The party included delicious food, a film screening, musical performances, and a social justice puppet show performed by RAP’s Common Threads Art Collective.

Common Threads was excited to participate in the party. Their 15-minute puppet show followed the story of two young LES girls who deal with being pulled apart when one finds out her family is being evicted. Complete with sock puppets and props portraying the new blue building encroaching on the older buildings, the story ends with the young girls encouraging their family to form a tenants union in their building so that they don’t have to leave. The end scene features the sock-puppets rallying with mini-picket signs.

The puppet show was followed by a 2001 documentary about displacement in San Francisco. The film, entitled Boom: The Sound of Eviction, documents gentrification in the Bay Area within the context of the dot-com bubble. The film looked at both the political landscape and human toll involved when low-income people are evicted to make room for luxury buildings and developments.

SummerFest is an annual series of five neighborhood events that aim to bring Lower East Side residents together to celebrate the diversity of their neighborhood and build momentum to continue to organize for justice.

Workers at the high-end clothing retailer Scoop NYC have won a victory that comes after a year of organizing, public demonstrations, and legal action to make the company follow wage and hour laws and respect immigrant worker rights. The confidential settlement is also a significant victory for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union’s Retail Action Project (RAP), an organization that is dedicated to improving wages and working conditions for retail workers.

In late 2008, 17 Scoop NYC workers joined RAP and filed complaints and launched a campaign against the company.

Scoop NYC, a high-end clothier that operates 11 stores nationwide, allegedly required stock and security workers to labor 60 or more hours per week for over six years without paying the legal overtime rate. Some workers contend they were discriminated against on the basis of their national origin because Scoop refused to accept their legal work authorization papers.

Madou Kone, a former Scoop NYC security supervisor said “This is a great victory for all the workers and for RAP. I really appreciate the support we got from RAP and the community in this fight for justice.”

With the help of RAP, and the workers’ rights law firm of Cary Kane LLP, workers filed two complaints against Scoop NYC, one seeking paid overtime and the second, which was filed at the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging discrimination based on national origin. The settlement with the company covers both cases.

“Because many retail workers are not properly paid and many others suffer from poverty wages, we have joined the fight to pass the Wage Theft Prevention Act at the State level and the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act in New York City,” said Jeff Eichler, the lead New York City organizer for the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union. “Not only must we ensure that legal wages are paid retail workers but we must lift the wage floor for retail workers by making sure they are paid a living wage.”

In July 2009, RAP organized a large demonstration outside Scoop NYC’s flagship store in SoHo to announce the lawsuit against the trendy clothing retailer. Then in February 2010, workers participated in the March of Hearts up Broadway in which they again marched on Scoop NYC’s SoHo retail location. RAP members from Mystique Boutique and Shoe Mania also participated in the march.

About RAP
The Retail Action Project (RAP) is a labor community partnership between the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) and Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES). Working with private attorneys and with the New York State Attorney General’s Labor Bureau office, RAP has helped workers win nearly $2 million dollars in back-pay awards. RAP has also aided in the arrest of retail owners who have engaged in wage theft. For more information, visit http://www.retailactionproject.org and http://www.rwdsu.org.

The panel starting by describing today’s retail workers and how retailers are making millions on their backs. For the most part, retail workers are not teenagers, college students or folks working to get out of the house and earn a little spending money. The huge majority of retail workers are supporting themselves, and very often their families, on wages so low that they have to work two or three different jobs just to make ends meet. The majority are people of color.

Retailers either offer no benefits or benefits hinged on an hours-worked quota system purposely coupled with an inability to get hours, preventing workers from accessing them. In other cases, (J.C. Penney and Whole Foods were cited as an examples), workers are terminated when they have enough seniority for benefits or, when benefits depend on being full-time, they are terminated and offered part-time positions at new-hire hourly rates.

"New York City retailers' had 70% growth in sales from 2001 to 2007 but still pay the lowest wages-44% earn less than $10 an hour, an outrage in New York City where the cost of living is so high," shared Chimuka, who works at Yellow Rat Bastard, a high-end skateboard and apparel shop in Manhattan. "It is like killing somebody." He started at $6.25 hour but fought with RAP and won a union contract that guaranteed better wages for the store's workers.

Romuald Ilboudo concurred. He stood up for better wages at Scoop NYC, a store frequented by the stars and paying workers poverty wages. “RAP taught us how to fight,” he said. “One, know your rights. Many retail workers are immigrants and need confidence. Learn how to approach new workers and mobilize them. (High turnover rates in retail make organizing difficult). Two, develop strategies for organizing and using media. And three, know how to file a complaint and where to get legal counsel. When we got fired, we received a $300,000 award.”

The Common Threads Art Collective is a group of RAP associated retail workers who are also artists. They put on exhibits that not only provide a venue for selling their work, but also make statements about the plight of retail workers. They also stage creative direct actions. They have handed out “subversive” coupons, displayed mannequins with a message outside of retailers, hosted a bread line and dressed as elves during the Christmas season.

Others on the workshop panel had fewer victories to share. Even though Walmart, as the world’s largest retailer, is guilty of the most heinous strategies for denying workers fair compensation, Wake Up Walmart faces a real struggle to get Walmart workers organized. But, Cynthia and Ernestine, two Walmart workers on the panel, are not giving up. “People are scared and have a right to be scared,” Cynthia said. “But with unity, we can overcome.”

Ernestine described her Walmart store as a plantation, with the store manager as an overseer. “No matter how hard we work, it’s never enough. To work like that on a daily basis and be paid such low wages, have your hours cut, be promised bonuses and not receive them, with no healthcare . . . Walmart makes billions of dollars and most of its workers are on food stamps and receiving government medical assistance. They can pick us off individually, but together we can make it work.”

Chicago’s Grassroots Collaborative has been fighting Walmart for six years. The morning of the workshop, they were dealt a stinging defeat. Chicago city government gave the go-ahead for the retail Goliath to build the first 22 planned Walmarts there. As part of its strategy to keep the retailer out, Grassroots Collaborative fought and won the passage of the Big Box Living Wage Ordinance. Mayor Daly vetoed it. A subsequent ordinance that requires corporations receiving subsidies or tax incentives to pay a living wage did pass, but probably will not help people working for Chicago’s new Walmarts.

“Six years of work went down this week,” said Amisha Patel, executive director of Grassroots Collaborative. “We’re taking on huge battles, we’re fighting capitalism. Capitalism is collapsing, but it’s collapsing on us.”

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After reading this post, Amisha asked to clarify a few things in a comment. ”I spoke about the discouragement of not winning all you want to in this work. In Chicago, we had worked to win higher wages for retail workers than was achieved this week. But getting walmart to sit down at the table and agree to wages $1 above minimum is a victory- it’s something we all must continue to build on.

We introduced the living wage for subsidized corporations bill, which would ensure that companies that get tax dollars don’t create poverty jobs. When passed, this bill could transform thousands of poverty jobs to living wage jobs, which absolutely would create more good jobs in the retail sector. We’re still working to move this forward.

Finally, I spoke about the discouragement of how hard it is to create transformative economic policies, but also that we get to feel those hard feelings and move through them so that we can keep working in a connected and powerful way. Capitalism will continue to work to keep us isolated, but we absolutely can and must keep working to build trust across divisions and build the labor-community coalitions that will win power for working families.