WWJ Helps Intermodal Workers Organize
February 10th, 2010Drivers at Hemisphere’s Largest ‘Inland Port’ Join the Fold
By Kari Lydersen
Working In These Times
The 160 drivers who work for Renzenberger in the Chicago suburbs are among the hidden workforce that keeps Chicago’s “logistics industry” humming. These workers shuttle railroad crews among the myriad intermodal facilities and rail hubs in the city’s western suburbs, where goods from across the globe arrive in massive containers and are redistributed throughout the country.
Now the drivers are the newest Chicago-area members of the Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the independent union famous for the Republic Windows and Doors occupation. On February 1, after a hard-fought organizing drive, the workers voted by a 3-1 margin to unionize with the UE.
The drivers say they are constantly on call, working long and erratic hours often without lunch breaks. (The company’s website says they are required to have nine hours rest after 10 hours of drive-time.)
“[S]ince they’re on call all the time and they don’t get the rest they need,” says UE organizer Mark Meinster, “it’s a safety issue.”
They start at minimum wage and complain they are subjected to unfair and arbitrary discipline, forced to work off the clock, denied due process for grievances and recently had wages cut and frozen. The drivers have no health insurance, paid sick days or holidays.
Read more at Working In These Times…
Councilman Dorris: Pay warehouse workers living wages
January 20th, 2010January 20, 2010
By BOB OKON, The Joliet Herald-News
JOLIET — The city will take a close look at its warehouses and what it is paying workers.
Councilman Warren Dorris on Tuesday said the city should push distribution centers to pay a “living wage” to employees.
Dorris’ comments at a city council meeting came a day after a boycott was initiated in Joliet to protest working conditions at one area distribution center.
Dorris pointed to the city’s long-standing policy of requiring union labor in the construction of major projects, including warehouses, and said it was time to apply similar standards to the people who work at those facilities.
“They build these warehouses with union labor and then they fill them with nonunion workers who aren’t even making living wages,” he said.
“We should start requiring that they pay a living wage,” Dorris said.
Legalities of matter
City Manager Thomas Thanas said the city could do the survey of local distribution centers that Dorris wanted. But he said it was too soon to discuss whether the city could force companies to increase wages.
“I’m not sure we’re ready to start talking about the legalities of it,” he told the council.”
On Monday, a group of warehouse workers, community leaders and local clergy gathered at Sacred Heart Church in Joliet to call for a boycott of Bissell products.
The action was taken in response to the firing of 70 workers who had joined a union last year and complained about working conditions at a Bissell Homecare Inc. warehouse in Elwood.
This isn’t the first time Dorris has questioned employment practices at local warehouses.
Management of the Dollar Tree distribution center in Joliet were called to the city council two years ago to discuss hiring practices after Dorris and some local workers said employees regularly were terminated just before they could work long enough to qualify for health benefits.
Management persuaded the council then that the company tried to retain its workers.
From: The Joliet Herald-News
Joliet Herald-News: In Dr. King’s footsteps
January 19th, 2010Group of 100 organizes a boycott to peacefully protest a company they say mistreated and fired local workers
January 19, 2010
By CINDY WOJDYLA CAIN
JOLIET — On a day set aside to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., a group of warehouse workers, community leaders and local clergy gathered at Sacred Heart Church to launch a peaceful protest of their own: a boycott of Bissell products.
The boycott stems from the termination of 70 employees who joined a union last year and complained about working conditions at the Bissell Homecare Inc. warehouse in Elwood.
Former warehouse employees allege they were paid below minimum wage, women were paid less than men, a pregnant worker was assigned heavy lifting and employees who complained were threatened with retaliation.
“How can we celebrate the legacy of Dr. King without addressing the injustice that exists in our backyard,” asked the Rev. Craig Purchase, of Mount Zion Tabernacle Church, who is president of Rainbow PUSH Coalition’s Joliet chapter.
Betty Washington, first vice president for the Joliet chapter of the NAACP, said she thinks King would have been pleased with Monday’s event, which drew about 100 people to the church at 337 S. Ottawa St.
“I believe Will County has become a place where warehouses come and use our citizens without paying them a living wage, and it adds to the poverty level here in Will County,” she said. “Yes they’re bringing jobs into the community, but for the most part people work 90 days and then they’re let go.”
Stacy Moskowitz, a Bissell spokeswoman, said the workers lost their jobs when Roadlink Workforce Solutions, a temp agency, decided to end its staffing contract with Maersk Distribution Services, the company hired by Bissell to manage the facility.
The termination of that pact, not worker complaints, appears to be “the root of the dispute,” she said.
“We have no information that Maersk has done anything wrong in the way that it has operated the facility,” Moskowitz said in a press release.
Both Maersk and Roadlink also have issued statements in the past denying any worker mistreatment at the warehouse that opened a year ago at Route 53 and Ira Morgan Road.
Boycott list
The Rev. Herbert Brooks Jr., who serves on the Will County Board, said he was happy with the “fantastic” turnout at Monday’s event.
“The 100 people told us, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore.’ And that’s what I loved best about it,” he said.
The Rev. Raymond Lescher, pastor at Sacred Heart, said the hearing was just the first step.
“We have to keep the pressure on and we have to stay focused.”
Leaders from Chicago-based Warehouse Workers for Justice, who helped organize the Joliet event, say they hope the boycott spreads from church to church and town to town. They distributed a list of Bissell products — including vacuum cleaners, mops, brooms, brushes, cleaning formulas and sweepers — that they urged the group to boycott.
Michael Meinster, a Warehouse Workers for Justice board member, said Bissell — not Maersk — is the target of the boycott because the company has the ultimate power to fix conditions at the warehouse and rehire the workers.
“They hold the strings,” he said. “Maersk works for them.”
‘Un-American’ acts
Scott Marshall, a mass communications professor at University of St. Francis, said he plans to go into area stores to tell managers that he is boycotting Bissell products to drive the point home.
“It’s un-American to treat workers that way,” he said of the alleged abuses.
Orland Rivera, of Wilmington, said his salary at the Bissell warehouse was cut from $12 to $10.50 with no warning. Rivera, 50, said he was laid off three times from warehouse jobs in 2008 and three more times in 2009. He remains unemployed after being fired from the Bissell job with 69 co-workers Nov. 6. He’s looked for other warehouse jobs, but they’re all staffed by temp agencies, he said.
After the Bissell workers were terminated, Warehouse Workers for Justice filed complaints against Maersk and Roadlink with the Illinois and U.S. labor departments and the National Labor Relations Board. In December, the group filed a class action lawsuit against the temp agency that staffs the Walmart warehouse in Joliet for allegedly not paying employees for all the hours they worked and for overtime. All of the cases are pending.
Stick Together As People
January 18th, 2010Celebrating the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. at Joliet’s Mt. Zion Baptist Church
January 18, 2010
By JOE HOSEY, The Joliet Herald-News
JOLIET–Martin Luther King Jr. was killed when he went to Memphis, to support striking sanitation workers. At the ecumenical celebration of King’s birth on Sunday, pastors and activists called attention to a present day labor struggle.
“We can’t really celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King if there are injustices occurring less than five miles away from us,” said Abraham Mwaura, a representative of Warehouse Workers for Justice.
Mwaura spoke during the celebration held at Mt. Zion Baptist Church and told of the conditions warehouse workers are subjected, including those right here in Joliet.
Mwaura imparted the story of a pregnant worker whose job in a frozen pizza warehouse had her bending over a conveyor belt for the duration of her shift. Her doctor told her she had to make an adjustment for the sake of her unborn baby, Mwaura said, but management “refused to move her, refused to give her a stool, refused to do anything to make her work lighter.”
Management stood fast even in the face of an organized protest by the workers, he said, and the woman ultimately lost her baby.
“What is that frozen pizza worth to us now?” Mwaura asked. “What is that economic development worth to us now?”
He also introduced a former warehouse worker identified only as Cindy, who was fired from the Bissell facility in Elwood after she and 69 of her co-workers protested such practices as mistreating the pregnant and paying below the minimum wage.
The Warehouse Workers for Justice are meeting at Sacred Heart Church on Ottawa Street today and will call for a boycott of Bissell products, Mwaura said.
The Rev. Isaac Singleton also addressed the crowd in Mt. Zion Baptist Church and spoke of the progress made by the black community, and of the struggle ahead.
“I remember when we couldn’t go downtown and buy nothing,” Singleton said. He also recalled “sitting on the back of the bus in Joliet.”
“I think about how far God brought us,” Singleton said, later adding,” We are really not that much better off than we were years ago.
“We’re not where we ought to be, and we’re not where we should be,” the reverend said. “But you have come along way.”
Most importantly, Singleton said, men and women of all races need to “stick together as people.”
“As people of the United States of America,” he said, “and more specifically, Joliet, Illinois, because we can make a difference.”
The Shipping Point
December 19th, 2009Between China and big box stores, minimum wage ‘temp’ workers take a stand.
By ROGER BYBEE
Chicago has long been an important center for both manufacturing and shipping goods. But now that the City of Big Shoulders has been stripped of much of its industrial base, state and local officials—along with corporate developers—hope to capitalize on its evermore important role as a transportation hub in the global supply chain.
Chicago is a critical juncture for distribution of goods throughout the nation, and by locating just outside the city, the “goods movement industry” can shave two days off of distribution time by avoiding the congestion that plagues the city’s railways according to Mark Meinster, international representative for the United Electrical Workers of America (UE).
More than ever, corporations need a complex distribution network to get the goods they produce in Mexico and China to market. Stepping into this role have been intermodal transportation complexes like the gigantic Centerpoint hub built in 2002 in Elwood, Ill., 75 minutes south of Chicago. Meinster said that the warehouses employ about 1,500 to 2,000 workers at warehouses owned by dozens of major firms, and helps make Chicago the third largest container port after Hong Kong and Singapore, and the largest intermodal facility in the U.S.
The company has received $160 million in state and local subsidies from public officials desperate to find a substitute for the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs. And Centerpoint claims that, when at full capacity, the hub in Elwood will have cost $1 billion total and will provide 8,000 jobs in the area.
However, the public subsidies have failed to produce a harvest of quality jobs at Centerpoint, as well as three other Chicago-area hubs already built or under construction. Most of the warehouse work is done by temporary workers paid minimum-wage, which is currently $8 per hour in Illinois.
The lack of public awareness about the warehouse workers’ plight began to change when 70 workers were fired at a warehouse owned by Michigan-based Bissell Corp.—best known for its vacuum cleaners, now all produced overseas—and managed by Danish logistics firm Maersk. The Maersk/Bissell workers’ mistake: seeking help from the UE, the union behind the Republic Windows and Doors sit-down strike one year ago.
Read the rest at In These Times…
Chicago Tribune: Temp agency shorted workers’ wages, lawsuit says
December 11th, 2009|
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Last September, Miguel Deniz, a laborer at a southwest suburban warehouse, wandered into a Joliet church looking for help.
Worker-rights organizers were holding an information session, and Deniz, who was with about 20 other employees, was pretty sure something was wrong. He was working an awful lot of hours that his paycheck didn’t seem to reflect.
On Thursday Deniz and seven other workers filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that SelectRemedy, the temp agency contracted to staff the warehouse that handles shipping for Wal-Mart, has been shorting wages over the past several years.
The lawsuit, filed in Cook County Circuit Court, also alleged that the company didn’t pay time-and-a-half for overtime work.
Only SelectRemedy was sued, not Wal-Mart. The accusers worked at the warehouse in Elwood as well as for Pampered Chef and other companies that contracted with SelectRemedy, according to the lawsuit.
But workers’ advocates said the majority of the alleged violations center on the warehouse. On Thursday, the employees stood in frigid weather outside the company’s West Side store to talk about the lost wages.
“I worked 57 hours and I only got paid for 35,” said Deniz, 62, holding a handful of pay stubs. “I think it’s unjust that we’re not getting paid complete hours and for overtime. We’re being defrauded.”
Another company, Schneider Logistics, operates part of the Elwood warehouse and contracts with SelectRemedy, said Mark Meinster, a board member of the Illinois-based Warehouse Workers for Justice.
Michelle Bradford, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the retailer tries to comply “with all labor laws and regulations.”
“And we rely on our third-party vendors to do the same,” she said.
SelectRemedy did not return calls seeking comment on the lawsuit. Schneider had no immediate comment.
In a written statement, Pampered Chef said it was unaware of the temp workers’ concerns, but it met its contractual obligations “to pay its workers regular and overtime rates for all hours worked.”
The workers at the warehouse near Joliet unload containers with goods including flat-screen TVs, cell phones, and PlayStations. The items are sent to stores across the Midwest.
As Christmas season rolls in and the packaging and shipping increases, the complaints have increased, Meinster said.
“They’ll do whatever it takes to drive labor costs down,” said Chris Williams, an attorney representing the workers. “They’re only working to make profits.”
–Daarel Burnette II and Annie Sweeney
Warehouse workers file against 2nd agency
December 11th, 2009By CINDY WOJDYLA CAIN
Bolingbrook Sun
JOLIET — A class-action lawsuit was filed Thursday against Select Remedy, the temp agency that staffs the Walmart warehouse in Elwood.
On Thursday, representatives from Working Hands Legal Clinic, Chicago Workers Collaborative and Warehouse Workers for Justice held a press conference in Chicago to announce the filing in Cook County Circuit Court.
According to the lawsuit, warehouse employees are being financially mistreated because they are not paid for all of the hours they work, and they are not paid for overtime.
Select Remedy, a California-based company, could not be reached for comment.
Walmart spokeswoman Michelle Bradford said Walmart hired another company to manage its warehouse. That company hired the temp agency.
“We work to comply with all labor laws and regulations,” she said. “And we rely on our third-party vendors to do the same.”
Mark Meinster, a board member for Warehouse Workers for Justice, said the lawsuit and action taken last month against Road Link, a temp agency that staffed the Bissell Homecare warehouse in Elwood, are only the beginning.
In the Bissell case, complaints on behalf of workers were filed with the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Labor Relations Board and the Illinois Department of Labor. The companies involved claimed no wrongdoing.
Eye on the industry
The two cases are just the tip of the iceberg in Will County, Meinster said Thursday morning as he waited for warehouse workers in front of the Walmart on Jefferson Street in Joliet. The group gathered at the Joliet site and then drove into Chicago for the press conference.
“We feel that the logistics industry in Will County needs to look at this problem and take responsibility for what’s happening in this supply chain,” Meinster said. “These could be very good, blue-collar jobs. There’s no reason these jobs shouldn’t be paying a living wage and shouldn’t be providing decent benefits for people.”
Will County has the highest concentration of temp agencies in Illinois on a per capita basis, said Meinster, who is the international representative for the United Electrical Workers union. Some distribution companies hire temp agencies to avoid paying benefits including health insurance, and vacation and holiday pay, he said.
“Although you don’t see these kinds of violations everywhere, they are prevalent in multiple warehouses,” he said. “Given that 70 percent of the industry are temporary workers, that we’re going to find more violations like this.”
In the Select Remedy case, some workers weren’t being paid for hours they worked; others were being paid split paychecks for work in different departments to avoid overtime pay, Meinster said.
“Under the law if you work for one employer more than 40 hours a week, they have to pay you time and a half,” he said.
Miguel Deniz, 62, of Joliet worked in the Walmart warehouse for a year. As he waited with Meinster for the trip to Chicago, he talked about his experience as a container loader/unloader. Deniz spoke in Spanish. Interpreter Leticia Marquez, a United Electrical Workers union organizer, translated his comments.
Deniz said he worked for Select Remedy for 57 hours and was only paid for 35 hours.
“I think it is an injustice and an abuse that they are committing against us,” he said. “We don’t always get paid the correct amount. We are always paid differently to cut corners.”
Another warehouse worker was quoted in a press release.
“Walmart is the richest company in the world, but the people who distribute their products are treated like slaves,” said Ruben Bautista, a plaintiff in the suit.
The lawsuit was filed under the Illinois Day Labor and Temporary Services Act.
Wage Theft: SelectRemedy Warehouse Workers
December 11th, 2009The Big Blue from Bentonville relies on its supply chain for its enormous profitability. The company constructs enormous regional distribution centers and automate their inventory system (in part using RFID technology) to load trucks with exactly the products that a store is selling, and their trucks are dispatched at regular times on regular routes, replenishing supplies steadily and precisely, allowing the individual stores to eliminate storage space in favor of floor space. It’s an impressive system, designed by Chief Information Officer Linda Dillman, the unheralded genius behind the company’s ridiculous profits.
The other, more important element behind the Bentonville Monster’s profitability is their ability to maintain a razor thin margin across a huge breadth of volume. The profit per unit sold is small–but the amount sold is enormous. Obviously, having an innovative supply chain is a critical part of this. The other part is pulling out all stops to keep labor costs down.
Walmart warehouse workers charge wage theft
December 9th, 2009By Curtis Black
NEWSTIPS
Workers at a huge Walmart warehouse south of Joliet are charging their subcontractor with wage theft.
Joined by supporters and attorneys, they’ll announce the filing of a class-action lawsuit against warehouse contractors at an event outside Chicago’s Walmart, 4650 W. North, tomorrow (Thursday, December 10) at 11:30 a.m.
The lawsuit, filed by the Working Hands Legal Clinic under the Day Laborer Services Act, targets Select Remedy, the staffing agency at the warehouse, and Schneider Logistics, which manages the facility, located in Elwood, Illinois.
The class action would cover about 300 workers at the Walmart warehouse and thousands of additional Select Remedies employees in the Chicago area, an organizer said.
The lawsuit charges that Select Remedies split workers paychecks in order to evade overtime laws and that warehouse workers have not been paid in full for hours worked.
Workers say Walmart, which owns the warehouse and whose products are shipped there, is ultimately reponsible.
“We hold Wal-Mart responsible for what has happened to us,” said Ruben Bautista, a plaintiff in the suit. “They control what happens in their warehouse.”
Said Bautista: “Wal-Mart is the richest company in the world, but the people who distribute their products are treated like slaves.”
The Walmart warehouse workers are supported by Warehouse Workers for Justice, a new workers center founded by United Electrical Workers and the Chicago Workers Collaborative. Workers centers mobilize community support to win protection from exploitation for vulnerable workforces, including immigrants and temporary workers (see Newstips 7-13-05).
“We’ve been getting calls for years from warehouse workers, especially in the southwest suburban area,” said Mark Meinster of UE. The warehouse workers center began conducting workers rights workshops in churches around Joliet last summer, and that’s where Walmart warehouse workers approached them, he said.
With train lines converging here as well as the third largest container port in the world, Chicago is a major center of the increasingly global distribution and supply chain. And with hundreds of new distribution centers opening along I-55 (with an estimated half billion square feet of warehouse space), Chicago has one of the biggest concentrations of warehouse workers in the world, Meinster said.
“The problem is, 70 percent of the workers are temps,” he said. They work for the minimum wage or little more, they have no health care, no sick pay or holidays, very little job security — and often little recourse to abuses on the job.
Often arrangements with contrators and subcontractors provide legal insulation for companies operating warehouses – though Meinster points out that the Day Labor Services Act allows workers to sue client companies.
Solidarity From Grand Rapids
November 28th, 2009IWW activists in Grand Rapids, MI let Kohl’s customers know that Bissell products are distributed with sweatshop labor. Grand Rapids is home to the headquarters of Bissell Homecare.
WWJ on Grit TV
November 25th, 2009The Quiet Giant: Chicago’s Distribution Industry
November 19th, 2009By Quincy Saul
A metropolis of many worlds, Chicago in the summer is at the height of its glory. The Daley empire presides over a diverse equilibrium of populism and plutocracy. While the city enchants politicians and business people with Olympian dreams, its center enthralls no less the leftists and revolutionaries who gather for demonstrations and conferences. A mecca of irreconcilable interests in the middle of North America, Chicago holds together even its most antagonistic ingredients. It is a city built in its own image.
Meanwhile, this same summer, an hour outside Chicago in the town of Joliet, Maria (name changed), a “temp” working as a packer in a warehouse, has another story to tell. Bent over a line packaging frozen pizza destined for Walmart,Sam’s Club, 7-Eleven, and Trader Joe’s, she works alongside many others who are employed in the fastest growing industry in Will County, one of the Chicago’s southern “collar” counties. The company she works for employs only Latino/a temporary workers. All are paid minimum wage, receive no benefits and are offered no opportunities for advancement. Many have been working in these “temporary” positions for years.
Bissell Tries Sucking the Life Out of Union Organizing Drive
November 14th, 2009By Mark Brenner
Labor Notes
Forty warehouse workers and their supporters picketed Wednesday in front of the Bissell distribution center in Joliet, Illinois, one of dozens of mammoth buildings that have sprung up off of I-55 south of Chicago. One week earlier Bissell—through their temp agency—dropped the axe on all 70 workers in the warehouse. Their offense? Trying to form a union.
Read the full article at Labor Notes
WBEZ on the struggle at the Bissell warehouse
November 13th, 2009Temp Agency Defends Warehouse Dismissals
Produced by Chip Mitchell on Friday, November 13, 2009
A firm that supplies labor for a southwest suburban warehouse is disputing a claim that it’s firing workers because they petitioned for a union.
Michigan-based Bissell Homecare distributes vacuum cleaners out of a warehouse in Elwood. Bissell pays a Danish company called Maersk to run it. Maersk contracts with Atlanta-based RoadLink to provide about 70 workers at the warehouse.
Last month, most of them signed a petition for representation by the United Electrical Workers.
Then RoadLink started laying them off. A union complaint to federal authorities accuses Maersk and RoadLink of retaliation.
RoadLink says the company simply decided not to pursue a new contract at the warehouse. Maersk says neither it nor Bissell are responsible for the workforce.
But Maersk could face penalties under at least one law. Illinois allows contracting for labor through a temporary agency only if that agency is registered with the state Department of Labor. RoadLink is not registered.
Joliet Herald-News: Workers Allege Retribution
November 12th, 2009Joliet Herald-News: Workers Allege Retribution
November 12, 2009
By CINDY WOJDYLA CAIN
ELWOOD — About 70 workers were fired Nov. 5 from the Bissell Homecare warehouse after they joined a union and filed complaints about working conditions at the facility.
Fired workers picketed Wednesday afternoon in front of the home cleaning products warehouse to protest the terminations. They carried signs that read “Stop Bissell’s Dirty Work.”
Cindy Marble, of Crest Hill, worked at the warehouse for seven months. Bissell cut employees’ pay, denied sick day pay and demoted one employee when he took off a week for his sister’s funeral, she said.
“We’re just really, really tired of it,” she said as she prepared to march in front of the warehouse.
Among the marchers was the Rev. Herbert Brooks Jr., who serves on the Will County Board.
“These workers were fired without just cause,” he said. “I’m crying (inside) today because of what happened right here at Bissell in the city of Elwood.”
Protesting Bissell
November 12th, 2009
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Photos From Bissell
November 8th, 2009
Employees at the Bissell warehouse near Joliet, arrived to work at 6am today only to be informed they were all fired, but not before they trained their replacements.
Read the rest of this entry »
WWJ and Chicago Workers’ Collaborative file first complaints under groundbreaking new law
October 20th, 2009Warehouse Workers for Justice and the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative have filed the first two complaints under Illinois’ Right To Privacy In The Workplace Act. This law protects workers from misuse of electronic employment verification systems by their employers.