News Clips

By Michelle Chen
The Nation

(Link to article.)

The Port of Los Angeles has been a crossroads of global trade for decades—and a labor battleground for just about as long. Following in the wake of the historic longshore union wars and the more recent port trucker strikes, warehouse workers are rumbling the docks.

A few dozen workers at the California Cartage warehouse went on strike on Tuesday to protest poverty wages and harsh working conditions. Though backed by the advocacy group Warehouse Workers Resource Center (WWRC), with support from the Teamsters, the strikers don’t have a union—many aren’t even permanent employees. But they’ve seized on a unique moment in the labor movement to push for a broad recognition of the equal rights of contingent workers and to hold all companies operating at the site accountable. The workers are demanding a $15 minimum wage (an immediate raise well ahead of Los Angeles County’s new target minimum wage to be phased in by 2020) and respect for the labor rights of all workers at the site.

Workers are simultaneously pressing a lawsuit filed last December against Cal Cartage and various staffing companies, charging that some 500 workers were systematically underpaid by as much as $2 to $3 per hour since at least 1999. They argue Cal Cartage is bound by local Living Wage standards because it operates on land leased from the city. Workers also charge that they were shorted on overtime hours and forced into erratic schedules, that sometimes led to being sent home immediately due to lack of work after reporting to the site.

The workers recently expanded their legal fight with a complaint at the National Labor Relations Board, claiming the management used abusive tactics to retaliating against workplace organizing, such as “attempting to provoke a physical altercation with workers after they asked to take a break while working during excessive heat this August,” and “implicitly threaten[ing] discharge” in response to workers’ organizing activities.

Crucially, both complaints named California Cartage and staffing agencies as joint employers, based on the rationale that while Cal Cartage had not hired the agency workers directly, they were nonetheless responsible for their conditions at work, including employment decisions, disciplinary practices, compensation, and scheduling.

The claim parallels a landmark NLRB decision in August that dramatically broadened the scope of the joint employer designation. That case, involving the Browning-Ferris Industries staffing agency at a California recycling plant, reversed a longstanding precedent enabling lead companies to shift employer responsibilities onto third-party subcontractors. The decision opened the door to unionizing both contract workers and direct hires under one collective bargaining unit.

The port workers are not actively campaigning for a union. But they voted for a joint strike action to pressure their employers, forming a united front between contract and regular workers and jointly asserting shared legal rights.

Anthony Vallicello, 28, an agency mechanic who has worked at the warehouse on and off for five years, says he has suffered physically due to rough and unsafe workplace conditions. The temps, many of them immigrants, “work under conditions where they’re in the cold, or in the rain, and it’s too hot for workers to be working in those working conditions… There’s lot of accidents that happen,” he says. “When it rains, they have them working harder [while] not thinking of the safety.” And though “they put more pressure on the agency workers,” conditions are degraded for all warehouse employees, he adds. (Workers recently accused Cal Cartage of various safety violations, including inadequate training and lack of vehicle safeguards, in a separate pending complaint with California’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration).

Cal Cartage has declined to comment to The Nation, but stated that it has been monitoring the strike situation.

Vallicello has too; but after trying to complain to supervisors about unpaid overtime hours, he’s realized that neither company wanted to address the issue. Instead, he explains, “What they do is, they put it onto each other. ‘Oh, go talk to the agency.’ And the agency says, ‘Go talk to Cal Cartage.’ So they’re trying to keep on tossing to each other their responsibility.” While bosses play ping-pong with workers’ grievances, Vallicello says, “Just because they got a third person to hire doesn’t mean they’re not responsible.”

Formally deeming Cal Cartage and staffing agencies as joint employers could weaken a key weapon corporations use to shirk liability and cut labor costs: Subcontracting, outsourcing, and stacking their staffs with temps to keep workers divided among themselves and distanced from the real source of managerial power.

The outsourcing of warehouse labor is actually a microcosm of the “just in time” global logistics infrastructure.

Another labor-relations case brought by McDonald’s workers under a similar joint employer claim could boost fast food worker organizing efforts by dismantling a major barrier to organizing—the franchise business model under which workers are technically hired by franchisees. If the Golden Arches were deemed an official joint employer, franchise workers could potentially unite as a single labor force. According to the National Employment Law Project, the ruling “means that corporations that share control over operations cannot feign ignorance or disclaim responsibility for illegal acts [that] flow from the business model the lead company imposes.” So instead of dodging regulations to “save” on labor costs, they’ll be held to regulatory obligations as employers, including sitting down with unions in contract negotiations.

The outsourcing of warehouse labor is actually just a microcosm of the “just in time” logistics infrastructure, in which retail giants like Amazon and Lowe’s (two brands linked to the warehouse) draw on a global supply chain brimming with poorly regulated contractors and subcontractors, from California warehouses to South Asian sweatshops.

According to Vallecillo, other coworkers would have joined their picket line, but feared potential repercussions. “Before, nobody knew about this,” he says. “A lot of workers didn’t want to speak up; they were intimidated.” He and his fellow strikers only learned about their rights on the job after getting involved with the WWRC; the idea for a strike emerged gradually from “a combination of everybody just being together and being a little more educated.”

And by joining together to jam up the port’s logistical gears, they hope to teach their bosses—all of them—that the laborers who have historically been treated as disposable, are in fact indispensable.

By Rubén Tapia
Radio Bilingue

(Link to article and radio story.)

In California, hundreds of thousands of workers receive less than minimum wage, or don’t get paid for overtime, or don’t get breaks they are due by law. In order to expose some of those responsible to public shame, a wide labor coalition just published a list of a dozen companies that consistently commit this kind of violation and, when ordered to pay, avoid their responsibility. The coalition says together, these companies show the wide variety of industries that commit this kind of labor law violation, and the broken system set up to protect workers. Our correspondent in Los Angeles, Rubén Tapia, has the story.

A group of workers protests outside the California Cartage Company, a transportation and storage company that has been in business for more than 70 years and has warehouses in the U.S. and Mexico.

“We have a big problem,” says Rafael Quinteros, in Spanish. Quinteros joined the protest after he got off work. “They’ve been stealing from us since who knows when, and we didn’t even realize.”

Quinteros drives a fork lift for the company, which does business with the city of Los Angeles. Eighteen years ago, the city approved an ordinance that companies that do business with the city have to pay their workers two to three dollars more than minimum wage. Quinteros hasn’t received this additional money in the 20 years he has worked with the company.

“I should have made a lot more, but they didn’t give me anything,” he says.

With his current salary of $10.50 an hour, Quinteros says he can barely support his family. He has a 17-year-old son and a wife who is sick and cannot work.

“With what I make here, I have to buy very little. I don’t even have enough to buy my wife’s medicine sometimes,” Quinteros says.

Rafel Quinteros says California Cartage Company owes him a lot of money. Photo: Rubén Tapia.

That’s why he joined a class-action lawsuit against California Cartage Company, calling on it to comply with the Los Angeles ordinance. The suit was filed in December, and a hearing will be held in October.

California Cartage Company is one of 12 businesses listed as consistently violating labor laws, in a new report. The company did not respond to a request for an interview with Radio Bilingüe.

“[Wage theft] doesn’t only happen in some industries in our economy, it happens in big companies and small companies, even mom-and-pop businesses,” says Lucero Herrera, a researcher with the UCLA Labor Center, which systematized the report, by a wide coalition of more than 30 community and labor organizations. One of the goals of the report is to expose the tactics used by companies to avoid having to comply with the law.

“Many of these corporations do business with contractors or subcontractors that they know are breaking the law. It also illustrates that there are a lot of loopholes in the laws and unscrupulous individuals take advantage of that. They can declare bankruptcy and keep operating the same business and nothing happens, and many companies just don’t pay,” Herrera says.

The study is titled “The Dirty Dozen: Snapshots of Wage Theft in California.”

“[These twelve] are the companies that we had the most information about and also they show what happens in different geographic regions and different industries: in the garment industry, carwash, transportation, security, manufacturing, housecleaning, child care and long-term adult care,” says Herrera.

The companies exposed in this report hae been fined for wage theft, or are being sued or confront charges for other violations of labor laws. The twelve are California Cartage Company, Bayview Care Home, Property Services, Coast to Coast West, Inc., GMS, North Coast Couriers, Scientific Concepts, Century Car Wash, XPO Logistics, the restaurant Crazy Buffet, supermarket chain El Super, and HCGS/ HSG Healthcare Services Group.

According to the report, the California Labor Commissioner has issued 16 judgments against this last company for unpaid wages. The company has 45,000 workers and annual revenue of nearly one and a half billion dollars. Its central offices are located in Pennsylvania and it is present in 48 states, including California.

The company hired Matilde Valenzuela through a subcontractor. In one of its clinics in Fontana, California, Valenzuela workers were not paid for obligatory meal and rest breaks.

“We would eat something fast, or standing up, while we worked, and then we would go back and punch in,” she explains.

Since Valenzuela didn’t know the law, she thought that ws normal and didn’t protest for more than a year.

“It was just routine, that’s how the rules were, that’s what we thought,” she says.

However, five years ago, the eight workers of the “Laurel” clinic filed a wage theft claim and were able to get their backwages.

“They paid me 400 dollars, and others got 500 dollars, according to the years they worked,” says Valenzuela.

After winning, the workers unionized and Valenzuela testified this year in the California Senate against wage theft.
Matilde Valenzuela is one of relatively few workers in California who are able to actually recover their stolen wages.

“If you don’t speak up, people abuse you and they keep abusing other people who come,” says Valenzuela.

These twelve companies are just the tip of the iceberg. They may only be the most visible because many have been taken to court. The problem of wage theft is much bigger.

The groups belonging to the California Fair Paycheck Coalition, which published the report The Dirty Dozen, have hopes that the bill SB 588, which passed the State Senate and is currently in the Assembly, will establish effective means to protect workers from these crimes.

By Shan Li, Samantha Masunaga and Daina Beth Solomon
Los Angeles Times

(Link to article.)

Unions and other labor advocates are brainstorming strategies in the wake of a National Labor Relations Board ruling that could strengthen the hand of those at the lowest level of key industries including warehousing, construction, fast food and home healthcare.

The NLRB said Thursday that a Silicon Valley recycling center was a “joint employer” along with the staffing agency that provided the center’s workers. The ruling determined that companies using workers hired by another business, such as temp agencies, contractors or even fast-food franchisees, are still responsible for labor violations and could be required to bargain with unions representing those employees.

That finding, which is sure to be tested in the courts, gives a boost to labor groups, which have scored victories in recent years with highly choreographed nationwide protests for better pay in traditionally minimum-wage industries such as retail and fast food, analysts say. It could also help increase union membership, which has been on the decline.

“It’s a seismic shift,” said Victor Narro, project director at the UCLA Labor Center. “This is not focused just on labor organizing, but every kind of labor law.”

The decision could spark huge aftershocks in the American workforce, where companies scalded by the recession have increasingly turned to temporary workers, who often lack health benefits and can be shed at a moment’s notice.

Nationwide, there were about 3.4 million so-called staffing-agency jobs, or 2.25% of total national employment, according to the National Employment Law Project, which advocates for low-wage workers. The sector grew 41% from 2008 to 2012.

The numbers probably are much higher, but the government doesn’t keep track of workers at subcontractors, which are common in a wide variety of industries, said Cathy Ruckelshaus, the group’s general counsel.

“It’s happening in hotels, in hospitals,” Ruckelshaus said. “Wherever there are a lot of workers in a business, there is a lot of this contracting out.”

Worker advocates say the ruling could have a profound effect on organizing movements, changing which workers are recruited, what tactics are deployed and even the broader goals to be reached.

The Warehouse Worker Resource Center usually must file lawsuits in its efforts to improve conditions for laborers at Southern California’s sprawling retail distribution centers, co-director Sheheryar Kaoosji said.

The Ontario-based organization, which doesn’t become involved with collective bargaining, largely exists because the warehousing industry is flooded with temporary agencies, making it “very difficult” to unionize, he said.
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“This is a big deal,” he said. “Warehousing companies make efforts to try to separate from their workers by saying, ‘We are not responsible'” for employees hired through staffing agencies.

For three years, Edelberto Zamora drove a forklift at a Long Beach warehouse. He had to line up every day to wait for sporadic hours because Zamora was employed by a contractor, not the warehouse operator, which gave preference to its own employees.

Then three months ago, the 41-year-old was hired directly by the warehouse company, and now he’s guaranteed work every day. Zamora said he hopes others toiling for subcontractors will get the same security he now enjoys.

“Our families would have a better life,” he said on Friday during a lunch break.

The decision will bolster future lawsuits brought by warehouse workers, making it easier to prove that both a staffing firm and its client companies are responsible for unsafe working conditions, wage theft or other violations, Kaoosji said.

It’s going to kill the concept of franchises if it goes this way. Who the hell is going to pay a franchise fee to effectively be just a manager for the bigger company? A well run union can be a good partner for a business. Too bad there are so few of them. I’ve seen companies where…

A handful of lawsuits brought by the organization, including one case that Wal-Mart settled last year with workers at a Riverside County warehouse complex, have argued that point, but those cases are complex, he said. The NLRB ruling has lowered that bar, increasing the odds of winning future lawsuits.

The ruling has also opened up another avenue of recourse: lodging a complaint with the NLRB itself, Kaoosji said.

“We have tried in the past,” he said, “but it’s much more likely to prevail by arguing that workers are jointly employed.”

Industries such as warehousing, construction and home healthcare, which commonly turn to temp agencies, could see a rise in nascent efforts to collectively bargain, labor experts said.

“Those workers now have an opportunity to more easily form labor organizations,” said Harris Freeman, a labor law expert at Western New England University’s School of Law. “There are a lot of low-wage workers whose situations are not going to appreciably change without unionization or collective bargaining.”

Unionizing can be an attractive way of seeking higher pay and more security, especially as many temp agencies are “fly by night” operations that will disappear at the first whiff of trouble, UCLA’s Narro said.

“Now you can go straight to the company that employed the subcontractor,” with actual power to fix problems or raise pay, he said. “It makes it easier to go after bigger companies.”

Making Change at Walmart, a worker advocacy group, is scrutinizing its own organizing efforts — and could possibly recruit employees at subcontractors all along the supply chain instead of just Wal-Mart store employees, said one campaign representative who requested anonymity to talk about strategy.

“With this ruling, the potential reach of workers could be exponentially higher,” the representative said. “If we could impact and change Wal-Mart, it could impact working conditions of subcontractors,” he added. “The more the merrier as far as people who can be helped.”

Making Change at Walmart has focused on orchestrating highly public rallies and protests that have seized headlines and highlighted the plight of minimum wage workers. The retailer said in February that it was raising its minimum pay to $9 an hour for nearly 40% of its American workforce.

But the organization will reconsider whether to push for unionizing, a strategy that has taken a back seat in recent years, the representative said. “We will be taking a very close look at collective bargaining and whether it’s a good strategy,” he said.

Labor movements still face many hurdles in organizing workers into unions.

Election rules for unions under the National Labor Relations Act are still “arcane and lengthy,” Ruckelshaus said. Elections can take months, during which employers can often discourage or scare workers. In businesses with high turnovers, she said, momentum could disappear by the time an election is actually held.

By Imran Ghori
Riverside Press-Enterprise

(Link to article.)

While Inland cities are increasingly looking to the logistics industry for economic growth, two recent studies by University of California, Riverside researchers say the mainly blue-collar employees who work at warehouses are paid poorly and lack proper access to health care.

But the study was heavily criticized by at least one prominent Inland economist.

The researchers, who surveyed 350 current and former warehouse workers in 2012 and 2013 about their work conditions, found that many of the jobs are filled through temporary staffing agencies, allowing employers not to provide health care and pay them less than the living wage. They recommended that Ontario, which has one of the largest concentrations of warehouses, increase its minimum wage as the city of Los Angeles did recently.

The two policy briefs compared their findings to other studies and statistics from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and found on average non-supervisory blue collar warehouse workers make $10.05 an hour. The estimated living wage – the amount needed to provide for basic necessities such as food and shelter — for a single person in the Inland area is $11.59 an hour.

Those survey results “suggest that while warehouses do provide jobs for the region’s workforce, these jobs are not necessarily good jobs,” the researchers stated.

Ellen Reese, a professor of sociology and chair of UC Riverside’s Labor Studies program who co-authored the studies, said cities can do more to improve wages for warehouse workers through agreements that require developers to provide permanent jobs and encouraging union contracts.

“If we’re going to have more and warehouses in our region, I think we need to start making demands on those employers to provide decent wages to its workers — all of its workers,” she said.

Inland economist John Husing called the findings “utter nonsense” and “totally biased.”

“There was a specific intent to prove that people were poorly paid,” he said. “This was not going to be a fair and balanced study.”

Among their findings in the study were that 63 percent of the warehouse workers they surveyed were temporary employees hired by a third-party agency; 85 percent were Latino; 28 percent were immigrants; and 65 percent had a high school or lower level of education.

For the wage study, researchers surveyed 136 workers at warehouses in Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario and Fontana and attempted to get a representative sample of different size warehouses and different ownership types, Reese said.

The health care survey interviewed a separate group of 224 current and former warehouse workers and found that only 35 percent had health care and only 15 percent through their employer.

Access to health care is especially important due to the high workplace injury statistics for warehouse workers, Reese said. Her study cites federal Bureau of Labor numbers that found that warehouse jobs had an injury and fatality rate three times the average of all workers.

The team’s findings counter those advanced by developers and cities that have approved millions of square feet of warehouse space from Ontario to Redlands in the past couple of years. Industry supporters say warehouse projects put thousands of people to work and provide a pathway to a middle-class living.

Husing, who has worked as a consultant on warehouse projects for cities and other agencies, said the median wage for the logistics industry based on state employment data he’s collected is $44,000 a year. His number includes all the different sectors that are part of the logistics industry — including trucking and wholesale manufacturing — while he said the UC Riverside study only looks at the bottom of the system.

The authors of the UC Riverside study say they focused specifically on non-supervisory blue-collar workers in five areas: forklift drivers; laborers and material movers; packers and packagers; shipping clerks; and stock clerks and order fillers.

“Certainly, for managers and highly-skilled technical workers, it may be a good field to go into,’ Reese said, “but there are tens of thousands of blue collar workers who are making poverty level wages.

Their research built upon a 2013 study by Juan De Lara, an assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His analysis also found that the warehouse industry relies heavily on temporary workers and that most full-time, blue-collar warehouse workers earn about $23,000 a year, and that women earn even less, about $19,000.

De Lara said it’s important to look at that segment of logistics employees because they make up the largest category of people working inside warehouses.

“What’s particular puzzling is why there’s such a hesitancy to admit those jobs exist and why those people are making those wages,” he said.

Sheheryar Kaoosji, co-director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center advocacy group in Ontario, said he believes the study reflects what his group has seen with warehouse employees it works with. Many are temporary employees, get only part-time hours or are employed seasonally, and cannot afford basic health care, he said.

“A lot of the workers we talk to are working two or three jobs,” Kaoosji said.

He said although warehouses also provide good-paying managerial and technical job, the system is bifurcated leaving little advancement opportunity for blue-collar workers.

Husing disputes that view, saying many warehouse managers started in blue-collar jobs.

“This is the sector that is providing jobs, providing potential for upward mobility to the middle class,” he said.

And while he disagrees with the studies’ findings, Husing agreed that increasing pay and access to health care for blue collar employees are worthy goals.