Okay so I think this Dillinger Escape Plan live video is really awesome. On the other hand, if anyone stepped on my head I would probably want them to suffer some similar act, their other talents and merits notwithstanding.
By the way, I have renewed my love for Pandora Dot Com. I’ve discovered crazy dissonant piano compositions, intensely aggressive grindcore, and lovely pop country. Hurray.
From the City Pages:
MoA Starbucks Union Goes Public
Members of a recently formed Starbucks union staged a small press conference today outside the Mall of America and issued several management-directed demands, including a living wage, an end to under-staffing, and guaranteed work hours.
Five baristas, each wearing a red-and-black Industrial Workers of the World pin, stood before TV cameras and took turns reading from printouts. Jake Bell spoke first, insisting on a more generous severance package for soon-to-be laid off employees. (Starbucks recently announced it will be closing 600 stores nationwide, including 27 in Minnesota.)
“Many workers at closing stores have served Starbucks loyally for years,” he said. “They deserve more than a 30-day notice before layoff, two weeks pay, and the vague possibility of a transfer.”
The MoA-based coffee shop is the latest Starbucks to affiliate with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Since 2004, the storied union has been organizing Starbucks shops throughout the country, much to the chagrin of company brass. Last year, the National Labor Relations Board accused the Seattle-based chain of union-busting.
“Starbucks is waging a vicious anti-union campaign across the country,” said Erik Forman, who claims his firing earlier this month was due to his association with the IWW. “We need to put a stop to this in Minnesota!”
Starbucks baristas union drive comes at key time
The effort to organize local latte-slingers could hurt the ailing chain
By Matt Snyders
Published on July 23, 2008
It was a typical, busy Thursday afternoon at the Mall of America’s first-floor Starbucks, and Erik Forman was four hours into his shift. The slight, 23-year-old barista was soon approached by a vaguely familiar face: Caroline Kaker, the chain’s Bloomington-based district manager. She pulled him aside and led him to the adjacent Barnes & Noble. There, she broke the grim news: You’re fired.
Forman was stunned. Sure, two weeks earlier, he had shown up a half-hour late and was issued a written warning. But that wasn’t why Forman was getting the ax today. Management decided to deep-six him after learning that Forman had discussed the warning with co-workers.
“Erik violated terms of his June 2008 final written corrective action by discussing it with a peer,” reads the notice of separation.
But there was another topic Forman had discussed with peers, one not explicitly mentioned in the write-up: unionizing.
A member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Forman had been in the process of organizing his co-workers under the IWW banner for nearly two years.
“It started with workers during their situations during cigarette breaks, during car rides to and from work,” Forman recalls. “We first approached the IWW in September of ‘06. They helped us figure out how to build a strategy.”
In 2004, the IWW took on a Starbucks in Midtown Manhattan, with modest success. In the following years, the list of IWW Starbucks Union affiliates grew to include five other shops in New York City; two in Chicago; one in Grand Rapids, Michigan; and one in Rockville, Maryland.
Shortly after the first union sprouted in New York, Starbucks higher-ups exchanged concerned emails, leaked to The Wall Street Journal, about how to handle the epidemic of unionizing. One, dated October 29, 2004, begins with a blunt introduction: “Below is a summary of the recent developments in New York City regarding our attempts to thwart a potential union situation,” it reads.
In March 2006, the IWW accused the coffee giant of union-busting and filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board. Starbucks settled, agreeing to display workers’ rights posters in three of its stores and to allow two fired workers back on staff.
“The reasons they gave for firing me were identical to what they did in New York,” says Forman, who’s also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. “This is a pretty blatant example of union-busting. We’ve been planning on making our movement public for a while—so even though it comes as a blow, it’s kind of a galvanizing blow.”
On July 11, one day after Forman got clipped, five workers walked off the floor and approached the floor manager, Jason Lyons, with a petition demanding Forman’s reinstatement. Lyons told them it was out of his hands.
Now Forman and the IWW stand poised to organize baristas throughout the metro. On Monday, July 21, they went public. Their demands include a living wage, “respectful” scheduling, and an end to the company’s alleged union-busting.
Asked about Forman’s allegations, a Starbucks spokesperson had little to say.
“We just received the charge [from Forman] and we’re reviewing it,” says Stacey Krum, on the phone from Seattle. “There’s nothing we can offer right now.”
The charges clash with Starbucks’ image as a corporate paragon of social responsibility. The Seattle-based chain has staked its reputation on progressive values that play well with its well-to-do clientele. Starbucks was listed as No. 7 in Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” this year.
The most frequently extolled of Starbucks’ labor practices is its healthcare program. It’s one of the few major retailers to provide health insurance to part-time employees. But that comes with a couple of caveats.
First, in order to qualify, workers must log 240 hours per quarter. However, there are no guaranteed hours and many baristas complain of sporadic, unpredictable scheduling. As a result, only 65 percent of Starbucks workers, including management, meet the 240-hour minimum. Many of the remaining workers (particularly part-timers) decide not to buy into the plan; rent payments take priority over premiums.
Consequently, the company’s health insurance plan covers less than half (40.9 percent) of employees. As organizers like to point out, that’s less than the oft-demonized Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., which covers 47 percent of its workers.
“It’s just incredible hypocrisy on this core identity issue,” says IWW organizer Daniel Gross. “It’s absolutely misleading. It’s taken a sub-par program and turned it into a marketing advantage through spin and PR.”
Last week, Starbucks released the full list of 600-odd stores expected to close in the coming months, including 27 in Minnesota. Sixteen of the doomed shops sit in the Twin Cities metro.The closings will affect some 12,000 workers nationwide. On Monday, Forman’s former co-workers at the Mall of America’s Starbucks walked off the floor and issued a letter to management demanding “just treatment of all employees affected by Starbucks’ closure of stores nationwide.” With an economy seemingly in free-fall and job security plummeting, unionization—for good or ill—enjoys more appeal than it did 10 years ago.
“This will be the biggest fire they’ve had to put out in a while,” says Forman. “The economy is getting worse, people can’t get by and are having to work 14-hour days. Management’s biggest tool has always been the threat of firing. People are starting to think maybe that’s a risk worth taking.”
I’m moving to a new apartment and it’s a major pain. As part of this, I’ve been going over stuff I have in paper and trying to get rid of it (I think I pitched like 3 copy paper boxes full of photocopied papers, it’s nuts. I also have sold over $200 in books to the used bookstore and donated more to the resale store near my house.) (more…)
So I was working on another post and remember I’d written this thing, which I thought I had put up on the blog before but which apparently I didn’t (I couldn’t find it, anyway). It’s from when I had plans to study the IWW. (more…)
I just stumbled on this web site, an e-journal called New Beginnings. I like it a lot. (more…)
July 21, 2008
Tel: 612-245-4871
web: http://starbucksunion.org/ http://iww.org
email: tcsbuxunion@gmail.com
Mall of America Starbucks Baristas Go Union
Baristas join IWW, Demand Fair Severance for Baristas at Closing Stores, Living Wage, Guaranteed Hours, Dignity and Respect
July 21- At 10am, baristas at the Mall of America I Starbucks donned red-and-black union pins and walked off the floor to present their manager with a demand letter. They announced their membership in the Industrial Workers of the World labor union
The decision to join a union comes in the wake of the coffee giant’s announcement that it will close 600 stores, including 27 in Minnesota. Union Baristas demanded a fair severance package for affected workers. Starbucks plans to give workers one
month notice before laying them off and will be paying a variable severance package of two weeks’ pay or less.
Union baristas working at stores remaining open, such as the Mall of America,
demand a living wage, annual cost-of-living increases, guaranteed hours, health and safety improvements, and dignity and respect.
While portraying itself as a ’socially-responsible’ employer, Starbucks pays baristas a poverty wage of $7.60/hr. In addition, every single retail hourly worker at Starbucks in the United States is a part-time employee with no guarantee of any number of work hours per week. According to a Wall Street Journal report, 42% of its employees (including managers) are covered by the company health care package, a lower percentage than Wal-Mart, which ensures 47% of its workforce.
The Mall of America Starbucks is the first Starbucks in Minnesota, and the first store in the Mall of America, to have a public union presence. Baristas at stores in New York, Chicago, Grand Rapids, and other cities have joined the Industrial Workers of the World since the campaign began on May 17, 2004, despite the anti-union
campaign on the part of Starbucks. Union baristas, bussers, and shift supervisors have fought successfully for improved scheduling and staffing levels, increased wages, and workplace safety.
The proletariat does not literally own nothing. The point really is not ownership at all but power and control. As Stan Weir and others have noted, at least in the US workers typically lose otherwise accessible democratic rights that they have outside the job. This is part of the doctrine of at-will employment. In a sense, within certain limits, this renders the workplace private in the way in which the home under couverture is private. It might be interesting to look at the changes in these doctrines over time and to what degree they may have inter-related. I’m also interested in a resonance between these and other themes which may be just metaphorical. That is, married women under couverture and workers might be said in a way to be legally disabled (often with attendant attempts to prove that this was justifiable due to inherent and biological disabilities which required subordinate social status). Did these legal disabilities relate at all the legal treatment of those who were in whatever fashion disabled physically or mentally? (Bracketing admittedly important questions about the meaning of this term.)
Not very clear notes on reading for the operaismo discussion group. (more…)