Monday, August 14, 2017
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Podcast: The Are You Crazy Show -- Choosing a Therapist -- Aug 8, 2017 Show
Blog: Enlighten Radio Podcasts
Post: Podcast: The Are You Crazy Show -- Choosing a Therapist -- Aug 8, 2017 Show
Link: http://podcasts.enlightenradio.org/2017/08/podcast-are-you-crazy-show-choosing.html
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Friday, August 11, 2017
Murphy Oil may be the last workers’ rights case the Supreme Court has the opportunity to consider
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Murphy Oil may be the last workers' rights case the Supreme Court has the opportunity to consider // Economic Policy Institute Blog
http://www.epi.org/blog/murphy-oil-may-be-the-last-workers-rights-case-the-supreme-court-has-the-opportunity-to-consider/
Yesterday, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed its brief in NLRB v. Murphy Oil, which will be argued in the Supreme Court in October. The case will determine whether mandatory arbitration agreements with individual workers that prevent them from pursuing work-related claims collectively are prohibited by the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The brief makes clear what is at stake for workers if the Supreme Court were to rule against the NLRB in this matter.
The NLRA guarantees workers the right to stand together for "mutual aid and protection" when seeking to improve their wages and working conditions. Employer interference with this right is prohibited. However, increasingly, employers are requiring workers to sign arbitration agreements that force them to waive their rights to collective actions, and handle workplace disputes as individuals. In practice, that means that even if many workers faced the same type of dispute at work, each individual employee must hire their own lawyer, and must resolve their disputes out of court, behind closed doors, with only their employer and a private arbitrator. The NLRB has found these forced arbitration agreements interfere with workers' right to engage in concerted activity for their mutual aid and protection, in violation of the NLRA.
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Thursday, August 10, 2017
Braceros Organize After a Worker Dies [feedly]
https://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/braceros-organize-after-a-worker-dies/
By David Bacon
The American Prospect, 8/8/17
https://davidbaconrealitycheck.blogspot.com/2017/08/braceros-strike-after-one-worker-dies.html
http://prospect.org/
Picking blueberries on a Washington State farm. Risking deportation, Washington state farmworkers protest dangerous conditions in the fields
A farmworker's death in the broiling fields of Washington state has prompted his fellow braceros to put their livelihoods in jeopardy by going on strike, joining a union, being discharged – and risking deportation.
Honesto Silva Ibarra died in Harborview hospital in Seattle on Sunday night, August 6. Silva, a married father of three, was a guest worker – in Spanish, a "contratado" – brought to the United States under the H2-A visa program, to work in the fields.
Miguel Angel Ramirez Salazar, another contratado, says Silva went to his supervisor at Sarbanand Farms last week, complaining that he was sick and couldn't work. "They said if he didn't keep working he'd be fired for 'abandoning work.' But after a while he couldn't work at all."
Silva finally went to the Bellingham Clinic, about an hour south of the farm where he was working, in Sumas, close to the Canadian border. By then it was too late, however. He was sent to Harborview, where he collapsed and died.
Silva's death was the final shove that pushed the contratados into an action unprecedented in modern farm labor history. They organized and protested, and when they were fired for it, they joined Washington State's new union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. As this article is being written, 120 H2A workers are sitting in tents on a patch of land near the ranch where they worked, protesting their treatment and demanding rights for guest workers.
On the website of CSI Visa Processing, which recruited Silva, Ramirez and others to work at Sarbanand Farms, a statement reads: "The compañero who is hospitalized, the cause was meningitis, an illness he suffered from before, and is not related to his work." Ramirez and other workers doubt that explanation. Silva had been working in the U.S. since May, and did not arrive with symptoms of meningitis. Instead, they insist that it was the consequence of increasingly bad conditions at the ranch.
According to Ramon Torres, president of Familias Unidas por la Justicia, H2-A workers at Sarbanand Farms had been complaining for weeks about bad food, temperatures in the 90s with no shade, warm drinking water and dirty bathrooms in the fields. In the last two weeks, the air near the border became smoky from forest fires just to the north in Canada, making it hard to breathe. Some workers fainted amid the blueberry plants where they were picking.
When Silva collapsed and went to the hospital, a group went to the ranch management and asked for safer working conditions. When they were turned away, they organized a one-day strike on Friday, August 4. Familias Unidas por la Justicia, which just signed its first union contract with Sakuma Brothers Farms in nearby Burlington, held its first convention that Friday. When the H2-A workers came from Sarbanand Farms, they decided to join.
The following day, 70 were fired. "They told all of us in the work stoppage we were fired for insubordination," another worker, Barbaro Rosas Olibares, told FUJ organizer Maru Mora Villapando in a video interview. The CSI statement insists: "Eleven people were fired for questions of insubordination, which is a legal cause."
While most workers in the U.S. are covered by laws that make such retaliation for striking a legal violation, farmworkers generally have no such protection except in the few states, like California, that have given agricultural workers those rights. H2-A workers have even fewer rights and protections. The visa they're given when they come to work in the U.S. binds them to the employer who recruited them. If they lose that job, they lose the visa and become deportable. They have no legal standing to sue their employer in a U.S. court.
It was therefore remarkable that not only did the Sarbanand workers strike in protest over bad conditions, but that after they were fired they did not leave the country. The company told the fired workers they would not pay them immediately for their final four days of work, but instead would send a check to their address in Mexico — a violation of H2-A regulations. The workers were given an hour to clear their belongings out of the company's labor camp, leaving them standing outside with no money.
Sarbanand's recruiter, CSI Visa Processing, took some to a local bus station, but didn't buy them a ticket home. This violates another H2-A recruitment regulation, which requires recruiters to pay transportation to and from the jobsite in the United States. In the meantime, workers reached out to union president Torres and also to Community2Community, a farmworker advocacy and immigrant rights organization in northwest Washington. Together, they found a private residence near the Sarbanand location, whose owners agreed to let the fired workers camp on their land while deciding on their next course of action. Local supporters brought out tents and a generator, and an encampment quickly sprang up.
The workers marched back to the ranch and demonstrated outside. "They formed a committee among themselves," Torres says, "and another 50 workers left the ranch and joined them, even though the [Whatcom County Sheriff] deputies and local police were threatening to call immigration."
Torres says other workers have suffered from partial facial paralysis, and three are now living at the camp. In the video interview, Rosas Olibares held a placard denouncing local authorities for turning a blind eye to their conditions. It read:
County & City – Your Blindness = GUILTY
– Suppression of immigrant workers rights
-Workers open to threats of deportation!
-Immigrant workers dying HERE/NOW
County & City – You are complicit through neglect!
How do you sleep at night?
According to H2-A worker Ramirez, "We just want respect for our rights – firing us was very unjust. We also want to continue working until the end of our contract." Ramirez has been working as a contratado for 15 years, picking tobacco in North Carolina and Kentucky, and for the last two years, blueberries in northwest Washington State. Last winter he signed a contract in the office of CSI Visa Processors in his hometown of Santiago Ixcuintla in the Mexican state of Nayarit. Under the terms of that contract he was guaranteed a minimum of five months of work, until October 25.
Ramirez was then taken to Nogales on the U.S.-Mexico border and given a visa. "But I saw that it was only good until June 30," he recalls. "When I asked, they said they'd fix it. But they never did."
Over 250 workers were recruited in the Nayarit office, he says, one of nine that CSI has in Mexico. They were brought to Delano, in California's San Joaquin Valley, on May 7. There they began picking blueberries at Munger Farms, a large grower and partner in the giant Naturipe growers partnership. Then, on July 1, the day after the visa of Ramirez and many others expired, they were transported to the Sarbanand Farms ranch in Washington State, where they continued picking. Sarbanand is a subsidiary of Munger Farms, owned by the family of Baldev and Kable Munger.
CSI's statement insists the workers "received an authorization by the government of the U.S. for this second contract, [and] none of them are out of legal status." Yet after the turmoil started last week, one worker tried to buy an airline ticket back home to Mexico, and was refused because his visa had expired. "We don't know what will happen now," Torres says. "What we believe is that workers have the right to protest and organize, and shouldn't be punished for that by being denied the work they were promised."
"I think we have to get organized," Ramirez adds. "I'm willing to work hard, but they put such pressure on us – that's the biggest problem. I have a 16-year-old son back home in Mexico. What would happen to him if I died here, like Honesto did?"
Reposted from The American Prospect
In the Fields of the North / En los Campos del Norte
Photographs and text by David Bacon
University of California Press / Colegio de la Frontera Norte
302 photographs, 450pp, 9"x9"
paperback, $34.95
En Mexico se puede pedir el libro en el sitio de COLEF:
https://www.colef.mx
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Facing the facts about coal booms, climate change and West Virginia political leaders [feedly]
http://blogs.wvgazettemail.com/coaltattoo/2017/08/09/facing-the-facts-about-coal-booms-climate-change-and-west-virginia-political-leaders/
President Donald Trump talks with West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice during a rally Thursday, Aug. 3, 2017, in Huntington, W.Va. Justice, a Democrat, announced that he is switching parties to join the Republicans. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
Here in West Virginia, the big political story over the last week has obviously been Gov. Jim Justice's return to the Republican party.
Some of the media are of course very interested in promoting one of the governor's reasons— this pretty far-out idea that the federal government is going to start subsidizing Appalachian steam coal production to the tune of $15 a ton.
There's also a lot of interest in continuing to promote the sort of pandering that Gov. Justice (not to mention President Trump) are pushing that there's a huge coal boom just around the corner. This is a comforting thought, both to state political leaders and to many of our fellow West Virginians. Just look at the last of those silly "Jim was right" press releases that Gov. Justice's press office put out back while he was still a Democrat.
A huge coal boom would mean none of us would have to do the really hard work of building other kinds of economies in our coalfield communities — at least not right now. And it's true that there has been an increase in coal jobs in West Virginia over the last three quarters. Taylor Kuykendall, the go-to guy among the media for these kind of numbers, explained last week:
Coal jobs in West Virginia are up 18.3% year over year in the second quarter, according to a new S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis of federal data, and up about 12.2% compared to the fourth quarter of 2016. The year-over-year increase represents about 2,132 jobs, while the increase from the final quarter of 2016 represents about 1,493 jobs.
But keep in mind, if you go back further than the last few quarters, or a year-over-year comparison, the increase in jobs doesn't come anywhere close to rebuilding the sort of coal-based economy that politicians would have you believe is going to reappear. Data from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration shows that West Virginia lost 13,000 coal jobs between the post-2000 high mark in the 4th quarter of 2011 and the low point in the 3rd quarter of 2016. Our state lost half of its coal-mining jobs in just that five-year period. We've only gained back a fraction of those. And the projections don't suggest the jobs are going to keep coming back.
Take a look at the new short-term energy forecast out this week from the U.S. Energy Information Administration:
Coal exports for the first five months of 2017 were 37 million short tons (MMst), which was 60% higher than coal exports over the same period last year. EIA expects growth in coal exports to slow in the coming months, with exports for all of 2017 forecast at 70 MMst, 17% above the 2016 level. The increase in coal exports contributes to an expected 58 MMst (8%) increase in coal production in 2017. In 2018, coal production is forecast to increase by 10 MMst (1%).
Maybe all the projections are wrong, and coal in West Virginia has a really bright future. That seems pretty unlikely, and a tremendously risky bet for our state. But even if you assume for the sake of argument that it happenes, when are our political leaders going to start talking seriously about what they're going to do about black lung, or about the environmental and public health damage from mountaintop removal? Or about the safety rules that their new buddy President Trump is reversing? What about the increase so far this year in coal-mining deaths?
More importantly, exactly what would a coal boom mean for the climate crisis?
The recent attention given by the media (by the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press and others) to the latest national climate assessment by our nation's best scientists paints a pretty dark present and future (from the AP story):
The assessment said global temperatures will continue to rise without steep reductions in the burning of fossil fuels, with increasingly dire effects on the lives of every American.
Even if humans stop spewing heat-trapping gases today, the world will warm another half a degree (0.3 degrees Celsius), the report said, citing high confidence in those calculations. Scientists, such as Stanford University's Chris Field, say that even a few tenths of a degree of warming can have a dramatic impact on human civilization and the natural environment.
"Every increment in warming is an increment in risk," said Field, who wasn't part of the report but reviewed it for The National Academy of Sciences.
As for coal, here's what that scientific report had to say:
Carbon emissions and economic growth may be beginning to decouple, as global 20 economies led by China and the United States phase out coal and begin the transition to 21 renewable, non-carbon energy …
But:
The cumulative carbon emissions that would allow the world to meet a given global temperature target can also be compared to known fossil fuel reserves to calculate how much of their carbon would have to "stay in the ground" to meet these targets, in the absence of widespread carbon capture and storage …
It is estimated that to meet the 2°C (3.6°F) target, two thirds of known global fossil fuel reserves would need to remain in the ground. Accounting for the differing carbon content of various types of fuels, in order to meet the 2°C target one third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves, and over 80% of coal reserves would need to remain unused, as well as any new unconventional, undeveloped, or undiscovered resources .
For more on that, you could read the paper that the new report cites, "The geographical distribution of fossil fuels unused when limiting global warming to 2 °C," published two years ago by the journal Nature. Among other things, the paper reports:
Our results show that policy makers' instincts to exploit rapidly and completely their territorial fossil fuels are, in aggregate, inconsistent with their commitments to this temperature limit … These results demonstrate that a stark transformation in our understanding of fossil fuel availability is necessary. Although there have previously been fears over the scarcity of fossil fuels, in a climate-constrained world this is no longer a relevant concern: large portions of the reserve base and an even greater proportion of the resource base should not be produced if the temperature rise is to remain below 2°C .
What West Virginia political leader will even try to face these facts?
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