Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers.
Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.
ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 87, said: “They’ve been working in the buildings downtown for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years.
David Bacon
About 650 workers at the St. Francis Hotel, one of San Francisco’s oldest and most luxurious, walked out on strike on November 18. This was the third of what may be many strikes to hit San Francisco’s Class A hotels.
Unionists protested on July 20 in San Francisco against the decision by Californian Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to cut the wages of more than 200,000 state workers to the federal minimum wage of US$6.55 per hour, alleging he must do so because the state legislature has not passed a budget.
While turmoil in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca has been in the headlines for weeks, little media coverage has noted that at its centre is a crusading newspaper, Noticias (The News). The dailys sportswriter is now a leading spokesperson for the teachers, doctors, nurses, newspaper workers and others who have joined together to call for greater democracy, and a new direction for the states economy. David Bacon interviewed Noticiass Jaime Medina in northern Mexico, where the writer was seeking support from the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras.
The British Midlands are being engulfed by race riots, pitting the children of whites who lost jobs in the country's devastating deindustrialisation against sons and daughters of those who came to fill service jobs in the
For two months, the banana groves in four of Dole Corporation's principal Philippine plantations have been uncharacteristically silent.