For Immediate Release: Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015
Contact: Donna De La Cruz, [email protected] (202) 339-9331

Los Angeles, Minneapolis Leaders Highlight Need to Include Worker Voices in Finding Solutions to Jobs Crisis

(WASHINGTON)—Local community leaders at the forefront of helping to end the jobs crisis were part of today’s White House Summit on Worker Voice, sharing their experiences to ensure that as the economy grows and strengthens, working Americans also are benefiting.

Lola Smallwood Cuevas, director of the Los Angeles Black Worker Center, and Veronica Mendez Moore, a community leader with Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha (CTUL) based in Minnesota, were part of two panels looking at how workers can use their voices to build power for themselves. Community Change (CCC) partners with these two organizations on workers’ rights issues.

Smallwood Cuevas was part of the “Community + Workers=Stronger Voices” panel that explored specific ways community groups, employers and unions work together to create good-paying jobs with benefits that help families prosper. Mendez Moore was part of the “Worker Voice, Making a Difference: Rejecting the False Choice” panel where she highlighted CTUL’s campaign of organizing with retail janitors as a model for low-wage worker organizing across the country.

The White House asked Smallwood Cuevas and Mendez Moore to participate in the summit because of the exemplary work they have done to increase access to good jobs with benefits that help families prosper. Smallwood Cuevas said she was thrilled that President Obama and his Administration are recognizing the work the Los Angeles Black Worker Center is doing to address the jobs crisis in the black community.

“Too many families are struggling to get by on wages that can’t sustain them,” Smallwood Cuevas said. “For black families, finding decent paying jobs has reached a crisis level. No work or bad work is a daily thing for people in our community. At the Center, we deal with the trauma of the black job crisis and the strain it puts on our hearts and lives with collective study and action.”

On her panel, Mendez Moore shared how retail janitors held a successful campaign that included marches, a 12-day hunger strike, several job strikes and other actions to make significant changes in their industry that included recovering over a million dollars in unpaid wages and damages, virtually ending wage theft in the industry and winning the first raises workers have seen after more than a decade of declining wages.

“All too often workers are afraid to speak out about abuses in the workplace, fearing that they will lose their job or fearing another form of retaliation,” Mendez Moore said. “In one extreme case, an employer head-butted a janitor sending him to the hospital, all for simply asking for his overdue paycheck. If workers fear losing their livelihood, and in some cases fear physical assault, for merely requesting wages for work they did, how could we expect any different result?”

Discussions at the summit often focused on how families have a hard time making ends meet and how to remedy these cases that often drive more families deeper into poverty.

“For many years, wages for most have been stagnant and other conditions on their jobs have been getting worse because of corporate practices such as the growing reliance on part time work, and ‘on-demand,’ unpredictable schedules. Equally important, these changes – worsening pay, tougher conditions – contribute to a loss of dignity for many, many workers,” said Steve Savner, CCC’s Director of Public Policy.

Savner said the introduction last month of the WAGE Act would be an important initial step in helping working families since the bill would help people enforce their rights and provide for penalties strong enough to hold accountable corporations who would deny those rights.

“It would help working people build the power needed to secure critical changes on the job and help build a more powerful movement to get our economy back in balance,” Savner said.

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