Archive for November 2011

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Residents Seek Economic Justice

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Times Weekly
By Ron Kurowski

“What is going on in America is wrong,” said Rev. Craig Purchase, Pastor, and Mt. Zion Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Joliet. Rev. Purchase was speaking about the economic injustice that is ravaging the less fortunate in our society and how “life for us just goes on”. For him the jobs crisis is a moral issue….

…Abe Mwaura, Coordinator for Warehouse Workers for Justice, explained how the job crisis for the temporary workers in Joliet and Will County was a long term structural problem and would require long term solutions.

More goods come through warehouses in Will County than through any port in the country. Of the 30,000 workers employed in warehouses, 63% are temps. Abe said, “These are workers who work for years without any benefits, no health insurance, no vacations, no overtime pay and no sick days. They suffer wage theft, safety violations, discrimination based on gender, age and national origin.” Since they have no union representation they can be fired at will. “Slavery”, is one word he said could describes what goes on in some of the warehouses.

The meeting concluded with members of the audience telling their personal stories on how the economic crisis affects them.

Demetrie Collins, who worked as a temp in the past, explained what it is like to have to work multiple shifts just to earn enough money to feed his family. He thinks he lost his job as a temp when his employer found out that he was involved with Warehouse Workers for Justice.

The last person to speak was Monica Morales who lost her job 1 ½ years ago. She spoke on how hard it is to support her family on unemployment payments, how difficult it is to find work, even low wage, side jobs. She spoke as if she didn’t believe in her future. She is 21years old.

Read full article here…

Chicago Warehouse Workers Navigate Maze Of Contractors To Organize

Friday, November 11th, 2011

Labor Notes
By Jane Slaughter

Heading down I-55 or I-80 southwest of Chicago, a driver passes mile after mile of anonymous, windowless warehouses. Each year a trillion dollars worth of goods moves through the area, one of the bigger nodes in the global distribution network of consumer products.

Computers, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, Halloween costumes arrive at West Coast ports on ships from Asia, are loaded onto trains, and chug to the City of Big Shoulders, where all six Class 1 railroads meet. Workers offload the goods, which are piled onto trucks or other trains and travel to the big boxes.

In between, those goods spend some time in a warehouse. “If it wasn’t for us, none of the stuff you have in your house would be in your house,” says Monica Morales, a former worker at a warehouse for Bissell, the vacuum cleaner maker. “There’s not many items that we don’t touch.”

Morales was fired in November 2009, along with 70 co-workers, a week after they filed charges against their employer, the contractor Maersk Logistics, for violations of minimum wage, civil rights, and labor laws and told management they had formed a union.

She is a member of Warehouse Workers for Justice, a worker center affiliated with the United Electrical Workers (UE). WWJ unites workers from across the dizzying array of contractors that operate in the warehouses and helps them fight for their rights with lawsuits, media pressure, and in-plant actions.

On October 15, with support from WWJ, UE launched an organizing committee, pulling together 50 leaders from different shops as a first step toward forming a union among the 150,000 warehouse workers in the area.

Read more at Labor Notes…