Big Union Victory In Anti-Union Texas
While Donald Trump’s Labor Department works to diminish employee rights, organized workers have scored an important victory deep in the heart of anti-union Texas.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner signed an executive order raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2021 for 8,000 people at the city’s two airports. That’s a 65% increase for workers paid the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. About 8,000 baggage handlers, caterers, wheelchair attendants and others benefit.
The Service Employees International Union organized the Houston workers. Workers in Denver earlier won $15 an hour by 2021. A new ordinance proposed in Minneapolis would require $15 an hour by 2022.
The federal minimum wage is worth only $6.10 an hour when adjusted for inflation since 2009 when the $7.25 floor was established.
“The contract workers get lower pay for longer hours as the airlines dodge their responsibility for the employees who make their businesses run and bring in their profits.”
That a local government in Texas is raising wages for mostly minority workers shows how organized efforts can win improved pay despite how Trump has turned the Labor Department into “the Department of Management Rights,”as Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik put it.
Vicious Scheme
Workers at Houston’s Bush airport suffer in a low-wage no-rights, no-benefits hell with the financial fires fueled by a vicious contracting-out scheme. It’s a perfect example of how the Trump administration’s misclassification of millions of “gig economy” employees as independent contractors hurts workers.
https://www.dcreport.org/2019/10/22/big-union-victory-in-anti-union-texas/
