WA State JwJ Update and
Local Workers' Rights Victories
July 2008
Contribute to WA State JwJ Today!
On this page:
Rather than face the giant inflatable rat and educating JwJ activists, Mr. Cohen suddenly closed his condo sales center and ducked into hiding for a day. Potential clients were left outside a locked gate taking leaflets from us and listening to the risks of buying million-dollar condos on the Asarco toxic waste site that was the sole domestic producer of rat poison.
We shared with condo buyers the toxic warning guide that Mr. Cohen's contractors give to Pt Ruston workers and asked if they had seen anything like it in the promotional materials. Many potential buyers could not understand it and couldn't imagine Spanish-only readers understanding it. Pt Ruston workers are now coming forward to expose that they are not getting proper training and being handed false federal hazardous material training cards. These stunning allegations are now available in an interview posted by the Carpenters union. We expect Mr. Cohen and other plantation capitalists to retaliate against these whistle-blowers who betray the rules of immigrant slavery.
If workers are treated this way under EPA supervision, condo buyers will wonder how safe is Pt Ruston LLC in the long run. Workers have safety rights that extend for decades after a project is completed while condo owners have only a few years to pursue their rights after Mike Cohen dissolves the LLC and his responsibility. A quick viewing of this slide show reveals Mike Cohen's practices of spreading Asarco dust in the surrounding community may answer that question for condo buyers. Asarco dust is back in the news for lead poisoning of Tacoma and Ruston's children causing brain, kidney,nervous system and liver damage, lower IQs, and other very serious health issues in adults as well.
JwJ activists decided to visit the sales center after Mr. Cohen planned to exploit the Tall Ships Festival to get free Pt Ruston advertising. In a cheesy move, Mr. Cohen located his $1 Billion Pt Ruston condo project "floating sales center" on public property in the middle of the Tall Ships Festival. He excluded the public to focus on privately entertaining wealthy boaters, his condo clientele. Before the festival, Mr. Cohen was probably employing a mole to ferret out JwJ plans circulating on the web to catch the rat. Condo buyers had confirmed with sales staff the center's open hours as recent as two days earlier and the Pt Ruston website info contradicted the shut down. For more background, see below.
Point Ruston Background
Mike Cohen wants to pull a fast one on the taxpayer dime at his $1 billion Point Ruston project. As the South Sound has learned from previous JwJ messages, Mr. Cohen's track record is evasive, anti-worker and community, corrupting our democracy, and doused with grinchy behavior.
Mr. Cohen can easily afford to behave better. He is selling $2 million condos while paying 7 times less in land costs than Downtown Tacoma. He could become a civic leader without too much sacrifice. He's made millions of dollars building luxury condos with government welfare from Rick Talbert's Tacoma City Council and from McMansion sprawl projects in the South Sound.
Instead, Mr. Cohen is hostile to community leaders requesting to explore common ground. Recently Mr. Cohen failed to appear at scheduled appointments and share promised information. Rather, Mr. Cohen hired 2 public relations firms an expensive team of lawyers. He has coordinated with the City of Tacoma to use our tax dollars to hire attorneys from Seattle and attack with procedural technicalities. Only our community's democratic activity will break Mr. Cohen's injustice.
Mr. Cohen has become a prime example of a broken property development system. He is one of the developers climbing over each other in a greedy rush for special treatment and tax-dollar funded subsidies. In the last few months, Mike Cohen has . . .
- Demanded that Tacoma extend the 8 year property tax break to his isolated Pt Ruston (even the developer advertiser News Tribune feels this is going too far)
- Manipulated Tacoma city managers to expedite construction and skip steps that responsible developers must take.
- Influenced Talbert's Council to enact fishy laws that exempt Pt Ruston from legal Shoreline protections while holding other property owners to the statewide standard.
- Pursued special city and state subsidies to build Point Ruston infrastructure while whining about JwJ calls for responsible practices
Creating chaos and chronyism in government land use plans, Mike Cohen and his Master Builders Association are ruining our quality of life. JwJ and allies have tried talking with the City Council and with industry-leading developers. But so far, Cohen and MBA's influence with the help of Rick Talbert is blocking a more full democratic debate by Council members.
(Back to the top)
Jobs with Justice went to delegations, mobilized for the Justice for Janitors rally as well as other rallies in solidarity with janitors as they negotiated for their second contract.
Janitors ratified a contract that protected affordable full family health care and won fair raises. After two months of negotiations, janitors were preparing for a strike when the employers caved on two key issues of health care and wages.
The key elements of the settlement were as follows:
- Wage increases averaging over 20% for all janitors
- Janitors at the Microsoft campus will see a $1 raise after July 1, 2008
- Moves workers on the Eastside towards wage parity with their Seattle counterparts
- Preserves affordable, full family health care for all janitors
- Employer contributions to pensions more than double over 4 years
- Protects janitors from on-the-job injuries
(Back to the top)
The working poor are still enjoying the stunning views from the Martin Luther King shelter: Mt. Rainier, Commencement Bay, and The Olympics. Top luxury developers and City officials wanted "those people gone" by July 1st. Led by the shelters' residents and Tacoma Catholic Worker, our justice community organized to shame these forces of greed to adopt a new plan. It now seems the shelter will remain in the luxury location indefinitely as Catholic Community Services (CCS) plans to assume the reigns.
This victory in which JwJ partnered was no easy feat. Developers exerted influence on anti-worker City Council members like Rick Talbert, complaining about stench, crime, filth, and violence generated by the working poor who are coincidentally employed at downtown luxury sites. Here was the line-up we faced:
- Condo developer Tom O'Connor is not your ordinary whining developer as the Immediate Past President and a National Director of the 950 developer Master Builders Pierce County (MBA). He was seeking to buy the shelter property which abuts the luxury condo that he is now building called Midtown Lofts. Rather than pay living wages and affordable healthcare, Mr. O'Connor boasts using Labor Ready (hiding under the new name of True Blue) so that he could have more money for his "big toys."
- Another whiner owning a parcel abutting the shelter, Bill Riley is a top lobbyist and VP for the Washington Association of Realtors and a prolific Pierce County developer in the MBA.
- Betraying shelter residents, developer Kevin Phelps infiltrated the board of the organization running the shelter and publicly led on plans to close the shelter and sell the site. JwJ activists might remember Mr. Phelps as the poverty-wage paying former Grinch-of-the-Year contest winner who left City Council office suddenly in an ethics cloud.
Teaching Developers: Be Responsible For Your Mess
As long as Tacoma's developers create poverty, they should take responsibility for "stench, crime, filth, and violence." We can expect more of these struggles coming soon. German billionaire and Gig Harbor resident Erivan Haub plans to build Russell Investment's new corporate headquarters. He's banking on raiding tens of millions of our tax-dollars with the help of Council member Talbert but also boasts that he adores the American system of "freedom." Mr. Haub refers to the freedom to pay workers a poverty wage while taking corporate welfare from working people. To model his standards, he stripped janitors at his luxury Columbia Bank building of affordable healthcare and their union while bankers, investors, and developers publicly turned their cheek.
Haub and Cohen - our Community's Anti-worker Leaders
If Council member Talbert would help us expose Tacoma's tax-dollar subsidized poverty-wage jobs, he would find many veterans and undocumented immigrants working for the wealthiest among us like Mr. Haub and Mr. Cohen. These workers are building the luxury condos, making beds at Marriott Courtyard hotel, cleaning toilets at Herb Simon office towers, washing floors at UW campus, and guarding the Maersk port terminal.
As long as Tacoma's corporations and Mr. Talbert continue "job creation" that denies living wages and affordable healthcare, we will not "address the problem" of growing poverty. Unfortunately, the good works of charity and government assistance will continue to fall short. "Improving operations" and "retooling and relocating" shelters do not address the root causes: we can work hard all day in Tacoma and still find ourselves in a shelter. This is the Erivan Haub and Mike Cohen model that the News Tribune pretends doesn't exist.
(Back to the top)
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a self-organized group of tomato pickers in Florida who took on McDonalds, Yum! Brands, the parent company of Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and Burger King for more money. They just recently won a one cent increase per pound of tomatoes. The last corporation to hold out on giving tomato pickers a living wage was Burger King.
This one cent increase will raise tomato-picker pay by 70 percent. Overall this agreement will cost Burger King, a company that makes over 2 billion dollars in revenues annually, 300,000 dollars a year.
CIW campaigned for 3 years against Burger King through using a sophisticated media campaign, conducting protests at BK corporate head quarters, engaging in a senate hearing and by utilizing hundreds of communities that came out in solidarity with the Immokalee workers.
The Whatcom County Organizing Committee of Washington State Jobs with Justice was one of those groups that came out in solidarity. Whatcom sent delegations and protested Burger King in Bellingham raising awareness amongst consumers, BK workers and management.
During one conversation with Burger King management (the manager herself was an immigrant) the manager expressed shock in learning that the Immokalee workers were only asking for a one cent increase.
On May 23rd Burger King held a press conference announcing their concession to a one cent increase and expressed hope in turning "a new page in our relationship and begin a new chapter of real progress for Florida farm workers." Now the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is holding Burger King to their word by negotiating a code of conduct that reflects just working conditions in the fields. The fight continues but this victory was hard won and well deserved.
(Back to the top)
People are homeless for many reasons: domestic violence, non-living wage jobs, foreclosures, mental health issues, homophobia against youth, homeland security raiding workplaces and peoples' homes, and the lack of services in Seattle to provide resources to our neighbors in need.
There is an alarming rise in homelessness in Seattle partially due to the failure of the Seattle / King County's: Ten Year Plan to End Homelessness to provide enough low-income housing to keep pace with the rapidly growing economic inequality in Seattle and the Mayor's refusal to replenish shelter beds as our homeless population increases.
The rise in homelessness has led Mayor Nickels to increase sweeps of non-emergency homeless encampments. This increase started in 2007. These non-emergency sweeps punish people for being homeless and destroy the few cherished items people have from family photos and relics, to clothing and jewelry.
Up until recently the Mayor's office has captured a sympathetic ear from the press, but the tides turned on June 9th. Jobs with Justice, Real Change and other community and faith groups organized a third campout at city hall and participated in civil disobedience to protest the inhuman sweeps of our streets. Finally the media listened and we got great coverage that put a human face to the homeless and demonstrated solidarity from people of all classes.
In this ongoing campaign we celebrate this significant moment when the broader community sees the real face of homelessness and decides not to punish the working poor.
Check out the press coverage:
(Back to the top)
|
