The Supreme Court may have eliminated fair share fees for home care workers in
Harris v. Quinn, but the SEIU is forging ahead with organizing the workers anyway. Child care workers and personal care attendants got the right to unionize in Minnesota in 2013, and now a union vote should be coming up for
26,000 workers in the state:
Flanked by clients with disabilities, pro-union workers rallied in the parking lot of the Minnesota Bureau of Mediation Services in St. Paul to announce their intention to join Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Minnesota.
Earlier in the day, they had presented the bureau with about 9,000 signed cards, triggering a union election later this summer that could be one of the largest in state history.
The low-paid workers tell about having to return to work shortly after major surgery because the alternative is going hungry. While
Harris v. Quinn will make it harder for unions like SEIU to fund its representation of home care workers, since non-union workers will be allowed to get the benefits of the union's work without paying a dime, the Court did not say the workers couldn't join unions and bargain collectively. So that's what they're trying to do.
Continue below the fold for more news on wages and education.
A fair day's wage
- Daniel Straus remains one of the worst people in the world.
- Four of the five workers fired by Manhattan's Book Culture bookstore have their jobs back and the fifth is receiving a compensation package. So that's nice, but the owner is still an asshole:
Doeblin says that he sees no conflict of interest between his store’s identity and his attitude toward organizing. “A union is not an ideal. Justice and fairness are ideals. … Retail bookselling is a tough business, and only tough operators will survive. Fair, just and tough can all coexist,” he writes in an email to In These Times.
Justice and fairness are ideals ... but ones he apparently doesn't possess himself. I mean, this is a guy who tried to make workers ineligible to join a union by "promoting" them to be "managers," but without the actual responsibilities of managers, let alone higher pay.
- They bring you serenity and flexibility, but how much thought have you given to your yoga teacher's wages and working conditions?
- The lowest-paid workers in the Los Angeles public schools are getting a raise to $15 an hour thanks to a new union contract. One of them, now earning $9.85 an hour and working second and third jobs to make ends meet, talks about how his life will change:
I feel fortunate for what I have. I also feel tired a lot, from all the work and from lack of sleep; sometimes I get as little as two hours a night. But what I miss most is time with my son. He’s always asking, “Daddy, where are you going?” Leaving breaks my heart every time. When I think about making $15 an hour, I think mostly of the time that money could buy with my son.
He’s going to start preschool in August — we’ve enrolled him in a public school pre-K, though the priest at St. Nicholas is lobbying us to send him there. I know that one of the best things about this raise is that so many of my fellow school workers have kids in district schools. So a raise like this won’t just give workers more — it will give the district happier parents.
- Excellent:
The wage theft lawsuit filed by five former members of the Buffalo Jills professional cheerleading squad got a little boost this week when a judge refused to toss the case after the Bills claimed they are not the cheerleaders’ employer.
Oh you might be, New York Supreme Court Judge Timothy Drury essentially told the team Tuesday. Drury said there was evidence to support the cheerleaders’ claim that they were, in fact, Bills employees, and only in the “nominal employment” of a pair of entertainment companies that run the squad.
Education