Page 6 - Ed Ott News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Waitresses, whatever, being able to go in and be at the bargaining able and feel like they're part of their own representation. why is that important? >> for a group like restaurant opportunity center, roc, they were really dealing with issues that in the industry the unions had not engaged what they saw as sufficiently. for instance, who gets to wait on tables in the front of the house as to the back of the house is as much a racial and actual politics issue as it is union organizing issue. and they've engaged that question with a real practical approach of working with employers who they cal...

We were taught you have to be careful in a capitalist society because there is no bottom to the bottom. that $7.25 worker is actually underbid in the marketplace for wages less than $6, $4 an hour. there are domestic workers that getting a paycheck at all is kind of a gamble. they're not sure they're going to be paid at the end of a given week. so part of the reason why we fight for unions, worker centers and legal protections for workers is that in the market, there is no bottom. that's the whole point. we mitigate market impacts. >> and new york, of course, a place where still there's a rela...

Organizations and worker centers are giving employees some hope and some empowerment. the book "new labor in new york" details case studies of this new way of organizing and how they could be replicated, potentially on a national level. the author is ed ott, the editor of that book, who also ran the new york city central labor council. ed joins us now. >> thank you very much. i was a co-editor. >> co-editor. thank you. one of the big shifts that's happened in the economy that's led to a decline in union membership has been a shift in the type of jobs. manufacturing jobs have dropped off. low-p...

The workers stood up to that, the labor relations board established the fact they have rights, i think the clear message from the workers is we're not going away, we're back this black friday and staying here. this is not a short-term action. this is a long term siege. i think the other thing that they established is that they are not alone. the workers have a lot of support, a lot of friends, the media including the main stream media has begun to pay attention to the needs of these workers in different ways. bloomberg news, fortune, have all said that in fact, walmart could afford to pay more...

Pressuring the university and the university has turned back toward getting more full timers but it's going to take years and years to dig out of that hole. it's unfair to the faculty but also as you pointed out before, it's very unfair to the students, and from an organizing perspective if you are running around new york city on three different campuses, getting a job you don't have time for anything else. your main goal is to get home to your family and do what else you got to do. >> that feels like it undermines the other key aspect of what we were meant to be up to in universities, the pro...