AT&T Park Protest: 10 Arrested At Sit-In During Concession Workers Demonstration

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

This story comes to us courtesy of SF Weekly.

By Erin Sherbert

It was an exciting night at AT&T Park. Not only did the Giants' Juan Perez hit a tiebreaking single to win the game, but a group of protesters were arrested somewhere between the garlic fries and the beer.

Here's what happened: As we reported yesterday, concession stand employees and their supporters planned a 6 p.m. rally outside the ballpark to protest the ongoing contract dispute with management. Some 400 protesters showed up, and were "peacefully marching" until the game started.

While some of those supporters are fans of fair labor, they're also big fans of the Giants (or at least the garlic fries). About 50 of them broke away from the group, and with purchased tickets, went inside the stadium.

According to Officer Gordon Shyy, that group staged a "sit-down" near section 119, which is right next to the delicious-tasting garlic fries stand. The cops spoke with protest organizers and they understood they were violating AT&T Park/Giants fan code of conduct.

Contrary to popular belief, when anyone buys a ticket to see the Giants play, they're also agreeing to behave (that applies to you, too, Dodger fans). When fans violate that code, they have two options: leave or go to jail.

In this case, 10 of protesters opted for no. 2 and were cited for trespassing. The remaining demonstrators decided to leave the game, Shyy said.

The demonstration was part of the Unite Here Local 2's campaign to get higher wages, job security, and better health benefits under their new labor agreement. The group laments that they have not received a raise since 2010, and on May 25 held a one-day strike at the ballpark.

However, Sam Singer, spokesman for Centerplate, the San Francisco Giants' food and beverage subcontractor, says it values its employees.

"That is why they are already the highest-paid staff in the concession business, earning between $15 and $20 an hour, receiving full healthcare and other benefits for their part time work," he told us.

He added that the company has offered its employees the following:

A 4.5 percent ratification bonus ($500 per employee) for those who worked more than 40 games in 2012

A 1.7 percent annual wage increase on top of the best compensation package in the industry

Increased contribution of 9.2 percent to the Unite Here benefit plans

Employer paid health care for employees and their families

Until some sort of agreement is digested, concession workers are asking you all to bring your own fries and hot dogs to the Giants game.

If anything, it would be cheaper.

William K. Black: Myerson's Newest Model: 'Tax Poor Workers to Subsidize Rich Bankers'

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Assoc. Professor, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City; Sr. regulator during S&L debacle

Get Business Alerts: Sign Up

Roger Myerson has recently updated an article on his purported mechanism for explaining why our supposedly efficient markets are producing growing crises.

A MODEL OF MORAL-HAZARD CREDIT CYCLES (March 2010, revised September 2012)

Myerson's credit cycle model is not the focus of this piece. I write about one recommendation he makes about how to respond to a financial crisis driven by control frauds led by financial CEOs. This is the third piece I have written on Myerson's paean to plutocracy. He asserted in his Nobel Prize Lecture in December 2007, as a global systemic crisis was breaking out driven by an epidemic of control fraud that the key advantage of capitalism over communism was that capitalism produced severe income inequality in the form of exceptionally wealthy CEOs. Myerson claimed in that lecture and a lecture in December 2012 that CEOs were naturally dishonest and abusive towards shareholders. The only reliable exception was if they had enormous personal ownership in "their" bank.

Myerson's "mechanism" for causing abusive bankers to act as if they cared about the interests of shareholders was for the shareholders to bribe the CEOs and for the CEOs to own a controlling interest in the banks they managed. The failure of Myerson's designs to have any effect in containing the epidemic of accounting control fraud did not dissuade Myerson from his faith in plutocracy, cause him to read any of the relevant criminology literature, or to consider the work of a fellow Nobel Laureate in Economics, George Akerlof on "looting" (with Paul Romer).

Instead, Myerson has doubled-down on his pandering to plutocrats. Here is his suggestion on how we should respond to the latest wave of looting by financial CEOs:

"In this sense, a tax on poor workers to subsidize rich bankers may actually benefit the workers, as the increase of investment and employment can raise their wages by more than the cost of the tax [p. 25]."

The reader may wonder whether Myerson is making an effort at irony. No. Our family rule that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody is once again vindicated.

Get Alerts

Bangladesh factory workers fall ill; Suspected water supply

DHAKA, Bangladesh - about 450 workers fell ill during their shifts at a sweater factory near the capital of Bangladesh, and officials said Thursday that the water supply was suspected.

Investigators of the Ministry of health of the Government were testing the water in the factory of Starlight sweater for possible contamination, civil surgeon of the area, said Syed Habibullah.

Diseased workers suffered vomiting, nausea and upset stomach from two hours in their changes on Wednesday. Habibullah said were mainly given saline in hospitals and those that were better left by Thursday.

The factory obtains its drinking water from an underground reservoir, said CEO Mohammad Shafiur Rahman. It has wire to a tank on the roof of the eight-story building and supplied to each plant pots. Drinking water is supplied separately from the water supply of the building, asking workers quit drinking, he said.

The factory, which employs about 6,000 people in Gazipur, near Dhaka was closed Wednesday but reopened Thursday. "We have cleaned the reservoirs during the night and now the water is safe to drink," said Rahman.

A collapse of building near Dhaka in April 1129 workers killed, injured others and highlighted the dangerous working conditions in thousands of Bangladesh garment factories.

HuffPost related:

Get alerts

Union Membership Decline Boosts Corporate Profit At Workers' Expense, Study Says

Corporate profit has been soaring for years at workers' expense and a decline in union membership is to blame -- not a rise in technology, a new study found.

The jump in corporate profit over the past few decades can be explained largely by a decline in union membership over the same period, according to a study by Tali Kristal, a sociologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. The boost in companies’ bottom line comes at workers’ expense, Kristal wrote in an email to The Huffington Post.

“It’s a zero sum game: whatever is not going to workers, goes to corporations,” Kristal said. “Union decline not only increased wage gaps among workers, but also enabled capitalists to grab a larger slice of the national income pie at the expense of all workers, including the highly skilled.”

The findings, published Thursday in the American Sociological Review, add a new dimension to the debate over income inequality in the U.S., suggesting that policies aimed at boosting unions may help. Corporate profit soared to a record high share of the economy earlier this year, according to Bloomberg, while workers' wages have remained largely stagnant. The rise in profit comes as union membership has dropped to a record low.

Kristal’s findings contradict claims that increased computerization largely accounts for the boost in corporate profit at the expense of workers. Kristal argued that the rise of machines is only indirectly to blame, because technology has reduced union workers by replacing some union jobs with automation, directly increasing corporate profit.

“If we want all workers to benefit from the economic growth, then policymakers can initiate some steps to strengthen unions, such as pro-union reforms of labor law, and deterioration with employers' illegal anti-union tactics that increasingly spread over the last decades,” Kristal wrote.

Indeed, other analyses, including one from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, have found that that the drop in union membership in recent decades correlates with the rise in inequality during the same period.

“The decline in union members is directly related to the stagnation of wages for working people,” Brandon Rees, acting director of the Office of Investment at the AFL-CIO, an umbrella labor organization for many unions, told HuffPost. “Economic growth has been going somewhere and its been going to the top 1 percent.”

That dynamic could be problematic for the U.S. economy as a whole, Rees said, as middle-class Americans burdened by debt and slow wage growth buy less and hold back the recovery.

“One of the reasons why we are suffering from anemic growth today is because consumers have been reducing their debt levels, but wages are not keeping up with productivity growth,” Reese said. “The rights of workers to join a union has helped create the middle class in this country and the middle class has been hammered in the past 20 years as unions have declined.”

Also on HuffPost:

Kermit Gosnell's Abortion Clinic Workers Plead Guilty To Murder

Sherry West, an abortion clinic worker, pleaded guilty to third-degree murder in two deaths at a Philadelphia clinic where seven babies were allegedly killed.

PHILADELPHIA -- In their own way, the four women being sentenced this week for working at a corrupt, grimy Philadelphia abortion clinic were just as desperate as their patients.

Lynda Williams, 44, was trying to raise four children after her husband was murdered.

Sherry West, 53, had been waiting more than a year for disability after contracting hepatitis C through her work as a medical assistant at a Veterans Administration Hospital, where she had spent 20 years.

Adrienne Moton, 36, was steered to the Women's Medical Society through a career school, where she was studying to be a medical assistant. And Elizabeth Hampton, 55, had been in foster care as a girl with the third wife of clinic owner Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

All but Hampton have pleaded guilty to murder in the deaths of babies born alive or an oversedated patient. Hampton was sentenced Tuesday to a year on probation after admitting she lied to a grand jury about a patient's overdose death in 2009.

Williams, West and Moton Wednesday face 20 to 40 years in prison for third-degree murder, but they are expected to get far less time after their testimony helped send Gosnell to prison for life for killing three babies born alive during abortions.

Also scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday is Gosnell's wife, Pearl, 51, who has spent two years on house arrest and could be sent to prison for racketeering and performing an illegal abortion. She feels she's left "holding the bag" after her husband shamed the family, turned down a plea deal that would have kept her out of prison, and refused to speak at his trial, her lawyer said Tuesday.

"You can tell from the arrogance that he displayed – turning down the deal, as well as refusing to speak – he's left her holding the bag in terms of talking to the public and apologizing," defense lawyer Michael Medway told The Associated Press.

"Her name is still Gosnell, unfortunately," he added. "I guess it's like being Mrs. Frankenstein."

West's lawyer described Gosnell as a controlling, charismatic figure who manipulated naive, poor and uneducated employees. She pleaded guilty to murder for helping give narcotics to the patient who died, although she was the only employee who also accompanied the dying woman to the hospital.

"He had a bit of Svengali control over these women," lawyer Michael Wallace said last week. "She was doing about 100 different things for this guy. It was such a hectic operation."

Gosnell, 72, was convicted this month of three counts of first-degree murder in the infant deaths, and involuntary manslaughter in the death of patient Karnamaya Mongar.

Gosnell had West and Williams – both medical assistants suffering from depression – and a teenager on duty delivering anesthesia the night Mongar came in, according to trial testimony.

"He preyed upon them, too, just as he did his patients," Assistant District Attorney Joanne Pescatore said last week. "They were used and abused."

Moton, a family friend, had moved in with the Gosnells in high school, then worked at the clinic from 2005 to 2008. She earned $8 to $10 an hour.

But she could make $120 on a busy Saturday, when Gosnell performed what he called "second trimester" cases and gave staff $20 per patient. Prosecutors charge that some of those procedures were illegal third-term abortions.

"I kept doing whatever I was told," Moton told the jury.

That included cutting the necks of at least 10 babies after they were born. Gosnell told her it was standard procedure, she said.

Gosnell agreed to serve a life term without parole rather than face a death-penalty hearing. In exchange, he has waived his right to appeal.

Gosnell, West and several others also face more time on federal drug charges involving the clinic's distribution of narcotics.

Later this year, an unlicensed doctor who often ran the clinic during Gosnell's frequent absences will be sentenced to two counts of third-degree murder.

Stephen Massof said he went to work when he needed "a fallback plan" after stints in laboratory research, medical school and bartending.

He ended up "snipping" babies in the back of the neck during unorthodox abortion techniques that Gosnell had taught him. Massof said he may have done it 100 times. But he's pleaded guilty to two counts of third-degree murder.

Many of the Gosnell co-defendants have already been in prison for more than two years, since a 2011 grand jury report lifted the veil on what prosecutors called a "house of horrors."

They will be sentenced by Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner, who handled pretrial pleas, but did not preside at the trial itself.

Lerner has more discretion than usual; the Gosnell co-defendants entered "open" pleas, rather than negotiate a proposed sentence with prosecutors.

"If it were up to me, she'd get probation," Wallace said of his client.

Also on HuffPost:

Get Alerts