Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

March 16, 2012

#Sidney's Picks: Republicans Against Prison Labor; "Authorette" 1; Limbaugh, 0; The 40-Hour Week

 

  • And now for something completely different: Republicans against prison labor! When public exploitation undercuts private profit, something has to be done. Defense contractors say they’re being undercut by Federal Prison Industries, a publicly-owned company that pays inmates between 23 cents to $1.15 an hour to make clothing and other items for the U.S. military, Diane Cardwell reports in the New York Times. The defense contractors have enlisted their friends in the Senate, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), to level the playing field between FPI and the private sector. Now, a bipartisan group of legislators seeks to revive a bill that would raise the minimum wage in federal prisons and increase Congressional oversight of the prison system.
  • Why the U.S. needs to bring back the 40-hour work week to preserve our sanity and our productivity, by Sarah Robinson in AlterNet.
  • Last week Rush Limbaugh attacked Tracie McMillan, the author of the critically acclaimed book The American Way of Eating as “wide-eyed” “authorette,” and an “overeducated” but unintelligent single woman. Clarissa León takes Rush to task for his ill-informed, sexist, classist diatribe in the Daily Beast: “‘Rush Limbaugh has crystallized something that is bigger than just him,’ writer Annia Ciezadlo says. ‘What he’s sort of unwittingly articulated is this hatred of the idea that working-class women will have a voice in anything that they do.’”
  • Former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit the legendary investment banking house because he realized that short-term greed was eclipsing long-term greed at Goldman, Ezra Klein explains in the Washington Post. In other words, Smith felt that Goldman was more interested in wringing money out of its own clients (short-term greed) than in making them money and taking a cut year after year (long-term greed).

 

March 14, 2012

"Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs"

Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith explains in the op/ed pages of the New York Times why he’s stepping down today after twelve years with the organization:

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.

Smith is concerned that integrity is on the decline at the 143-year-old investment bank. He’s not worried about what Goldman is doing to society at large, but he draws the line at what he sees as his former firm’s willingness to exploit its own clients.  “Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail,” he writes. That does sound like a bad sign.

[Photo credit: Erik Daniel Drost, Creative Commons.]

March 14, 2012

Minimum Rage: Will Gen-Y Occupy the Service Industry?

Young, college-educated workers are shaking up the service sector, Nona Willis Aronowitz reports in GOOD magazine:

Behind the bar of a fancy New York restaurant, a 27-year-old bartender tidies her olive-and-cherry box. She attempts to look distracted while a middle-aged financial analyst holds her captive with small talk.

“So what else do you do?” he slurs, four Manhattans deep.
 
“Nothing,” she says. “I just do this.”
 
“Oh!” he answers. “That’s cool. Did you go to college?”
 
“Yup. I went to NYU.”
 
The man makes no attempt to hide his confusion. She leans forward and wipes away a few whiskey drops in front of him.
 
“I have loans,” she says, with a touch of attitude. “Don’t know what to tell you.”
 
Emily Sanders has been a waitress or bartender, on and off, for almost a decade. She’s made anywhere from minimum wage to around $1,000 a week, which is what she hauls in now. She has no health insurance, no 401(k), and a pathetic savings account. Most days, she gets to her first job at noon and leaves her second after midnight. If she’s sick but a little short on cash, she downs some DayQuil and goes into work anyway.

Willis Aronowitz profiles Erik Forman, a former humanites student at Macalester College who now works as an Industrial Workers of the World organizer in Minneapolis.

Forman played a leading role in a hard-fought but unsuccessful campaign to unionize ten Jimmy Johns sub shops in the Twin Cities.

“People didn’t want to admit that they were going to be in these jobs for a long time,” Erik says. “It’s a classist stereotype that these jobs don’t deserve to be good jobs,” he told GOOD. 

Organizing in the service industry has languished since the 1980s, but a new cadre of professional organizers is coming of age. These activists were raised middle class, but they are downwardly moble. Many initially assumed that the service industry was just a temporary waystation on the road to a more lucrative career, but with unemployment stubbornly high, and student loan debt pressing in, they have decided to stand and fight for the jobs they have.

[Photo credit: Jezlyn26, Creative Commons.]

March 13, 2012

No Cookies, No Contract: Ian Frazier wins March Sidney for Story of Stella D'oro Strike

Ian Frazier of The New Yorker has won the March Sidney Award for his powerful account of the 2008 Stella D’oro biscuit strike. Stella D’oro was a local landmark in the Bronx for more than 60 years, churning out anisette toasts and almond sponges around the clock and perfuming Kingsbridge with the scent of baking cookies. In 2006, the company was sold to Brynwood Capital Partners, a Greenwich-based private equity firm specializing in “orphan brands.” The new management demanded steep wage and benefit cuts and the Stella D’oro workers went out on strike. They stayed out for 10 months.

Ultimately, the workers won the strike when the National Labor Relations Board ordered them back to work under their existing contract. The Board found that Brynwood had bargained in bad faith. Unfortunately, the 134 Stella D’oro workers still lost their jobs when Brynwood sold Stella, at a loss, to an anti-union firm which moved the entire operation to Ohio and didn’t rehire any of the Bronx-based workforce.

Here’s my interview with Frazier about his story. He argues that steep economic inequality between workers and management undermined their ability to understand one another’s motives an achieve a mutually beneficial settlement. The workers refused to accept cuts because they saw themselves as making a last stand for their middle class way of life. If they accepted the cuts, many would have to move to worse neighborhoods, lose their health insurance, and be unable to afford college tuition for their children (which previous generations of Stella D’oro workers had been able to afford). Management regarded the workers as willful and impossible to deal with. Wasn’t any job better than no job at all? The workers countered that Brynwood promised its investors a 28% rate of return. By management’s logic, wasn’t any ROI better than none at all? Evidently not.

Frazier’s story emphasizes the challenges facing unions confronted with private equity owners that have no interest in keeping a business local, or running it over the long term. When Stella D’oro was family-owned, labor and management sorted out their differences quickly. When the going got tough, Brynwood unloaded Stella D’oro and allowed 134 desperately-needed blue collar jobs in the Bronx to be exported to Ohio. The irony is that Brynwood, by its own admission, lost millions of dollars in the process of unloading Stella. So much for the cold, dispassionate logic of capitalism.

[Photo: Lindsay Beyerstein, All Rights Reserved.]

March 12, 2012

Are Student Loans the Next Big "Debt Bomb"?

Student debt is one of the major rallying points of the Occupy Movement. Now, bankruptcy lawyers are lending credence to that message, Eric Pianen reports for the Washington Post: 


Bankruptcy lawyers have a frightening message for America: They’re seeing the telltale signs of a student loan debt bubble that is placing increased financial pressure on families struggling with their children’s mounting debt. According to a recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, more than 80 percent of bankruptcy lawyers have seen a substantial increase in the number of clients seeking relief from student loans in recent years.

In most cases, those clients could not meet the federal hardship standards that are necessary to discharge a student loan through bankruptcy proceedings. Instead, many of these parents or guardians who co-signed the student loans face the prospect of losing their life savings, cars or homes to collection agencies for aggressive private lenders.

The head of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACABA) told Pianen that, while he doesn’t expect student debt to have the same crushing short-term economic impact as the mortgage crisis, the long-term impact on the economy could be severe. If students aren’t willing to take on debt to get the education and training they need, the U.S. will ultimately become less competitive compared to countries where students can get affordable post secondary education.

[Photo credit: Lindsay Beyerstein, all rights reserved.]

March 9, 2012

#Sidney's Picks: A Great Escape; Protecting Homecare Workers; Errol Morris

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

March 7, 2012

Limbaugh's "Choice of Words"

Right wing radio host Rush Limbaugh grudgingly apologized for his “choice of words” regarding Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified in support of the birth control mandate. The problem words were “slut” and “prostitute.” By implication, Limbaugh is not sorry at all about his choice of thoughts about uppity women and birth control.

Likewise, Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney has no problem with the general idea that Congressional testimony and bodily autonomy turn women into filthy whores, but he doesn’t think Rush hit on le mot juste. “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used,” Romney said.

Given that the GOP has decided to refight the election of 1910–birth control and the gold standard!–we know that this delicate subject is going to come up again. So, what’s the classy way to impugn a lady’s virtue when you don’t like her politics? Hillman judge Rick Hertzberg helpfully suggests some more decorous synonyms: “ ‘Strumpet’ has a jolly, Falstaffian feel, consistent with Limbaugh’s purportedly “humorous” rotundity.”

[Photo credit: Boston Bill, Creative Commons.]

 

March 6, 2012

Save the Date: Remember the Triangle Fire, Mar 23

SAVE THE DATE!
101st Triangle Factory Fire Commemoration
Workers United/SEIU (ILGWU)
Friday, March 23, 2012
12 noon – 1 pm
Washington Place and Greene Street, NYC

March 5, 2012

NYC Carwash Workers Plan Union Drive

Hoping to replicate the success of their brothers and sisters in Los Angeles, carwash workers in New York City are launching a unionization drive in a bid to clean up labor practices in their troubled industry. Kirk Semple reports for the New York Times:

At a carwash in an industrial patch of Astoria, Queens, Adan Nicolas, a Mexican immigrant, is preparing to open the newest front in New York City’s labor battles.

His bosses have often paid him and the other carwash workers less than minimum wage and have cheated them on overtime pay, Mr. Nicolas said. The workers, he said, are not provided with protective gear but are forced to use caustic cleaners that burn their eyes and noses.

Community organizers say these kinds of violations are rampant among local carwashes.

So for the past several weeks, under the tutelage of immigrants’ advocates, Mr. Nicolas, 31, has been briefing his colleagues in rudimentary labor law and the language of organizing. Out of the sight of bosses, similar conversations have been unfolding at other carwashes around New York City.

“We’re all ready to fight for our rights and have a dignified place to work, and not to be abused like we are today,” Mr. Nicolas said.

On Tuesday, a coalition of community and labor organizations plans to introduce a citywide campaign to reform the carwash industry. The union advocates, in turn, hope to use the campaign to unionize carwash workers across the city, most of whom are immigrants.

Similar campaigns in Los Angeles have so far yielded collective bargaining agreements at three car washes.

[Photo credit: Nyer82, Creative Commons.]

March 2, 2012

#Sidney's Picks: Women to Watch; Taibbi on Breitbart

  • Public colleges have raised tuitions and slashed enrollments in the wake of state funding cuts, depriving the economy of qualified applicants for critical jobs, Catherine Rampell reports in the New York Times.
  • A tough job market and gender discrimination are fueling a cosmetic surgery craze in China, reports Jin Zhao at Things You Don’t Know About China. China’s $47.7 billion cosmetic surgery industry is the third-largest in the world, after the U.S. and Brazil; but South Korea still leads the world in cosmetic surgery per capita thanks in part to surgical tourists from China.
  • Alyssa Rosenberg of ThinkProgress suggests 10 Women Major Magazines Should be Commissioning.
  • Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone on the late right wing media baron Andrew Breitbart, a con man who debased journalism.
  • A Los Angeles woman was deported after getting arrested protesting the foreclosure of her home, Colorlines reports.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

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