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What Obama Should Have Said

4 Feb

Andrew Sum, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University and Paul Harrington, Director, Center for Labor Markets and Policy, Drexel University, writing for the Huffington Post, offered their own version of a progressive State of the Union address that President Obama should have offered last week:

A State of the Union Address for Today’s Labor Market Realities

“Our nation’s teenagers and many young adults ages 20-29 are working at a considerably lower rate today than at any time since the end of World War Two. Absence of work experience in the teen years and early 20s prevents our youth from acquiring marketable occupational skills, solid work habits, the soft skills demanded by employers, and opportunities to interact with adults and observe the skills and behaviors needed to succeed at work. Absence of early work experience will reduce their employment, wages, and training opportunities in their mid 20s. These problems are not confined to young adults lacking college degrees. Too many of our new college graduates are left either jobless or holding jobs that do not utilize the skills and knowledge that they acquired in college, reducing the return on their human capital investments and those of society.

A variety of actions are needed to improve the employment prospects of these young workers. We will work with states and local workforce development boards to expand internship opportunities and paid employment of high school students both year round and during the summer, increase the hiring of career specialists to prepare them to make the transition from high school to the world of work, and work with the nation’s employers to expand new youth apprenticeship opportunities, and provide subsidized employment in the summer for the nation’s jobless at-risk youth. We also will experiment with employer wage subsidies to promote the full-time employment of out-of-school youth, and we shall work with colleges and universities to provide additional internships and cooperative education positions for our college students to facilitate their transition to the labor market upon graduation.”

The Epidemic of This Decade: Youth Unemployment

4 Feb

Businessweek’s cover article this week is on the global crisis of youth unemployment. With protests led by young workers demanding democracy in Egypt, what is it this generation cannot do?  And what is society loosing by derailing their opportunity to enter the labor market?

The Youth Unemployment Bomb:

From Cairo to London to Brooklyn, too many young people are jobless and disaffected. Inside the global effort to put the next generation to work

“An economy that can’t generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed—including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer. Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution was not the first time these alienated men and women have made themselves heard. Last year, British students outraged by proposed tuition increases—at a moment when a college education is no guarantee of prosperity—attacked the Conservative Party’s headquarters in London and pummeled a limousine carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla Bowles. Scuffles with police have repeatedly broken out at student demonstrations across Continental Europe. And last March in Oakland, Calif., students protesting tuition hikes walked onto Interstate 880, shutting it down for an hour in both directions.

More common is the quiet desperation of a generation in “waithood,” suspended short of fully employed adulthood. At 26, Sandy Brown of Brooklyn, N.Y., is a college graduate and a mother of two who hasn’t worked in seven months. “I used to be a manager at a Duane Reade [drugstore] in Manhattan, but they laid me off. I’ve looked for work everywhere and I can’t find nothing,” she says. “It’s like I got my diploma for nothing.”

While the details differ from one nation to the next, the common element is failure—not just of young people to find a place in society, but of society itself to harness the energy, intelligence, and enthusiasm of the next generation. Here’s what makes it extra-worrisome: The world is aging. In many countries the young are being crushed by a gerontocracy of older workers who appear determined to cling to the better jobs as long as possible and then, when they do retire, demand impossibly rich private and public pensions that the younger generation will be forced to shoulder.”

So here is the main question… ignoring the frame of a choice between protecting seasoned workers or nurturing young workers… what can we do to expand job opportunities for young workers? And what can unions do to prevent a lost generation?

The end of the article returns to the standard anti-worker propaganda that minimum wage laws and unions decrease hiring. We know these to be empirically false, but if young workers are looking for institutions to blame how do we make sure this propaganda does not take off and young workers see the labor movement as part of the solution?

AFL-CIO Young Worker Advisory Council Launched

3 Feb

The AFL-CIO is clearly moving on some of the recommendations from the Next Up Summit last summer, launching a Young Worker Advisory Council similar to their other advisory councils on central labor councils and state federations. Here’ s a new post from the AFL-CIO NOW Blog:

Labor’s Next Gen Moves Forward with Young Worker Advisory Council

Photo credit: Joe Kekeris

Nora Frederickson, AFL-CIO Media fellow, sends us this report on the first Young Worker Advisory Council meeting.

The union movement’s young workers are getting ready to shake things up.

Working off of the short- and long-term goals laid out at last summer’s Next Up Summit, the brand-new Young Worker Advisory Council met in Washington, D.C., this week to put together a three-month plan to engage the next generation of young workers.

The council emerged out of discussions held during the Next Up Summit. Young union workers and activists expressed their desire to have a greater voice in the development of AFL-CIO’s national outreach program for young workers.

Following the summit, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, who has made young worker outreach and mobilization a top priority, began a series of conversations on the composition of the Young Worker Advisory Council and how it should inform the union movement’s outreach to young workers. Says Shuler:

When the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO created this council, our hope was to give young activists and leaders a clear voice in shaping the conversation and how to grow and develop the next generation of labor leaders.

Following the first day of discussions, Chris Lane, a public safety officer from Richmond, Va., and president of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 2201, said he was pleased with the progress that had been made since last summer.

I’ve been a member of CWA for 13 years. Obviously this effort is still in the infancy stages, but it’s a breath of fresh air for the labor movement.

Shuler says the council’s first meeting marks a major milestone in our efforts to engage young workers.

I am so excited to meet this incredible group of leaders, and I look forward to the unique perspective that their voices will bring to this initiative.

These efforts came to fruition this week as the more than 20 new members of the council—a diverse group of emerging labor leaders from national affiliate unions, state and local labor bodies, constituency groups and Working America—met for the first time in Washington D.C., this week.

Young Worker Advisory Council members include:

Tahir Duckett – Working America
Sara Kuntzler – Denver Area Labor Federation
Reggie Davis – UWUA
Sherrice Wilfong – APWU
Jessica Ingerick – OPEIU
Chris Sloan _ IUPAT
Jessica Hayssen – Minnesota AFL-CIO
Jeremy Redleaf – AFTRA
Chris Lane – CWA
Michelle Wyvill – IAM
Casey Karns – AFSCME
Nick Guitaud – USW
Allison Doherty-LaCasse – AFT
Joe Briggs – NFLPA
Lorenzo Arciniega – IBEW
Jesse Barber – UMWA
Keith Richardson – APWU
Eric Clinton – UNITEHERE!

The council focused its efforts this week on developing concrete next steps covering four young worker priorities:

  • Developing a toolkit for young workers to use in starting or leading a young worker group at the local levels
  • Connecting young workers with opportunities for training and mentoring
  • Developing a brand that resonates with young workers
  • Identifying new ways to bring young people into the labor movement.

Members also brainstormed the roles of the council, national unions and the AFL-CIO  in the labor movement’s outreach to young workers.

Over the next three months, advisory board members will work with the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions to ensure the Next Up website serves as a resource for young workers managing or starting local groups, survey young workers to find out what kind of mentoring and labor education programs they want access to and examine how to expand existing models for union internship programs and organizer trainings. They will also start planning the next young workers summit, set for this summer.

Sara Kuntzler, political director of the Colorado AFL-CIO and another Council member, put it this way.

We’re at a pivotal moment in the labor movement, and young workers are where the energy is. They are the hope of the movement. It’s so encouraging to work with a group with so much passion, energy, and hope in prioritizing areas of focus for our work with young workers.

Alta Gracia Factory In Action

2 Feb

Last year, United Students Against Sweatshops were able to make a significant step in changing the way the collegiate apparel industry operates by working with Knights Apparel to open the Alta Gracia factory, offering students the opportunity to buy sweat-free hoodies.  Recently they took a group of students to visit the factory and inspect the working conditions.  Here’s a report from the Daily at University of Washington, which is contracting with Alta Gracia.

By Kirsten Johnson
February 1, 2011

On a typical day in any lecture class, it’s easy to spot students sporting purple UW-logo hoodies. While owning one or two of these is common, some people might not think about the working conditions under which they were made.


Photo by Lucas Anderson.

USAS member Morgan Currier wears her Alta Gracia sweatshirt in front of the only U-Book Store clothing rack that holds the brand.

“Something that we take for granted [is] where our clothes come from,” said sophomore Morgan Currier. “Like we don’t necessarily think about it that much.”

As a member of the UW chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS), Currier and her fellow members have been bringing attention on campus to the issue of sweatshop-made apparel, as well as promoting Alta Gracia Apparel — a brand that guarantees its factory workers benefits including health care, a living wage and unionization.

Just recently, Currier traveled alongside six other USAS college students to view the Alta Gracia factory conditions firsthand.

“It’s exactly what a factory should be,” she said. “It has fans, it has lights, emergency exits. They can get up and get water when they need, they can talk to each other, they can go on bathroom breaks.”

Currier said that she found it interesting to see the work ethic the factory workers had in performing simple tasks.

“Everyone has a part,” she said. “Someone will sew on the hood, someone will sew on the sleeve — they do this all day, every day. They make thousands of pieces of apparel every day. I don’t think the average American would be able to sit [there] all day and sew on a hood the same way they do a thousand times, every day.”

During her visit, she brought her own UW sweatshirt to show one of the workers.

“I swore he was going to cry,” she said. “It was just like, ‘Look at this thing that I have created that has your university logo, and you wear it at your school in America, but I made it here.’ He was just looking at the stitching and [was] really, really proud of his work.”

This past November, the U-Book Store began selling a small selection of Alta Gracia apparel in its stores. CEO of the U-Book Store Bryan Pearce said that the store looked into the initiative that was proposed by Knights Apparel, who created the Alta Gracia brand, and decided to place an initial order.

“We thought it was very noble and had quite a bit of merit to it,” Pearce said. “We felt it was important for our store to carry that line of products along with the other things that we do in the interest of being socially responsible.”

Before the Alta Gracia apparel arrived in the U-Book Store last November, members of USAS brought two factory workers from the Dominican Republic to campus to describe their former working conditions and help promote Alta Gracia.

USAS — previously known as SLAP — has existed in various forms on campus since 1997. They have been actively involved in many major social-justice campaigns, including the Nike campaign last year.

USAS is hoping to promote Alta Gracia since the U-Book Store sells the apparel based on demand.

Senior Garrett Strain, a member of USAS, said he hopes that eventually all the apparel purchased by the university will be produced in factories like Alta Gracia.

“It’s much less important to me that it’s Alta Gracia and more that it’s produced in a factory where workers have the right to have the freedom to join a union and be paid a living wage,” he said. “That’s ultimately the bottom line for me. Students should care because it’s their school’s emblem that is being screened on these sweatshirts. In many ways, [sweatshop-produced apparel] tarnishes the reputation and the image of our school. And I think students should be proactive in wanting to purchase clothes that shed their school in a good light and provide it with a reputation for standing up for workers’ rights.”

Currier said that response that they have received from student groups so far has been encouraging.

“The school argues that there is only a small percentage of students that care about where their apparel was made and that those are the types of students [who] don’t necessarily wear UW apparel, but we think that they’re wrong,” she said. “We think a lot of students care, including students in the Greek Community, in ASUW, in these smaller communities that typically wear their apparel more, we think that they care just as much.”

Reach reporter Kirsten Johnson at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.

Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) Connects College Campuses to Union Movement

1 Feb

AFL-CIO Now Blog:

Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) Connects College Campuses to Union Movement

AFL-CIO Media Outreach fellow Jennifer Angarita joins Chris Hicks, Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) coordinator, to discuss the parallels between campus and community organizing.

Founded in 1999 as a joint initiative between Jobs with Justice and the United States Student Association, the Student Labor Action Project (SLAP) engages student activists with economic justice campaigns in their communities and campuses.

Across the country, students in local SLAP chapters meet to organize around issues that affect both students and workers. Currently, campuses are working together to campaign against dramatic state budget cuts that threaten the layoffs of thousands of workers and increase fee tuitions, which leave students with astronomical amounts of debt.

As coordinator, Chris Hicks helps student activists build relationships with local unions and community and faith-based groups and Jobs with Justice coalitions. Hicks said:

SLAP supports the growing student movement for economic justice by making links between campus and community organizing, providing skills training to build lasting student organizations, and developing campaigns that win concrete victories for working families while breaking the poverty cycle by fighting for access to higher education and full and fair employment.

Every year from March 28 to April 4, SLAP organizes more than 150 campuses during the National Student Labor Week of Action. Across the country, students hold hundreds of events to celebrate the lives of César Chávez and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and build solidarity between students and workers.

Before joining SLAP, Hicks, a recent college grad from Wichita State University, worked as a union organizer for SEIU. His first memory of the union movement came from his mother’s attempt to organize her workplace. The experience helped to expose Hicks to the collective power of working people.

For Hicks, the student and union movements have always gone hand in hand.

Students graduate [and] want the best workplace conditions possible. The interest of the union movement is the interest of the student movement, and that goes both ways. Students should care [about unions] because as soon as they graduate, the labor movement is where they will be. If they don’t fight as students to protect jobs, to stop corporate greed and to stand with workers, then they will be worse off for it. If they do those things, though, and understand that what directly affects workers, indirectly affects them, they will be much better off.

Learn more about the Student Labor Week of Action at www.studentlabor.org. For individuals or groups interested in getting involved with SLAP, please contact slap@jwj.org.

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