In some local unions, #MeToo has galvanized members

December 14, 2018 by

A hashtag that began trending on social media just over a year ago is now the rallying cry of a movement seeking to change cultural attitudes toward sexual harassment, especially in the workplace.

But ask a trade unionist, and she’ll likely tell you workplace cultures don’t change on their own.

Last month the East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul brought together a panel of local women fighting for change through the collective bargaining process. They exchanged ideas and strategies, reported their victories and setbacks, and reflected on the impact the #MeToo movement has had – and could still have – on both union and non-union workplaces.

It was the first in a series of monthly conversations planned by the ESFL and the University of Minnesota’s Labor Education Service exploring how labor and social movements intersect.

Up next: “The Labor Movement and Environmentalism.” The discussion is set to begin at 7 p.m. Dec. 17 at the Freedom Library, 1105 Greenbrier St.

Beyond celebrity scandal

The #MeToo hashtag – and the movement it inspired – created a community of support that emboldened women to come forward with their experiences of harassment. Their allegations helped reveal the misconduct of several powerful, prominent men, making headlines worldwide.

But these cases represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to workplace sexual harassment. Far less visible are the multitudes of women working in the shadows, harassed by bosses, clients or co-workers who aren’t rich or famous.

The federal agency that investigates workplace sexual harassment, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, says it is difficult to pinpoint how pervasive the problem is, as the overwhelming majority of those who experience harassment do not file a legal complaint. An EEOC task force two years ago estimated anywhere between 25 and 85 percent of working women experience sexual harassment – which includes unwanted touching or comments, requests for sexual favors and sexual assault – on the job.

In August, the National Women’s Law Center released a report analyzing the sexual harassment charges that do get reported. Between 2012 and 2016, researchers found, the most charges came from three industries ­– hospitality, retail and health care – that “employ women in lower paying jobs.”

“A precarious economic situation, including lack of a financial cushion, may make such women more vulnerable to coercion and harassment,” researchers wrote, adding that the same factors make women in low-paying jobs less likely to report harassment.

Shifting the power dynamics

Having a union on the job doesn’t protect workers – in low-wage jobs or any line of work – from sexual harassment. But harassment is fundamentally an abuse of power, and having a union increases workers’ collective power.

Two panelists at the Freedom Library last month discussed how their unions are using the power of solidarity to get justice for women who experience harassment, and to bargain contracts that protect against harassment in the first place.

In negotiations with 20 Twin Cities hotels, members of UNITE HERE Local 17 are demanding all housekeepers be equipped with panic buttons capable of calling for help at a moment’s notice. Local 17 President Christa Mello said union leaders decided to launch the “Hands Off Pants On” campaign after talking to members about their experiences in guest rooms.

“Some of the severe cases of harassment and assault made it really apparent something needed to be done,” Mello said. “Other workers didn’t even know it was a problem … to have something like that happen. And management didn’t want to address it because these (guests) are the people giving them money.”

UNITE HERE locals in other U.S. cities, starting with Chicago, have successfully bargained for panic buttons. Mello said Local 17 members plan to lobby state lawmakers in support of a bill requiring all hotels to equip housekeepers with panic buttons.

Standing with survivors

Members of Local 2822 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees took up #MeToo organizing under much different circumstances, local president Ali Fuhrman said.

The clerical workers’ union last year mobilized support for a member sexually assaulted by her manager at the correctional facility where they work. The survivor, Fuhrman said, reported the incident to management immediately, but it wasn’t until her bosses attempted to discipline her – not her attacker – that she got AFSCME involved. (Management said she was in violation of a policy prohibiting corrections workers from being at the facility on their days off.)

“For me, it was a real quick introduction to supervisor abuse, to the … lengths management will go to protect their own,” said Fuhrman, who won election as president of Local 2822 just two months before the assault.

The county finally put the supervisor on administrative leave after a call from union leadership. When Fuhrman asked for a meeting with a director in the county’s HR department, she brought along 20 fellow members who wanted to show their support for the survivor.

The supervisor was fired, but Local 2822 members didn’t stop mobilizing around the issue. They have since formed a committee on workplace harassment, and taken on the work of confronting harassment claims workers levy against fellow union members – a topic that can be tricky for organizations committed to due process.

“We’re hoping to create a culture in our local where people are given a chance to learn and change,” Fuhrman said. “But if they blow it, then they blow it.”

‘All you have to be is a co-worker’

Unions like Local 17 and 2822 offer solidarity, grievance structures and access to representation that strengthen workers’ ability to stop harassment before it happens and seek justice when it does. But differences exist even among unionized workplaces when it comes to cultural attitudes toward sexual harassment.

Several workers at the Freedom Library discussion – panelists and audience members – said it remains difficult to speak up about incidents on a construction job site, in particular.

Joanne Hager, a member of Laborers Local 563, said most tradespeople are nomadic, moving from job site to job site as their skills are needed. Working in an industry that cycles through workers quickly, Hager knows the risks that come with speaking up or pushing back against harassment.

“Every day I come home and my husband asks, ‘So, are you going to be invited back?’” she said.

Construction, of course, is a male-dominated industry. (“I don’t just hear locker-room talk,” Hager said. “I work in the locker room.”) But unions, employers and public policymakers are working on multiple fronts to recruit more women into careers in the trades – and to make the construction job site less threatening when women get there.

Kathrine Engel, a labor-law attorney who sat on the Freedom Library panel, began leading harassment training sessions for apprentices in Local 292 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers more than 20 years ago. The trainings make apprentices aware of what harassment looks like – and how one person’s toxic behavior can cause distractions and distrust on the job site, making all workers less safe.

“All you have to be is a coworker,” Engel tells apprentices. “One of the most powerful things you can do if you see somebody being harassed is to say, ‘I saw that, and that’s not OK.’”

Changing workplace culture doesn’t happen overnight, but Engel has seen changes over the last two decades that give her hope.

The first year she led a training, the room was filled exclusively with white men, most of whom were openly hostile to her presence. “I joked about wearing a flack jacket,” she said.

“Now it has evolved to where the apprentices are much more diverse racially and gender wise,” Engel added. “And increasingly, I see just one or two or three people in a class of 20 who are having a hard time with the concept of not harassing.

“But certainly, there’s still a long way to go.”

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St. Paul workers, families keep pressure on as council takes up $15

October 19, 2018 by

Mayor Melvin Carter snaps a selfie with advocates for a $15 minimum wage outside City Hall.

It felt like a victory celebration as working people and their families rallied with elected officials outside City Hall Wednesday, just minutes before council members formally introduced an ordinance that would put St. Paul on track to a $15 minimum wage.

The finish line may be in sight, but Mayor Melvin Carter had a warning for supporters.

“We’re not done yet,” he said, listing the procedural hurdles and public hearings the ordinance faces before it can receive a vote. “But I’ve committed myself and our city to passing this into law by the end of the year, and I remain committed. And I want to say thank you to all of you for being engaged.”

Carter was speaking to union members, tipped workers and other low-wage workers who have been pushing for action in St. Paul since Minneapolis adopted its ordinance over a year ago. At the rally, they stood together in support of the proposed ordinance, unveiled a week earlier by Mayor Carter.

Co-authored by five of the council’s seven members (Amy Brendmoen, Mitra Jalali Nelson, Rebecca Noecker, Dai Thao and Chris Tolbert), the ordinance closely mirrors recommendations of a task force that spent more than three months studying the potential effects of a wage hike and listening to workers, business owners and others who would be impacted by the ordinance.

“We have been listening, talking, debating and voting for almost a year now,” said SEIU Healthcare Minnesota Political Director Rick Varco, who co-chaired the task force. “Now is the time to act.”

Action by the council would raise wages for an estimated 56,000 people – nearly a third of the city’s workforce – who earn less than $15 an hour.

Rosalio Vences, a janitor at a Target store in St. Paul, is among them. The cleaning contractor he works for has raised his pay just once – from $11 to $11.25 per hour – in the nearly three years Vences has been on the job. Lately, he said, the boss has been cutting hours off his scheduled shifts, too.

“But they always give us a raise in workload,” Vences said. “We always have more work to do, faster and faster.”

With the extra money he’d be earning with a $15 minimum wage, Vences could afford to move out of the room he rents in someone else’s home and get his own place. “With our current wages, we can’t afford to pay our rent and our bills,” he said.

Erin Lynch, a server at a full-service restaurant in St. Paul, speaks at a press conference staged by supporters of a $15 minimum wage with no tip adjustment.

Servers like Erin Lynch also praised the proposed ordinance, which would not carve out a lower wage for workers who earn tips. The question of whether to include a so-called “tip adjustment” has been a focus of debate, but Lynch said earning a livable wage makes servers more likely to stand up to harassment from customers and managers who “wave the prospect of a tip over your head.”

Restaurant workers experience sexual harassment on the job more frequently than workers in any other industry. A 2014 report by the Restaurant Opportunities Center United found 9 of 10 women working in the industry had experienced sexual harassment on the job, and so had 7 of 10 men. Sexual harassment is more prevalent, the report found, in states that allow servers and bartenders to be paid less than minimum wage.

“It’s really demoralizing that me and my coworkers have to put up with this stuff every day, to varying amounts,” Lynch said. “A $15 an hour minimum wage would alleviate this and would lessen my dependence on tips. It puts me in a better position to stand up for my dignity.”

The ordinance, as currently drafted, would take effect in 2020, and would affect employers differently based on their size.

Large businesses – those with more than 100 workers – would be required to pay $15 per hour by July 1, 2023. Workers at small businesses would reach $15 by July 1, 2026. Microbusinesses – those with five or fewer employees – would have two more years to phase in the full minimum wage, which would adjust annually for inflation.

The ordinance also would put the city’s own employees on track to earn $15 by July 1, 2022.

The Met Council’s most recent analysis of census data shows 40.8 percent of St. Paul residents live in poverty, a higher rate than any other metro-area community.

“We’re so grateful to the mayor for having listened to our words to help bring change with our employers,” Vences, a member of the Twin Cities worker center CTUL, said. “For so long we’ve been lifting our voices to say we need a raise to $15 an hour.”

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Women workers take on MN restaurant lobby over tip penalty

June 28, 2018 by

St. Paul barista Evann Zuckerman joins a march on the Minnesota Restaurant Association’s offices in St. Paul.

Women workers delivered a message to the state’s powerful restaurant lobby yesterday that an attack on tipped workers’ wages is an attack on women.

Tipped workers joined union members and other supporters in a march on the Minnesota Restaurant Association’s offices in St. Paul, where the women staged a rally and delivered a letter demanding the organization end its campaign to carve out a subminimum “tipped wage” in St. Paul.

“I want to keep one fair wage in my industry,” St. Paul barista Evann Zuckerman told other activists at the rally. “I want the MRA out of the way, and to stop putting profits over people.”

Mayor Melvin Carter, who made a $15 citywide minimum wage the centerpiece of his 2017 election campaign, wants an ordinance on the books by the end of the year. Among the biggest questions he and City Council members face in drafting the ordinance is whether to include a tipped wage.

MRA is lobbying hard for a carve-out, as the organization does any time elected officials consider raising the minimum wage. (The MRA also supports a statewide law stripping cities like St. Paul of the power to raise labor standards in their communities.)

Minnesota is one of seven states without a “tip penalty,” which allows restaurants and bars to pay workers a lower wage as long as they make up the difference in tips. Not only is the arrangement highly susceptible to wage theft, but it also puts servers and bartenders – 70 percent of whom are women – at a greater risk of experiencing sexual harassment and abusive behavior.

Zuckerman, who has five years of experience in the industry, said she’s been hit on by customers and harassed by managers.

“Skewed power dynamics,” she said, are a big part of restaurant culture. The more reliant workers are on tips, the less likely they are to push back.

“Men who are already feel entitled treat female workers even worse knowing that they hold so much over us, as the minimum wage now is not enough and we need tips to survive,” she said. “The Minnesota Restaurant Association knows that making us rely on tips means workers are disempowered, and they just don’t care.”

A restaurant owner from Seattle, where the minimum wage is on track to reach $15, also spoke at the rally. Shirley Henderson urged St. Paul servers not to buy into the MRA’s warnings that service jobs will disappear or customers will stop tipping if servers’ wages increase.

“In Seattle, groups like the MRA use the same fear-mongering about $15,” Henderson said. “The sky is not falling in Seattle. Small business is thriving.”

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