20 minute read
Union Matters
We need legislation to help keep Amazon warehouse workers safe
Stuart Appelbaum
President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, Twitter: @sappelbaum. www.rwdsu.org
More people are shopping online, buying everything from toothpaste and tissues to desks and dining tables. As a result, warehouse facilities are popping up across New York at staggering numbers; Amazon alone has opened nearly 70 facilities in the state and over half of those facilities have been built since January 2021. At the same time, we have seen increased stress, pain, and resulting safety issues for warehouse workers, due to increased quotas and speeds.
Unsafe work speeds, unreasonable work quotas, dangerous work, and insufficient breaks all contribute to the skyrocketing rate of injuries and sickness in the industry––including heart attacks, strokes, repetitive motion injuries, and irreparable life-long joint and back pain. At Amazon, the injury rate is 54% higher than the average rate for the state’s warehousing industry––and even that is a staggering misrepresentation of the reality given how many injuries at Amazon go unreported.
Regulations protecting workers in the warehousing industry have lagged far behind its rapid growth. The RWDSU has long prioritized the challenge of protecting warehouse workers from stress induced injuries and illness from limitless quotas.
The RWDSU encouraged the introduction of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act (WWPA – A10020/ S8922), modeled after similar legislation signed into law in California last year. The law would help protect workers from inhumane quotas––quotas that have caused workers lifelong injuries and outrageously, in some cases, their lives. The WWPA would require that quotas, which are oftentimes completely unknown to workers, be transparent. And it would prevent workers from being disciplined if they fail to meet these quotas, especially if it’s due to basic human needs like bathroom and water breaks. Research shows that many of these injuries and illnesses are preventable and are the result of mismanagement that prioritizes speed and productivity for profits over workers’ safety. The WWPA would create important boundaries to protect warehouse industry workers from the brutal line speeds and quotas that are driving injuries and sickness at New York’s warehouses.
The rise of e-commerce has forever changed the retail sector. Just because the work has changed doesn’t mean workers shouldn’t be protected. We will continue to fight to ensure workers and their health and safety are protected. Without the WWPA, workers will suffer.
Our coalition of workers, community groups and unions took a huge step and achieved a big win for workers’ safety when the WWPA passed the NYS legislature. This critical bill needs to be signed into law so it can start helping workers who need it now more than ever.
Black workers, history, and building union membership
(Amanda Ulloa photo)
By KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO
Special to the AmNews
There’s been a growing worker union movement in 2022. Workers are turning to labor unions at traditionally non-union companies like Trader Joe’s, Amazon, REI, Target, Chipotle, Starbucks, Apple, and more.
“Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of labor unions,” Gallup announced in reference to its annual Work and Education survey, conducted between Aug. 1-23. “Although statistically similar to last year’s 68%, [labor union approval] is up from 64% before the pandemic and is the highest Gallup has recorded on this measure since 1965.
“Such support comes despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans aren’t in a labor union themselves.”
The current unionization wave is a response to the strains many workers have dealt with during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having to struggle to pay for goods and services due to rising costs and stagnant wages while reflecting on ongoing conversations about the need for everyone to have a better work-life balance, has pushed workers to strike out for the positive features—i.e., better wages, health, and work-rule benefits—that being part of a union can bring.
“Among major race and ethnicity groups,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said when it released its annual report on unionization this past January, “Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2021 (11.5%) than white workers (10.3%), Asian workers (7.7%), and Hispanic workers (9.0%).” Generally, the Black community’s allegiance to unions comes as an inheritance from the Civil Rights Movement. Initially, when trade union organizations were created in the 1860s, white members voted to exclude Black workers. So, Blacks created their own labor organizations. Black women were the first to establish a union less than a year after the official end of African enslavement. On June 20, 1866, the Washerwomen of Jackson, Mississippi sent a letter to the city’s mayor, making it known that they would be establishing a set price for their laundry work. There’s little information on how their statement was received in Jackson, but other unions of now free Black laborers were also quickly established. Two of the most famous were the “Colored” National Labor Union (CNLU) where Frederick Douglass was elected president in 1872, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the first all-Black labor union in the U.S., established in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph.
Randolph organized the men hired to work as sleeping car porters with the Pullman Palace Car Company because he knew they had been specifically hired to cater to the wishes of white railroad car travelers. “[George] Pullman was open about his reasons for hiring Black porters;” Jennifer Hasso writes in an article for Ferris State University’s online “Jim Crow Museum.” “[H]e reasoned that formerly enslaved people would best anticipate and cater to his customers’ needs and would work long hours for cheap wages. By the 1920s, 20,224 African Americans were working as Pullman porters and train personnel. This was the largest category of Black labor in the United States and Canada at the time.”
Under Randolph, members of the BSCP were considered some of the best-paid Black workers in the country. BSCP was later chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL)— and the organization’s strength and ability to promote and formulate agendas (Randolph’s threat of a march on Washington, D.C. in 1941 pushed then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination by federal agencies and all unions working with the defense industry), made it vital in working with Civil Rights Movement activists. Alongside the BSCP, Randolph established the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in 1960. The NALC was never as powerful as the BSCP, but it is recognized for having initiated the call for 1963’s famous “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
THE NEW YORK AMSTERDAM NEWS
September 8, 2022 - September 14, 2022 • 11
New York drops mask requirement on public transportation
Commuter wears mask on subway (Liliana Drew Pexels photo)
Associated Press Hochul announced Wednesday.
Masks will be encouraged but not required on buses and trains including the New York City subway system, Hochul said.
Compliance with the subway mask requirement was high early in the coronavirus pandemic but has dropped steeply in recent months. Masks will still be required in healthcare settings including hospitals and nursing homes, Hochul said.
Federal officials approved booster shots last week that target the most prevalent strain of the COVID-19 omicron variant.
Hochul, a Democrat, got the booster herself at her news conference in New York City and urged others to follow her example.
“We do believe that we’re in a good place right now, especially if New Yorkers take advantage of these boosters,” she said.
There was a time in our eduEDITORIAL cational system when classical poetry was part of the curriculum, and every schoolchild knew by heart this stanza from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”—“Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere. Nor any drop to drink.”
We talk a lot about the past as prologue and this stanza is very apt today when we consider the water crisis, particularly the ever-widening reports of water unfit to drink.
Eight years ago, though it seems like yesterday, Flint, Michigan was faced with the problem of water contaminated with lead and other toxins. Memories of that came back the other day via the situation in Jackson, Mississippi, and even closer to home with the alert that arsenic was found in the water of one of the NYCHA housing units.
While the conditions in Mississippi have improved with the news that the water pressure has increased, allowing residents to have water to shower and to flush their toilets, there are still some concerns about whether it’s drinkable.
A similar caveat pertains here in the city at the Jacob Riis Houses after testing showed no detection of arsenic; still residents are advised against using the available water supply until additional testing.
What’s happening here and in Mississippi are by no means anomalies; they are just symptomatic of an increasingly widespread infrastructure problem in terrible disrepair.
If something as critical and seemingly reliable as our drinking water is suddenly a danger to our health, what’s to be said of other features of our crumbling system?
Yes, Samuel, there is water, water everywhere and whether it’s in the flooding regions of the nation or undrinkable in other places, you were spot on back in your Rime at the end of the 18tth century.
By ROGER WAREHAM
In 2022, in the richest country the world has ever seen, Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, has no water for drinking, cooking, bathing, flushing a toilet or fighting a fire. As of this moment, the situation is predicted to continue “indefinitely.” We are calling on President Joe Biden to expeditiously authorize billions of dollars in emergency funds to address both the current humanitarian crisis triggered by the climate crisis induced flooding, and the implementation of long-term action steps to correct decades-long operational neglect of Jackson’s water systems.
The situation in Jackson is not new, nor unexpected. As Jackson Mayor Antar Lumumba said, “We’ve been crying out for more than two years, saying that it’s not a matter of if our [water] systems will fail but a matter of when our systems will fail.”
Almost 17 years to the day of the Katrina man-made disaster, the citizens of predominantly Black Jackson are facing the same problem which the citizens of then-predominantly Black New Orleans had. As Jelani Cobb wrote in 2005, “Katrina can be viewed as the first of a series of crises that seem to have become a referendum on Black citizenship.”
Jackson is the latest crisis in that series which now includes Flint and Detroit and Newark, N.J. Clearly the referendum has voted thumbs down on Black citizenship.
The citizens of Jackson are the victims of structural and environmental racism. And we are concerned that this latest disaster of capitalism not become a cover to force people out of Jackson as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Black people around the U.S.
What Black people have learned through these crises is that we must organize to take care of ourselves. We cannot depend upon anyone else to do it out of benevolence or simply because it is the humane thing to do. We will join with other groups around the country to get aid to Jackson. But the investment needed to address the roots of the problem has to come from the federal government. We’ve got to bring that pressure to bear on Joe Biden.
Two years ago President Biden said that Black people made his election possible, that we had his back and he’ll have ours. Well the time to have our backs is now. Send the aid to Jackson as quickly and extensively as you have been sending it to the Ukraine.
“THAT’S OUR BLOOD DOWN THERE!” NO MORE KATRINAS!
Attorney Roger Wareham, December 12th Movement International Secretariat. Email: D12m@aol.com website: www.D12M.com
Can you take important files home with you when you leave your job?
By JAMES B. EWERS JR. ED.D.
Elinor R. Tatum: Publisher
and Editor in Chief
I spend a considerable amount of time around student records.
Some records were more confidential which caused me to use additional discretion and caution.
Student records contain data and information that not everyone needs to see.
A person whether they are related to the student or not can’t just arbitrarily come in and see a student’s record.
As a student grows in age and in grade, their records become more difficult to access. Privacy stipulations are enforced regarding who can legally see student records. This can be a challenging situation especially if you are in college. A scenario that I have seen play out on many occasions is that the student won’t sign off on their parents seeing their grades, yet they pay the bill. Because of the positions I held, I had access to a great deal of student information and student files. Students knew that I probably knew what was contained in them. A major part of my professional life was spent in higher education. To be around students helping them to create their own places and spaces was truly an honor. I realized that students trusting me was an important part of their college experience. Keeping student records and files confidential was important to their own success and to my credibility as a college official.
Did I ever take student records home for review? The answer is no.
Did I ever make copies of student records for my files or use? The answer is no.
When I left a position, did I ever take any student records with me to keep at my house? The answer is no.
They were not mine to keep or to muse over when I left the position.
Whatever position of influence you have, you must know the parameters of the position.
Could I have faced any charges if I was found to have taken records home? The answer is yes.
The yes is compounded with the embarrassment and shame that I would have felt.
I am flummoxed by what is happening with the former president of the United States of America and classified documents. Do the words classified, and secretive mean anything to him? Obviously, the answer is no.
The Department of Justice found over 11,000 government documents when they searched his Mar-a-Lago home. Is there any guilt associated with Mr. Trump over having these documents at his home? That answer in my opinion is an easy yes.
William Barr, former U.S. attorney general last week on Fox News said, “No, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why they should have been away from the government if they are classified.” He added, “I, frankly, am skeptical of the claim that [Trump] declassified everything.” The former president wants to have a special master to review boxes and documents taken by the FBI. Barr said, “Well, I think the whole idea of a special master is a bit of a red herring.” Additionally, he said, “At this stage since they have already gone through the documents, I think it’s a waste of time.” Some have reasoned that having a special master is simply a delaying tactic. The truth has always been problematic for him. He casts himself as a savior, yet he is really a sinister sorcerer. It is unthinkable for a former president to have top secret documents at his house. There is no rhyme or reason for it, and you can’t defend the indefensible. One of Trump’s lawyers equated the classified documents being like overdue books at the library. Does that response surprise you? Kristin Fayne-Mulroy: Managing Editor Mr. Trump, the wheels of justice move Nayaba Arinde: Editor slowly, but rest assured they are moving Cyril Josh Barker: Digital Editor towards you.
Damaso Reyes: Investigative Editor Siobhan "Sam" Bennett: Chief Revenue Officer and Head of Advertising Wilbert A. Tatum (1984-2009): Chairman of the Board, CEO and Publisher Emeritus
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the New York Amsterdam News. We continue to publish a variety of viewpoints so that we may know the opinions of others that may differ from our own.
ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS
Without a doubt, China has become the greatest adversarial threat to the United States’ global dominance. While China’s resurgence may surprise those in the West, it comes as no surprise to the rest of Asia. China’s rich history dates back to the Shang Dynasty over 3,000 years ago making it one of the world’s four oldest civilizations along with Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley. China has the longest continuous history of any country in the world. While in the West, we might think of it as a nation of people lagging behind, China’s slow and steady pace is perhaps what has permitted it to outlive all other ancient civilizations.
China’s resurgence comes at an interesting time as the dynamics of a global superpower are somewhat up for grabs as the United States faces multiple internal conflicts that threaten its position as the world’s superpower. This internal conflict couldn’t come at a more significant time for China. Some experts refer to it as the “Chinese Marshall Plan, a 21st-century silk road,” borrowing its name from the original Marshall Plan, also known as the European Recovery Program. This U.S. initiative provided aid to Western Europe following the devastation of World War II. The plan was enacted in 1948 and provided $15 billion to help rebuild efforts across Europe and ultimately helped to cement the U.S. as the world’s superpower. This was undoubtedly a momentous effort but, consider this, 1948 was only 73 years ago. This absolutely pales in comparison to even the shortest-lived Chinese dynasty and while there are starch differences, the point remains that our culture pales in contrast to that of the Chinese. It is that advantage of adversarial competitions that bodes well for China and its Asian neighbors are fully aware of it.
The advantage of an old civilization should not be underestimated. Its values, culture and heritage have been slowly perfected over thousands of years and are baked in every Chinese man, woman, and child. The pride in their rich cultural history and their hunger and aptitude for education is one of the main reasons China’s progress has been amazingly rapid. Contrast China’s rich history to America where people are spending time debating how many genders exist and it’s no surprise that we find ourselves closer and closer to a face off with this rising power.
As China continues to climb, so do its global ambitions, starting with it seeking to reclaim the territory of Taiwan, whose independent political status was determined as a result of World War II, the second phase of the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War. Despite this, China maintains that Taiwan is Chinese territory and belongs to China. This friction has caused the United States, an ally of Taiwan, to go on the offensive. Most recently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, making her the most senior U.S. official to visit in 20 years which received a strong rebuke from China.
Following Nancy Pelosi’s trip, the United States Navy sent two warships into the Taiwan Strait, making it the first U.S. naval transit in the waterway since tensions have spiked between the U.S. and China. China has since stated that it was “ready to thwart any provocation,” which shouldn’t be taken lightly by the U.S. What happens if things between the U.S. and China do escalate? If China ultimately decides to invade Taiwan, will the U.S. really provide direct military protection to the small island nation? Are we truly ready for escalation to a war with China which has the second-largest military in the world? Such a war would be of epic proportions, the likes of which we haven’t seen since one of the major world wars. With technological advancements, the lethality of all attacks would make World War I and II look like child’s play.
The United States should not and cannot continue to be the sole protector of every small nation facing threats by a larger adversarial nation; it’s not in our domestic or international interests. Military conflicts would be prolonged, have a significant toll on the economy and would result in tens of thousands of casualties and there is simply no appetite in the U.S. for such a massive conflict.
With that being said, there are other ways that we can challenge China. We should begin focusing on increasing our educational standards, specifically in math, science and technology. Leading the world on that front and renewing our interests in creating innovative minds and helping developing nations come of age through technology, education, and economic progress is a way to win without war. That is how we challenge and ultimately beat the world’s oldest civilization today. War and military conflict aren’t the solution. Instead, altering our strategy for a more extended play would come as a great surprise to China which likely views the U.S. as a nation only as capable as its military might. While there may be some truth to that theory, military strength cannot be the only tool in our toolbox.
Armstrong Williams (@ARightSide) is manager / sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the year. www. armstrongwilliams.co | www. howardstirkholdings.com
Remembering September 11th
CHRISTINA GREER PH.D.
It is hard to believe it has been almost 21 years since the tragic events of September 11th. I don’t know if I have fully processed that day and the subsequent months that followed. I remember watching television in my Harlem apartment and not fully synthesizing what was happening. I had just flown the day before and had returned to go to class, statistics class I recall.
The remainder of the day was a blur as I tried to comprehend what had happened, what was currently happening, and what our nation would do in response to this attack. I feared America would go on the offensive with a “scorched earth” strategy and sadly my fears were realized as the U.S. military invaded Iraq and Afghanistan which has resulted in war, death, destruction, and the dissolution of families across the world for over 20 years.
As I see the fights still being waged in Congress about compensation for the brave first responders who assisted victims that day and the subsequent weeks, it infuriates me to think that so many families have lost loved ones who worked on September 11th to help the thousands of New Yorkers who were in the vicinity of the fallen buildings. How can we as a nation not want to properly compensate our first responders?
I also think of all the domestic workers and sanitation staff whose names we may never know. The people who were in the buildings early that morning cleaning and preparing the building for others. The laborers who are invisible to far too many, we must remember and honor them just as forcefully as we honor all others.
As a New Yorker, I don’t know how to properly honor and commemorate September 11th. It is such a large part of our city and our nation’s story. It is also one of so many tragedies, I am not sure how to hold space for it. I also think of all the tragedies across the globe that have occurred because of the American military. I think also of the innocent people in various countries just going to work on a mundane day and having unimaginable tragedy befall them by the U.S. military. I don’t want to create an oppression Olympics, but I do want to remind myself to contextualize the brutality that America continues to inflict on innocent workers and citizens of other nations. It is a lot.
So, how do you plan to commemorate September 11th? Will you focus on New York and those lost that fateful day? Will you think more globally about the interconnected violence we inflict upon nations? Or will you think of ways you can become an instrument of peace in an increasingly violent world? However you choose to remember September 11th, may your heart find peace.
Christina Greer, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Fordham University, the author of “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream,” and the cohost of the podcast “FAQ-NYC” and host of “The Blackest Questions” podcast.
