least $10 an hour. The workers, members of the Houston Organization of Public Employees (HOPE), have introduced the wage proposal in ongoing contract talks with the City of Houston.
"Roughly one thousand city workers make less than $10 an hour," said Noriega. "Our community can do better than that. Every worker deserves a living wage." The federal poverty rate for a family of four is $9.83 an hour.
Check out this video of the rally they held on November 1st:
If you're from Houston, you can help! Please send an email or call Mayor Bill White (mayor@cityofhouston.net or 713-247-2200) and ask him to pay these city workers a fair wage. Remember to be polite - and at this point, it's really better for only local people to call or email.
A word about our series:
Issues of class and labor seem to pop up quite a bit on Daily Kos as sidebars or as impacting other topics in important ways, but they don't get their own diaries as often as they perhaps should. Yet work and class have enormous relevance in American life. Almost all of us must work for a living. Most of us who work owe a great debt to organized labor - even if we are not ourselves members of unions, we benefit from the advances unions have made over the years, in safety conditions, limited hours and overtime pay, benefits, child labor laws. And while a shrinking percentage of American workers are represented by unions, not only do union members earn more than their nonunion counterparts, but nonunion workers in highly unionized industries and areas benefit from employer competition for workers, leading to better pay and conditions. Class issues, too, apart from the question of organized labor, are central in many of the political struggles of the day. From bankruptcy legislation to the minimum wage to student loans, legislation affects people differently based on how much they make, what kind of access to power and support they have.
With this series we aim to develop an ongoing discussion around class and labor issues. Such ongoing discussions have emerged in the Feminisms and Kossacks Under 35 series, and, given the frequent requests for more (and more commented-in) diaries on these issues, we hope this series will accomplish the same. Entries will be posted every Tuesday night between 8 and 9pm eastern. If you are interested in a writing a diary for this series, please email Elise or MissLaura and we will arrange for you to be put on the schedule.