Student Labor Action Project: The Beginning Semester of a Continued Campaign

by Samuel Maron and Ryan Bess Winnick

Hesitant to admit success, but determined to embrace the eminent possibilities of the Basic Needs Task Force proposals, members of the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) at UVM are both earnest and prepared. Ready for the challenge of administrative and truly bureaucratic hesitation, SLAP members have pressingly decided to march onward in demand of livable wages on campus for all UVM workers, both directly employed and contracted.

The continued campaign has three goals:

1. All UVM employees must earn at least a livable wage as defined by the Basic Needs Task Force and the VT Joint Fiscal Office as approximately $12.23 and hour.
2. President Fogel must accept and endorse the Task Force recommendation by November 3rd, 2006, make a real implementation schedule, and begin to make steps for implementation.
3. There must be public acknowledgement of the endorsement, and complete transparency of the implementation process by the administration.

The recommendation from the Task Force only applies to direct UVM employees and denies contracted workers. This is a huge step and victory in the campaign, but it is only partial, and does not go far enough. Besides the injustice of denying a livable wage to some of the lowest paid workers on campus, contracted employees give UVM an incentive to outsource, a tactic that is bad for the workers, the community, and workers’ rights in general.

Every tactic to win justice at UVM is on the table. The attempted office takeover, and resulting tent-city had the administration shaking in its boots and directly resulted in the creation of the task force.

We must continue to work together and make sure everyone in Burlington knows about livable wages and why they are so necessary! This injustice cannot continue, and SLAP won’t stop working until every worker on the UVM campus is paid a livable wage. If the administration accepts the recommendation, the process will be a lot easier for everyone and we will stop denying our workers what they deserve. UVM will pay a livable wage. They have stalled for long enough, it’s time for action! Solidarity!

To read the preliminary report and send a comment to the Task Force: http://www.uvm.edu/president/?Page=basicneeds/preliminary_report.html

Some (Not So) Surprising Laws Affecting Vermont Workers

by Kim Lawson, VWC Hotline Coordinator

Volunteers on the Workers Rights Hotline answer phone calls from workers who are feel they have been mistreated on the job. We get all sorts of questions. Some questions are asked often and are easy to answer. For example:

Q: Can my boss just fire me with no reason or because he doesn’t like me?
A: Without a Union, that is true. It’s called “employment at will.”

Or this one.

Q: My boss doesn’t give us a lunch break – isn’t that illegal?
A: No. Vermont does not require employers to provide any breaks beyond a “reasonable time” to go to the bathroom, etc.

Some questions are more difficult to answer, in fact we are asked questions that stump us on a fairly regular basis. Then we have to go looking for the answers and those answers are often surprising. Here are a few of the things VWC Hotline volunteers have recently learned:

• Auto mechanics, car salespeople and parts salespeople who work at car dealerships are explicitly excluded from the right to time and a half (overtime) after 40 hours of work in a week. Mechanics at garages that are not part of a dealership are entitled to overtime after 40 hours of work.
• Unless you have a union contract or employee handbook that says otherwise, the boss can legally not pay out any accumulated vacation, personal or other paid leave days to you if you quit your job or are fired.
• An employer who offers housing and deducts the cost of that housing from a pay check can only deduct the difference between the workers’ wage and Vermont’s minimum wage plus $19.85 a week. So a worker at a ski resort who earns $8.25 an hour and charged for housing can only legally be charged the difference between the wage paid and minimum wage (in this example 8.25 minus 7.25 or $1 per hour ($40 a week) plus $19.85 for a total of $59.85 a week. This is far less than many ski resorts charge their employees. For workers who receive reduced day care rates when day care is provided for a fee, the formula is the same.
• While many employees cannot collect Unemployment Insurance when they quit their jobs, they sometimes can file and receive unemployment when the reason for quitting was a significant reduction in pay and/or benefits.
• Recently, the Vermont legislature voted to classify newspaper delivery workers as subcontractors. The result is that now newspaper delivery workers are exempt from most wage and hour protections.

We’re sure we’ll get more questions at the hotline that we won’t be able to answer right away. We’re learning all the time. As we learn interesting facts and information, we’ll pass it along.

If you or someone you know is interested in becoming a hotline volunteer, we’ll train you how to answer the calls, record the information and find answers. Your time commitment can be as little as 2 hours every other week. If you’re interested, call me, the Hotline Coordinator, at (802) 658-6788.

Will Vermont’s Information Superhighway Turn Into a Dirt Road?

By Mike O’Day, Verizon Employee, CWA Local 1400

You may or may not have heard, but Verizon has put its land-based telephone operations in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine on the auction block. According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the sale could be worth up to $8 billion as Verizon cuts off telephone lines in favor of wireless and broadband expansion. Landlines bought and paid for by rate-payers over the last century are about to be abandoned to the highest bidder with little regulatory oversight – and hundreds of good paying jobs across New England will be lost as a result.

Verizon’s landline sell-off is yet another example of a “race to the bottom” economy that will effect our jobs and economy, as well as the quality and reliability of local services. Over 130 customer service and administrative staff are represented by CWA Local 1400 and members of IBEW Local 2326 account for the remaining 450 Verizon jobs in Vermont, which includes all the technicians, operators, and engineering people who maintain and service the lines. Verizon also subcontracts 700 or more employees – everything from landscapers to electricians – widening the potential impact to over 1,250 working Vermonters.

What would the sell-off mean for Verizon?

• Decreased state regulation and public oversight.
• Desertion from the costly obligation to provide universal service to all areas of the state at the same price.
• Reduction of the pressure to build high speed internet networks in rural areas.
• A “take the money and run” attitude in order to concentrate high speed FIOS data and video networks in more populous states such as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and California.

What does this mean for Vermont Ratepayers?

• Verizon wants to cherry-pick its customers by liquidating landlines in rural states to finance high-speed networks more populous states. This “rural redlining” will handicap Vermonters and Vermont businesses.
• The sale would allow Verizon, which has been guaranteed a profit for over a hundred years, to liquidate assets bought and paid for by the ratepayers in order to re-invest profits in bordering states.
• The exit of Verizon, a Fortune 500 company, would signal a set-back for the Vermont economy in state-of-the-art fiber-optic networks which are currently available to our neighbors in New York and Massachusetts.
• If the sale goes through, Vermonters will be at the mercy of an undercapitalized, highly leveraged company that will be expected to return a quick profit to its investors. That will equate to very little investment in high speed internet apart from the downtown areas, and reduced capital to support infrastructure.

What impact could this have on the Vermont labor movement?

• The companies currently showing an interest in Vermont – Fairpoint, Century Tel, and Citizens – all have an aversion to organized labor. They centralize call centers, not sharing the Vermont philosophy that local customers should speak with a local agent. They contract out construction work and use attrition to let existing contracts lapse.
• The sale would witness the further decline of good healthcare benefits and the loss of defined pension plans, and provide another example of corporate greed for short term gains.

As a regulated utility, cherry-picking customers must not be tolerated. Encourage your legislator to block the sale of Verizon, so that the information superhighway isn’t turned into a dirt road!

FOR MORE INFO: Visit http://www.stop-the-sale.org

Rally For Livable Wages at UVM

Student Labor Action Project
Students for Peace and Global Justice
RALLY
September 29th
NOON on the steps of Waterman, UVM
for
LIVABLE WAGES FOR ALL!
DIRECTLY EMPLOYED AND CONTRACTED WORKERS!
Come celebrate the Basic Needs Task Force's recommendation to the administration that calls for all directly employed workers to be brought to a livable wage!
Tell the UVM Administration to accept the recommendation and implement it as soon as possible!
Demand that contracted workers be included in the livable wage policy!
This is the University of Vermont's chance to be a leader in labor issues to Burlington, Vermont, and the whole country! With a real livable wage policy, we will send the message that we care about the workers that make this University run and make it great. By paying a livable wage, we will send the message that we believe our workers should not be living in poverty, and should be earning at least enough to support themselves and their families! Social justice is an important value of UVM, and a livable wage policy will help immensely in the pursuit of that goal. Lets work together to make UVM as great is it can be!
To find out more information, or if you or your club/organization are interested in endorsing this rally, please contact SLAP at uvmslap[at]riseup.net

Labor unites to make Burlington a Livable City

Labor unites to make Burlington a livable city

Published: Sunday, September 3, 2006
Burlington Free Press (versions also published in Times Argus and other VT newspapers)

By James Haslam

On the evening of Aug. 24, an unusual meeting took place. Burlington teachers, construction workers, University of Vermont faculty, service and maintenance workers from both UVM and Burlington public schools, and union representatives from the Burlington Electric Department, Chittenden County Transportation Authority, UPS, City Market and Burlington schools paraeducators sat down together to discuss how to make Burlington a "real livable city" for working people. It was fitting that this took place near the eve of Labor Day. We started by asking ourselves: "Is Burlington one of the 'top 10 most livable cities' in the country?" as has been boasted in national magazines. And, if so, livable for whom? The discussion, surprisingly, painted the picture of a different reality for thousands of community members who are feeling very insecure about the future. The common problems were pointed out:Health care costs are soaring. The system is broken, health care should be a basic right and companies shouldn't be profiting off the sick. There is no affordable housing.We can't afford to send our children to college.The costs of living are going up across the board, and wages aren't keeping up. Property taxes are not the way to fund our schools; they need to be funded by fair income taxes based on people's ability to pay.The point of this meeting wasn't just to list problems, but to do something about them. Burlington labor leaders began making plans on taking action. The first step is to recognize that there's a "race to the bottom" going on, where workers are forced to take less every passing year -- cuts in benefits, low wages, increased hours of work. Almost every employer, whether they be mega-corporations or public school administrations, are saying in unison that benefits need to be cut. Nowadays, unionized workers are the last workers to have affordable health care and decent retirement benefits, and now those are under attack. For workers who don't have unions, those benefits are often cut unilaterally, or they were never given in the first place. But even when union workers successfully fight back against concessions and hold on to decent benefits, the race to the bottom continues as the thousands of non-unionized workers continue to lose ground and good jobs disappear. Unionized workers are only 10 percent of the work force, but organized labor is still the only voice of all working people. On Labor Day we celebrate victories won by the labor movement: the weekend, the eight-hour workday, employer-funded health care, a more humane workplace, and Social Security. But as these past gains erode, the need for a new labor movement based in our communities, workplaces, and homes is increasingly important. On Labor Day 2006, labor leaders in Burlington are upholding this tradition when they say "Let's make Burlington a real livable city for everyone." At 10 a.m., Monday, join hundreds of Burlington-area community members for a Labor Day parade starting outside the H.O. Wheeler School on the corners of Elmwood Avenue and Archibald Street. The parade will make its way through the city and down to Battery Park where there will be a rally and free community picnic with hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream. It will not only be a fun family day of celebration, but a starting point for a new movement in Burlington. A movement to establish affordable health care as a basic right, livable wages for all workers, the creation of much needed affordable housing and for people to have time to spend with their families. The race to the bottom must be stopped. Together we can make Burlington a real livable city for everyone.

James Haslam is the director of the Vermont Workers' Center Jobs With Justice. E-mail info@workerscenter.org to tell them what a livable city would mean to you and to learn more.