Retail Employees Work Towards a Better Economy and a Better Life

Today's post is the first in what will be an ongoing series on the retail industry, its impact on our economy, and the opportunities and challenges its workers face.

A recent article in Good Magazine focused on telling the stories of workers in the service industry that anyone who works in the sector is all too familiar with. The piece is filled with examples of workers who are overworked, underpaid and do not have any job security or benefits. The fear of not being able to pay the bills, getting sick or getting fired at any moment is plaguing workers in an industry that will become the backbone of the American economy.

Retail jobs are growing, and they’re poised to become as important to the 21st Century American economy as manufacturing jobs once were. Yet, despite the growing demand of the service industry, retail jobs don’t always come with a path to the middle class, and instead leave workers struggling to meet their basic needs. If we want to have a middle class in America, it is crucial that millions of American retail workers have good jobs with solid work schedules, and a paycheck and benefits that pay the bills.

Make no mistake, retailers actively work to make these jobs “bad” jobs. Driven by the bottom line of profit, and emboldened by a struggling economy and a plethora of applicants, they’ve purposely created a broken system and negative working environment for workers. With the exception of a few responsible retailers whose workers have a union voice, most retail employers don’t pay a living wage. They depend on high turnover. They’re stingy with schedules in order to avoid paying overtime and providing benefits.

Retailers trap their workers in a cycle of inconsistent schedules and wages that leave them struggling to make ends meet and support their families. Many workers have to balance two or three different jobs at a time in order to make a 40 hour work week possible. The middle class cannot survive or prosper if its foundation of workers is scrambling between several jobs just to pay the bills or put food on the table.

Retailers and other service industry employers do this to send a clear message to workers: you don’t deserve good jobs. In surprising, stark contrast to the way we felt about manufacturing jobs, Americans are starting to believe retail jobs – the very foundation of our new economy – shouldn’t be decent, dependable, middle class jobs. Many workers are just grateful to have a job at all, and they expect low wages and benefits because it is part of the system that has been ingrained in them.

These workers will play a significant role in the American economy. It’s shocking to think about the consequences of a generation of workers whose primary job opportunities offer them no path to the middle class.

Many people see their retail jobs as temporary or as a stepping stone to other careers, so they don’t want to invest a lot in a position they believe will not serve them in the long run. But the fact is that many will end up staying in their service industry jobs because those will be the only opportunities available to them. That’s why retail workers need to unite and take action now to fight against the industry’s push to make retail jobs “bad jobs.”

Workers in retail can be empowered by coming together on the job, recognizing that they are a critical part of the national workforce, and demanding to share the success with profitable national and international retailers. Union workers at retailers like Macys, H&M, Modells, and Bloomingdales already know that having a union voice on the job means they’ll be compensated and treated in a way that reflects their hard work. They’re able to bargain the middle class wages and health care benefits they earn and deserve.

With a union on the job, empowered retail workers can bolster the growing service industry and re-create the modern middle class that workers had in the past, and what we certainly need now.

Union Members Occupy Wall Street for Good Jobs

Yesterday, union members joined the ranks of those Occupying Wall Street in a stand against the insidious corporate greed that has infiltrated our democracy and eroded our jobs, our health care, our economy, and our way of life. 

Protesters gathered in Zuccotti Square and marched approximately one mile north to Foley Square where they joined with members from the RWDSU/UFCW and other labor unions. From Foley Square, the crowd marched side by side descending on Wall Street shouting “We are the 99%.”

Worker productivity has been rising over the past decade, but wages have remained stagnant while the cost of health care has sky-rocketed, leaving the average American struggling to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the gap between the richest 1% and the rest of us has gotten even wider as corporate fat cats pocket the profits that should be going to build good jobs. 

We’ve heard from the Occupy Wall Street folks that they are currently low on food. You can help out by ordering from local businesses or sending care packages. Please try to focus on vegan and vegetarian options with some meat options since we don’t want our vegetarian brothers and sisters to go hungry.

Send care packages and other supplies to this address:

118A Fulton st #205
New York, NY, 10038
Non perishable, no checks (money orders okay), any size package okay

Official Occupy Wall Street page: http://occupywallst.org/

Looking for events in your city? Check out MeetUp.com or find events on Facebook.

Live streaming of Occupy Wall Street: http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution

What does recovery look like?

A recent study has confirmed what many of us already knew from experience: the economic recovery we've been hearing about since 2009 isn't really reaching average Americans. Instead, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent,” according to the study just released from economists at Northeastern University.

"The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome,” wrote the report’s authors, Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin and Sheila Palma.

Sounds like we've got to start making our lawmakers clarify what they mean by recovery. Is it when corporations are comfortably raking in dough, or is it when the rest of us can all pay our utility bills?

UFCW President Joe Hansen said it best in a letter to the editor in the Washington Post this week:

The decision by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) to pull out of budget talks with the White House [“GOP declares impasse on debt,” front page, June 23] highlights the GOP’s disconnect from the realities of everyday Americans. Instead of offering solutions for job creation, the GOP is trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor and middle class while insisting that revenue increases of any kind are off the table.

Instead of playing risky games with the U.S. economy, pitting workers against workers, engaging in anti-union rhetoric and turning a blind eye to the growing gap between the rich and the poor, our lawmakers must focus on creating economic policies that create and sustain good jobs. If our elected officials fail to address this issue, our country will never fully recover from this economic downturn.

Fixing our Economy with Union Values

Greed. Avarice. Reckless speculation. Zero accountability. That’s what got America into the financial mess we’re in. But those aren’t the values we advocate when we are teaching our children how to get ahead, how to support themselves financially, or how to be successful. We teach them just the opposite: responsibility, hard work, fairness, cautiousness, and generosity.

Those are also union values, and they’re the values that our governors, senators, representatives and elected officials at every level must draw on if we are to repair a decade of economic damage caused by Republican malfeasance. We have no choice but to draw on our own ethics and principles—not the ethics of Wall Street bankers—if we want to grow an economy that strengthens our country and middle-class families for the long run.

President Obama inherited an economy in free-fall with huge deficits, skyrocketing health care costs, rising unemployment, and banking and housing markets on the brink of collapse. It took two years, and we still have quite a way to go, but the fact is that under George Bush, our economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month. Despite Republican obstructionism, Democrats were the ones to turn America around by cutting taxes for 95 percent of working families, and investing in the sectors of our economy that are projected to grow the most jobs: health care, energy, education. And, there’s still more work planned.

• Putting Americans to work rebuilding roads, bridges, rails, and ports, strengthening our economy and our infrastructure across all 50 states.

• Investing in a clean energy economy, and providing tax credits to spark manufacturing of windmills, solar panels, and electric cars here at home; and

• Valuing and rewarding with decent pay and family-supporting benefits those who are already employed in the jobs and sectors that are here to stay—like the 4.2 million Americans who work in retail; grocery workers; food processing meat packing and other plant workers.

In addition to the Recovery Act, which stabilized the financial system and helped to prevent a second Great Depression, the President and Democrats have taken several actions to save and create jobs and to get our economy moving again and to ensure that as the engine of our economy comes back to life, it will run for working people, not Wall Street.

• Passed the Manufacturing Enhancement Act to help create jobs, lower business costs, and strengthen the manufacturing sector.

• Supported Americans looking for work by passing the Unemployment Compensation Act which restored badly needed assistance to hard-working Americans who lost their jobs in the recession.

• Reinstated fiscal responsibility in government spending and ensured that American taxpayers will never again be forced to bail out big banks.

• Passed the Home Buyers Assistance and Improvement Act of 2010, extending the eligibility for new home buyers to receive a tax credit for their purchase.

• Passed a bill that will cut taxes and increase lending for small businesses, helping them to grow and hire new workers. It also lets businesses write off half of their equipment investments this year, and lets employers deduct health insurance costs from their taxes.

• Signed into law emergency aid for states saving the jobs of more than 140,000 teachers and preventing the layoffs of police officers, firefighters and first responders.

Powering Up the NYC Economy With Good Grocery Jobs

Last night local retail employers, policy experts, community and union leaders debated the issues faced by grocery store employees and grocery store operators in a recovering economy. The discussion was moderated by Mimi Rosenberg of WBAI's Building Bridges, and tackled the ways in which successful grocery businesses can also be community-leading employers.

Retail jobs are the fastest growing industry in the country. To enable the growing numbers employed in retail to achieve the American Dream, workers and customers alike are beginning to push back against the Walmart business model that’s driven down wages, benefits and standards of living for workers and communities nationwide.

Upper East Side market Agata & Valentina employees shared how they are struggling to attain the American Dream. Agata & Valentina worker Alfredo Pena said, “For me, a union means a voice for workers on the job. It means we don’t have to ask the boss for things like a raise individually, because we can stand together and have more power to improve our jobs that way.”

Pathmark employee and United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1500 member Ann Marie Griffin spoke about the benefits of having a union at her workplace. “If it were not for the health insurance I receive as a union member,” she said, “I would not have been able to have two c-sections that I needed. And because I am a union member my salary has increased over the years. I know that others at non-union stores who are doing the same work I do, for the same amount of years, they may not even come close to what I make.”

Business leaders at the roundtable discussed how the union-employer partnership works well to improve their business. Charles Farfaglia, Fairway Market LLC, Vice President of Human Resources, said that having the UFCW working with his company helps with problem-solving, creates lower turnover rates, and gives employees a sense of security and stability that helps them better perform their jobs.

“When employees are given an unfettered choice, they view working in a union store as desirable,” he said. “That actually helps in recruiting new people. Fairway opened a store in Paramus, NJ, last March. We conducted seven job fairs…and many people asked if the store was going to be union. All who asked wanted to work in a union store.”

Also on the panel were: Rene Flores, Gristedes Foods, Executive Director of Human Resources and Asset Management; Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg, City University of New York, Distinguished Professor of Public Health; UFCW Local 1500 Field Director Rob Newell; and Paul Sonn, National Employment Law Project, Legal Co-Director.

UFCW Director of Organizing, Walmart Workers and Others Talk Walmart Economy with Laura Flanders

The Mezzo-Mezzo Jobs Report

So, I guess it's good news because it's not getting worse...right?

I mean, as a non-economist, when I see that we lost 345,000 jobs in May, I think about all the men and women who lost those jobs and what that will mean for their families in the months ahead.

There's no good news for them.

On the other hand, the Washington Post reports that:

Economists had expected a much worse loss, of as many as 525,000 jobs. The Labor Department also said that April job losses were somewhat less severe than originally reported.

So I guess that's good. That's 180,000 jobs we didn't lose; that's 180,000 people who can still expect a paycheck next week or next month. The bleeding hasn't stopped, but at least it's slowed a bit.

"Health Care Reform Cannot Wait"

President Obama in his remarks this morning on the 2010 Fiscal Budget announced a radical departure from the old trends in spending and outlined his support for sweeping reforms that will reach all of America.

Among the reforms, Obama reemphasized health care as a priority in getting our economy back on track:

Because of crushing health care costs and the fact that they drag down our economy, bankrupt our families, and represent the fastest-growing part of our budget, we must make it a priority to give every single American quality, affordable health care....With this budget, we are making a historic commitment to comprehensive health care reform. It's a step that will not only make families healthier and companies more competitive, but over the long term it will also help us bring down our deficit.

Obama's budget reflects the urgent need for action he spoke of in his State of the Union address earlier this week:

Now, there will be many different opinions and ideas about how to achieve reform, and that is why I’m bringing together businesses and workers, doctors and health care providers, Democrats and Republicans to begin work on this issue next week.

I suffer no illusions that this will be an easy process. It will be hard. But I also now that nearly a century after Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform, the cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience of our nation long enough. So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.

We have fought tirelessly for this moment and the time is finally here: we are going to get health care reform in 2009. The question now is what will that reform look like?

As the fat cats who have been profiting off of the status quo for so long start to throw up roadblocks on the path to change, it is crucial that we all make sure those who are working for the right kind of reform know they have our support.

Can you help by sending a quick note to the Senate Finance Committee and President Obama thanking them for their swift action so far and commitment to change?

It only takes a minute and we know it makes a difference.

Stronger Unions Can Strengthen Economy

New York Times op-ed contributor, Robert B. Reich, is calling out Washington politicians for taking "normal remedies" to address the continuing economic slide.

Reich says it's time to address the real problem - American workers are earning 12% less than their counterparts 30 years ago when wages are adjusted for inflation.

Among Reich's solutions: Organize and Unionize.

"We also need stronger unions, especially in the local service sector that’s sheltered from global competition. Employees should be able to form a union without the current protracted certification process that gives employers too much opportunity to intimidate or coerce them. Workers should be able to decide whether to form a union with a simple majority vote."

Read the rest of the editorial here.