National push for $15 minimum wage hits home for U.S. Senate workers
Errol
Baker left his job at the Washington Hilton in 2004 after 12 years to
pursue what he thought would be a better life working at the U.S.
Capitol.
“I thought I was going to be working in a better
environment,” he said. “I’d get to meet senators and congressmen and
movie stars. I was very excited.”
Baker, 52, has brushed
shoulders with the famous and the powerful in his years as a Senate food
service worker — once, for instance, he received a $20 tip from
then-Sen. Barack Obama — but he is otherwise no better off.
Unable
to make ends meet on his $11.30 hourly wage, he now cleans offices for
five hours at night after his eight-hour Capitol shift ends. It’s nearly
midnight before he comes home to his D.C. apartment, hoping to catch a
few hours of sleep before he reports to the Senate for his morning
shift.
Baker is among a group of federal contract workers who are
joining with union-backed advocates to call on lawmakers to do more to
protect an increasingly privatized federal workforce, where low wages
and minimal benefits often clash with the rhetoric espoused by elected
leaders.
“We work for them every day,” Baker said.
“They have a clean environment; they’ve got good food to eat. They say,
‘Thank you very much’ and ‘Good work.’ But that’s not enough. I need
more so I can pay my bills. . . . $15 and a union.”
The
national campaign for higher wages and better benefits — reflected in
the “Fight for $15” backed by the Service Employees International Union —
has landed squarely on Capitol Hill as the 2016 presidential race spins
up.
“If the candidates can’t help the workers who cook and clean
for them, how will they help the low-wage workers who labor all across
America?” said Joseph Geevarghese, deputy director of the Change to Win
labor coalition, a sponsor of the Good Jobs Nation campaign that is
seeking to highlight job conditions among federal contract workers.
“What happens at the Capitol is a litmus test about whether or not
presidential candidates who know these workers really care.”
A
protest in April helped highlight the plight of Senate workers such as
Charles Gladden, 63, who had been sleeping outside the McPherson Square
Metro Station. On Tuesday, another Senate food worker, Sontia Bailey, wrote in the Guardian
about having a miscarriage after working two jobs: Her full-time
$10.59-an-hour Senate position, and an $11-an-hour part-time job at a
Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.
On Wednesday, liberal members
of Congress — including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Democratic
presidential candidate — will appear on the Capitol grounds with worker
advocates to call for a $15 minimum wage.
That
proposal, which would more than double the current federal minimum wage,
is almost certain to be dead on arrival in a Congress controlled by
Republicans who argue that a minimum-wage increase would reduce the
overall number of jobs. But advocates want President Obama to take
executive action to improve standards for federal contractors, and there
is hope that senators might try to improve the lives of contract
workers such as Baker, Bailey and Gladden.
Senate food services
were contracted out amid ongoing operating deficits in 2008, when
Democrats were in the majority. “There are parts of government that can
be run like a business and should be run like businesses,” Sen. Dianne
Feinstein (D-Calif.), then-chairman of the Senate Rules and
Administration Committee, said at the time.
The contract with New
York-based Restaurant Associates is now up for review, and workers and
advocates are pushing for a seat at the table to negotiate improvements
for employees.
House workers have been unionized for nearly three
decades, but Senate workers are not. Although the Restaurant Associates
contract guarantees the right of workers to form a union, a 2012
SEIU-backed organizing drive failed
A
spokesman for Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the current chairman of the rules
panel, declined to comment on the ongoing negotiations, saying they are
now between Restaurant Associates and the Architect of the Capitol, not
the committee. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the
panel, said the contract workers are “part of the Senate family and they
deserve to be treated as such.”
“A
$15 minimum wage and better benefits would be a great way to say thanks
for all that they do, and we’re working hard to make it happen,”
Schumer said.
A Democratic aide who is familiar with the process
but was not authorized to comment on it publicly said that “some
progress” has been made but that “there is more to be done.”
A
report issued this week by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute and Good
Jobs Nation found that tens of thousands of federal contract jobs, about
30 percent of the total, pay less than the D.C. living wage for a
family of four. That includes the vast majority of grounds maintenance
and food service jobs. That, in effect, the report says, makes the
federal government one of the Washington region’s largest low-wage
employers.
The wages and benefits offered to Senate workers are
made even starker by the internal disparities between Restaurant
Associates employees. Those who were hired before privatization — such
as 33-year worker Norma Rogers, 76 — receive higher wages and robust
federal benefits.
The newer workers “are treated like when they
had slaves, you know? ‘You got to do what I tell you or otherwise you
go,’ ” said Rogers, who earns $17 an hour. “With us, it’s a little
different.”
When Baker was hired at the Capitol in 2004, he took a
temporary job expecting to transition into a good-paying job with
federal benefits like Rogers’s. That hope ended once food services were
contracted out in 2008.
Had he stayed at the Hilton, Baker
probably would be much better off: Under the latest contract negotiated
by the union representing most D.C. hotel workers, Baker would make at
least $18 an hour now, plus employer-paid medical and dental benefits.
Baker said he regrets coming to work at the Capitol. “I’m not going to lie to you,” he said. “Especially now.”
No comments:
Post a Comment