Folks,
Greetings from the Burgh, where I am returning after a few days off for vacation to enjoy the weather.
Cleveland Trip Delayed
Given our limited resources, Payday is trying to go only on reporting trips that we can fully fund. Due to low fundraising (we raised $36) to cover Ironworkers’ Brian Poindexter’s run for Congress in the Cleveland suburbs, we decided to delay the trip to Cleveland until we can find a place to stay.
We are gonna try to figure out a different way to finance the trip and hope to do it in the next few weeks. The best way to help us finance future trips is to keep donating so we can maintain our reserve fund and financial stability.
Socialist Florida SEIU Organizer Wins Senate Primary Upset
In Florida, socialist State Representative Angie Nixon, who previously served as field director of Florida SEIU, won a surprise upset to be the party’s nominee for Senate. Despite her opponent Alex Vindaman raising $16 million to Nixon’s $900,000, Nixon defeated him by a margin of 56% to 44%.
“We have proved that everyday people are more powerful than corporations and millionaires,” said Nixon in her victory speech. “Together we went up against the political establishment — against millions of dollars of outside spending. We were outspent 16 to 1 and we won.”
For more on her speech, check out the 19th.
Maine Shipworkers Blast Plans to Build Ships Overseas
In Maine, unionized shipworkers are blasting plans by the Trump Administration to build warships in non-union plants overseas.
“This administration appears to be bound and determined to send American shipbuilding jobs overseas and sell American shipyards to foreign corporations,” Congressman Jared Golden told WGME.
What’s Sparking Massive Meatpacking Strikes & Lockouts?
Finally, yesterday, 1,700 Cargill meatpackers in Fort Morgan, Colorado voted to accept a deal to end a lockout. The lockout was part of a growing series of strikes and lockouts in the meatpacking industry. Sentient Media has more:
In interviews with Sentient, union leaders questioned why JBS and Cargill pushed for nearly identical wage proposals, raising concerns about the world’s largest meatpackers conspiring to suppress wages, known as wage fixing, during recent, unusually tense contract negotiations in Colorado. It’s part of a broader pattern, union leaders allege, of meatpacking plants across the country pressuring unions into either accepting the same wage structure, or mere nickels apart.
“They can’t force you to take somebody else’s contract, and that’s what they essentially were doing,” says Kim Cordova, the president of the Unified Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, who led the JBS strike in Greeley. Although the strike was successful, she wants the federal government to examine what she claims is a much wider, coordinated effort to cap wages. “We want to show the government: ‘Look at the pattern here. This is them consolidating with each other to set a wage standard for the industry.’”
A standardization of wages, across different labor markets, can be an indicator of collusion between companies to suppress wages, says Elena Prager, an applied microeconomist at the University of Rochester.
“If you get extremely similar levels or trends in wages across geographic markets, where presumably competition for workers is different. That is suspicious,” says Prager, who was not directly commenting on JBS or Cargill. “It’s not dispositive, as lawyers like to say. It’s not enough to know that there’s for sure collusion going on, but it’s the kind of thing that would make you look twice.”
For more, check out Sentient Media.
Alright folks, that’s all for today. We will have much more tomorrow. Keep sending tips, comments, and complaints to melk@paydayreport.com
From Payday Report via This RSS Feed.