AFL - CIO tells politicians: A raise or else!

by Evelina Alarcon

This article was reprinted from the May 4, 1996 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

LOS ANGELES - The AFL-CIO's "America Needs a Raise" campaign shifted into high gear April 29 with a town hall meeting followed by a solidarity sit-in at the Gas Company Tower in downtown Los Angeles.

Sumi Haru, president of the Screen Actors Guild and a member of the AFL-CIO executive council, chaired the meeting attended by hundreds of trade unionists and community leaders in the Gold Room of the Biltmore Hotel. "Our goal," she told the World, "is to encourage labor and community organizations to work together on common issues" in the upcoming elections.

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka, who participated in the Los Angeles meeting and an earlier one in Birmingham, Ala., said they were the first of a series of 30 town hall meetings the AFL-CIO plans to hold over the next few months.

Pointing to the fact that corporate profits are at a 40-year high, Trumka said that some CEOs make more in one day than a person earning the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour would make in 18 months.

"There's something wrong with a country that allows this to happen and we are are here to say that America needs a raise," Trumka thundered. "It's our turn to take on the politicians one at a time. We'll tell them 'either you are with us and want to give America a raise or you are against us and, come election day, we will let you know that we are against you!'"

Trumka drew cheers when he demanded that the GOP leadership allow Congress to vote on increasing the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.15 immediately. The California Livable Wage Coalition has turned in more than 700,000 signatures to place an initiative raising the state's minimum wage to $5.25 an hour.

The Los Angeles meeting coincided with the 4th anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising following the acquittal of police officers Stacey Koon and Laurence Powell in the beating of Rodney King. In a pointed reference to the uprising, Trumka said the unemployment rate in L.A. was 8.6 percent then and is 8.4 percent today, nearly 3 percent higher than the national average. He said LA manufacturing wages are a dollar-an-hour less today than they were at the time of the uprising.

Participants leaned forward as the audience listened to testimony from Los Angeles workers fighting to survive on minimum wages or working in sweatshops.

One of the 72 Thai immigrant women imprisoned in a garment workshop in El Monte drew gasps as she described conditions where she and her coworkers, working behind locked doors and penned in by coils of razor wire, were forced to work seven days a week, 18 hours a day for 70 cents an hour. "If this continues to exist, I want it stopped right now," she said to applause and cheers.

Jimmy Booker is one of the thousands of aerospace workers in southern California who have been laid off in recent years. A tool maker laid off by McDonnell Douglas after 28 years, Booker told of losing half his income, facing age discrimination and struggling to find odd jobs to support his teen-age children. "It gets tough because there's not enough money to go around," he said in a hushed voice.

Bryan Aguilar, a janitor who earns the minimum wage working full-time at his janitor job, also works a second - and sometimes a third - full-time job. "The hardest thing for a father is not to be able to do everything for his children," he said.

Marge and Sandy, a mother and daughter team who work as waiters at a popular eatery said their minimum wage job forces them to live "one paycheck away from the street." Then, in the fight back spirit of the rally, Marge said, "We have to make our demand, work hard and stick together."

Steve Feber, a meter reader for southern California Gas Company for 25 years, told of a letter sent to all employees saying that the "American worker needs to wake up to the new realities in the world. That made chills run up and down my spine," he said.

Feber said his future "is up in the air" because the company has systematically reduced the number of full-time workers from 650 to 180 and filling those jobs with with part-timers who have lower wages and fewer benefits.

Following the meeting in the hotel, participants streamed across the street for a Pershing Square rally where local union leaders spoke of their battles with the the Onti Hotel, health care giant Kaiser-Permanente and California Gas and GTE. Following the rally, Trumka and other union leaders locked arms and, backed by hundreds of demonstrators, marched into the Gas Company Tower in a show of solidarity with members of the Utility Workers Union now involved in contract negotiations with the company.