WBEZ | minimum wage

Downtown walkout for higher minimum wage shakes up Chicago businesses

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:32:00 -0500

A group of fast food and retail workers in downtown Chicago staged a protest and walkout Wednesday to demand a minimum wage of $15 an hour for all downtown workers. Beginning very early in the morning, the roving protest grew in size as it made noise in front of stores including Macy’s, Nordstrom Rack, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s.

Felix Mendez said he changed out of his uniform and into a red shirt and walked out of his job at Subway early Wednesday morning.

“Every two weeks my check is less than $500,” he said. In two years at Subway he said he’s never gotten a raise, and he and his family recently had to move because they couldn’t pay rent. He lives with his girlfriend, who’s a teacher, and his two kids. “We make it, but it would be nice not to have to struggle, just to live comfortable live everybody else.”

Managers at Mendez’s Subway didn’t want to comment. But another Subway manager whose employees walked out said he’d support a higher state minimum wage.

“Why not?” said Subway manager Firoj Ali. But he said Subway won’t be the one to set that new minimum. “The franchise is not going to decide minimum wage.”

“I have to go paycheck by paycheck struggling,” said Amani Johnson, who works at the same Subway. The 26-year-old has two young children, and he’s been at Subway for six years. “Why be greedy and keep the money to yourself when you could be helping many others out here that are struggling?”

Earlier this year in his State of the State address, Ill. Gov. Pat Quinn voiced his support for raising the state minimum above $8.25. But lawmakers have not yet addressed legislation this session. The last change in the state minimum wage was in 2010.

A study by the National Employment Law Project shows that since the economic crash in 2008, the growth of low-wage jobs has far outpaced mid- and high-wage jobs.

The group behind Wednesday’s protest, the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC), wants downtown businesses to raise pay on their own rather than waiting for a change in laws. The WOCC is using a protest strategy that has also been gaining some traction with fast food workers in New York City: getting workers to go out on “strike” without officially forming a union. But Wednesday’s demonstration was more a walkout than a strike; workers said they will be back on the job Thursday.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

Fast food and retail workers march on the Magnificent Mile

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 20:26:00 -0600

A worker advocacy group is asking downtown businesses to pay their employees at least $15 an hour.

Over 100 people marched on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile Thursday to protest low wages for retail and fast food workers as a part of the Fight For 15 Campaign, a new project of the Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago.

“I literally live paycheck to paycheck, like right now I have a dollar and thirty-six cent in my bank account,” said Kenyanna Brown. She works at Victoria’s Secret in Watertower Place for $8.75 an hour; Illinois’ current minimum wage is $8.25. “If I didn’t live with my mom I’d be on the streets, I wouldn’t be able to provide for myself.”

Protesters delivered a letter to the Greater North Michigan Avenue Association, a downtown business group, and asked for a response by Dec. 22.

Brown said she was part of the small group who launched the campaign last month. The committee is affiliated with the community organization Action Now, and many who attended the protest wore Service Employees International Union (SEIU) shirts and hats. Protesters represented their home neighborhoods with large canvas signs.

A recent study by the National Employment Law Project says that although only 21 percent of jobs lost in the recession were in low-wage occupations, jobs paying less that $13.84 per hour account for 58 percent of new positions created since 2008. Of those new low-wage jobs, the sectors with the most growth are retail sales and food preparation.

And more low-wage workers in Chicago are above the age of 30 or supporting a whole household, according to a study affiliated with the campaign.

“I think that there’s a misconception of the people that do work for minimum wage,” said Amie Crawford, another organizer. She’s 56 and works at downtown health-food store Protein Bar after struggling to find work in her profession as an interior designer. “I feel that they - we - are dismissed because we’re high school kids or we’re retired people that just want extra money...that’s not true.”

Fight For 15 has links to a similar effort in New York that organized a fast food worker walk-out in November.

Nannies and housecleaners speak up about abuse

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:38:00 -0600

A new national report suggests many household workers are subject to low wages and dangerous working conditions. The study, co-sponsored by the Center for Urban and Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, surveyed more than 2,000 nannies, caregivers and housecleaners in 14 metropolitan areas. Authors say it is the first national statistical report on home workers.

The study found that nearly a quarter of domestic workers are paid less than their state’s minimum wage, and 65 percent of those surveyed lack health insurance. Only 4 percent reported being provided with health insurance by their employers. The report also revealed a high likelihood of injury and exposure to chemicals on the job. And 36 percent of live-in workers and 19 percent of all workers said they’d been threatened, insulted, or verbally abused by an employer.

The vast majority of domestic workers are women.

“Some of them are working for $1.42 an hour and they’re working 24-hour days," said Lisa Thomas, who helped administer related surveys in Chicago. "I didn’t realize that this was going on.”

Thomas, who has worked in home care for 21 years, said she had been verbally harassed on the job and worked without benefits for many years. But, she said, she was surprised and horrified to hear about female live-in workers who said they were often afraid to complain about conditions. Thomas said many thought they might lose their jobs or be deported.

“A majority of them were living in fear,” she said.

Thomas is working with the Chicago Coalition of Household Workers (CCHW) to advocate for a domestic workers bill of rights similar to one passed in New York in 2010. The coalition is based at the Latino Union of Chicago, an organization that advocates for the rights of day laborers.

“We participated in the survey to get a better sense of the problems going on and have it verified,” said Elisa Ringholm of the Latino Union. Over the last year members of the coalition traveled to California to work with organizers there on a bill of rights. California Governor Jerry Brown vetoed that bill in September.

“Domestic workers are not considered workers,” said Ringholm. Most domestic workers do not have a legal right to a minimum wage, overtime, or workers compensation. “Those are the kind of things that we want to change in Illinois.”

State Senator Ira Silverstein (D-8th) of Chicago says he plans to introduce the bill in January. In 2011 the Illinois Senate voted down a domestic workers rights bill sponsored by Silverstein; the new bill will include the input of the Chicago coalition.

Revision Street: Vanessa Roanhorse, 31

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:25:00 -0600

In our hyper-branded, if-you-like-this-you’ll-also-like-this, 24-hour-news cycle culture, we forget how easy it is to specialize unthinkingly. Meaning: we narrow our own interests so severely that, for example, we no longer talk to our neighbors. We don’t treat the foreclosures down the street as news. We don’t think our individual circumstances can possibly reflect the same national or international concerns we glimpse on cable news or read on our RSS feeds.

And we forget how early it starts. How quickly and efficiently we narrow. Categorize. Dismiss. Until finally we are demanding of people: what is interesting about you? Why should I care?

I’d met Vanessa a number of times over the years, and exchanged pleasant enough conversation with her. Yet when I began Revision Street: America, she appeared on none of my initial lists of interview subjects. Simply put, I had no idea what she might have to say. Nor why I should care.

But Revision Street has been about allowing those things to be said anyway: finding place for them, granting them import. So I trundled down to her Pilsen home on a quiet weekend to listen. I'm not even sure why she let me.

Our conversation gutted me. And I can think of no better way of signing off from Revision Street—even temporarily—than by asking you to listen, too.

I’ve lived here almost 10 years. I left for two years to California and then I came back. I don’t count those two years in California because I was so unhappy there. I was editing. Nothing really big. Commercials, some short films here and there, some adult industry stuff for a short amount of time because it was good money and it was consistent. I really enjoyed editing but I think what happened was I just recognized that I wasn’t gonna be a great editor. I didn’t have that extreme perfectionism about the work. And I realized I didn’t want do it anymore… so I quit, came back to Chicago and I don’t even know how I ended up where I’m at right now. This is now my chance to figure it out publicly, I guess.

You start off thinking you know who you’re going to be in college and college tells you, You know this. Where I went to high school, they were all like, You can be the next president. I get why they do that, but I think I just figured out too quickly that I was gonna be a filmmaker/editor and that that’s who I had to be. So after I took a break from it, which turned into quitting, I had no idea who I was supposed to be anymore.

Since the time you’re about 17 to—I was about 26, 27—I spent time dreaming that this was what my life was gonna be about. I was kinda screwed for a while. I didn’t really have any other skills [laughs]. I didn’t really do graphic design, I didn’t do a lot of writing anymore, and then I didn’t have the tools—like if I wanted to get into photography again I didn’t have the right tools for it. I just felt like I put myself into this corner with this like knowledge of information that was totally useless if I wasn’t going to be editing [laughs]. So I just bounced around.

I had some really weird jobs: I tried to go back to the food industry, and I got a job at the first place that took me, which was this crappy little burger joint down the street. They must have missed that they had the worst people working for them at all times because they were so impressed that I was wiping down counters without them asking me. They were like, Wow you take so much initiative. Then about halfway through the day, they were like, Hey can you get the garbage out of the bathroom? I remember opening the bathroom and it smelled so terrible that I just started crying. A total breakdown. I’m 26, I’m cleaning the bathroom in a crappy burger joint making minimum wage. I guess in some circles of life you should just be grateful to have a job. I struggled with that because where I came from it’s hard to find work. Living on a reservation, it’s the worst. It’s basically the ghetto without the city. So I felt like such a whiney baby, totally privileged, crying ‘cause I have a job, but it was a total blow to my ego.

I went to an upscale all-girls private school on the East Coast. I could have gone anywhere for college, but I went to Arizona because my mom wanted me closer. It’s like this lead up, this mythology I had created about myself all got broken down in the bathroom of a burger joint on Milwaukee. It was really a dark time.

After that I was like, I can’t do this. I can’t serve people anymore, I can’t work for these large corporations any more. I was able to ignore what I was doing for a really long time, but then I turned 30 and four years had gone by. I thought, I don’t know how this happened. I’m 30 years old I have no ethical or moral solace. Then luckily a friend mentioned there was a job opening at her work. It was totally administrative, but I was like, I don’t care.

From 30 to 31 was the big push of evolving and growing and trying to be like, fuck that. I can’t do that. Part of it is because I have a lot of family back home and everyone’s at different stages in their lives. Whenever I talk to them, they’re always saying, God, your life is so great. I mean it’s not that I’m trying to live up to their expectations, but I feel like I got lucky, I got an opportunity, but I was scared and so I wasn’t doing anything about it. So 30 to 31 was totally life changing.

That was just a year ago. I started doing more volunteer work, I started setting indigenous plants, in particular American Indian indigenous herbal stuff. It helps that my partner Blaine is an urban farmer, so he’s always bringing books home and I get to read them. It was a really good year for me, so then I started working at the Delta Institute* and I can’t tell you the shit I’ve learned.

It’s so nice to be challenged on an everyday basis and enjoy what you’re doing. The whole sustainable thing—I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing already. You know, biking, trying to buy local, recycling and stuff like that. It’s nice to be working with an organization that’s doing it on such a larger scale. I don’t know what it means for my future, but the eventual plan is, we’re gonna move back, close to the reservation in two or three years, start our own farm, and do a native traditional agricultural program, a job training program to reteach my people how to grow the food they used to grow. That’s the goal.

* A nonprofit organization that works on environmental sustainability policies and practices in the Great Lakes area.