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| TZINTZUN |
The Workers Defense Project (WDP) also won an effort to increase entry-level pay to $12 an hour from the typical $10 an hour and secure workers' compensation insurance for low-level workers helping to build Apple's $300-million operations center in Austin, says Tzintzún.
The Austin worker center's biggest coup to date, though, may have been its successful effort to focus attention on the large number of construction-related deaths in Texas and the need for improved jobsite safety. WDP released a study highlighting the state's high construction fatality rate and grabbed widespread media coverage with protest marches on the capitol building that featured workers carrying black coffins to commemorate jobsite deaths.
"I don't always agree with their approach to influencing public opinion," says Phil Thoden, president of the Austin chapter of Associated General Contractors, who says the WDP sometimes "paints the entire [construction] industry in a negative light and leads people to believe all contractors aren't paying their workers fairly and aren't educating them about safety."
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| THODEN |
"We've also worked together on the issue of making workers' compensation mandatory on state-of-Texas construction projects," Thoden says. "We also share a similar agenda on immigration reform."
Breaking New Ground
"We're in a period of broad experimentation in the ways to represent workers," says Jefferson Cowie, a labor history professor and chairman of the labor relations, law and history department at Cornell University's School of Industrial & Labor Relations.
Worker centers have been "very innovative" in using their limited financial resources to improve the lives of very low-income workers, says Cowie. "They've been filling a vacuum in the labor-relations field, and I fully endorse everything they are trying to do."
Cowie notes that unions "used to look down on worker centers," largely because they did not provide traditional collective-bargaining services. "But it's a new world," and organized labor increasingly views worker centers as "natural allies" in that they, too, are struggling to help revive the working class, he says.
Christina Tzintzún, executive director of the Austin-based Workers Defense Project, says her organization has had successes on several fronts, including enactment of Texas laws that prohibit wage theft or "stiffing" and that establish penalties for employers who misclassify their employees as independent contractors on state contracts.Still, Thoden says worker centers "exist because there are some bad actors in this industry" and a need for someone to stand up to them. He said AGC and the WDP share goals on improving jobsite safety and treating workers fairly.
