The fight continues for Spectrum employees…. Come out and support your fellow workers! When we stand together, everyone wins! (except the bosses…but hey, scrooge them!)

(Hartford) For six months now, members of SEIU District 1199 have been on strike at four nursing homes operated by Spectrum Healthcare following failed attempts to secure a contract, which originally expired on March 15, 2009. In that time, workers have faced intimidation, harassment and at least 14 Spectrum employees have been suspended or fired. Recently the National Labor Relations Board issued a formal complaint against Spectrum for “failing and refusing” to negotiate in good faith.

Interviews with striking workers and supporters:   (Transcripts below video)

For more info visit: www.seiu1199ne.org

Transcript of audio:

My name’s Patty Pickis. I’m a LPN at Park Place Center, I’ve been a LPN there for 21years. Basically we went out on strike, April 15. That’s when our struggle began. Spectrum has been told that Spectrum broke the law by the NLRB by firings and hiring replacements. Our strike was basically an unfair labor practice strike against the laws that they were breaking.

Meghan Quinn: Specifically what laws was the management breaking?

PP: They were firing people, first of all. They were suspending people unjustly. And then they hired permanent replacements when we went out. That’s basically it in a nutshell. They actually have a hearing on November 2, to give their side of it. Of course, you know, everybody gets a chance to speak but we know what happened inside.

MQ: You’ve been on strike here for six months. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PP: It’s been a struggle. But we’ve built a lot of tight relationships while being out here. Financially we’re all doing okay. We’d like to have our jobs back, we’d love to have our jobs back. But we’re going to manage until this strike is over. Otherwise we’re caving in to a society of people that don’t have fair wages and decent benefits.

MQ: Is there anything else you want to add?

PP: Just hopefully they’ll start abiding by the law. They’re still breaking the law as to how they’re taking us back. If they just would smarten up and end this strike, everything would be wonderful.

…

First of all my name is Taycha Trinidad. I worked as a nurse’s aid at Park Place, in Hartford. We are not “on strike” right now because they don’t consider it a strike, but we’re still struggling for what we need because they’re still breaking the law. I’m out here just to teach my kids that they’ve got to stand up for what they believe in because if not, you’re not going to get anywhere.

One of the things that they are trying to take away from us is the funding for school, and right now I am going to school to become a LPN hopefully a nurse one day. And I think for me that’s one of the things that I’m fighting out here – and my pension, because I want to have something when I get old. And they keep on like that, I’m not going to have anything, you know? So that’s why I’m out here.

MQ: What’s it been like being on strike for 6 months?

TT: It’s been pretty hard having to be out here because I used to work part time. In order for me to make what I was making in there part time, I have to be here forty hours a week. Basically, before I only worked three days. So I am having problems with child care and stuff like that. But I’m getting by. And one of the good things of being out on strike is us as co-workers have gotten to know each other much better and I think when we go back in there we’re going to be a whole lot stronger together as a team.

MQ: How many of you are on strike right now?

TT: All together, it’s about 300 workers, with all four nursing homes. And out here, I think it’s about 100 at Park Place.

MQ: So what have you learned from this whole experience… about labor, about nursing, or whatever?

TT: Just that I think they need to put a whole lot more money than what they’re putting into nursing homes because this is where we’re all going to end up one day or another, you know, believe it or not. They need to spend the time and effort into making it better. And where do you start? With your workers.

MQ: How does this affect the clients in the nursing home to have people who are underpaid taking care of them? I mean, it seems like an obvious equation that you’d want to pay people well who are taking care of your grandparents.

TT: I would’ve figured that that’s what you’d want to do, pay people bettter. Especially people who are doing the job that nobody wants to do, basically. Because a lot of people don’t want to do this kind of job. And we’re out here doing it. And it’s hard when we don’t even get a break. And working short every day. It’s very hard doing that kind of job. We do what we can and I know when I do my job, I don’t do it for the money. But I would like to be compensated for what I’m doing.

I love these patients. They were part of my family. I see them every day, I cry with them, I laugh with them, I hug them, they knew my kids, you know. So it’s hard seeing them suffering there. Because that’s what they’re going through right now, they’re suffering. Because those people aren’t taking care of them the way they’re supposed to.

Dave Rozza: Do you have the support of the patients?

TT: Yeah, we have support of the patients. There’s a few of them that can’t come out and support us of course, but the ones that do, they do come out and they do support us. So that’s a good thing – we know that we have their support.

…

MQ: Why are you supporting this effort?

Bill Shortell: These are brave workers. They’ve been been on strike for, trying to get a living wage for 6 months, in the rain, and you’ve got to come out. Actually we get energy from being here.

MQ: Do you think their efforts will be successful?

BS: It’s more the struggle than it is some of the time. The fact that they’re not giving up, the fact that they won’t allow the boss to dictate without a fight, it gives energy to the rest of us. I’m a machinist and we’re going into contract negotiations, and our company United Technologies is attempting to gut out contract so we’re going to need all the help we can get too. (Bill Shortell)

…

Steve Thornton, SEIU: Today we’re marking the 6 month anniversary of our struggle at Spectrum Healthcare. In Hartford, it’s the Park Place nursing home, where 120 nursing home workers were forced out on strike on April 15. And that’s after having worked without a contract for over a year. This is an employer who doesn’t want to settle a fair contract with us.

We’ve had 36 other homes who have settled fair contracts with us – modest contracts, nothing we can tout because they’re relatively modest contracts, but this employer – Howard Dickstein, Brian Dickstein, Sean Murphy, David Kelly, these owners of the nursing home chain have decided that they’re going to break this union. These workers are telling them, again, that they won’t let them do it.

MQ: How do you feel at the 6-month mark right now?

ST: No one wants to be out on strike. And certainly in a bad economy it’s tougher. But what’s really absolutely amazing about these workers, these nurse’s aids, dietary workers, laundry workers, housekeepers and nurses, it’s really truly extraordinary is that they got pushed to the wall, and they decided they aren’t going to take this and they went out on strike to protect what they had. I’m just enormously proud of being able to work with them.

I know we’re going to win but I also know that these victories sometimes take quite a while, much longer strikes than what we’ve got right now when we’ve prevailed, so we fully expect to do that too, but we really need to have community support.

So everybody who sits back and listens to this radio broadcast and says “yeah, gee aren’t they good,” they should come and walk the picket with us sometimes. And if they don’t know why we’re doing this, and they need more explanation, they should come and just talk to some of these single moms who are risking everything to protect the gains they built.

MQ: So where are you located if people want to come out and support or just ask questions?

ST: Park Place Nursing Home is at 5 Greenwood Street, which is off Park Street, near Lena’s and Sully’s. We are here from 6 in the morning until 11:30 at night. You may see people sitting occasionally because they’re resting their feet or they’re eating their meals, but in general we’re walking that picket line 18 hours a day.
(Steve Thornton, SEIU 1199)

For Immediate Release: September 2, 2010

Contact: Matt O’Connor, CSEA/SEIU Local 2001 – (860) 221-5696 (cell)

HARTFORD SCHOOL BUS SUBCONTRACTORS “GAMING THE SYSTEM” AT TAXPAYER AND STUDENT EXPENSE

Union representing employees of transportation service providers applauds City Council resolution calling for investigation of compliance with living wage law, adherence to student safety standards

HARTFORD—

Elected officials, school bus drivers, and monitors are alarmed that transportation vendors subcontracted to the city of Hartford are circumventing living wage laws, evading local property taxes, and risking student safety. Court of Common Council President rJo Winch has called for a sweeping investigation of contracts approved under former Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez involving a regional education service provider and companies with the worst safety records in Connecticut.

At issue is a deceptive arrangement between the Capitol Region Education Council (CREC) and Logisticare Solutions, Inc. to provide bus services for suburban students attending Hartford Host Magnet Schools. The company has subcontracted actual bus services to Specialty Transportation and Autumn Transportation, which were both at the center of a high-profile fatal accident in January. The Hartford City Council’s Labor and Workforce Development Committee will take up a resolution authored by President Winch to fully investigate the matter at their September 13 meeting. “Bernie Madoff would blush at the ‘Ponzi scheme’ concocted by the former mayor,” said Robert Rinker, Executive Director of CSEA/SEIU Local 2001, which represents Hartford school bus monitors employed by Logisticare. “Hartford taxpayers should be outraged that CREC and a bus contractor are gaming the system. They’re charging unnecessary administrative fees at each layer, and now it appears that they are scheming to deprive Hartford residents of a livable wage,” said Rinker.

Rinker’s comments refer to a joint announcement by Autumn and Specialty last month that approximately 130 of their drivers and buses were being relocated to a new facility in the town of East Hartford. The move appears designed to allow both companies to avoid compliance with Hartford’s Living Wage Ordinance and evade business property taxes, despite transporting children to and from magnet schools in the city. “It just looks questionable that these companies are moving out of town,” said special education school bus driver Debbie King, who has been employed by Autumn for four years. “It seems like it’s just to get away without having to pay living wages and get out of paying property taxes. I’m happy to see that the Hartford City Council cares about the students and us drivers,” King said.

CSEA/SEIU Local 2001’s nearly 25,000 members are retired and active public sector workers in state, municipal, and local schools’ agencies across Connecticut, as well as workers employed by non-profit organizations and private companies contracted to provide public services. Visit www.seiu2001.org online for more information about the union’s efforts to “Drive Up Standards” in the student transportation industry.

Over the summer I had the pleasure of staying in Madrid with my brother. Most of my time was spent relaxing and recovering from work, but I did take some time to meet up with local comrades while I was there. The second time I got together with the CNT folks there, they were doing roving pickets of Hotel Vincci. As a result of an unfair firing (Is there ever a “fair” one?), they were exerting pressure on the hotel by paying a visit to its Madrid locations. My compa, Abbey, and I tagged along for three of the locations where we stood outside the hotel and fliered, informed patrons and prospective patrons about the hotel’s bad labor practices, stickered the outside of the hotels, and got the cops called on us once (they never showed).

The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (“National Confederation of Labour”) is a confederation of labor unions in Spain (there is a French CNT as well) with a lot of significance for anarchists. Founded in 1910 (and only taking a year to be declared illegal in 1911!), the anarcho-syndicalist union played a major role organizing workers and developing a sense of solidarity among them prior to, and during, the Spanish Civil War. Contemporarily, in Spain, the CNT has thousands of workers, but still lags behind the mainstream unions in numbers within the country (which are funded by the state–the CNT is not). It is a proud, fighting organization of workers committed to direct action strategies and self-management rather than capitulating to the demands of politicians or bosses.

When I asked our comrades about common CNT strategies, our hosts told us that often, when workers needed solidarity work due to firings or unfair labor practices, the union would wage campaigns like the Hotel Vincci pickets that we took part in. The union, however, also involves itself in other social struggles and participates in workers’ struggles outside of the workplace as well. I sent some interview questions over to our comrades in Madrid and, what follows, are their responses. I do think some of the questions didn’t “translate” very well (for example, when we talk of “political organizations” in the Anglo world, we mean anarchist organizations that DO NOT participate in state politics in which we develop theory and practice collectively while also organizing in mass organizations with workers as militant minorities in social movements—we call this dual organizationalism), but I feel the interview carries with it some important insights (and differences) for discussion among anglo comrades.

1. First, can you tell us a little about the CNT, its structure, and some of the things the organization does?

The CNT is an anarchosyndicalist union. The organization aims to be a tool to channel and support workers’ day to day struggles. We try to reflect how we would like a future society to look in the way we organize and struggle. That future society would be (and this union now is) horizontally governed, decisions are made through direct democracy, and actions are carried out by self-management. We accept no subsidies from the government and do not believe in hierarchical structures. Everyone in the CNT is a “volunteer”, the arm of his or her own struggle, and our strength comes from each and every person’s awareness and willingness to help their comrades.

The CNT is a federation of independent, autonomous unions scattered throughout Spain. These unions make their own decisions in their general assemblies and do not depend on national permissions or oks. To coordinate the different unions and to be able to make CNT-wide decisions, we hold plenary sessions and Congresses where delegates given decision-making authority by their local unions agree on more far-reaching actions and problems.

The CNT organizes in workplaces, creating union sections (“secciones sindicales”), minding health and security issues and progressively building up a social conscience, focused on the struggle. When conflict arises, all comrades, unions and International sections help in solidarity with actions that go from phone calling, faxing, sending mailings, picketing in front of the company, leafleting, graffiti, going inside the company and increasing pressure as the conflict escalates, going to the boss’s house or family business, where ever direct action is more effective.

2. What campaigns are the CNT focusing on in Spain right now?

On the ground, we have campaigns open against Ferroser in Madrid, Giraud in Valladolid, NuevoFuturo in Sevilla, STV Gestión in Pilar de la Horadada, Lavanderías Azul in Ciudad Real, Mercadona in Puçol and in San Sebastián de los Reyes, Eulen and Satein in Córdoba and a few more. We have International campaigns against StartPeople, Hotel Vincci and the publishing house Editorial Oceano.

At a national level we are working against the crisis, as a failure of international capitalism, the government’s response (as expected) bailing out banks with public funds and then immediately afterwards cutting workers wages like some sort of inverse solidarity measure. This occurred, of course, when a plethora of national media published recently that there are 16,000 “new wealthy” members of this society. The four million currently registered as on unemployment should not be forgotten.

Our work is not only against these governmental measures but, perhaps more importantly, to raise workers’ awareness about the complete injustice of these draconian methods, the danger in terms of future attacks, and the turncoat nature of “socialist” governments who are completely unable to withstand international monetary pressure and act as autonomous entities—much less “represent” their voters. The big name unions (UGT and CCOO), supposedly working in the workers’ interest, repeatedly sell out the workers for the people paying for their fancy cars and their summer houses until, at this point, they are openly on their knees.

3. In what ways can comrades in the US contribute to your struggles?

You can take action against Hotel Vincci in New York and Editorial Océano, Inc. in Florida. We’ll try to keep you informed about these conflicts. When you have any conflicts where we can help please do send us information. It’s also important to raise awareness about the whiplash affect throughout all of Europe where 100 years of labor struggle is being given a military haircut, in general with the passive acceptance of the major unions. Anarchosyndicalist organizing has an opportunity to be an incredibly valid alternative, and a strong way to combat this affront.

4. Can you talk a little bit about the CNTs organizational “identity”?
There seems to be some disagreement in the IWW and the SAC, for example,
over whether they should be unions (mass organizations), political
organizations, or both. Are there similar disagreements within the CNT?

CNT wants to be a mass organization; there is no disagreement on this. It is in our principles; we want to be a tool for workers to fight, to win, to learn and to join us. We need to be a mass organization to be able to create a social revolution. If “political organization” means working within the state we cannot be for it. We would be tacitly accepting the validity of the state (and its dinner table partner, capitalism) by working with it.

Mass organization is the aim but we cannot lose our principles of horizontality, direct action and self-management. Accepting subsidizes from the state and playing in the Spanish workers council framework like CGT does is a sure way to losing these principles.

5. What role, if any, do you see for anarchist political groups (like the FAI) within the CNT?

FAI has no role in the CNT. FAI is a sister organization and many FAI anarchists are in the CNT, but FAI as an organization has no special role.

6. What developments have you seen within anarchism and the Left in Spain in the last decade or so? What ideas and events have inspired Leftists and anti-authoritarians there?

The anti-authoritarian and anarchosyndicalist movement has stayed much the same for the last 10 years, growing slowly. Spanish society is, as a whole, less and less radical, and the working class less and less combative. The mainstream unions are totally discredited and the working class does not have any clear reference to subverting this situation. At the same time, squatting, animal rights, environmentalism, vegetarianism, so-called “anti-system” movements, immigrant rights, antinuclear power and antiwar have all gained momentum in the last ten years. The 2002 general strike and massive 2003 antiwar demonstrations were the big events of the 2000′s.

7. What does the CNT do in terms of member education, both around theory and organizing?

We don’t do much member education in the traditional sense of the word, seated in a classroom. Much of the “education” members can receive comes from participating in the struggles of their comrades and in their own struggles, at the assemblies, in the street, in protests, etc. Then we have our newspaper and all the unions have many books for any comrade to take as they please

8. How does the CNT relate to the anarchist movement in Spain?

The CNT is, and has been for 100 years, part of the anarchist movement. The union aspires to be the practical end of a more theoretical, private, anarchist ideology by materializing those beliefs in open conflict with late capitalism, the ever more cumbersome state structure and suppression of workers struggles in open (police) and insidious (laws, legislation, policy, media) ways. Our natural habitat is the street and the workplace, our natural forum is combat.

9. How has the economic crisis affected the CNT? Has it grown, stayed the same, decreased in membership?

It is growing steadily but it should be growing a hell of a lot more with the current situation!

10. Can you tell us a bit about how you organize? In what ways does the CNT organize for worker’s power on the shopfloor and in your communities?

The main CNT unit is the union assembly: all decisions are made there. In the union there are many union sections. A union section is a group of workers in a company. No union elections are needed, just one or more workers get together, create a union section and inform the company. This is our main weapon. This union section figure is in the Spanish legislation together with the “workers council delegate” figure. The union section enables us to fight horizontally and with the workers in the companies. Community work is done through “athenaeums” or specific causes create committees, like the recent committee against CCTV in our neighborhoods.

21 Arrested as Community Leaders Block Scabs to Support Strike

Visit www.seiu1199ne.org or call 860-549-1199
More photos: http://www.homestead.com/homefront

photos courtesy of Steve Thornton

SEIU 1199’s Steve Thornton discusses the events surrounding Hartford’s first annual May Day celebration, coming Saturday May 1 to Burr Mall, Main Street next to city hall in Downtown Hartford – music, food, workshops and a walking tour of labor history in Hartford.

Click here to download the MP3

Calling Labor and Community Supporters:

RALLY!

FOR 1199 SPECTRUM STRIKERS

SATURDAY, APRIL 24
11:00 AM TO 12:00 NOON
PARK PLACE HEALTH CENTER

5 Greenwood Street, Hartford
(off Park St.  Parking on Amity, Madison, Grace, and nearby streets)

On the 10th day of the strike, join nursing home workers who are fighting unfair labor practices and the threat of permanent replacements.  The Spectrum Corporation has intimidated, suspended and fired dozens of workers at four nursing homes over the past year while workers have been trying to negotiate a fair contract.

Show your support!  Contact Steve Thornton for more information, 860-251-6013