Building a Better Airport: Living wage campaign steps up this Monday

The drive for a Living Wage for all workers at Mineta San Jose International Airport is poised to move ahead on Monday, when the living wage proposal will be heard by the Transportation & Environment Committee of the San Jose City Council.

If all goes well, Monday's hearing will put the policy on track for the final step -- the full City Council -- to raise service standards at the Airport and give over five hundred workers a much-needed raise.

Below is an article on the Airport Living Wage from today's Partnership for Working Families newsletter.


Working Partnerships USA Launches Campaign to Extend Living Wage to San Jose International Airport

Last month, community, labor and faith leaders came together to call for the City of San Jose to assure that it is truly building a better airport -- by ensuring a living wage, establishing increased oversight of subcontractors, and guaranteeing the highest quality, most skilled employees serving the airport's millions of annual passengers.

Stemming from a report by Working Partnerships USA which documented alarming security and retention challenges at Mineta San Jose International Airport, Vice Mayor Dave Cortese and Councilmember Forrest Williams asked the Council's Transportation committee to consider extending a living wage to all airport employees. The report found that over half of airport employees responding to a survey weren't trained in critical emergency procedures, such as facility evacuation. Additionally, while over half of employees earning a living wage had been at the Airport for over three years, the percentage of those earning less who remained that long was 6% or lower.

Members of the community joined elected officials in support of the policy. Pastor Kenny Foreman, of the Cathedral of Faith in Willow Glen, stated:

Our City has been richly blessed, and now should continue its leadership in maintaining the standard that has already been set; ensuring that San Jose will continue to lead the way in providing employees that serve the City a living wage -- including everyone who works at the San Jose Mineta Airport.

(Continued...)

Wheelchair attendant Dwayne Green, an employee at the airport who earns a minimum wage, related his story, including being forced into homelessness for an inability to afford even a basic rent. "I struggled, I fought, and today I see a brighter future. For our safety, we can't afford to churn through employees," Green stated. "The City I live in and love cannot afford to lose good employees simply because they can't afford to live here, to have families."

Dr. Steven Pitts of UC Berkeley relayed the findings of a study conducted by researchers following San Francisco's application of a living wage to its airport. The study found that the living wage did not negatively impact the function of the airport, and that cost to employers was less than a penny on the dollar. In fact, due to decreases in employee turn-over, some employers saw cost savings of up to 11%.

The Living Wage campaign will be discussed at the San Jose City Council's Transportation and Environment Committee on June 2nd and will likely go before the full City Council in the fall.

Copies of the Working Partnerships report, the UC Berkeley study and event photos can be found at the campaign website: http://www.buildingabetterairport.com/


Working Partnerships USA is a public policy and research institute that builds partnerships with community groups, labor unions, and faith based organizations to improve the lives of working families in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit the WPUSA website at http://www.wpusa.org/.

[ Continue reading Building a Better Airport: Living wage campaign steps up this Monday ]

How to fight back against the middle-class squeeze? Form a union, says new study

With wages for most workers failing to keep up with the cost of living, families in Silicon Valley, California and throughout the nation are feeling the "middle-class squeeze": working hard but unable to make ends meet.

Perhaps the most at risk are families who have been squeezed right out of the middle class -- trapped in the low-wage, dead-end jobs that are increasingly becoming the only jobs available (a recent analysis concluded that only one out of every four jobs in the U.S. can be considered a "good job".)

How can a community (or a nation) reverse a trend like this, and turn its low-wage jobs back into good jobs? There's no single answer, but a new study performed by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) makes a powerful case for the wage-raising effects of one strategy: unions.

CEPR looked at five years' worth of wages for union and nonunion workers in every state, adjusting for differences in education, age, experience, gender, and race to make sure they were comparing workers with similar characteristics. They broke it down further by examining the impact of unionization on workers at different wage levels.(Continued...)

Their findings:

• In every state and in the District of Columbia, unionization significantly improves workers' wages.


• Nationwide, low-wage workers gain the largest benefit from joining a union. The typical union wage premium for a low-wage worker (10th percentile wage level) is 20.7 percent: the equivalent of a raise from $10.00/hr.to $12.07/hr.


• In California:


• the lowest-wage workers (10th percentile) see a 16.5% wage increase from unionization;


• middle-wage workers (50th percentile) see a 15.9% wage increase;


• and higher-wage workers (90th percentile) see a 6.0% wage increase.

Unfortunately, joining a union isn't as easy as signing up on the dotted line. Workers who want to organize a union are usually subjected to intimidation, threats, harassment, mandatory anti-union meetings, or even being fired for speaking up (the latter is illegal, but it still happens, and even employers who get caught illegally firing employees for organizing don't face high enough penalties to be deterred.) The system currently in place, overseen by a National Labor Relations Board comprised of political appointees, is heavily slanted towards making it extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights while giving a free pass to unscrupulous employers, and indirectly penalizing those employers who try to treat their workers fairly and do the right thing.

Legislation currently in Congress, titled the Employee Free Choice Act, would help restore the rights that have been eroded by making it easier for a majority of employees in a workplace to form a union. Based on the findings of the CEPR study, this legislation would not only restore lost rights, but could also go a long way towards helping workers restore their eroded paychecks.

[ Continue reading How to fight back against the middle-class squeeze? Form a union, says new study ]

Building a Better Airport

To counteract all the gloom and doom from the previous week, here's some good news: a new campaign for a living wage for all workers at San Jose Airport.

Last week, WPUSA released a report documenting alarming security and retention challenges at Mineta San Jose International Airport, stemming from the practice of subcontracting airport duties to workers who are paid minimum wage with no benefits or time off and receive little to no training on security procedures.

Community, labor and faith leaders have now come together to call on the City of San Jose to adopt a policy that assures a living wage for all workers at the Airport, along with improved oversight of job and training standards at subcontractors. (Continued...)

The rapidly rising cost of living in the San Jose region makes this campaign especially timely; surviving in Silicon Valley at minimum wage, difficult at the best of times, is becoming nearly impossible.

On the scale of the regional economy, establishing a comprehensive living wage policy will help to make San Jose Airport competitive with SFO and OAK, which have been gaining air passenger market share at the expense of SJC. Both of these neighboring airports have already implemented Living Wage policies. If San Jose does the same, it will help hundreds of workers and their families climb out of poverty, and could give the local economy -- particularly the visitor and retail sectors -- a boost that we badly need.

Find out more at the campaign website: Building a Better Airport.

[ Continue reading Building a Better Airport ]

Collaborating to Build Good Green Jobs

Check out the following article from the Partnership for Working Families (PWF) newsletter describing WPUSA's focus in the emerging new policy area of "green jobs". You can read more about green jobs campaigns around the country at the PWF website.

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Collaborating to Build Good Green Jobs
By Working Partnerships USA

Over the past year, the enormous challenge posed by climate change has been catapulted into the limelight. Prominent leaders in all sectors are now calling for serious and immediate efforts to fight global warming. As mainstream interest in the "green economy" explodes, so too has the concept of green jobs: the alluring idea that efforts to defend the environment can also create new job opportunities that will enable millions of people to climb out of poverty and restore the middle class.

Green jobs present an enormous opportunity. But we also see a growing threat: as investment capital pours into the field, the concerns of marginalized communities and even the underlying climate threat may be overridden by business concerns.

Job quality is key. Will green jobs be good jobs, accessible to all our communities? Or will the green economy be an hourglass economy, with a handful of people making huge profits at the top, propped up by a huge force of low-wage, disposable workers? (Continued...)

Unless we organize and advocate for high-quality jobs in our communities, we won't get them. We will just get more of the same -- poverty-level jobs and zero respect for workers -- while businesses brag about their freshly washed green credentials.

These aren't easy problems to solve, but communities and unions around the nation (and the world) have jumped into the fray. Many of these grassroots groups gathered at the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference in March; more will come together at the Dream Reborn conference in April; all are organizing and strategizing around how to bring green jobs to their communities.

WPUSA's vision for a green economy is one in which union-community coalitions don't just fight for a piece of the green pie, but take the lead in creating new green jobs. Starting from our base of knowledge and experience with our grassroots base's needs and their potential, our organizations should be designing green policies and bringing in capital to make them work. If we design the programs ourselves, we can insure that they emphasize environmental justice for all neighborhoods, high standards for jobs, and integrated training and career ladder programs to fill those jobs with a local, highly qualified and motivated workforce.

What kinds of local green jobs can we create? In our own region of Silicon Valley, WPUSA is looking for opportunities in several sectors, including:

• Energy efficiency building retrofits. Updating buildings with insulation, efficient lighting, and improved heating and cooling systems can save as much as 50-60% on energy costs. This is a golden opportunity to create new jobs for the construction trades and help families save money on their gas and electric bills.


• Green building maintenance. As companies create green buildings and green processes, they need janitors, groundskeepers and other maintenance workers who have the training and resources to make the new processes work. But too often, these needs are ignored, and building services workers are expected to do twice as much work in the same amount of time with little to no training. There is an urgent need to turn this dynamic on its head by making green-focused building owners and managers aware of the key role building services workers will have in achieving their environmental goals, and convincing them of the value-added they gain by investing in responsible building services contractors and trained workers.


• Waste management and reduction. Sanitation workers, environmental advocates, and communities impacted by landfills or waste disposal all have a common stake in reducing waste, increasing recycling or reuse, and finding safer ways to dispose of what waste remains.


• Public transit. Inadequate or unaffordable public transit hits low-income communities the hardest; at the same time, lack of good public transit drives people into their cars, spewing out ever more CO2 into the atmosphere. Building effective transit systems and transit-oriented development would create jobs in construction and operations, help meet the needs of low-income families, and contribute enormously to the fight against global warming.

To pursue these possibilities, WPUSA has entered into a collaboration with the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, a San Jose-based environmental justice group. At the same time we are engaging with our region's Building Trades Council and with local service sector and public sector unions, while reaching out to community- and faith-based organizations, environmentalists, and local business associations.

Collaborating in regional, state, national and international partnerships will be critical to succeeding at this ground-breaking effort in which communities across the country are now engaged: to make green jobs good jobs.

[ Continue reading Collaborating to Build Good Green Jobs ]