From: xcruz@webtv.net (Robert Chavez) Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 01:04:41 -0700 To: Labor-Rap@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Fwd: Sweeney Attends Davos Elite Confab; CA Overtime Repeal's Heavy Impact; Las Vegas Strike Over --WebTV-Mail-840721540-5291 --WebTV-Mail-840721540-5291 Approved-By: Michael Eisenscher Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 23:05:37 -0800 Reply-To: LABNEWS - News and Organizing about the Labor Movement Sender: LABNEWS - News and Organizing about the Labor Movement From: Michael Eisenscher Subject: Sweeney Attends Davos Elite Confab; CA Overtime Repeal's Heavy Impact; Las Vegas Strike Over February 5, 1998 U.S. Labor Leader Hobnobs in Europe By LOUIS UCHITELLE DAVOS, Switzerland -- The chief executives lunching with John Sweeney, the American labor leader, seemed almost to be seeking his blessing. A Frenchman tried to get him to criticize the French government's plan to shorten the workweek. A Canadian sought his approval of bonuses and profit-sharing for workers, rather than wage increases. And an American tried to get Sweeney's consent to the proposition that Mexican wages will rise. Like a water buffalo at a gathering of elephants, Sweeney, the president of the AFL-CIO, was an unusual sight at the annual World Economic Forum, which ended here Wednesday. This is a gathering of several heads of state and hundreds of top government officials, corporate chiefs, financiers, academics and bankers who network, lobby, make deals and talk over the ills of the global economy. Until recently, union leaders were seldom invited, and this time only six were present, the five others from Europe. Sweeney, who first attended last year, is the only union official ever to come from the United States in the forum's 27 years. Like everyone else, he wandered the crowded halls of the conference center, greeting people like Donald Fites, chairman of Caterpillar Inc., as if that company had never gone through a horrendous, still unresolved union battle. Or he agreed to have a cup of coffee with a chief executive in a hotel coffee shop, a short walk or shuttle-bus ride along the snowy main street of Davos. "In this atmosphere," Sweeney said, "you can chat with chief executives and world leaders so easily in ways that I cannot do back home." His message was short, focused, direct and repeated, like a politician's stump speech. The global economy and free trade are here, a fait accompli, acknowledged by labor, Sweeney said. Job-shifting across borders to lower-wage labor cannot be entirely stopped. Nor can damage to workers from crises like the current one in Asia. But national labor movements must come together to insist on minimum international labor standards and a seat at the table when the International Monetary Fund negotiates bailout agreements that fall hardest on workers. "We will demand coordinated efforts to stimulate growth, to regulate currency and capital speculation, to extend labor and democratic rights as part of the response to the Asian collapse," Sweeney declared. He made this case on Saturday from a podium that he shared with Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil's president, and George Soros, the financier. The audience of several hundred responded with warm applause to the presentations of Cardoso and Soros. Their view generally was that strong economic growth would raise worker incomes. Sweeney, taking a different tack, drew no applause. "I got good feedback later," he said. "People here don't want to publicly applaud labor." House Speaker Newt Gingrich made Sweeney a target in one of his presentations, charging that he was out of date, a throwback to labor movement thinking in the 1930s at a moment when the issues have changed. "He just does not get it," Sweeney said. "We are not opposed to trade agreements, but they have to be done properly, and not leave out workers." Whatever the frictions, the organizers of the World Economic Forum say they will add to the rostrum of labor leaders next year. "I had made an attempt before to invite more labor leaders," said Klaus Schwab, the forum's president. "But unlike business leaders, you did not find many labor leaders who thought globally. And I did not want Davos misused as a forum for national disputes." Schwab is also responding to another concern of the business executives and government officials who are the backbone of these annual conferences. A frequently expressed worry at the forum was the potential for strikes, demonstrations and violence, particularly in Indonesia, as workers react to the damage from the Asian crisis. "I think everyone is very concerned with the second wave of the Asian crisis," Schwab said. "The first was financial and the second is going to be social and political." At a luncheon on Monday given by the labor leaders, the half-dozen executives at Sweeney's table sought his sympathy or at least his informal counsel for their labor problems back home. Roger Cukierman, chairman of the Compagnie Financiere Edmond de Rothschild Banque, in Paris, asked Sweeney if he favored the French plan to cut the workweek to 35 hours from 39, with no cut in pay. Sweeney said he did, to Cukierman's disappointment, but on a softer note, he agreed with the banker that the shorter week would not prompt French employers to hire more workers, which is the goal. Instead, they will probably fill the extra hours on overtime, the two men agreed. Predictably, Mexico and the North American Free Trade Agreement came up. "What people in Mexico tell us is that as productivity rises, they will pay higher wages," said Steven Kletjian, chairman of Unicco Service Co. in the United States, which takes over operations that corporations outsource. Kletjian's comment brought a standard Sweeney reaction. "From the data we have now," Sweeney said, "we know that while NAFTA created some jobs in the United States, they are mostly low wage. In Mexico, the new jobs are the lowest of the low." Brian Smith got the answer he sought. He is chairman of the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority, a government-owned electric power utility, with 6,000 unionized employees. He is trying to convince his workers that they should accept profit-sharing and bonuses, rather than fixed wage increases. "That is happening more and more," Sweeney said, "not only profit-sharing but stock distribution." And Smith beamed. Will he quote Sweeney in his continuing conversations with his workers? "Definitely," he said. Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company ============================= Thursday, February 5, 1998 Overtime Law Repeal Hits Some Doubly By STUART SILVERSTEIN, Times Staff Writer Delivery driver Gerald Hackler often works long, hard days carting explosives to dusty construction sites and rock quarries, sometimes staying on the job up to 16 hours. Still, the payoff has been sweet. Along with bringing home plenty of regular time-and-a-half overtime pay, Hackler has gotten a double-time premium for the days when he puts in more than 12 hours. But no more. A relatively unheralded provision in the Jan. 1 repeal of California's daily overtime rules lifted the obligation on many employers to pay thousands of workers double their normal rate when they put in more than 12 hours in a single day. It also scrapped double time that was required, in certain circumstances, for hourly employees who came in all seven days in a given workweek. The result--that some workers are putting in the same long hours they did last year but receiving less money--"is a recipe for a lot of poor morale," said Steve Mardon, editor of ShiftWork Alert, a monthly newsletter focusing on work-related fatigue and safety issues. Those affected include drivers, manufacturing workers, technicians, restaurant employees and others accustomed to earning double-time pay in exchange for prolonged hours on the job. By one rough estimate, the double-time change could, in any given week, affect 1% of working Californians, or about 150,000 people. As more employers learn about the regulatory reform allowing elimination of double-time pay, frictions are developing in workplaces scattered around the state. One manager who asked not to be identified, the head of human resources at a San Diego-area aerospace firm that has eliminated double-time pay in most cases, acknowledged that employees "feel like they're losing out on some extra bucks that they earn on hard, long shifts." Still, he said, the company won't restore the double-time premium to the workers who lost it. It's important for the company to "lower costs a bit," he said. When the since-disbanded California Industrial Welfare Commission voted last year to kill the daily overtime rules governing many of the state's big industries, the issue of double-time pay was largely overlooked. Most of the focus was on scuttling the long-standing mandate for employers to pay hourly workers, including part-timers, time-and-one-half overtime wages whenever they put in more than eight hours in a day. Although organized labor and part-time employees opposed the move, many employer groups and ordinary Californians say the change is giving more full-time workers a chance to have flexible schedules. At the same time, while everyone agrees that some part-timers who put in long days are losing money, supporters of the daily overtime repeal say that it is costing full-time workers little, if anything, in wages. That's because the 8 million hourly workers at job sites subject to the repeal still qualify for regular overtime pay as long as they put in more than 40 hours in a given week, as provided by federal law. But that's scant consolation for Hackler and other workers like him. Hackler, who lives in an unincorporated area of Butte County in Northern California, said he earned about $40,000 last year. With the elimination of double time, he expects to lose $3,000 to $4,000 a year. The repeal of the daily overtime and double time, Hackler said, is intended to benefit 40-hour-a-week office workers who want to, for example, leave a couple of hours early one day and make up the time on another day. Those workers, he said, "don't seem to have the strains and responsibilities that we have. . . . We don't even know what it's like to work just 40 hours a week." "There's nothing I do or my co-workers do that doesn't revolve around work," said Hackler, 37, who has a 17-year-old son. "We have to work the hours we work just to make ends meet. If work comes up, you have to take it." What's more, Hackler said, because employers around the state are taking advantage of the overtime and double-time pay repeal to cut wages, he doesn't regard changing jobs as a realistic option. That is especially so, he said, because he lives in a rural area with limited job possibilities. His wife, Mary, works at the same company as a part-time driver. Also feeling the pinch of lost double time is Mary Piowaty, a part-time respiratory therapist at Lassen Community Hospital in Susanville, about 90 miles northwest of Reno. Piowaty, 44, is normally scheduled for two 12-hour days every week. She never earned straight overtime for her scheduled hours because of a waiver received by the hospital under an agreement reached with employees to promote flexible schedules. Yet Piowaty used to earn ample double time because the hospital frequently called her back to work beyond her scheduled hours, time that wasn't covered by the waiver. One day in December, for example, she put in 20 hours, which meant she received eight hours of double-time pay. But now, taking advantage of the state's daily overtime repeal, the hospital is no longer paying double time. Piowaty said the gross pay on her first check after double time was eliminated, covering a two-week period, was $66 less than it would have been last year. "I see it as losing my grocery money," she said. "I have four children at home." But like other employers who in the past paid double time, David Anderson, the administrator of Lassen Community Hospital, said it sometimes is too much of a cost to bear in a competitive business world. Anderson said his facility faces increasing cost-containment pressures, particularly from the federal government. "We need to minimize salary and benefit costs to the extent we're able to within the law," he said, while adding that Lassen has budgeted 3% raises for 1998. Anderson said the hospital's financial condition "is good, and we want to maintain that." Various studies, while not yet conclusive, suggest that workers who put in lots of overtime face enormous strains. One study has found higher suicide rates among people who frequently work overtime. Separate research detected lower birth weights among babies whose mothers often put in overtime. In addition, a review of construction managers who worked overtime found that they had higher levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, factors linked to cardiovascular disease. In the entertainment industry, unions launched a push last year for a 14-hour limit on the workday. It began after an assistant camera operator, Brent Hershman of West Hills, died in a car crash while driving home after 19 hours on the job. Most employers, in fact, don't put workers on long shifts or extensive overtime because they consider it counterproductive. "It just doesn't make sense to work people beyond 12 hours. It becomes a safety issue," said Anita Gorino, a human resources consultant in Thousand Oaks. She added, "People get tired, and they're just not as productive." On the other hand, for many of the workers who have shouldered the burden of long hours, double-time pay has provided some relief, but that's now changing. Surveys by two California business organizations--the Professionals in Human Resources Assn. and the Employers Group--show that the vast majority of the state's employers plan to take advantage of the repeal. Squabbling over the end of double time could get more heated in California as union contracts come up for renegotiation in the state. Tom Rankin, president of the California Labor Federation, predicted that more and more employers will say that "our nonunion competition no longer has to pay daily overtime and double time, and we don't want to either." In the past, when unions agreed to waive double-time requirements, Rankin said, they normally extracted some other protection against excessive overtime. The old rules, he said, "provided a floor for bargaining, but now the floor is gone." Copyright Los Angeles Times ======================== February 5, 1998 At Hotel-Casino, Triumphant Shouts of 'Union!' By SARA MOSLE LAS VEGAS -- Joseph Daugherty is thinking about taking a vacation. As an organizer for the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, he has not taken a day off since Sept. 21, 1991, when 550 workers -- maids, cocktail waitresses, bartenders, cooks -- walked off their jobs at the Frontier hotel and casino to protest the resort's treatment of its employees. "I used to tell my family on the East Coast that I'd see them when the strike was over," he said with a rueful smile. He did not realize that the walkout, the nation's longest in almost four decades, would end up lasting nearly six and a half years. A minute after midnight Sunday, the strike finally ended as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Richard Trumka led returning workers, national labor leaders, local politicians, union members and some 2,000 other revelers on a triumphant march around the craps and black jack tables, their shouts of "union" drowning out the tintinnabulation of the slot machines. Strikers wept and hugged, but many looked dazed as they wandered through a place that was both intimately familiar and strange after so long. Raymond Turner, who had worked as a cook at the Frontier for 25 years before walking out, said, "I guess it looks the same, but it hasn't sunk in yet." Like soldiers who recall their years of service with fondness, many strikers admitted to an unexpected emotion: they were going to miss the picket line. Mirna Preciado, who was returning to her job as a waitress at the Frontier's Mexican restaurant that morning, said: "I'm glad we won, but I'm sad, too. I'm going to miss my friends." During the strike, children graduated from their strollers to walk with their mothers on the picket line. Couples met and married. Seventeen strikers also died during the course of the walk-out. "We are like family," Ms. Preciado said. Strikers had vowed to hold out "one day longer" than the Elardis, the Las Vegas family that bought the Frontier from Summa Corp. in 1989 and began taking actions like dismissing workers without cause, reducing wages and refusing to contribute to the pension fund. In September 1995, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, upheld dozens of charges of violation of labor law. In an uncommon display of solidarity, strikers walked the picket line around the clock for six years, four months and 10 days. Not a single striker crossed back over the picket line, and union members voted to double their dues to support a strike fund. Picketers credited Daugherty for helping to sustain morale. Motorists would sometimes pelt them with rocks, eggs, ice-cream and even a dead rabbit that was shot. Occasionally, resort workers would spray the picketers with water hoses usually reserved for cleaning the parking lot. And then there were the 120-degree summers and wintry cold nights. "Joe was our glue," Ms. Preciado said. "We called him Saint Joe." John Wilhelm, secretary-treasurer of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International, said, "In my 28 years in labor, I have never met a more extraordinary leader than Joe." Whenever union conventions were held here, members would join the picket line. Postal workers, teachers and state, county and municipal employees all marched with the strikers. A local doctor, Elias Ghanem, provided free medical service -- delivering 107 babies to their families. Even management at other hotel-casinos sympathized with the workers. William Bennett, then the head of Circus Circus and now the owner of the Sahara became so distressed with the strikers' plight that he provided three hot meals a day for more than five years at an estimated cost of $1 million. Last fall, Phillip Ruffin, a Midwestern businessman, ended the standoff when he bought the Frontier for $167 million and agreed to sign a union contract and take back the employees with their seniority and pensions intact. (About 100 replacement workers lost their jobs.) Last week, Ruffin revealed that the strike had cut the Elardis' business in half, even though the economy was booming. The Elardis had argued that they could not make a profit if they paid union wages, but nearly every other major hotel and casino on the Strip was a union shop at the time. For labor leaders, the victory was sweet. "This strike is the most significant victory in American labor since the early CIO days and Walter Reuther," said Gerald McEntee, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. And many other leaders have begun to point to Las Vegas as a model for organized labor. AFL-CIO president John Sweeney has called Las Vegas "the hottest union city in America." In recent years, the Strip has been the scene of demonstrations reminiscent of the 1930s as thousands of workers, even tens of thousands, have taken to the streets to fight for better wages and benefits. In the last 15 years, the Culinary Union has more than doubled its ranks, to over 40,000 members. Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in the country, and the union is the fastest growing local in the private sector. As Wilhelm of the hotel-restaurant union put it, service workers' jobs cannot be shipped overseas. He says Las Vegas' prosperity depends in large part on the union contract. For his part, Daugherty, the organizer, said he might not take the vacation, after all. "In labor," he said, "there's a saying that a union is only as strong as its next strike." Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company =================================== --WebTV-Mail-840721540-5291--