IWW strike continues in Bay Area

After two years of bad-faith bargaining by bosses, the IWW-organized workers at Berkeley retail salvager Urban Ore began a strike last week. The workers began solidarity union organizing in 2021, and in 2023 voted to join IWW for greater support and organizational structure. Wages are the principal issue.

Urban Ore is somewhat similar to Bellingham’s ReStore- retailing recycled building materials to the public- except Urban Ore is a for-profit privately owned corporation. Since at least 2017, owners have claimed they’d like to transfer shop ownership to workers, however, Urban Ore’s management has been consistently absent from meetings and has delayed bargaining sessions with workers.

The wage system is unconventional and the main source of conflict. Workers get a starting wage of $21.50 which is better than the Berkeley minimum wage ($16.50) but still significantly below what it takes to make a living in the Bay Area (graph).

Beyond the base pay, workers get a share of revenue that is ostensibly added to their hourly wage. The third tier is supposed to be a bi-annual share of profits, but the bosses stopped paying that out in May 2023 when bargaining began.

Fellow Worker Benno Giammarinaro, an organizer in the receiving department, reported that in practice, the revenue-sharing incentive creates an unstable wage structure for workers; their pay fluctuates each pay period in unpredictable ways. What’s more, workers don’t have access to the revenue numbers for each pay period and thus can’t accurately calculate it themselves- and they think they are being shorted.

“They don’t provide weekly profits for us to do the calculations ourselves … They display the revenue totals each month but that’s not broken down by pay period. So we don’t actually see the revenue broken down into that pay period,” said FW Giammarinaro.

During collective bargaining negotiations, workers uncovered inconsistencies in the revenue-sharing formula which were dismissed by the owners. Workers say that ownership has not provided financial information that is legally required in such collective bargaining negotiations, like expenses for example.

IWW Organizers said “…our first proposal was $25 an hour starting wage, still below the calculated living wage for a single person, with a 3.5 percent annual cost of living adjustment and 5 percent raises from time of employment at specific intervals. They said right away, that’s way too expensive, that’s gonna bankrupt the company, that’s gonna drain our cash reserves in a year, all of these other things”.

FW Giammarinaro added “and we’re like this is not why we work hard. We work hard because we like what Urban Ore does and we like working together and we take pride in our work but not because of this shitty pay structure that you have”.

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