Tag: Teamsters

Last night at 6pm est the AFL-CIO along with the SEIU, the National Education Association (NEA), Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters held a virtual town hall meeting for some forty five minutes.

I was hoping to catch it so to archive, no luck with the program I have while live. Then was hoping the Unions would and have it posted up, no luck as to the whole call in Town Hall at least so far, nothing on any of the sites except a quick writeup.

Low and behold the Huff post did catch the comments by Vice President Biden. This first part is what I posted on my site, the taped comments were just added, all below the fold:

I’ve written about Uniform Justice before.  An earlier diary I wrote that about  Uniform Justiceyou may recall is Did Eleazar Torres-Gomez Lose his Life for Company Profits?  

Today, I have good news.  A panel of the California Court of Appeal ordered the Cintas Corporation to pay more than $1.18 million in back wages and interest to hundreds of Northern California workers for violating the city of Hayward’s Living Wage Ordinance.  This judgment likely is the largest living wage award in U.S. history.

“Cintas had a moral and legal obligation to pay workers a living wage, but they ignored it.” says UNITE HERE General President Bruce Raynor.  “The company would rather fight workers tooth and nail than pay them what they deserve.”

 COURT ORDERS CINTAS TO PAY WORKERS $1.18 MILLION IN BACK PAY AND INTEREST

They fought tooth and nail, but lost to 219 workers.  It’s a great victory for working people.

More, after the fold.

Also on Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/story/…

Over the last few years, over 1000 migrants have perished making the hazardous journey through the desert to make new lives in “el Norte.” Some were small coffee growers from Vera Cruz, chicken farmers from Jalisco, or vegetable growers from Guadalajara. Others were indigenous subsistence farmers from the Chiapas highlands no longer able to eek out a living. Still others were Guatemalan migrant workers who could not find work on either side of Mexico’s border and jumped on El Tren de Muerte (The Death Train) in Tapachula for the first leg of their journey, boarding alongside Salvadorans escaping decades of political upheaval and Hondurans escaping crushing poverty.

Between 6 and 7 million people have taken the arduous journey north, many within the last ten years, most of them coming from poor agriultural areas that are no longer able to support their populations. Yet, with all the debate about reforming US immigration policy and securing the borders, we have not heard one solid proposal to address the root causes of this massive migration.

The question of why so many must leave their homes and families to simply survive is rarely mentioned, but remains the missing piece in the comprehensive immigration reform puzzle.