Unions and their members are marking World Day for Decent Work today with rallies, discussions and petitions to highlight the point that not every job is a “good job.” Decent work means employment that provides living wages in workplaces that are safe and healthy. Decent work is about fairness on the job and social protections for workers when they are sick, injured or retire. Working people time and again have proven that when they are free to form and join unions and bargain for better working conditions, they can achieve decent work and improve their lives and benefit their families and communities. The Solidarity Center works around the world with unions and other allies to empower workers to collectively achieve decent work—check out some of their stories – and a great photo essay -- at solidaritycenter.org
For the latest local labor calendar, go to dclabor.org and click on Calendar. Here’s today's labor history: On this date in 1879, labor leader and songwriter Joe Hill was born in Sweden. In 1946, the "Battle of the Mirrors" took place in Hollywood. Picketing members of the Conference of Studio Unions disrupted an outdoor shoot by holding up large reflectors that filled camera lenses with blinding sunlight. Members of the competing IATSE union retaliated by using the reflectors to shoot sunlight back across the street. The battle went on all day. And on October 9, 1997, retail stock brokerage Smith Barney reached a tentative sexual harassment settlement with a group of female employees. The suit charged, among other things, that branch managers asked female workers to remove their tops in exchange for money and one office featured a "boom boom room" where women workers were encouraged to, quote, "entertain clients," unquote. The settlement was never finalized: the judge refused to approve the deal because it failed to adequately redress the women’s grievances. Today’s labor quote is by Joe Hill “A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read.”
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