Could Tom Perez or his top lieutenants afford to shave $10 an hour from their own salaries to pay interns? Could its millionaire consultants be taxed a little to make sure interns get paid the minimum wage?” asks Ross Eisenbrey, a senior fellow at the union-funded Economic Policy Institute. “A party that claims to want a higher minimum wage should pay it to every employee—even those it calls interns.”
“We are here to work and make money, and anybody would do the same thing—stop working if you aren’t paid what you are promised,” says the worker. “We plan to stay out for as long as it takes to find a solution.”
Cambiemos de lugar. Bromea Bryce. Paul Ryan puede venir a trabajar en el acero y yo me iré a D. C.
“Let’s trade places,” Bryce quips. “Paul Ryan can come work the iron and I’ll go to D.C.”
“We have supported the pipeline from the beginning and that hasn’t changed,” says Jeff Rowe, president of the 10,000 member-strong Virginia Association of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. “That being said, this election is about a lot more than pipeline.”
Perriello sat down with Payday to discuss how Virginia can move away from, as he puts it, “an economy of extraction to an economy of restoration.”
Of the cities surveyed—Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Houston, and Dallas —researchers found that Nashville was the most dangerous city for construction workers.
Despite the intimidation felt by many immigrants, FLOC activists say that community labor organizations like FLOC are going to become even more vital in the Trump era.
“There are a lot of abuses against Latinos and farmworkers,” says Floricel Morales-Cruz, one of the kale workers. “I want people to know that they shouldn’t let growers take advantage of them and that we need to be organized.”
“We can’t find workers this year – it’s been tough,” says Julio Rubio of the Kentucky Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association. “Most of the workers we have at the track won’t even leave to go out at night to buy groceries because they are so scared of being deported.”
“Having a union doesn’t mean you have to have a majority of workers or a union contract,” said veteran union organizer Saladin Muhammad, co-founder of the Southern Workers Assembly. “A union exists whenever workers come together to form an organization to build power.”
University of Wyoming Labor Law Professor Mike Duff tells Payday’s Mike Elk that it is likely the Trump Administration will slowly kill the investigation. Duff and Elk discuss what type of enforcement actions the Trump Administration is going to allow and why the Google investigation is unlikely to continue.
In an exclusive interview with Payday, Perez says that he wants to see Democratic politicians get more involved in building community support for labor struggles in the South, like the recent union drives at Boeing in South Carolina and Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tenn., where Republican politicians vigorously fought against unionization. If Perez is able to get Southern Democrats to embrace the labor movement, it would be a significant reversal of practices by the Democratic Party.