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Nathan Newman is going to do a week long series on why Unions matter. I was planning on posting something along those lines today, but I wanted to point out this story:
Fight for Dignity: Early on in Vegas, the casino owners wanted to stick the youngest waitresses on those tables, so if you aged a few years as a cocktail waitress, you often found yourself consigned to siberia in the casino. Or worse, you had the best positions handed out by supervisors based on who would do "favors" for them.
At least they couldn't be fired just for getting old because of the basic union contract -- and this was true before age discrimination legislation was passed in Congress -- but the indignity of sex discrimination in all its forms was harshly at play for Vegas cocktail waitresses.
So they organized.
Go read the whole thing. Even today, except in the rarest of cases, if you are not one of the lucky few who posses skills hard to find in your area, Union members are paid better and treated better than their non-Union counterparts.
Read Labornotes.org for more info on why and HOW unions matter.
Posted by: charlesHave you ever heard of, "the glass ceiling"?
How do you deal with it? How do you fight it?
I work for the federal government, Interior Dept., Bureau of Reclamation. I belong to the local union here called IFPTE (International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers - we have no professional engineers in our group since they opt'ed out over 15+ years ago so most of us are technicians, secretaries, and clerks - but we keep the name) Local 128. We want to try to increase our membership from 40 out of nearly 500 employees. Our women engineers are complaining up a storm about, "the glass ceiling".
We're trying to figure out how to approach this issue. Any thoughts?
303-445-2337
Posted by: Marcia Jones
