American Autumn and the Unions

Dr. Cornel West calls it the U.S. Autumn. 

For thirteen days, as of this writing, hundreds have been occupying Wall Street to protest what many see as an evolving plutocracy in the US.  Many of the occupiers have been angered at the dismissal of their movement by the corporate press.  (see Ginia Bellafante's article from the New York Times of September 23)  Many seem to automatically reject this movement for its lack of a centralized, organized center.  O.W.S. is grass roots in the strictest sense.  (unlike the so-called Tea Party, for example: an organization funded by large organizations attempting to appear as an upswell of popular rage)

A common canard (often heard these days in this anti-union climate) is that a labor union is but its own clunky organizational machinery, which serves to feed itself, rather than to facilitate and uplift the will of the group with common aims that formed it.  Local 100 of the Transit Workers Union or TWU, has joined O.W.S. So has Teamsters Local 814.    My hope is that all unions, including the performers' unions, Equity, SAG and AFTRA, will throw their support behind this movement.  After all, there are more of us (i.e. non-rich people) than them (e.g. millionaires who hold undue influence on our government and economy).  The same epithets lobbed at protestors of the Viet Nam war, The Civil Rights Movement, Women's Rights and the like, are being yelled from the balconies of the rich upon the regular folk below (See video at the end of this post).  Despite characterizations of "the great unwashed" and "unemployed trust fund babies," change was forced.

Keep up the pressure!  Make the American Autumn a force that changes our world.  Solidarity forever!

Thespianic Civil Servant

I have worked quite a bit in Europe, quite a bit in Germany.  It is fascinating to talk to European actors.  Sitting over kaffe in the theatre's kantine - the small employees only restaurant in the basement of most municipal theatres.  - very civilized - I have swapped stories with many actors from across the pond.  Their concept of American actors?  "Hollywood!" "Broadway!" "Gelt! (Money)"  German schauspielers are surprised when I tell them the reality of our gold-paved streets.

The concept of the freelance actor, for the most part, does not exist over there.  A German actor, for example, usually gets a 2-year contract and is attached to a local theatre. There is usually no guarantee of roles and one receives a regular salary, whether one is actually working on a show or not.  The drawbacks?  More or less like ours.  Directors have their favorites.  Company A is substandard according to common lore; Company B is preferable because of an established artist or its location, etc.  This is much like the life of those who do regional theatre in our country, with the difference being the removal from the equation of the constant search for the next job.
Theatre was invented by the Greeks, but show business was invented by Americans.  Could the actor-as-civil-servant be a viable model down the road for regional theatres in our country? Aside from a very few like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, theatre companies - i.e. companies of artists who work together over a period of years - are a thing of the past.  Mike Daisey, the monologist, in his very funny, HOW THEATRE FAILED AMERICA, talks about the current system of creating theatrical works as being in the main a chemistry experiment - add actors and a director for a few weeks and see what happens.  We know what happens - hit or miss.

Does not a country like ours deserve better?  The echo I already hear reverberating is "The Economy-onomy-onomy."  The money is there.  It's just apportioned to other things.

The actor as civil servant, hmm....

My Friend, The Producer (Part 2)

When your boss is a producer, an artistic director, a colleague as well as a friend, how do you deal with him or her when on the other side of the negotiating table?

A greater degree of intimacy with an artistic director/producer gives you an idea of how the field lays when it comes to contracts. Regional theatre in today's United States is not on its strongest footing ever. Very few, if any, have bucketsfull of money hidden away. The best way to negotiate contracts (and a couple of key contracts, like LORT, are up for re-negotiation soon) is to use all that knowledge that we have from working closely as colleagues and friends as a yardstick to know what we can successfully demand, and realistically achieve.

Most theatres of the same economic plane have similar needs and ways of operation. Some are better business people than others, of course. It is our collective wisdom that will allow us to know what and what not to demand; knowing that we seek to, form a symbiosis between our employers and ourselves and not so much a stand-off. Those who are more comfortable in the position of negotiator tend to spearhead contract talks for the producers' side. The signatories-to-be (the producers not actively involved in contract talks) trust in the wisdom and ability of their asignees.

There are producers who enjoy the contract negotiation process. It is the thrill of combat that spurs them along, as well as the actual benefits for their respective business plans. They are committed. They are smart, and they have more money, as a collective, than our union does. We always have an edge in that, they can't present their shows without us. That is power.

That is the macro-relationship. In the micro-relationship, that is the producer in negotiations with a potential and unrepresented employee. There are contract minimums. There are regional producers who will not budge on salary. It never hurts to ask, however. If you are negotiating your own contracts, (many of are right now doing just that. It's Stock Season) make sure you have a list of things that you want and things that you need. Chief among these for you will probably be salary considerations. Have a high (What you think you can get if the market will bear) and a low (the least that you can realistically accept)

If negotiating for salary points comes to a dead end, sometimes it is possible to get a producer to add a per diem. Not all contracts require a per diem. But just because it's not required does not mean that you can't get it. The advantage of per diem, for the producer, is that there are no hidden additional costs. With salaries, the rule of thumb is that on top of the actual salary, the producer will have to pay an additional 40% in fringe benefits. Fringe benefits include AEA pension and health contribution, payroll taxes, unemployment and processing. The advantage for the actor or stage manager, of course, is more money.

Per diem has no on-the-top expenses for the producer. You end up getting more money, but the producer pays less fringes. Of course ones unemployment rate is based on ones salary alone, not salary plus per diem.

There are other points of bargaining, however. Many regional theatres get support, not in money, but in goods and services. There are negotiating points which are not covered in any rule book. Many are locality-specific. Some of them include: lodging upgrades, travel upgrades, temporary health club memberships, comp tickets, and others. Be creative.

What the Triangle Shirtwaist fire means for workers now

Below is a reprint from The Washington Post of an op-ed piece by Hilda Solis, our Secretary Of Labor on March 18, 2011.  I had the good fortune to hear her speak at the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire of March 25, 1911.  This fire was a watershed moment for trade unionism.  From this tragedy, which killed 146 known victims, many of the benefits and labor practices that we take for granted sprang.  Frances Perkins, who watched the fire in horror said later, after retiring as FDR's Secretary Of Labor, that "the New Deal began on March 25, 1011."  We're lucky to have a Secretary like Hilda Solis.

What the Triangle Shirtwaist fire means for workers now 
By Hilda L. Solis, Friday, March 18, 8:35 PM
 
A century ago this week, in Lower Manhattan, a young social worker named Frances Perkins was having tea at the Greenwich Village townhouse of her friend, the socialite Margaret Morgan Norrie. They were interrupted by clanging fire truck bells. Then they heard the anguished screams: “Don’t jump!”

They raced out of the townhouse and ran toward the commotion: a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, just off Washington Square. Flames and black smoke shot from the top floors, and as they watched in shock, young girls and women, some alone, some clutching hands, inched up to the windows’ ledges — and jumped to their deaths.

Perkins would describe the scene in lectures later: “They couldn’t hold on any longer. There was no place to go. The fire was between them and any means of exit. It’s that awful choice people talk of — what kind of choice to make?” She added: “I shall never forget the frozen horror that came across as we stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help.”

The sewing factory employed more than 500 people, who worked long hours for low wages, in wretched and unsanitary conditions. They turned out “shirtwaists” — blouses with puffed sleeves and tight bodices popularized by the “Gibson Girl.” The factory owners had locked the fire-escape doors. The seamstresses were trapped when fire raced through the sweatshop just before closing on March 25, 1911.

In less than 20 minutes, 146 people, mostly Italian and Jewish immigrant women and girls, were dead. The last six victims were officially identified just a few weeks ago. Triangle outraged the public and offered a grisly example of how powerless workers were without collective bargaining, because unionized garment workers received better pay and had safer conditions. And it galvanized Frances Perkins.

Twenty-two years later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her secretary of labor, the first woman to serve as a Cabinet secretary. During her 12-year tenure, she directed the formulation and implementation of the Social Security Act, one of the most important pieces of social legislation in our history. Among other extraordinary accomplishments, she helped create unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, and the legislation that guarantees the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. She also established the department’s Labor Standards Bureau, a precursor to what is now the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Perkins clearly had the Triangle victims in mind as she weaved the nation’s social safety net.

Now I have the same job she once held, with the responsibility of repairing and strengthening that net. And although our passion for workers’ rights came from different paths (she was the daughter of privilege; I am the daughter of immigrant union members), I understand the impact that moment had on her work.

I had my own moment involving a sweatshop. Although it was not as horrifying as that afternoon was for Perkins, it fueled my beliefs. In 1995, 75 Thai immigrants were freed from a so-called factory in the city of El Monte, Calif., part of the district I represented in the state Senate. They had been forced to eat, sleep and work in a place they called home.

Their employer confiscated their passports and kept them like slaves. Threatened with violence to themselves or their families, the workers hunched over sewing machines in dimly lit garages bound by barbed wire, sewing brand-name clothing for less than $2 an hour. Most of them were women.

I met them shortly after they were freed and heard their stories. And at that moment, the unthinkable became real for me. I had assumed that sweatshops were a thing of the past. But they had just spread — from Perkins’s New York City to my Los Angeles, from the Italian and Eastern European immigrants victimized in her day to the Asian and Latino immigrants victimized in mine.

Combating garment sweatshops is, sadly, still on the labor secretary’s agenda. In the past fiscal year, the department’s Wage and Hour division conducted 374 investigations and collected $2.1 million for 2,215 workers, primarily in the major U.S. garment centers of Southern California and New York. In these cases, vulnerable immigrant workers have been deprived of minimum-wage pay, overtime pay and safe working conditions — all the haunting echoes of Triangle.

We have had many improvements in the past century. Today, we have more tools to pursue violators who deny workers their pay, including issuing subpoenas and preventing companies from shipping goods produced in violation of the law.

In 1911, more than 100 workers were estimated to have died on the job each day. In 2010, 4,340 workers were killed on the job — and more than 3.3 million were seriously injured. Last April 5, in a fiery explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, 29 miners died in one day.

I was at the mine the next day, while rescue efforts still were underway.

In times of crisis, one often becomes two people. In one sense, I was simply Hilda, the person I’ve always been, there just to be by the family members’ sides as they kept vigil. In another sense, I was Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis, trying to convey to them the depth of their government’s commitment. In either case, no words can adequately express your emotion and sympathy. A grief that great can be endured only if it is shared — and then acted upon in good time.

Both Triangle and Upper Big Branch became calls to action. New York quickly implemented groundbreaking workplace safety laws and regulations, including fire exits. But nearly one year after Upper Big Branch, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, part of the Labor Department, still needs additional tools that only Congress can provide. And OSHA needs better tools, such as stricter penalties against employers who put their workers’ lives at risk, and stronger protections for whistle-blowers.

In both cases, if these workers had a voice — a union — and the ability to speak up about conditions, these events probably could have been prevented, because unions play an important role in making workplaces safer. In both cases, they had tried to organize and faced virulent opposition.

Today, workers and their allies are being met with that same kind of opposition. In states nationwide, working people are protesting the actions to strip them of collective bargaining. The Triangle fire and the Upper Big Branch explosion a century later make clear to me that workers want and need that voice — about wages and benefits, yes, but about more, too. Collective bargaining still means a seat at the table to discuss issues such as working conditions, workplace safety and workplace innovation, empowering individuals to do the best job they can. And it means dignity and a chance for Americans to earn a better life, whether they work in sewing factories or mines, build tall buildings or care for our neighbors, teach our children, or run into burning buildings when others run out of them.

I’ll be thinking about all of this as I make my way to New York on Friday for the 100th anniversary of the Triangle factory tragedy. The building is still there; it now houses offices for New York University. Thousands are expected to mark the occasion with a march, speeches, the reading of the victims’ names and the laying of flowers in their honor at the site by schoolchildren. It will be a powerful reminder of what we’ve lived through, and what we still have to do.

History is an extraordinary thing. You can choose to learn from it, or you can choose to repeat it.

For me, the choice is clear, as it was for Frances Perkins. We must always be a nation that catches workers before they fall.

Unions - The Villain of the Day

Recently an article on the AFL-CIO blog called, The Shameful Attack On Public Employees caught my interest .

As anyone who pays attention knows, every state in the union is in financial crisis.  Ask anyone how to fix a state's budget and there will come many strategies - many of which involve gutting union entitlements.  Indeed, the very word, entitlement elicits an emotional reflex.  A person with a "sense of entitlement" of course, evokes the image of a carping, narcissistic glutton, with coat-of-arms: the whip, the crown and the diaper.  There are many (including some union officials, mind) who willingly scapegoat union contracts as being out-of-date and out of sych with today's culture and economy.  A relic of a bygone era.

"While the rest of the country struggles," goes the canard, "union members enjoy a soft, cradle-to-grave cushy life."  It is easy to find those who weigh their own work life with that of the union member, and carp about inequities.  As a union leader, I am often assailed by anti-trade unionists with the following example: "Why should a guy get [fill in dollar amount] an hour for [fill in job] when I [fill in job] get half that and have no benefits? 

The trouble with the conversation is that is it is backwards.

As was stated in a recent front page story in the New York Times:
"A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers. The Manhattan Institute, which is not terribly sympathetic to unions, studied New Jersey and concluded that teachers earned wages roughly comparable to people in the private sector with a similar education."

"Vu iz geschriben," as they say in Yiddish - Where is it written that the person who [fill in job] does not deserve whatever he or she is earning?  Those who have trouble with this specific example fall into two groups: 1) Those who envy the union member's seemingly great deal and 2) Employers.

I can not help hearing the reverberations of the Candy Incident of 1963.  If you remember: Central Park Playground.  Summer.  Near the sandbox.  Johnny, on seeing that he had not as much candy as Elsie, screamed his ever-lovin' toe-headed head off.  Being a union member, I have joined with others who do the same work I do, to come to an agreement with our employers as to not only how much money we get, but clean and safe working conditions.  Also, in the eventuality that I am too old or sick to work, me and my brothers and sisters have given up rightful and fair salary increases to guarantee that.

When organizing, we often hear complaints from actors who don't want to join a union.  Usually there is something about freedom (like in those right-to-work-for-less states) and the fact that unions ignore realities about the economy and demand what is not fiscally possible.  Having been at the negotiating table myself, I can tell you that we don't go in without full knowledge of the economy and the business models of our employers.

We simply demand what is right and fair.

Another reason for flying alone, without union protection, is usually that an actor can "work more."  Yes, you might do more shows than a union actor in a season, but you also will work for lower pay, no benefits and no redress for grievances than your union counterpart.  And hour for hour, you will probably get a third of what I get in salary. 


In a way there is a self-satisfied feeling I get when I hear all this complaining.  Wanna know why I joined a union?  This is why.

Take our benefits that we have worked for all these years?  Like hell!