Beefed up SWAT teams sent to WalMart protests

Which elected official sent these guys along?

Left: beefed up cops turn up at peaceful WalMart protest

In response to the protests/strikes by WalMart workers and their supporters yesterday,  WalMart spokesperson Brooke Buchanan said that the protests were, just, “…another stunt to garner attention, it's the same old cast members trying to get some attention for their cause."  The protesters are just a lot of “…union activists and professional protesters - not a lot of Wal-Mart associates,'' Buchanan added.

WalMart has 4600 stores in the US employing 1.3 million workers, many of then part-time workers earning $8 or $9 an hour.  With no union therefore very few rights on the job, the fact that any workers walk of the job is a feat of courage in itself. Buchanan’s comments are standard from the 1%’s spokesperson’s---there’s no problems at WalMart, workers are happy, there are merely a few disgruntled folks and outside agitators.

The coalition leading these protests includes community groups, non-profits and the UFCW, are demanding WalMart pays full-time workers $25,000 a year.  Organizing one million workers would bring in a huge revenue stream for the UFCW even if these members were low waged workers that’s how the strategists atop organized labor look at it.  It’s possible that WalMart might throw a few crumbs on the table in response to these activities which would add some momentum to the movement perhaps.  The UFCW leadership, like the entire leadership of organized Labor is not willing to build a real, militant movement to unionize WalMart which would mean involving trucking (deliveries), the community, and other sections of the class that could force through direct action and strikes, WalMart to accept union recognition.

Sometimes though, mobilizations can get out of control of those who initiate them, the mood can be such that the limits put on them by the leadership are discarded and we know there is much anger and discontent beneath the surface of US society that can break the bonds of acceptable behavior at any time.

In fact what motives this short commentary is the picture included. This is how the cops turned up to one of the WalMart workers’ peaceful protests.  It is standard these days and part of the beefing up of state security forces where regular cops and SWAT teams are indistinguishable from each other. The use of drones domestically and the massive spying apparatus that Edward Snowden thankfully revealed to us is also part of this increased state security. The bosses were a little shaken up by the Occupy Movement that showed direct action and defiance of the law is a necessary part of the struggle for a decent life. The object is to intimidate workers with these thugs, terrify us in to submission.

The politicians that make the decisions to send these characters to a peaceful protest by workers earning starvation wages, no doubt receive money and support at election time from the heads of organized labor. Meanwhile, the Walton family heirs have as much wealth as 100 million Americans and Wal-Mart CEO Michael Duke earned nearly $20 million in 2012, including pay, stock awards and incentives. That works out to about $9,600 an hour. He got another $21.4 million from exercising stock options and vested shares.

But the more astute political representatives of the bankers recognize the explosive and volatile nature of the present period and their increased security measures are a necessary precaution from their point of view.  One has to think that there is no way any politician or public figure that has anything to do with sending a force like those in the picture to protect the rights of the WalMart family are anything but enemies of workers and the poor.

The ongoing crisis of capitalism and the declining influence of US capitalism on the world stage will bring more attacks on workers at home as Washington’s imperialist adventures have to be paid for.  All the gains won over the last century are to be taken back.  As we have explained many times on this blog, the refusal of the labor leaders to fight and the violent nature of the US authorities has delayed the response to this offensive of capital, has held back a movement of the working class that would introduce an offensive of our own to the equation, but the bosses will not stop, driven as they are by the nature of their system.  Our offensive will come, it will not be pretty, it will contain much confusion but it will arrive.

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The Restaurant lobby, the other NRA

With fast food workers around the nation walking off the job tomorrow I thought it would be of interest to readers to know a bit more about the  National Restaurant Association. This piece below is from AlterNet.

The Other NRA: How the Insidiously Powerful Restaurant Lobby Makes Sure Fast-Food Workers Get Poverty Wages and Have to Work While Sick

Fast-food workers feed their families on a pittance while the big corporations resist fair pay and sick leave.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/L. Kragt Bakker

August 27, 2013  |  

 

Editors note: This is the first in a series of reader-supported—i.e. crowdfunded —articles about the powerful National Restaurant Association and the plight of low-wage workers who are being screwed at every turn by industry lobbying tactics and misleading propaganda. An amazing 387 AlterNet readers contributed more than $5,500 to support this ongoing investigative project. Many of the donors are listed at the end of the article.

 

While thousands of fast-food workers were preparing to walk off their jobs earlier this summer to seek raises to $15 an hour, the industry’s corporate lobbyist, the National Restaurant Association, was celebrating a string of political victories blocking state minimum wage increases and preempting local sick day laws.

 

In June, the NRA boasted that its lobbyists had stopped minimum wage increases in 27 out of 29 states in 2013. In Connecticut, which increased its state minimum wage, a raise in the base pay for tipped workers such as waitresses and bartenders vanished in the final bill. A similar scenario unfolded in New York State: It increased its minimum wage, but the NRA’s last-minute lobbying derailed raising the pre-tip wage at restaurants and bars. The deals came despite polls showing 80 percent support for raising the minimum wage. 
 
The NRA’s lobbying didn’t stop there. It also told members that it blocked a dozen states this year from passing laws that would require earned paid sick leave, which is what New York City and Portland, Oregon adopted. Meanwhile, it boasted that six states, including Florida, passed NRA-backed laws that preemptively ban localities from granting earned and paid employee sick time. “These are horrible things, but there are amazing things that are happening to change it,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director and co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC), which has been working a dozen years to slowly change the industry’s exploitive business model and labor practices. “And there will be increasingly important stuff coming up.”    

As fast-food workers across the country prepare for a second nationwide walkout over wages on Thursday, most Americans have little idea how profitable and politically aggressive the corporate mainstays of America’s second biggest employer have become. While labor activists have had victories in 2013, such as New York and Portland passing sick leave laws, and New Jersey poised to raise its minimum wage via a ballot measure this fall, the restaurant industry’s lobbying powerhouse is at war with the industry’s workers.

“It’s an old-boy network. It’s very old-school thinking. It’s very, very conservative,” said Paul Saginaw, founder of Zingerman’s food companies in Michigan, which employes 600 people and unlike the NRA, supports better benefits for employees like healthcare. “There has to be some pressure put out to provide better lives for people.”

Most Americans are unaware that millions of people who work in the industry—especially the 2.5 million fast-food preparers and servers who earn an average of $8.74 an hour, according to federal labor statistics—are not just teens in their first job, but adults with families to support. They may not know there’s a separate minimum wage for tipped workers, $2.13 an hour, that hasn’t changed in 22 years—although 32 states have raised it slightly. They may not realize that they, as the restaurant-going public, subsidize owners via cash tips, even as the NRA routinely tells legislators its industry cannot afford to pay better wages or basic benefits.

Most Americans don’t know that restaurant salaries are so low that the industry’s 12.2 million workers use food stamps at twice the rate of the U.S. workforce, and are three times as likely to be below the poverty line. Or that women earn less than men in similar jobs. Or that restaurants are among the biggest low-wage employers of people of color. Or that virtually every chain—except for In and Out, according to ROC—don’t want to pay living wages and benefits or offer real opportunities for advancement.

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Wireless companies responsible for worker deaths.

Two workers fell from tower in Texas

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

When I was active in my Union I was for many years a member of the Contracting Out Committee. Working for a public utility we were always trying to prevent the private sector from getting our work.  The developers and real estate firms, in league with contractors that would do this work, had representatives on the Board of Directors that would assure their interests were protected.  They would generally be supported by building trades unions that wanted the work for their members.  So workers in the public sector were forced in to competition with workers in the private sector for who got the work.

I always argued for more hiring, bringing workers in as public sector union members expanding our workforce. Public sector employment even today after the onslaught we have faced, is generally a more humane and less competitive workplace with more security and better benefits and retirement, that’s why they want to smash the public sector Unions.

Sending out work to private (non-union) contractors in particular, always means workplace safety suffers as the effects of the market are greater.  The telecommunication companies like Sprint contract out a great deal of their work to contractors and sub contractors much like the retail giants contract work to sweatshops.  The race to provide faster, more extensive and advanced networks has led to an increase in the deaths of tower workers and 2013 has been a bumper year with ten tower workers dying in falls so far. After 2006, when 18 tower workers died, OSHA declared tower climbing beat out fishing and logging as “The most dangerous job in America.” *

I touched on the ineffectiveness of OSHA in an earlier commentary on the market driven catastrophe at the fertilizer plant in West Texas (hereand here) pointing out that today there are 2200 OSHA inspectors for 8 million workplaces. It’s hard not to laugh at statistics like that were the consequences not so dire. Workers cannot put our lives in the hands of a state agency that was opposed by many politicians and the US Chamber of Commerce. If it was set up to seriously protect workers on the job, the ratio of OSHA inspectors to workplaces would be much different.

The fierce competition for market share and profits trumps safety, “…there is so much work this year that many crews are working around the clock and haven't taken days off in weeks.”,  industry representatives tell the Wall Street Journal,  “crews are working 12- or 16-hour days and, when they get tired, forget to clip on safety lines or clip them on improperly.” One project manager adds.

But am I not right in thinking there’s 20 to 30 million workers that capitalism refuses to put to work?  Yes, but it’s a better business decision to have people work longer hours than shortening them and hiring more people----it’s more profitable.  Sure, the pace of work destroys the body, the family and leads to unnecessary deaths and the tendency towards drugs that increase energy and keep you awake when your body demands rest.  But in order to win the bid to do this work for the telecommunications giant, a contractor has to underbid his or her competitors.  The wireless industries PR departments sing the same old tune workers are all too familiar with. Sprint says it is “deeply saddened” by the recent spate of deaths and “requires subcontractors to maintain written safety programs and designate one employee on site responsible for ensuring safety.”

OK, they’ve covered their asses, it must be the workers’ fault.  Let’s not forget though, that here in the US, a corporation has personhood; a corporation is a person and with the same rights as a person. And as any worker knows, the person making the decisions does not tend to take positions that are against their own self-interest. If the company-designated employee for safety takes action that hurts profits, they’re in trouble. This is why the Team Concept in the workplace is so destructive as it undermines independent worker power on the job. You can’t mobilize the power you have, and in our case it’s numbers and the ability to stop production, if the object of your activity is supposedly on the same team.

It’s obvious that a huge cause of death and injury in the workplace is the pace of the work and the competition between workers as we are forced to cut corners in order to help our bosses win market share from their rivals. 

One of the major contractors that oversees work for Sprint instituted a “Tower Construction Acceleration Program” that pays a $3000 bonus to contractors that finish on time and with no defects (workers health and happiness aside). One construction manager told the WSJ that some jobs pay $12,000 in bonuses per site and that the bonuses “encourage them to work more quickly.”  Nothing new there.

Many of the telecommunication companies are unionized so contracting work out eliminates those concerns, it’s the private, unorganized sector getting a hold of public work through these contracts and workers suffer for it, not just in in lower wages and benefits which is most often the case, but also in quality of life and workplace rights. Some tower workers admit that the carriers set “pricing and schedules that can create strong incentives to cut corners.”

The word terrorism is thrown about a lot these days.  Every individual or force that stands in opposition to capital’s rapacious quest for profits is given the terror label and their actions “terrorism”.  Some have not liked that I refer to the West Texas catastrophe or the mine explosion or the Fukushima disaster acts of market terror but they are exactly that; they are not accidents in the way we think of an accident.  Capitalism is an economic system that exists through coercion and force and is, by its very nature, a system of terror.  Workplace terrorism, economic terrorism, we don’t have to buy in to the language and terms that the 1% use to describe life’s events.  We have our own view of the world and our own language which describes what happens around us more accurately.

In the case of the tower worker, of course a bad decision by an individual worker might lead to an accident or death.  The issue is under what conditions are the decisions workers make made.  We have free will, Marx once said, but we rarely, if ever, get to choose the circumstances in which we exercise that free will.  And in the case of the workplace, there is no democracy there, we do not control the labor process, we are simply a part of it under the direction of the owner(s) of capital.

There are only two sources of power in the workplace, the bosses and the organized workers. Without organization it’s every man or woman for themselves as each individual tries to make a deal and the boss sets one against the other. Safety is strongest where workers are organized and elected worker representatives have a real presence on the job. The power to shut down an unsafe project is something workplace representatives must fight for.

Building and strengthening the organized workers’ movement in the workplace and in our communities as well is what will reduce injury on the job and disasters like the recent spate of mine deaths and catastrophes like the BP spill that killed 11 workers and did untold environmental damage. No one can work an eight-hour day these days and pay the rent.  Sixteen-hour days, speed ups caused by the competition between capitalists for market domination---this is why 13 tower workers have died this year.  They were victims of the free market at work. 

The Union hierarchy has all but abandoned any attempt to win a shorter workweek with no loss in pay or win anything for that matter. As recently as 1984, the AFL-CIO platform to the Democratic Party called for a continuation of the historic norm of reducing the hours of work.  The Democrats of course will do no such thing just like this party of Wall Street will not put any teeth in to OSHA. Along with workers having independent organizations in the workplace, independent of the bosses, we have to have political independence as well in the form of our own party based on these organizations and the communities in which we work and live.

I want to stress as another author on this blog did a few days ago, the small businesses that cannot afford a $15 or $20 an hour minimum wage must join with workers in the struggle for it.  For most community businesses don’t object to such a wage, they just can’t afford it.  The workers’ movement in return must fight to free small business from the clutches of the corporations, the insurance companies, the taxman, bankers and others that weigh heavily on them.  It is absurd that a community business should provide health care for workers; the sickness industrial complex, the hospital and pharmaceutical industries, must be taken in to public ownership and these vital services can be managed in the public’s interest.

These are all steps we must take that will curb the power of the bosses over our lives in the workplace and outside it. But each victory in this regard is only temporary until we take control of the labor process and the management of society as a whole.

* A New Spate of Deaths inthe Wireless Industry WSJ 8-22-13

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Fast food workers plan surprise strike

From Salon.com

Breaking: Workers in some 50 restaurants expected to walk off job, potentially shutting down several eateries today

By Josh Eidelson

 
A protester holds up a sign at a demonstration outside McDonald's in Times Square in support of employees on strike at various fast-food chains in New York November 29, 2012. (Credit: Reuters/Andrew Kelly)

New York City fast food workers this morning planned to walk off the job in what organizers promised would be the largest-ever strike against the fast-growing, virtually union-free industry. The workers are demanding that chains like McDonald’s and Wendy’s raise their wages to $15 an hour and allow them to organize a union without retaliation. The campaign expected over 400 workers from 50-some stores to participate in the surprise strike, doubling the size of their previous walkout and potentially shutting down several fast food restaurants for the day.

“Obviously, it will piss off our bosses even more than before,” KFC worker Joe Barrera told Salon in a pre-strike interview. Barrera, 22, said that over his seven years in the industry, “we’ve had our complaints, but no one actually spoke out about it … I guess people were finally tired of the disrespect, under-compensation, being overworked, not having steady schedules and times, not having enough hours – basically, being played around with.” Workers from Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Papa John’s, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut are also expected to join the strike.

Barrera, who’s paid the $7.25 minimum wage, said that a decent raise would allow him to stop skipping meals and start pursuing college. “Maybe I could afford to have a girlfriend, take her out on a date …” he added. “All of that money goes right now to just surviving.”
Fast food is becoming an ever-larger and more representative sector of the U.S. economy. “We should think of these jobs as the norm,” said Columbia University political scientist Dorian Warren, “because even when you look at the high-skilled, high-paying jobs, they’re even adopting the low-wage model” of management. That means erratic schedules, paltry benefits, and – so far – almost no unions. “These are the quintessential example of the kinds of jobs that we have now,” said Warren, “and of the kind of job that we can expect in the future for the next few decades.”

Asked yesterday about recent labor protests, a McDonald’s spokesperson emailed a statement saying, “We value and respect all the employees who work at McDonald’s restaurants” and that the majority of its stores are franchisee-run restaurants “where employees are paid competitive wages, and have access to flexible schedules and quality, affordable benefits.”

Today’s planned work stoppage represents a major escalation by Fast Food Forward, a campaign spearheaded by the community organizing group New York Communities for Change (a successor to the now deceased ACORN). The fast food campaign’s funders include the Service Employees International Union. As Salon first reported, the campaign went public with a previous strike on Nov. 29. A parallel effort is underway in Chicago, where workers are also demanding $15 an hour and unionization without intimidation, but so far haven’t gone on strike. While New York’s and Chicago’s are the only ones to go public so far, similar organizing efforts are underway elsewhere as well.

Reached over email regarding the Fast Food Forward campaign, National Restaurant Association executive vice president Scott DeFife warned that “Any additional labor cost can negatively impact a restaurant’s ability to hire or maintain jobs.”

If the nature of the fast food industry reflects what’s happening to U.S. jobs, the shape of the fast food campaign reflects the challenges unions face in fighting back.
Since 1935, federal law has promised workers who want a union the chance to hold an election and force their boss to negotiate. But that promise has proven pretty empty. Among the obstacles: The government-sponsored election process is rife with opportunities for intimidation and delay. Companies that fire workers for organizing risk only meager penalties, after what can be a years-long process. Even when workers win a unionization election, they’re as likely as not to be left without a union contract a year later, because companies can stall or stonewall negotiations.

So even though the law says that it’s up to workers whether to bargain collectively with their boss, it’s really up to bosses whether to bargain in good faith with their employees. To succeed, union campaigns have to mount enough pressure against companies to make the costs of holding out greater than the benefits. But courts and politicians have made that harder to pull off, by making one of labor’s key weapons – the strike – harder to effectively use. Many of the most effective strike tactics – from sit-down strikes that physically occupy a workplace, to solidarity strikes that spread through a supply chain – are now generally illegal. And “permanently replacing” striking workers – de facto terminating them by refusing to let them have their jobs back after a strike – is generally kosher under the law.

“It’s important to recognize that labor law is set up to prevent exactly this type of organizing,” Joe Burns, the author of “Reviving the Strike,” said of the fast food campaign.

The Fast Food Forward campaign reflects some of the ways unions are taking on this challenge: finding alternative leverage points against corporations, and reimagining the strike. NYCC executive director Jonathan Westin told Salon that the campaign “is taking on all of the different avenues that we can, to engage workers, community, clergy, elected officials, and allies, to do everything we can to change the conditions within the industry. And if that’s through labor law, great. If it’s through other avenues, where community folks are stepping up and doing things differently, that’s great.” As Salon reported, when a Wendy’s worker was told she’d been terminated the day after the November strike, clergy, politicians and other supporters won her job back within an hour by rallying inside and outside her store.

In recent decades, as strikes have declined, unions have increasingly turned to “comprehensive campaign” tactics designed to compel companies to budge through a combination of political, consumer, community and media pressure. Tactics in such campaigns can range from digging up dirt on management, to calling on customers to boycott, to lobbying against a company’s zoning application. Each of these can pack a punch. But unless the campaign is really engaging workers, companies can often just wait out the bad press while forcing employees to attend that many more anti-union meetings. Just look at Wal-Mart, which withstood a well-funded union-backed air war in the 2000s without really breaking a sweat.

Simply put, few things engage customers, threaten management and transform workers like a good strike. And so, with organized labor nationally very much playing defense, labor organizers have been grappling with how to make strikes work for non-union workers. Today’s fast food strike, the fall strikes by Wal-Mart retail and warehouse workers, and a February strike by janitors who clean Twin Cities Target stores all share a few apparent tactics in common.

Because it’s legal to “permanently replace” workers who just strike in order to win union recognition or higher wages, workers announce that they are striking in protest of violations of labor law by management (if the government finds this to be true, then permanently replacing them becomes illegal – though that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen anyway). Because modern U.S. strikes are often more about humiliating management than shutting down business, workers go out on strike for a single day rather than walking off the job indefinitely. And rather than waiting until a majority of workers are willing to take the risk of going on strike, organizers mount strikes with a minority of the workforce, in hopes that their courage – and their safe return to work afterward – will inspire more of their co-workers to join in the next time.

If organizers’ estimates (400 to 500 strikers today) hold true, that’ll suggest that such “minority unionism” is paying off for NYC fast food workers, at least so far. McDonald’s employee Stephen Warner told Salon that when he heard about other workers going on strike in November, “it gave me hope for a better future … I was very surprised.” He’ll be out on the picket lines himself this time, he said, “hopefully to set an example for the rest of the people in fast food, so that they know that change is possible.”

But can these efforts ever develop the clout to compel a company like Wendy’s to foreswear union-busting? Labor campaigns have won some victories against fast food giants before. As I reported for the Nation last month, a strike by 15 immigrant guest workers led McDonald’s to cut ties to a franchisee that had allegedly subjected them to shifts of up to 25 hours straight. Consumer pressure campaigns by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (a non-union labor group) have gotten chains like Taco Bell to sign agreements requiring improved conditions for Florida tomato workers. And members of the Industrial Workers of the World, a union that generally eschews legal union recognition, say their workplace has forced improvements in discipline, scheduling and pay in some Minneapolis Jimmy John’s stores. But getting industry giants to drop their opposition to collective bargaining would be a tall order, one that would likely require much larger strikes, in many more cities, to even be conceivable.

“The franchise structure makes it easier for McDonald’s or the other food chains to just cut a franchise loose and say they’re not responsible,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, who directs labor education and research at Cornell. That’s because it’s the thousands of individual store franchisee-owners who legally employ workers, but it’s the corporate headquarters that actually calls the shots. On the other hand, Bronfenbrenner told Salon, “unlike Wal-Mart, McDonald’s is much more vulnerable to consumer pressure, in that they have competitors.” While some labor campaigns focus all of their firepower on making an example of a single company, Bronfenbrenner said that this campaign’s strategy of mobilizing against all of the major fast food industry players could pay off if one chain decides to make a deal with the union in hopes of getting a competitive advantage by escaping labor strife.

Burns, a negotiator for an airline union, called the fast food workers’ willingness to walk off the job “a very positive sign” of “a major shift in organizing strategy” after years in which unions largely neglected strikes. But he predicted that the constraints of labor law — including the laws limiting “representational strikes” designed to win collective bargaining, and repeated “intermittent strikes” against the same boss — will come to pose a major obstacle. “In the long run,” Burns told Salon, “it’s hard to see a successful strategy organizing fast food that doesn’t involve violating labor law.”
While that hasn’t happened so far, the fast food strikers are drawing inspiration from a group of workers who famously mounted an illegal strike. Today’s strike date was chosen because it marks 45 years since Rev. Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis, where he was supporting striking sanitation workers who were demanding union recognition. At a New York City meeting last Thursday, two veterans of that strike met with fast food employees just before a secret meeting where workers voted to authorize today’s strike. “In order for you all to win anything, you’re going to have to stand up,” Memphis striker Alvin Turner, now 78, told the crowd. “You’re going to have to stand up and be counted … If you don’t stand up, you can kiss it goodbye.”

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Amnesty for the undocumented, they've earned it.

by Richard Mellor

Immigrants are hard workers; they have to be.  They are usually economic refugees, victims of wars, both physical wars and trade wars.  The Irish came to England and to the US in droves to escape poverty in their homeland, a poverty that was a product of occupation and the theft of their land.  As a person of English origin living in California, I have often compared the Irish immigrants to Britain to our Mexican and other Latino immigrants who are also economic migrants, forced to leave their homes and families to stave off starvation.  NAFTA drove more than a million Mexican farmers from their subsistence farms; many came up here.  It’s hard to compete with Con Agra or Monsanto when it comes to agricultural production, the US small farmer can testify to that.

Many of the day laborers we see on the street corners of our cities are indigenous people that fled Guatemala to escape the murderous regime that the US installed there.  These peasants fought to defend their land but US weaponry and money ensures the land barons their primary place in the pecking order.

The question of “illegal” immigration is a major issue between the two Wall Street parties here in the US.  The Democrats claim to be the party of the poor, the workers, the downtrodden masses. But the voluntary exit from the political arena of some 140 million eligible voters in the election cycle shows how much faith Americans have in either of the parties of capitalism. The trade Union hierarchy continues to push a political party that millions of US workers have already abandoned.

In hard times----meaning during times of market failure----immigrants are an easy target, a handy scapegoat to divert attention from the inability of the market to provide a secure and fruitful existence for millions of people even in the most powerful economy in human history. They are to blame along with native workers but more so.  They take our jobs, they drag down wages, use our public services, etc. Racism is added to the mix; they wouldn’t be desperate if they could govern themselves; if they were smart like us.

There are some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, the majority of them from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.  How to deal with these people is a bit of an issue in Democratic and Republican circles.  As they always do in order to obscure the class divide, Obama talked of unity in his recent Inaugural address. “He used the word, ‘together’ seven times in the 15 minute speech” according to Bloomberg Business Week.

He went on to the subject of immigration touting the US as the land of opportunity and that the US “journey”(to where I’m not sure) is not complete “Until bright young students and engineers are listed in our workforce, rather than expelled from our country.”

It is not so difficult to get in to the US if you are a Russian tennis star or a former assassin for the CIA (there’s a few of them here) or a former dictator that helped US corporations plunder a third world country’s resources, Marcos of the Phillipines, the Shah of Iran, etc.

If you have money there are special considerations.

Neither party really seriously objects to these types of immigrants, the “bright stars”. The ones with money or potential to make money. The problem is the 11 million who “aren’t the ‘bright young’ future job creators Obama lauded in his speech.”, says Business Week.   So who are they then?

Making Calif a global agricultural powerhouse

Well if you live in California and you eat anything that pretty much grows out of the ground you can thank many of these brothers and sisters for it, undocumented or not.  If you go out for a nice meal no matter which type of ethnic food it is, Indian, Persian, Italian, Pakistani, Afghan or plain old American food, there’s a good chance a Latino, one of the 11 million will be cooking it.  If you need work on your home, your lawn, your rental unit, they might be doing that too.  They’ll be doing all of this for piss poor wages.  Then there’s the hog factories meat processing plants and chicken processing plants, you name it. You’ll find them there as well. After crushing militancy in the meat backing Unions with the help of the Union hierarchy, the bosses actually recruited labor from Mexico and Central America, providing transportation up north.

The ruling class whips up anti-immigrant feeling when it’s useful for them.  They take our jobs, they’re jacking up the cost of medical care and when there is a serious criminal offense committed by one of them it proves how we have to deal with this problem.

These workers are economic migrants, victims of the market.  They are the allies of US workers not the enemies.  The bosses favor the “bright stars” those that will more likely support capitalism and have ambitions to exploit workers when they arrive.  The US capitalist class doesn’t support these people coming in because they “create”jobs.  They support them because they are not hostile to the state of affairs, to capitalism.  Because they have desires to exploit Labor, to become rich off of the Labor of others or to at least facilitate the process of capital accumulation through their special skills for which they’ll be handsomely rewarded; they will tend to be more middle class in their outlook.

The Republicans are supposed to be the obstacle but what do the Democrats offer?  Outgoing Labor Secretary Hilda Solis wants things to be “fair”. She wants to bring the undocumented “out of the shadows”. Amnesty is “..a word we do not use.” she tells Charlie Rose, the journalist, commentator and big business insider. Solis has a radical solution, “earned legalization and fairness.”  Once this is done these immigrants “pay their back taxes, they get in line, they have no criminal record.”

Back taxes?  How about reimbursing them for all the profits they’ve made for US businesses receiving slave wages in return?  How about that? What about the rents they have paid to the “bright stars” in the slumlord business? Solis is herself a Latina from an immigrant working class background whose father was a Teamster and a shop steward.  But she represents the US capitalist class, rising to a considerable rank in one of its two political parties.  The undocumented workers in the US have contributed a lot more to our society than Donald Trump.  They have done so through the most backbreaking work in the worst conditions and living in constant fear and insecurity.  They do what all immigrants do, they work their asses off. They have to listen to racist ideologues demanding that they be denied basic rights like the right to drive a car legally (a must in California where “communist”public transport is so poor) or the right to medical care.  They have paid for the right to medical treatment ten times over. They actually contribute to our welfare.

Those immigrants that Obama refers to, the “bright young students and engineers”are generally less likely to join Unions or appeal to Unions or live in or close to the communities of native-born workers no matter what their racial background.  They will not frequent the bars and clubs and social activities we frequent in the main as we are forced to do through work and living in communities that border each other.  The class composition of the 11 million is overwhelmingly working class, and despite their attempts to divide us, demonize them and weaken class unity, when the struggle breaks out in to the open, there is a powerful tendency to overcome these divisions and for us to seek class allies and unite along class lines. Racism and xenophobia will also play its part, but this tendency to class unity is always there.  This is why these 11 million immigrants are feared and why they have to be portrayed negatively.

The AFL-CIO leadership needs the 11 million as does the Catholic Church, one for dollars in the Sunday plate the other to add to the declining Union membership and as votes for their Democratic allies at election time.  Not long ago a friend of mine who was a waiter in a fancy hotel helped the restaurant workers’ Union get a foot in the door.  The place was eventually Unionized.  Their pay increased a little and they now had Union dues.  My friend wanted to have a steward’s election and was an aggressive advocate of workers’ rights himself.  He called me frustrated with the Union staffer’s lack of response, never returning his calls.  He eventually went down the Union office and managed to talk to one of the staffers who told him that their resources were stretched as they were busy “growing”the Union.  In their competition with other Unions for “market share” and revenue growth, both bosses’ terms, they were done with the hotel.  They had a five-year contract a no-strike clause and some increased revenue.  The workers meanwhile were already beginning to hate the Union

It was Clinton who not long ago betrayed the Labor officialdom with his support for NAFTA after agreeing to oppose it, but they’ll let that go; their jobs are secure; won’t be exported. The Wall Street Journal reports today that Latino membership in Unions has risen 21% over the last 10 years while “white” membership fell 13%.  Leaving aside the discriminatory reasons for it, we could put this another way; we could say that higher paying jobs with better benefits and Union strength on the job have declined and low waged unionized service jobs have grown. The Union hierarchy is less interested in immigrant rights than the need for increased revenue as they see the Unions as employment agencies with them as the CEO’s.  They call for support for a wage raise to $10 an hour from $8 for a family of four as they assist the bosses drive wages and benefits at the higher end down further.

AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka, like any good businessman needs increased revenue. He brushes the past aside and ignores the fact that his Democratic Party allies, like California governor Jerry Brown are savaging workers’ living standards on behalf of the corporations announcing that the AFL-CIO leadership looks, “…..forward to working with members of Congress and the president to ensure that all men and women here, regardless of their skin color or where they were born, can participate meaningfully in the United States of America with full rights and equal protections.”

Good luck with that Mr. Trumka. Some team you’re on there.

Those in the immigration debate that simply call for the opening of borders are on the wrong track as a huge influx of Labor power would undoubtedly place significant downward pressure on wages.  The Labor movement must develop its own response to these issues rather than allowing big business, through the two political parties that it controls to set the ground rules. We must support immigrant rights domestically and not fall in to the skape-goating trap while at the same time assisting the growth and development of Labor organizations in other counties where poverty is rife. Most people emigrate because they can’t feed their families. We must reject competition between workers in different countries and work to build a united global working -class movement to fight global capital.

Even if these workers and peasants don't come here to the US, staying in their home countries will have basically the same effect. It will increase the supply of Labor, further driving down wages (Labor’s price) and increasing the rate at which capital invests since there would be even greater profits to be made there; capital doesn’t like closed borders. Obviously this would mean further job losses here in the U.S. Thus, we cannot escape the affects of the conditions of those workers and peasants, no matter if they come here or stay in their home countries. The only real difference is that if they come here, the effects of this forced competition are more visible to us. We can bury our heads in the sand and ignore the conditions in such countries as El Salvador, Mexico, etc., but that in no way means that those conditions don't affect us just as much. Therefore, our only choice is to join with them, wherever they are, in a united struggle to improve wages and conditions, as well as democratic rights, whether they be here or there.

Of course, this means opposing U.S. foreign policy, which has actively suppressed democracy and trade union rights in these countries in the interests of the giant multi-nationals.  It also means a struggle within the AFL-CIO whose leadership has blindly supported this foreign policy that has installed and/or supported one ruthless dictator after another in these countries.

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Union officialdom responsible for decline in membership

11-02-11. Occupy Oakland shuts down the port. More pics

by Richard Mellor

"Brethren we conjure you...not to believe a word of what is being said about your interests and those of your employers being the same. Your interests and theirs are in a nature of things, hostile and irreconcilable.  Then do not look to them for relief...Our salvation must, through the blessing of God, come from ourselves.  It is useless to expect it from those whom our labors enrich." (1)

The response from the heads of organized Labor to the war on public workers and services has been the same as the war on all workers----do nothing.  Well, that’s not exactly true, they offer concessions, just slightly less aggressive ones and in some instances have cooperated with the bosses in terminating local leaders who fight back as in the case of the Freightliner plant in Cleveland NC.  To attain fewer concessions, they throw more workers’ money and full time staff at Democratic Party politicians in the hope of alleviating the worst.

During the height of the assault here in California where workers were forced to take unpaid time off that amounted to 20% pay cuts, the teachers Union, the largest in the country with more than 300,000 members in the state, held a few rallies and at some of them encouraged their members to show their opposition and “wear red”on Fridays as symbols of the pink slips (layoff notices) they were receiving. Needless to say, the bosses weren’t cowed and public services and jobs have been slashed. So it should come as no surprise that almost half of the 400,000 members organized Labor lost last year were in the public sector according to the BLS.

The public sector has a much higher Union density than the private and fresh from significant victories over the once proud UAW, the benchmark group for the American workers’ advance in to the “middle class”, the owners of capital need to get the public sector Unionization rate down to size.  This would coincide with their privatization agenda which will give them greater access to public projects and increase flexibility in hiring which means the ability to fire at will.  The latest figures from the BLS show the public sector declining to 35.9% from 37% and the private sector to 6.6% from 6.9% in 2012 with a 2.8% decline overall. (WSJ 1-24-13)

This is at a time when we saw 100,000 people in the streets of Madison Wisconsin, a huge work stoppage at Verizon and other actions.  The Labor leaders’ strategy of getting a friendly Democrat elected is a catastrophe as Jerry Brown’s assault on workers and the middle class in California shows. In the Wisconsin protests against a political assault on trade Union rights, both the Labor leadership and their Democratic allies supported the economic concessions the bosses were demanding.

The Union officialdom is blaming the decline on “the economy, the state level collective bargaining battles and outdated federal labor laws that they say make organizing too difficult.”, according to the Wall Street Journal.  The Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein reckons it’s like a dog chasing its tail if the WSJ is to be believed, “The decline in membership generates a weaker political position and that leads to a situation where membership declines even more” he’s quoted as saying.

The weaker political position stems not from the declining number of voters the Labor hierarchy can turn out for the Democrats but from the fact that they continue to support this Wall Street Party with our money and resources rather than use them to build an independent party of working people based on our organizations and communities and the myriad of groups that have arisen in the wake of the crash. I am referring to groups fighting foreclosures, school closings, evictions, racism and police abuse for example.  During Jimmy Carter’s four years in the White House not one major bill important to Labor was passed despite the Democrats controlling both houses and the presidency and he used the Taft Hartley against the miners. The same situation existed during Clinton’s first two years and he brought us NAFTA and threw working class women off welfare during his time in the White House.

The failure to organize workers and the drastic decline in our living standards over the past 50 years is the result of the heads of organized Labor’s policies. The law is never on our side and any gains we’ve made politically have been won first in the streets, they are a response to mass action.  The objective conditions were far worse for us in the 1930’s.  But we saw in that period a massive uprising of the working class that not only broke the back of the mighty GM and built the UAW but brought about most of the social reforms we still enjoy today that they are in the process of reversing. Millions joined the trade Union movement in that period. The civil rights movement also brought progressive legislation.

The heads of organized Labor are wedded to the market and capitalism.  They agree that workers have to compete with each other in order to assist either their individual employers in driving their rivals from the market place, or at least increasing their market share, what is referred to as the Team Concept, Labor/Management partnerships and other nice sounding titles.  They apply the same philosophy internationally; siding with US corporations against foreign ones therefore pitting workers in one country against those in another. In his opening address to the 20th biennial convention of the California State Labor Federation in 1994 at which I was a delegate and at which I introduced a resolution for the formation of an independent Labor Party, Executive Secretary Jack Henning said:

"The two party system can't give relief because capitalism in large finances both parties in one way or another.  We may say it finances the Republican Party more.  But have you ever known Democrats en masse to turn down the enticements of capitalism?

"There should originate, in the leadership of the AFL-CIO, a call to the unions for the only answer that is noble: global unionism is the answer to global capitalism.

"We were never meant to be beggars at the table of wealth.  We were never meant to be the apostles of labor cannibalism on the world stage.  We were meant for a higher destiny.  We were never meant to be the lieutenants of capitalism.  We were never meant to be the pall bearers of the workers of the world."

Unfortunately Henning didn’t go beyond the fiery rhetoric and ensured my local’s resolution went down.

In response to the recent BLS figures Labor tops, are taking radical steps indeed calling for, ”stronger labor laws and an end to attacks on collective bargaining rights.” The legal right to bargain is important to them as they wouldn’t have a job without it; they want a seat at the table in order to participate in the destruction of our living standards.  They want their rightful place as junior partners-------as members of the team. Their policy of winning lower paid workers is based on increasing numbers for the purpose of pressuring Democrats at the polls.

The problem is that the bosses are forever discussing, planning and orchestrating new offensives as the strategists of organized Labor continue to hold out the olive branch.  The state is being used more. The courts (bankruptcy is used more frequently to throw out Union contracts and renege on pension agreements) and the police are being beefed up with more advanced weaponry and technology as unmanned drones are seen more in our communities.  All these measure will be used against workers in the struggles ahead including ant-terrorism laws.  From the bosses’ point of view, stopping production is interfering with commerce and that’s terrorism, mass terrorism.

In Wisconsin union membership fell 13.5% last year; in Indiana it fell 18.5%.  Caterpillar shut down its plant in London Ontario where workers refused to take a 50% pay cut shifting production to Muncie Indiana.  Wages at the Ontario plant were $35 an hour, in Muncie Caterpillar is offering $12 to $18. (see hereand hereand the WSJ  here) The US is becoming attractive to global capitalists as a low wage, Union free place to do business. Where they can they will move production, close the plants as they do in manufacturing seeking cheaper Labor power elsewhere.  It shows that the issue of nationalization, of public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy is crucial or we will never win.  Even public ownership in a capitalist economy is preferable along the road to workers control and management.

When every opportunity has arisen that could open up an offensive of our own, the heads of organized Labor have successfully derailed it. They undermined the movement that followed the Battle in Seattle when the youth shut down the WTO and thousands of workers praised them.  In Wisconsin they channeled it in to an electoral movement for Democrats.  Here in California, they ensured the student movement against the fee hikes in 2010, the Occupy Movement that followed and numerous strikes here and throughout the country went nowhere. As ardent supporters of the free market they avoid a victory like the plague, after all, where will it lead? Where will it stop? For them a movement of the working class can only lead to chaos and it is from this world -view that all their betrayals arise. Corruption and their obscene salaries, their lifetime positions and other perks, these are secondary factors.

The policies of the present trade Union leadership are a complete failure. They are responsible for the decline. Building opposition caucuses in our Unions around a program that rejects the bosses’ austerity agenda, reject the Team Concept, fights for what workers need on the job and in our communities, jobs (not prisons) wages, increased leisure time, maternity leave, (see some of the US statistics compared to Europe in a previous blog)
a national minimum wage of $15 to $20 an hour and for affordable housing, free federally funded education, health care, transportation etc.  All of these are affordable and can be paid for by the rich and the ending of the wars and dismantling of hundreds of bases to facilitate them. These necessities and a mass direct action campaign to win them is what will swell the ranks of organized Labor, not low interest credit cards and talk of “shared sacrifice”.  Why support your Union when your wages and living standards continue to decline as dues continue to rise?

While the main responsibility lies with the trade Union hierarchy, I have to raise the issue of what we call the “left” in this country as we have many times before on this blog.  In the years I was active in some of the higher bodies of the AFL-CIO, members that considered themselves leftists, socialists or were members of left groups of one type or another were indistinguishable from the right wing bureaucracy despite militant sounding phrases outside of the movement. In the Labor Council I was a delegate to they refused to openly campaign against their failed policies and acted as a left cover for them; this continues today.  By functioning in this way, some of the best workers, and those looking for an understanding of why things are like they are or where they can go to change them have nowhere to turn.  The left has to reflect on why we have never built a left current in the workers’ movement or outside of it in the working class a s a whole. We have not drawn the most combative workers to our ideas.  The left is absent in local and municipal elections unable to unite around a basic program that connects with the most pressing issues that are on worker’s minds.

Things will change as resistance to the offensive grows and organized Labor will be engulfed in turmoil in the struggles ahead.  But the slow decline may not have reached bottom yet.

“Unions are seeking innovative ways to organize workers” says AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka.  Here’s a suggestion---- an innovative beginning---fight for them.

(1) 1840's appeal from New England laborers to their fellows to abandon the idea that the employers/capitalists would solve working people's problems.  Philip Foner History of the Labor Movement Vol. 1 p192

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Wal-Mart will police Labor conditions at US suppliers.

 

Hundreds die at Wal-Mart supplier in Bangladesh

by Richard Mellor

What a New Year’s treat.  Low waged workers that are employed by subcontractors that supply retail giants like Wal-Mart will have a brighter future apparently.  Wal-Mart says it will monitor these subcontractors in the same way it police’s working conditions at its supplier’s factors around the world.

Wal-Mart insists that this auditing system will be “…similar to the one it uses to monitor overseas factories in places such as China and Bangladesh….”, the Wall Street Journal reports. When I was active in my Union, contracting out of services was something we fought hard to prevent as wages were lower, benefits non existent or slim and conditions in general not up to par. But having Wal-Mart corporation police working conditions is a sick joke, it's hard to imagine that such a development can be reported on without a barrage of responses from the heads organized Labor but we should be used to their deafening silence by now.

Wal-Mart has tried to avoid any responsibility for conditions in the supply warehouses saying that the logistics companies that it contracts with should be targeted.  The logistics companies pass the buck as well claiming that the staffing agencies they deal with are expected to comply with Labor laws.  Workers have complained about horrendous conditions in these warehouses, one group of workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma Calif. complained of temperatures of 125 degrees and that the staffing company that ran the place deducted wages for workers that demanded “safety goggles and dust masks.”  The suppliers have also been accused of arbitrarily withholding wages and overtime pay and of even denying proper medical care to workers suffering from heatstroke. 

The group Warehouse Workers United is backed and funded by the UFCW and other Unions that fund workers’ legal efforts and lawsuits.  The claim is that the UFCW has tried to unionize workers at Wal-Mart but failed.  This issue of why they fail is the question.  The UFCW leadership, like the entire leadership of organized Labor in the US accepts that concessions to the employers have to be made and has consistently offered their members wages and benefits up at the negotiating table.  Like all of them, they have also called workers out on strike for concessions, fewer concessions than the employer is demanding; not very inspiring. It is hard to motivate people around a program of concessions.  Their strategy fails because rather than mobilizing the millions of workers in this country around a fighting program and an offensive of our own, the tactics amount to relying on the courts on the one hand and electing a friendly Democrat on the other.

The conditions in retail and industries that we are talking about here are so bad that the strategists atop organized Labor feel that they can win important allies to the cause for organizing low waged workers and bring in more revenue at the same time. It’s hard to argue against someone increasing their pay to $10 an hour from $8 and most decent people are horrified at the thought of wages being withheld and safety concerns ignored. On top of this, many of these low waged workers are women and workers of color so the issue of racism and sexism can be used to draw in support from liberal groups who believe in equality and fairness for all, including the boss, they can accept us all being poor but don't discriminate.  Like the Union leadership they accept that wages and conditions at the higher end need to be driven down to accommodate the needs of “tough economic times”. We have to be realistic, but there is such a thing as fairness.

It is obvious to any thinking worker that we are in a war here.  Working hours, wages, conditions are all under assault as hedge fund managers and other coupon clippers rake in billions of dollars a year as this blog pointed out yesterday.  It is the power of a united working class movement that will change this situation. Bosses like the Waltons that own Wal-Mart and the others that are part of private equity groups or investment blocs (Bain Capital of Romney fame and Goldman Sachs have each owned Burger King for example) that invest in production will only respond to power.  GM, that swore a Union would never be accepted in its plants and that was one of the largest corporations in the world at one time changed its mind after workers occupied its factories and shut down production.  This is not a utopian dream, some glorification or desire for a lost past, it is what will work today. Strikes today are merely 24-hour protests, but if you can’t shut down production, you can’t win.

In the previous blog we pointed out the potential power of organized Labor which is a mere 12% of the workforce but at the time of the 1968 French General Strike when ten million workers occupied their workplaces only 10% of workers were organized.  Both coasts of the US can be shut down as I hinted at yesterday.  Wal-Mart can be shut down but not using the present methods and without demands and goals that are worth fighting for that can draw workers and our communities in to activity.  Truckers, airlines, the public sector, retail, all these sectors are under assault but workers have to see power in order to openly confront the boss especially one like Wal-Mart.  Even small community businesses can be won to our side with the right program, and if they see our power; they too are under assault. There is still a tremendous disdain and hatred for the rich and corporations in this country, especially since the onset of the Great Recession.

Within organized Labor the obstacle of our own leadership will inevitably be overcome, but we can hasten this development by openly challenging their concessionary, class collaborationist policies; but not by simply calling them names or blaming their obscene salaries and perks which are a secondary issue.  Ideological corruption is the culprit; they accept capitalism and worship the market.  By building fighting opposition caucuses in our locals that can offer an alternative and battle for the consciousness of the ranks and the working class as whole we can turn this tide; the times of middle ground and room to maneuver have passed.

Our greatest crisis is one of leadership

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Fast-Food Workers Walk Off the Job

McDonald's protest, Auckland NZ

We are sharing this piece from the NYT with our readers given the importance of this walk off of fast food workers.  This is occurring as Walmart workers also take steps toward confronting their bosses which in this industry can have unpleasant consequences.  it shows how in the light of the recent crisis, workers are being forced in to action. The economic crisis is savaging the poor and low waged. (this image did not come with the original article)


NYT
November 28, 2012
In Drive to Unionize, Fast-Food Workers Walk Off the Job

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States. The effort — backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union — has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city.

Leaders of the effort said that workers were walking off the job to protest what they said were low wages and retaliation against several workers who have backed the unionization campaign. They said it would be the first multi-restaurant strike by fast-food workers in American history, although it was unclear how many workers would walk off the job.

 The first walkout took place at 6:30 a.m. at a McDonald’s at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, where several dozen striking workers and supporters chanted: “Hey, hey, what do you say? We demand fair pay.” An organizer of the unionizing campaign said that 14 of the 17 employees scheduled to work the morning shift had gone on strike.

Raymond Lopez, 21, an aspiring actor who has worked at the McDonald’s for more than two years, showed up on his day off to protest. “In this job having a union would really be a dream come true,” said Mr. Lopez, who added that he makes $8.75 an hour. He said that he, and fellow fast-food workers, were under-compensated. “We don’t get paid for what we do,” he said. “It really is living in poverty.”

Over the decades there have been occasional efforts to unionize a fast-food restaurant here or there, but labor experts say there has never before been an effort to unionize dozens of such restaurants. The new campaign aims in part to raise low-end wages and reduce income inequality, and is also an uphill battle to win union recognition.

Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the City University of New York, said there had been so few efforts to unionize fast-food workers because it was such a daunting challenge.

“These jobs have extremely high turnover, so by the time you get around to organizing folks, they’re not on the job anymore,” she said. Nonetheless, she said the new effort might gain traction because it is taking place in New York, a city with deep union roots where many workers are sympathetic to unions.

Christine C. Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council who has struggled with various measures intended to improve wages and working conditions in the city, expressed support for fast-food workers.

"I support fast food restaurant workers’ rights to organize and fight for decent wages,’' Ms. Quinn wrote in a Twitter message on Thursday morning.

Jonathan Westin, organizing director at New York Communities for Change, a community group that is playing a central role in the effort, said hundreds of workers had already voiced support for the campaign, called Fast Food Forward.

“The fast-food industry employs tens of thousands of workers in New York and pays them poverty wages,” Mr. Westin said. “A lot of them can’t afford to get by. A lot have to rely on public assistance, and taxpayers are often footing the bill because these companies are not paying a living wage.”

Mr. Westin said the campaign was using techniques that differed from those in most unionization drives, and was still developing overall strategy. He declined to say whether it would pursue unionization through elections or by getting workers to sign a majority of cards backing a union.

McDonald’s issued a statement about the incipient unionization push. “McDonald’s values our employees and has consistently remained committed to them, so in turn they can provide quality service to our customers,” the company said.

It added that the company had an “an open dialogue with our employees” and always encouraged them to express any concerns “so we can continue to be an even better employer.” McDonald’s noted that most of its restaurants were owned and operated by franchisees “who offer pay and benefits competitive within the” industry.

But workers demonstrating outside the McDonald’s on Madison Avenue said their employer paid them wages that made it difficult to pay for basics.

“We can’t pay rent, pay bills,’' said Hector Henningham, 40, a manager, who said he had worked for McDonald’s for eight years and made $8 an hour. “We need change.’'

One customer drinking coffee inside the McDonald’s said she supported the organizing effort. “If anybody deserves to unionize, it’s fast food workers,” said the customer, Jocelyn Horner, 35, a graduate student.

Even with a union, it might be hard to obtain wages of $15 an hour, and many employers say they would most likely employ fewer workers if they had to pay that much.

Mr. Westin’s group, New York Communities for Change, has played a major role in the recent uptick in unionizing low-wage workers in New York, many of whom are immigrants. In the past year, his group, working closely with the retail, wholesale and department store union and other organizations, has helped win unionization votes at four carwashes and six supermarkets in New York.

The sponsors of the fast-food campaign also include UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and the Service Employees International Union, a powerful union that is playing a quiet but important role behind the scenes.

Several religious leaders are backing the effort. “I’ve become involved because it is primarily a matter of justice,” said the Rev. Michael Walrond of the First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem. “We seek to protect those who are the most vulnerable in our culture, and some of the most vulnerable people in the city are fast-food workers who work for poverty wages.”

According to the State Labor Department, median pay for fast-food workers in the city is around $9 an hour — or about $18,500 a year for a full-time worker.

After three years of working at a McDonald’s restaurant on 51st Street and Broadway, Alterique Hall earns $8 an hour — and is yearning for something better.

So when he heard about the unionization campaign, Mr. Hall, 23, was quick to sign on.

“It’s time for a change,” he said, “It’s time to put on the gloves.”

Linda Archer, a cashier at the McDonald’s on 42nd Street just west of Times Square, said she wished she earned that much. She earns $8 an hour after three years there and averages 24 hours a week, she said, meaning her pay totals about $10,000 a year.

“I feel I deserve $15 an hour,” said Ms. Archer, 59. “I work very hard.” She said she hoped a union would deliver affordable health insurance and paid sick days.

“My hope is we can all come together in a union without being intimidated,” she said.

TCB Management, the franchisee that operates Mr. Hall’s McDonald’s, and Lewis Foods, which runs Ms. Archer’s, did not respond to inquiries.

Tim McIntyre, a Domino’s Pizza spokesman, said the few efforts to unionize its stores and drivers had fallen flat.

“It’s a fairly high-turnover position, so there’s never been a successful union effort,” he said. “People who are doing this part time, seasonally or as they work their way through college don’t find much interest in membership.”

Richard W. Hurd, a labor relations professor at Cornell, said the organizations backing the fast-food campaign seemed intent on finding pressure points to push the restaurants to improve wages and benefits.

“But it’s going to be a lot harder for them to win union recognition,” he said. “It will be harder to unionize them than carwash workers because the parent companies will fight hard against it, because they worry if you unionize fast-food outlets in New York, that’s going to have a lot of ramifications elsewhere.”

Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

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