National groups discuss workers’ rights
Meetings held over 3 days on South Side
Stephanie Fello, a preparedfoods clerk at the South Side Giant Eagle, rose through the ranks of the union representing workers during her nearly six years with the O’Hara-based grocer.
Yet she still finds herself in disbelief that hers is truly a union job, she said. She earns just over $8 an hour, she said, while dealing with an unpredictable schedule and more duties piled onto an already demanding work flow that includes stocking the store with fresh salads, fruit and sandwiches; frying fish and chicken; and, most recently, being trained in how to legally sell alcohol.
“It’s ridiculous they expect that of people they’re paying $8.25 an hour,” she said. This week, Ms. Fello got a chance to air her complaints to a group much more influential on a national scale than any single company or union.
Several dozen program officers from 19 charitable foundations and advocacy groups across the country converged at the South Side grocery store on Tuesday as part of a three-day event to discuss how best to to improve the lives of lowwage workers.
The focus of the conversation was how to target the foundations’ collective spending power — endowments worth billions of dollars and annual grants in the hundreds of millions of dollars — on local workers’ rights campaigns.
Progressive groups have formed coalitions to figure out how to advance workers’ rights as organized labor has declined and as much of the nation’s job growth since the Great Recession has centered on low-wage work in the service sector.
“I would say that it provides a lot of impetus for us to be more creative and collaborative,” said Nikki Fortunato Bas, executive director at the Partnership for Working Families, an Oakland, Calif.-based group that forms regional coalitions to advocate for progressive and labor-friendly causes.
The partnership has coalitions in 17 cities, including Pittsburgh United, which was formed in 2007 by 12 groups including the Service Employees International Union, United Steelworkers, Sierra Club and Group Against Smog and Pollution. Representatives from those groups sit on Pittsburgh United’s board of directors, while seven staff members organize campaigns from offices in a former letter carriers’ union hall building on the North Side.
But the coalitions are not foundations that have tons of money.
The idea discussed this week was that foundations — in addition to spending money on more traditional charitable causes like social services — should also invest in campaigns that press employers to raise the minimum wage, provide paid sick leave and create affordable housing trust funds.
Such movements have gained steam in recent years. In 2015, after a campaign by Pittsburgh United, the Pittsburgh City Council passed a law requiring businesses to offer paid sick leave to workers. A court challenge filed by a business group over that law is headed to the state Supreme Court.
Last year, UPMC, the Pittsburgh region’s largest employer, agreed to voluntarily boost entry-level wages to $15 an hour, after pressure from activists, organized largely by the SEIU, who called $15 an hour a “living wage.” The health system has denied it was giving in to demands from protesters.
The groups stressed that this week was a time to listen and connect. No immediate funding from the foundations is in the works.
On Tuesday, the program officers arrived at the Giant Eagle by bus and a group of workers came out to the parking lot to chat, said Nile Malloy, a senior program manager with the Neighborhood Funders Group, an Oakland, Calif.-based group that hosted the conference.
“I think it was important to be involved in Pittsburgh because its rich history of union work, to witness that and to still see there’s still a lot of work that needs to be done,” Mr. Malloy said.
It can be a tall order to convince large foundations, many of them established decades ago by capitalist tycoons, to fund what Mr. Malloy calls a “radical progressive” agenda.
“They have limitations: conservative boards and conservative management at the institution,” Mr. Malloy said. Sometimes, even the language is changed slightly when applying for grant money, he said — replacing the word “justice” with “equity,” for example.
“What I’m witnessing here is a lot of the program officers are translating to the board (of a foundation) what community members want,” Mr. Malloy said.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Pittsburghbased Heinz Endowments, which took part in the activities, said the group has worked to solve “the very real philanthropic challenges that exist at the intersections of low wages, affordable housing, and environmental issues.”
Ms. Fello, the preparedfoods worker, started at Giant Eagle after a 14-month period of unemployment. In 2010, not long after getting a history degree from Carlow University, she lost her job as a legal advocate for Crisis Center North, a domestic violence center in Allegheny County.
She ended up taking a job with the grocery chain in East Liberty because she could walk to work — she didn’t have a car at the time.
She has been active in the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has bargained some small wage increases at Giant Eagle and health care for part-time workers who work there one year. But she acknowledged, “We have a long way to go.”
“We could call on the employers to pay their workers a living wage, and then maybe people wouldn’t need to utilize food banks and social services as much,” Ms. Fello said. “We’re always struggling to maintain our lives, our personal lives, our housing, or situations with family members who need help.”
Daniel Moore: dmoore@post-gazette.com, 412-263-2743 and Twitter @PGdanielmoore.