Labor News — 2/17/2022
The Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation Weekly Report comes out (nearly) every Thursday with news and updates relevant to the Gulf Coast labor movement. To subscribe, click here.
Union members rally in support of Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo as early voting begins
Last week, members from 13 Harris County unions came out to support Lina Hidalgo at her “Win with Lina” rally.
Over her past three years in office, Judge Hidalgo has delivered for working people. From implementing new construction standards and expanding opportunities for good paying jobs, to COVID safety measures that kept workers safe and healthy on the job, to standing up to attacks on voting rights — Lina has stood shoulder to shoulder with unions in the fight for a fair shot for all Harris County workers.
After voting unanimously to endorse Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo last December, the 92 unions of the Texas Gulf Coast Area Labor Federation have been hard at work getting out the vote to re-elect Judge Hidalgo.
Sign up to help get out the union vote this Saturday!
NE Houston AFT hosts community town hall for Candis Houston
Last week, NE Houston AFT hosted a community town hall for fellow union educator Candis Houston, COPE-endorsed candidate for Texas House District 142.
During the town hall, Houston talked about her background in the classroom as a long-time teacher in Aldine ISD, the value of being a part of a union, and her commitment to representing providing real representation to her neighbors in Sheldon, Channelview, Humble, Fifth Ward, Denver Harbor, and everyone else living in the 142th State House District.
Early voting in the Democratic primary continues through February 25th, and election day is March 1st. Find the full list of COPE endorsed candidates here.
Learn more about Candis Houston
After years of advocacy, Houston airport workers win path to $15 minimum wage
Airport workers in Houston, who have fought for years for decent wages through UNITE HERE and SEIU Texas with support of other unions and allies, are on a path to a $15 an hour minimum wage by 2023 under an executive order signed this week by Mayor Sylvester Turner.
Teresa McClatchy, a Bush Airport Escalator Guard organizing with SEIU Texas, has been fighting for this wage increase for 6 years alongside her co-workers. “Poverty pay was the norm before we began working together as a union”.
Congratulations to the workers of UNITE HERE and SEIU who keep our transportation infrastructure going on this big, historic win.
CWA Local 6222 partners with Rep. Al Green to deliver flags to area veterans
Last week, led by President Ray Rodriguez, CWA Local 6222 members joined with Veterans for Social Change and the office of Congressman Al Green to fold 800 U.S. flags. These flags were delivered to Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center on Valentines Day. This is part of an ongoing partnership between CWA and Congressman Green to support veterans in the Houston area.
Horrific allegations of racism prompt California lawsuit against Tesla
The N-word and other racist slurs were hurled daily at Black workers at Tesla’s California plant, delivered not just by fellow employees but also by managers and supervisors.
These and other horrific details were included in a lawsuit filed against the Elon Musk-founded electric-vehicle maker in Alameda County Superior Court on Thursday on behalf of thousands of Black workers after a decade of complaints and a 32-month investigation.
Musk, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, responded to an earlier suit, which called the company “a hotbed of racist behavior,” with an email to employees describing company culture as “hardcore and demanding.” Anyone who makes an ”unintentional slur” should apologize, he wrote, and the recipient should “be thick-skinned and accept the apology.”
Tesla segregated Black workers into separate areas that its employees referred to as “porch monkey stations,” “the dark side,” “the slave ship” and “the plantation,” the lawsuit alleges.
The company has a long, documented history of creating a hostile work environment for black employees, which has led to multiple successful lawsuits.
REI uses language of social justice to bust efforts by workers to form union
In January, workers at one of REI’s nearly 170 stores filed for a union election, which would make them the first of the company’s 15,000 employees to form a union. Among other things, those employees, who work at a store in New York, have expressed concern with insufficient wages, limited access to benefits like health care, exploitative part-time status practices, inadequate Covid-19 safety protocols and the perception that the company allegedly let go employees who had voiced concerns about workplace safety early in the pandemic.
The workers have asked for voluntary recognition for their union, but REI released a statement saying a union is not “needed or beneficial” and pinned up anti-union fliers designed to intimidate people from joining and implying that the unionization effort could backfire.
In an unusual move, REI chose to address the unionization effort by publishing what it calls a podcast. The entire conversation is a heavily scripted setup where she lobs Artz softballs and allows him to cloak himself in the rhetoric of social justice.
Target deploys union-busting playbook to silence worker voices
Worried about the unionization wave, Target has begun telling store managers to look for signs of unionization & then take steps to stamp it out.
At the end of January 2022, Target emailed store management new training guidelines on labor relations to complete, prompting managers to look for warning signs of worker and labor union organizing within their stores and coordinate with corporate human resources to quell union organizing campaigns.
The training email and documents were leaked anonymously to the workers’ advocacy group, Target Workers Unite, and come as other large US chains including Amazon and Starbucks are fighting unionization plans.
Target CEO Brian Cornell’s received a compensation of $77.5 million in 2020, 805 times more than the median Target employee.
Houston, Harris County snubbed in Houston-Galveston Area Council’s flood mitigation funding plan
On Tuesday, The Houston-Galveston Area Council approved a plan Tuesday to spend nearly $500 million in federal flood mitigation funding, setting aside only a small fraction of that for the city of Houston and Harris County , the epicenter of Hurricane Harvey and home to the majority of the region’s population.
The decision to snub Houston and Harris County was said to be based on an assumption that the city would receive up to $750 million in federal funding through the state General Land Office, but the George P Bush led GLO has so far allocated $0 to both Houston and Harris County.
The Houston-Galveston Area Council plays a critical role in regional planning and distribution of resources, but its 28 member board is heavily weighted to favor counties and cities outside of Houston and Harris County. Houston only has 3 voting members, and Harris County only has 2, despite being home to more than half of the region’s population.
The majority of H-GAC board members voted in favor of the plan, with just seven members voting against it — Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia, Deer Park Councilmember Bill Patterson, Houston City Councilmember Sallie Alcorn, Houston City Councilmember Ed Pollard, La Porte Councilmember Chuck Engelken Jr., Pasadena Councilmember Cary Bass, and Sugar Land Mayor Joe Zimmerman.
Partisan tactic by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign delays thousands of requests for mail-in ballots from Texas voters
Thousands of applications for mail-in ballots submitted by Texas voters have been delayed — and some voters may ultimately not receive ballots — because Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s campaign instructed eligible voters to send requests for absentee ballots to the Texas secretary of state’s office instead of their local elections offices.
The fiasco has further muddled the first election held since Patrick, as head of the state Senate, presided over last year’s passage of new laws tightening voting processes, including a measure making it a crime for local election officials to send out applications for mail-in ballots to people who did not request them.
Texas got $2.4B to safely reopen schools. Some teachers ask where it went
In total, Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has tried to bar schools from requiring masks, was given $2.4 billion in the first two federal emergency Covid relief installments “intended to help states and school districts safely reopen schools, measure and effectively address significant learning loss and take other actions to mitigate the impact of COVID-19,” according to the U.S. Dept. of Education.
Voices featured in a new survey by the Texas American Federation of Teachers include a special education teacher who spent $100 of her own money to buy N95 masks to keep herself safe at work, as well as bus drivers and nurses who were not given protective equipment during the January Covid surge.
“They’re asking to be provided with N95 masks and rapid tests, to be able to take leave when they’re sick… This is basic stuff, it was taxpayer money they received for the purposes of mitigating these Covid issues.”
On anniversary of winter storm, remembering a decade of failures by Texas leaders to protect grid
A year ago, a blast of frigid weather swept across the state, paralyzing the power grid and setting off a catastrophe. Power generators went offline, leaving millions in the dark for days without heat or water. Frozen pipes ruptured, damaging tens of thousands of homes in Houston alone. The state’s overwhelmed electrical grid came within five minutes of a total collapse.
Hundreds of Texans died from a variety of freeze-related causes, including automobile wrecks, hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning from fires or generators brought inside their homes. And millions more are still living with the trauma of those terrible days.
In a place all too familiar with natural disasters, many still remain shocked by the failures of the electrical grid and government leaders, who failed to heed prior warnings about the importance of ensuring power plants prepared for winter storms.
Texas A&M moves to place longstanding independent newspaper under university control
In a move some have called an attempt to silence independent voices on campus, this week Texas A&M President Katherine Banks took steps to place student newspaper The Battalion under university control.
“The independent student voice of Texas A&M is not a public relations adjunct of anyone,” The Battalion editorial board said in response. “We print the news; the good, the bad and the ugly. Anyone who has any concerns over that can take it up with the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution.”
You can sign a petition in support of the student journalists here.
A Landmark Bill Would Outlaw Bosses Cutting off Healthcare to Striking Workers
Nearly 25,000 workers went out on strike last October across a range of industries — including healthcare, steel, telecommunications, coal mining, production plants and carpentry — in what many media outlets dubbed “Striketober.” Often, the first thing employers do in retaliation is simply cut off workers’ healthcare benefits.
The 1,400 striking workers in Kellogg’s production plants lost their healthcare for the duration of their 11-week strike. Workers at the Warrior Met Coal mines in Alabama have been on strike without pay or healthcare for 10 months now, and their union, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), estimates they have collectively lost out on roughly $1.1 billion in pay, overtime, and other benefits.
Last week, Democrats in Congress introduced a landmark bill that would finally make this strike-breaking tactic illegal.
Texas AG Paxton sues Biden over $15 minimum wage mandate for federal contractors
Criminally-indicted Texas Attorney General, who this week received his latest misconduct charge, launched his latest taxpayer funded misadventure last week, this time attacking the lowest paid workers in our state by trying to overturn President Biden’s $15 minimum wage mandate for federal contractors.
The wage hike impacted about 6,800 federal contractors when it took effect at the end of last month, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The minimum wage in Texas is just $7.25 an hour.
“It has come to this: Ken Paxton is actually suing to lower worker wages to as little as $7.25 an hour,” Texas AFL-CIO President Rick Levy said. “Texas needs an Attorney General who will fight for workers rather than force them into poverty.”
Read more about the impact of Biden’s $15 minimum wage mandate
Cruz threatens government shutdown in latest attack on public health, common sense
Texas Republicans, led by noted coward and Cancun aficionado Sen. Ted Cruz, again threated a government shutdown over President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates as the Senate works to pass a short-term funding bill by the end of the week.
Fortunately, on Thursday night, common sense prevailed in the US Senate, as Cruz was rejected by a bi-partisan vote.
“Everyone in this body [the Senate] who attended school in the United States had to get vaccines to attend school,” said Sen. Tim Kaine in response to Cruz’s motion. “Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox. Everyone in his body who has sent a child to school in the United States had to make sure that they got their children vaccinated. And is that because of a big federal mandate? No. All 51 states — Utah, Texas, New York, Maine, Washington, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Virginia — embrace their own vaccine mandates. All 51.”
Over her past three years in office, Judge Hidalgo has delivered for working people. From implementing new construction standards and expanding opportunities for good paying jobs, to COVID safety measures that kept workers safe and healthy on the job, to standing up to attacks on voting rights — Lina has stood shoulder to shoulder with unions in the fight for a fair shot for all Harris County workers.
Join us to send a clear message — with one, unified voice — the working people of Harris County stand with Lina.
We’ll be knocking the doors of union households to encourage them to go vote for Lina and the rest of our labor slate in the Democratic primary election!
