How Corporations Intimidate Workers
The definition of bravery is a worker who organizes a union or speaks out about bad conditions in the workplace. That’s because companies come down like a ton of bricks on these workers.
See for instance Elvia Bahena, a housekeeper who works for a company Hyatt Hotels uses to subcontract its cleaners. She testified in front of the Indianapolis City Council on the working conditions she and her other housekeepers face. And now she’s been fired.
Or take Wal-Mart, which is punishing workers who took their story to the company’s shareholder meeting. According to Josh Eidelson (America’s best labor journalist in my opinion), Wal-Mart has fired one worker involved in the action and has issued a “third-level warning” to another, meaning they are ready to fire him the next time he drops a bag of diapers or something.
well, yeah. they can’t flog them or hang them anymore, so they’re stuck with just firing them. you have a problem with that?
If we had something like a federal Labor Department, complaints could be filed and adjudicated, and businesses enjoined and/or punished.
If we had something like a federal Labor Department….
Note that in at least the case of Elvia Bahena, she was a subcontractor who works for a company that Hyatt pays to provide service staff.
And the subcontracting company says: “A manager at Chicago-based United Service disputed Bahena’s contention that she has been fired, saying rather she “currently is unassigned.””
“She ain’t been fired – we just don’t got any work for her. We’ll call her if we need her.”
And that’s how you get around any pesky labor laws you want to get around.
Cowed, contingent, compliant.
That’s the CCC of this Depression.
And notice how the Hyatt spokesperson failed to get his story straight with the sub-contractor, ’cause he damn well believes she was fired.
That way, she’s not getting unemployment, either. Pricks.
Something like half of actually-unemployed workers aren’t unemployed for purposes of receiving UI.
Of course, the real problem is that unemployment insurance causes layoffs. Casey Mulligan told me so.
At least in MA, temp workers currently unassigned count as laid off for UI purposes, and can collect.
Which, needless to say, does not justify what happened to her.
If they are already signed up, they can apply for that week’s benefits.
I think that’s also true in Washington.
That happened to me in Indiana as well. I was receiving unemployment, got a temp job, it ended, and unemployment started back up.
In a lot of states, you are eligible for UI in a situation like this. The frequent definition of employed is that you are performing work and being paid for it. So she’s (hopefully) considered to have a lack of work when not on assignment.
it’s not just corporations, it’s any large institution. think of the sad note in the freeh report about the janitor who was afraid to speak up for fear of losing his job.
Ugh. And Spanier just got his parachute. Ugh. Ugh.
Not that I should put too much stock in it, but I’d read comments about the janitor to the effect that he shouldn’t have worried about his job because he if had been fired, he could have just found a similar job somewhere else.
I don’t know about UPenn, but at a number of schools the menial workers receive vastly better pay and benefits than workers performing similar jobs for, say, subcontractors to WalMart. I am far from sure similar jobs were readily available.
No, they almost certainly weren’t. Not to mention that having one’s job potentially threatened for doing the right thing is, in itself, a problem.
Two things: UPenn is in Philadelphia, and doesn’t have a pedophile coach problem that we know of, and there are probably other similar jobs around, although likely without the same benies. Penn State is in the middle of nowhere, and likely not too many other similar jobs around.
Let me say, as a proud Hoosier, that I read about this story in the Indianapolis Star today and was utterly ashamed by the comments of my fellow citizens regarding this woman’s plight.
No sympathy, whatsoever. Only wisecracks about her requirement for a translator, innuendo that she should be deported, and repeated reference to Indiana’s at-will employment status.
What makes this especially galling for me is that we just got finished with a 2-year “right to work” battle in this state. The same people who have no problem with the Hyatt (and every other major hotel in Indianapolis) colluding with temp agencies to essentially blacklist employees were howling back in February about how it is SO UNFAIR to require somebody to pay union dues in order to work.
Am I the only one who sees the disconnect there? If RTW was really about empowering workers (which we all know it wasn’t… any more than voter ID is about preventing fraud), why is there such a problem among the SAME F**KING PEOPLE when those very workers expect to be empowered to rise or fall on their own merits, regardless of contracts entered into by people independent of the worker.
I can tell I’m getting angry again, as I’m starting to rant.
Agreed that Josh Eidelson is best labor journalists in the country.