Photo: Workers at the Augusta Chipotle | Courtesy Maine AFL-CIO
Originally published in the Maine Beacon on March 27, 2023
Chipotle has agreed to pay $240,000 to former workers at its now-closed Augusta location as part of a settlement for shuttering that restaurant after employees announced they would attempt to form a union.
The settlement comes after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said late last year that Chipotle’s actions violated federal law.
Workers at the Augusta Chipotle filed to form a union in June, which they called Chipotle United, the first attempted union by workers at the national fast-food chain. The union was spurred by concerns over persistent understaffing and a lack of training, which had prompted workers to walk off the job earlier in the month because they felt their employment conditions were unsafe.
The store was temporarily closed after that walkout and the Augusta restaurant was then permanently shut down just before a hearing to determine the union process for workers, according to Chipotle United. Workers at the time called the move a clear example of union busting by the restaurant chain and filed a complaint, although Chipotle claimed the closing of the store had “nothing to do with union activity.” However, the NLRB disagreed and argued that Chipotle violated the law by closing the Augusta location in a complaint filed against the company in November.
In addition, the NLRB found that Chipotle broke the law by blacklisting Augusta workers and refusing to consider hiring them at other locations in Maine. The NLRB explicitly stated in its complaint that Chipotle took that action and closed its Augusta restaurant because “employees supported and assisted the union.”
According to a press release from workers and their allies, under the terms of the settlement, Chipotle will pay a total of $240,000 to workers on the payroll of the Augusta restaurant when that store was closed in July. Depending on their average hours worked, pay rate, and length of employment before the location closed, employees will receive between $5,800 and $21,000.
Furthermore, Chipotle will offer “preferential rehire” to employees at the Augusta restaurant at other Chipotle locations in Maine for one year, meaning those workers will receive first consideration for open positions. In addition, the company is required to post notices in about 40 restaurant locations in Maine, New Hampshire and Massachusetts that it will “not close stores or discriminate on the basis of union support.” That provision was created because those stores are under the leadership of Chipotle Regional Manager Jarolin Maldonado, who workers said was responsible for blacklisting pro-union employees from being hired at other locations.
The former Chipotle workers hailed the settlement agreement.
“This isn’t just a victory for Chipotle United. It’s a win for food service workers across the country,” said Brandi McNease, a former Augusta Chipotle employee and lead Chipotle United organizer. “It sends a message to corporations that shutting down a store and blackballing workers didn’t work for Chipotle and it won’t work for them either.”
“Now that we’ve won this battle, we will keep fighting,” McNease added. “Every service employee deserves the right to safe working conditions and fair wages to support our families and this movement won’t stop until we get them. We are going to put an end to the old way of doing business.”
In a statement, Laurie Schalow, chief corporate affairs officer for Chipotle, confirmed that the company has reached a settlement with the Augusta workers. Schalow said Chipotle agreed to the deal “not because we did anything wrong, but because the time, energy and cost to litigate would have far outweighed the settlement agreement.” Schalow added that the company respects the right of employees to organize.
However, Jeffrey Neil Young, an attorney with Solidarity Law who represented Chipotle United workers throughout their organizing drive, said the company clearly engaged in union busting. Young said the settlement helps rectify some of that behavior.
“While we did not force Chipotle to reopen the [Augusta] store, we won substantial gains for workers,” Young said. “Not all of the workers have secured work elsewhere and offering them preferential rehiring rights as well as substantial back pay helps remedy Chipotle’s blatant union busting. The labor laws need to be changed to impose greater penalties to more effectively deter companies like Chipotle and Starbucks from closing stores and blackballing workers in the face of union organizing efforts.”
Chipotle, like other fast-food companies, is seeing union activity on multiple fronts around the country. For example, Chipotle workers in Kansas have also sought to organize — and have complained of union-busting attempts — and another restaurant in Michigan successfully formed a bargaining unit.
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.
Originally published in the Maine Beacon on March 24, 2023
In a bid to fund education programs and ensure that the state has revenue to meet myriad unmet needs, Democratic lawmakers are pushing for two bills that would make the wealthiest Mainers pay what they see as their fair share in taxes.
Those two bills were heard during a public hearing Thursday before the legislature’s Taxation Committee.
One of the measures, LD 843, sponsored by Rep. Laurie Osher (D-Orono), would establish an additional income tax bracket in Maine with a tax rate of 11.15%. That rate would apply to income in excess of $125,000 for single filers, income in excess of $150,000 for heads of household, and income in excess of $250,000 for married couples filing jointly.
Maine’s current top tax bracket is 7.15%, and single filers pay that rate on income in excess of $58,050, heads of household pay that on money in excess of $87,100 and joint filers pay that rate on income over $116,100. That is the result of action taken by former Gov. Paul LePage, who pushed to lower the top income tax rate from 8.5% in a move that has cost Maine hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and has resulted in low and middle income residents being hit harder by property taxes while the wealthy primarily benefit from the lower income tax rate.
The other bill lawmakers heard Thursday was LD 667, sponsored by Rep. Ben Collings (D-Portland). That measure would establish a surcharge of 3% on income in excess of $1 million and a 6% surcharge on income in excess of $10 million. The bill would require that 75% of the revenue generated from the measure go to funding K-12 education and 25% of the funds be spent on rural economic development.
The measures are being introduced at a time of stark income inequality across the country, with the richest 1% making 84 times as much as the bottom 20%. Further, rising corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation in yet another example of the wealthy doing well during the COVID-19 economic recovery while working class people struggle.
Raising money to pay for unmet needs
Speaking in favor of his bill to generate money for education and rural economies, Collings noted that every year crucial programs and initiatives aren’t able to be funded in the budget due to a lack of revenue. LD 667, he said, would provide money to ensure that programs that help address the needs of Mainers can be paid for, setting the state up to succeed going forward.
“Education and rural economics are vital for our future and vital for our economy,” he said.
Collings also noted that a majority of Mainers voted in 2016 to create a 3% tax on income over $200,000 to pay for education programs — a policy that was subsequently repealed by the legislature. He argued that the referendum shows Maine people support tax fairness policies.
In presenting her bill, Osher noted that income tax is the fairest form of taxation. In other forms of taxation, such as sales tax or property tax, low-income people end up getting hit hardest in terms of the percentage of their wealth that they pay. But progressive income tax reflects the differences in people’s finances, with wealthier people paying more and lower-income people paying less.
But Maine’s current income tax code doesn’t truly reflect that policy goal, Osher said, pointing out that middle-income people are treated the same as wealthy people.
“When it comes to fairness, Maine’s current income tax structure misses the mark,” Osher said.
Osher said her bill would address this issue while also generating revenue to pay for items such as education programs, initiatives to help adults with disabilities, and behavioral health care and other programs that have long gone underfunded.
Maura Pillsbury, an analyst with the Maine Center for Economic Policy (MECEP), testified in favor of both Osher and Collings’ bills. Pillsbury said the issue comes down to fairness and prioritizing the needs of those who are truly struggling.
“Raising top income tax rates will allow us to fund important needs and priorities,” she said. “Under our current tax code, millionaires pay the same income tax rates as middle-class families. We urge you to make Maine’s tax code fairer by increasing taxes on top earners.”
Mills among opponents of bills
The Mills administration is opposed to both tax fairness bills. Michael Allen of the Department of Administrative and Financial Services submitted testimony on behalf of the governor, who has pledged not to raise taxes. Allen said the bills are unnecessary given the state’s short-term budget surplus, which advocates have argued is not actually a surplus given the longstanding deficit the state faces in meeting Mainers’ everyday needs.
The administration also said the bills would make Maine among the states with the highest tax burden in the country and argued that the measures could result in higher-income earners departing Maine for lower-tax states. However, that argument is not borne out by research, which shows that lower taxes for millionaires in more conservative states and higher taxes in more liberal places haven’t spurred the rich to move to red states in large numbers.
Others also submitted testimony in opposition to the bills, with Nick Murray of the Maine Policy Institute arguing that, “Raising income taxes further will not help the state or its citizens. Both LD 667 and LD 843 would move Maine in the wrong direction, driving a larger wedge between the people and prosperity.”
However, Jeff McCabe of the Maine Service Employees Association noted that the state is facing a crisis in terms of being able to provide key services for its citizens and that the wealthy can afford to pay more to help rectify the situation.
“We pay taxes for critical services that benefit all of us,” he said. “Our public schools and colleges, roads and bridges, public safety, parks, clean water and the safety net protecting our children and seniors are just a few of the services we all count on. The revenues we raise through taxes ideally would provide the conditions for Maine communities to be places where we can all live, work, raise our families and, someday, retire with dignity in our own homes.”
Along with the two progressive taxation bills, lawmakers on Thursday also heard testimony on a Republican bill to phase out the income tax over five years, an idea that research shows would enrich the wealthy while hurting the poor, as municipalities would likely be forced to raise property taxes to make up for lost revenue. Furthermore, lawmakers brought up the point that the proposal would devastate the state budget, as nearly half of general fund revenue comes from state income taxes. As a result, initiatives such as the state funding 55% of education, municipal revenue sharing, and the MaineCare program would be much more difficult to pay for, MECEP said in its testimony.
Republicans on Thursday also pushed for a bill to use excess state revenue for income tax “relief” that advocates said would serve to squirrel away money rather than using such funds to address various problems in the state.
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.
House District 81 Democratic candidate Daniel Sipe. | From Sipe’s Facebook page
Origninally published in the Beacon on November 24, 2022
Political newcomer Daniel Sipe came within 392 votes of unseating a conservative stalwart in a rural district in western Maine. He did it by talking to residents about their most immediate concerns: jobs, healthcare, housing, energy costs and the environment.
“I really think that people are closer together on how they want the country to move forward than we are told by the media,” said Sipe, a resident of Norway and a first-time political candidate.
Sipe, a Democrat, lost to incumbent Republican Rep. Sawin Millett by nine percentage points in House District 81, which includes Norway, Waterford, Greenwood and Stoneham. Millett, who has been in the legislature off and on since 1969 and served in the administrations of four governors, is an influential member of the legislature’s powerful budget-making committee.
Sipe was able to keep the race relatively close, considering his opponent’s name recognition and the perception that his district leans conservative. However, after knocking on over a thousand doors and having countless conversations, he’s begun to question that characterization.
Sipe found that while voters may consume different media and identify with different candidates or parties, if he kept the conversation on the issues that impact them most, there is a surprising degree of commonality.
“The first thing is meeting people where they’re at and listening to the problems they face,” Sipe said. “When you get them talking, you see that people want good jobs and they want their neighbors to have good jobs. They don’t want to be saddled with medical debt. And they don’t want their neighbors to be saddled with medical debt either.”
Democratic candidate Daniel Sipe talks with a resident at a food co-op in Norway last summer. | From Sipe’s Facebook page.
People want real solutions, not tweaks
Sipe entered Maine politics as a canvasser with the Maine People’s Alliance (of which Beacon is a project), working on referendum campaigns to increase the minimum wage, expand Medicaid eligibility and increase funding for public education through taxes on the wealthy. He moved to Norway in 2020 when he co-founded a non-profit consulting company where he works closely with local artists and craftspeople in the community.
He said the issue that voters in his district were most concerned about this election season is the lack of good-paying jobs in the community. The biggest employers in the district are the school system, Stephens Memorial Hospital, and the New Balance shoe factory in Norway. There are no chain stores in the entire district.
“People feel forgotten about out here in western Maine,” Sipe said. “We have massive infrastructure problems. Our roads are quite bad. A lot of folks don’t have access to good internet. No one is going to move their business here if we don’t have good roads and internet.”
People are also worried about the high cost of goods and energy, he said. The price for a gallon of heating oil has hit a record high. Electricity bills for many customers of Central Maine Power and Versant will increase by as much as 49% at the beginning of next year. This follows rate hikes made earlier this year with more likely to come next summer.
“It’s scary to think about the winter that’s coming,” Sipe said. “I think that it’s one of those things as a state legislator, unfortunately, there’s not much that we can do about high prices, but we can work to provide heating assistance to low-income families.”
On a complex issue like healthcare, Sipe found that rural voters are not afraid of confronting difficult and persistence problems at their root.
“People talk about getting rid of insurance companies and providing healthcare for everyone. That is not as radical an idea as it seems,” he said.
While Maine’s larger towns and cities often get the headlines, Sipe said the housing crisis hits all corners of the state. Across Maine, rents are soaring. Home prices have climbed dramatically in many areas. Average long-term mortgage interest rates have risen above 7% for the first time in decades. As a result, people are taking on more debt to buy a house.
Residents want the state to take urgent action, Sipe said.
“People feel that housing is a huge problem here. It’s a huge problem everywhere,” he said. “We need to invest at the state level in housing.”
And, as Europe had its most severe drought in 500 years last summer, residents in western Maine were also concerned about the lack of rain. It was the third consecutive year that large parts of the state experienced drought.
“People have started experiencing drought that they’d never experienced before. People’s wells are running dry,” Sipe said.
He added, “They’re worried about large corporations taking advantage of our landscape. They’re worried about CMP, for instance, not just the rising electricity costs, but the fact that they are not really going to benefit from a corridor that is just owned by an out-of-country corporation,” referring to CMP and Hydro-Quebec’s 145-mile transmission corridor that was rejected by voters in 2021.
Hitting the right target
There has been some debate in Maine politics about what Democrats need to do to win in rural districts. Rifts in the party emerged after former Democratic legislator Chloe Maxmin of Nobleboro co-authored a book, “Dirt Road Revival,” claiming that the party has lost touch with rural voters.
Despite losing his race on Nov. 8, Sipe believes that Democrats can steadily win voters in rural districts if they consistently prove themselves to be loyal to working-class Mainers. That has not always been the case, he said, and that failing has given Republicans an opening to present themselves as the party of “family values and workers.”
“I think Democrats need to stop kowtowing to large corporations and go to work for the people that live here. We need to focus on the things that make people’s lives a little bit easier,” he said.
Sipe said progressive policy arguments will win, even in rural areas, if the correct sources of problems are consistently articulated to voters. Otherwise, right-wing narratives and scapegoating will win the day.
“Oftentimes people focus on who they see as taking advantage of the system. But I think when you have a real conversation about who’s taking advantage of the system, you can change their lens,” he said. “It’s not your neighbor who might be getting assistance to pay for food or who has a disability and can’t work who is the source of the problem. It’s the corporation that is not paying any taxes and is raising the cost of goods and making it really hard to survive.”
Sipe continued, “We need to be constantly pivoting away from blaming the folks who have it hard and putting the focus on the folks that are taking advantage of us. I think most people instinctively know what the actual problem is. It’s just not always what they go to first.”
Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.
A recent report found that although Maine bounced back quickly from the pandemic-induced downturn, that recovery has masked “continued underlying weaknesses in the economy.”
Challenges identified in the Maine Center for Economic Policy’s annual “State of Working Maine” report include that many jobs continue to lack basic labor protections — even as workers increasingly assert their power and demand improved standards — and that wage growth has been stymied by high inflation.
The study, authored by MECEP economist James Myall, found that Maine has enjoyed a near-full recovery from the economic shock created by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with employment almost back to pre-pandemic levels and the state GDP higher than before the crisis. Myall credited the recovery in part to an aggressive fiscal response by the federal government, which provided states and people with funds during the pandemic through various programs.
In all, Maine’s economic bounce back from the crisis was much faster than the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. After that crisis, the state’s employment and GDP levels lagged behind pre-2008 levels until 2016, which Myall attributed in part to austerity policies, which took place primarily under the LePage administration.
Still, the report found that the recovery from the pandemic is fragile and has hidden several warning signs for Maine’s economy.
Inflation blunting impact of wage growth
One significant problem is inflation, which is higher in the U.S. than at any point in the last 40 years. While a strong labor market has improved wages for Maine workers, the report found that the “rapidly rising cost of living has dulled the benefit” of that higher pay. For example, although wages for middle income workers in Maine have increased by 18% in the last three years, inflation has risen by nearly 13% over that same period. That creates an actual wage growth of just under 5% for workers during that time, which Myall writes is “much more modest than the substantial increase indicated in many news headlines.”
Wages not rising enough to significantly outpace inflation is of particular concern in the child care and direct care industries, the report states. People in both occupations have been chronicallyunderpaid for years, leading to a shortage of such workers. The market has failed to rectify the problem, Myall said, calling for intervention from the state to raise those workers’ wages and provide subsidies for those who need to access services. And while the state has acted to increase child care and direct care employees’ pay, Myall argued it might not be enough to attract workers to the industry, especially given the continued issue of inflation.
Those in the industry are also calling for better working conditions to attract more potential employees.
“Our early childhood education system is sinking. There are so many families in Maine with no options for child care,” Terri Crocker, the owner of Creative Play Childcare in Bath, says in the report.
Given the economic landscape, the Working Maine study makes several recommendations to improve workers wages against inflation. The first is to preserve and expand the state’s minimum wage, which is currently tied to the cost of living. However, MECEP has found that by going beyond that and raising the minimum wage to $16 an hour by 2025, Maine would increase pay for over 350,000 workers and make strides in addressing economic inequality.
Myall also recommends paying direct care workers adequately and requiring employers to be transparent on job applications about the wages that potential workers can expect to receive.
Worker protections must be strengthened
Another challenge to the seemingly strong economic recovery is that labor protections remain scant for too many workers, according to the report. Myall notes that the pandemic caused many workers to reevaluate their relationship to their job, resulting in a significant number leaving for new positions. The amount of Mainers quitting and being hired for new positions recently hit its highest point in two decades, the report found. Higher wages are the prime motivation for workers switching jobs, along with affordable health care, more predictable hours and paid time off.
Given this amount of labor “churn,” Myall argued there is more to be done to improve working conditions for Mainers. Some moderate improvements have been made over the years, including when Maine’s paid time off law took effect in 2022. That law caused the number of Mainers who get paid time off to increase from 33% in the five years preceding the pandemic to 54% this year.
Still, that means a substantial number of Mainers continue to face the potential of financial struggles if they have to take time off for illness, caring for a loved one, or other reasons, Myall pointed out. He argued that the paid time off law should be broadened to encompass more workers and should also include provisions to protect against retaliation, which the statute currently lacks. A bill to bar retaliation by employers against workers who use paid time off was vetoed by Gov. Janet Mills in 2022.
An additional recommendation for improving labor standards is to create a fair workweek standard, which would require business to create predictable schedules for workers. Unpredictable schedules, Myall states, have been shown to negatively impact workers’ bottom line as well as their physical and mental health.
A recent rally in support of Chipotle workers in Augusta | Maine Service Employees Association, SEIU Local 1989 via Facebook
Another policy that would improve workers’ lives is paid family and medical leave, which allows employees to take time off work for a longer period of time. That differentiates it from paid time off, which covers short-term leave. Maine will have a chance to create a paid family and medical leave system in 2023, either through legislative action or via the ballot box, as advocates (including Maine People’s Alliance, of which Beacon is a project) are gathering signatures for a potential referendum.
In discussing how labor standards can be improved, Myall noted the increased leverage workers have right now, as businesses and other employers seek to fill positions.
Much of that power has manifested in increased unionization activity in Maine and nationwide, as workers seek to form collective bargaining units in various industries, including at stores operated by corporate giants such as Chipotle and Starbucks. Worker power has reached heights not seen in decades, MECEP found.
“Now that the country has seen how valuable we are, it’s time for us to demand that we are cared for as well as workers in any other industry,” Brandi McNease, who helped lead a recent unionization campaign at a Chipotle in Augusta, said in the report.
Still, the study found that “as much as worker power has increased, it is still eclipsed by the clout of many corporations and businesses,” with employers often fighting back hard against unionization efforts.
To address such challenges, the report recommends that policymakers guarantee the right to unionize in Maine without interference by bosses. Myall also calls for an improvement to the bargaining power of public sector unions in Maine. Arbitration decisions on wages and benefits for workers in such unions are not currently binding, which allows employers to often ignore workers’ demands. Public sector union workers in Maine are also not allowed to strike, which undermines their leverage, Myall argues.
Finally, the report recommends that agricultural workers be allowed to form unions. Such workers have long been denied basic labor protections, including the right to form a collective bargaining unit or even be considered employees under state wage and hour laws. A bill passed by the legislature that would have allowed farmworkers to unionize was vetoed by Mills in January.
Structural barriers keep too many out of workforce
Another issue Maine faces is that some people can’t participate fully — or at all — in the labor market. Some barriers to employment that Mainers face include health issues, caregiving responsibilities, fewer labor opportunities in rural areas and continued structural racism, according to the study. There are jobs available for such people, Myall found, and including them in the labor market would improve the economy without lowering wages for existing workers.
One indication of Maine’s problems with full workforce participation is that there are fewer prime-age people — 25 to 54-year-olds — participating in the labor market than prior to the pandemic. That dip has not manifested fully in Maine’s overall employment numbers since older workers are staying employed longer, the study found.
Myall states in the report that a reduced number of prime age people in the workforce often indicates that “people are either discouraged about their ability to find a job with a sustainable wage or in some way prevented from working (for example, a health condition, lack of child care, or transportation issue).”
Furthermore, asylum-seekers are currently barred from requesting a work permit for 180 days, preventing another segment of people from joining the labor force.
“I want to have a house and take care of myself, my friends, and my family. It’s difficult to support myself without working,” Gervin Kah, an asylum-seeker in Maine, said in the report.
To address these issues in the workforce, the report argues that the state has to help prime age people return to the labor force while also supporting older Mainers who want to keep working and allowing those who want to retire to do so with security.
There are a number of policy recommendations that could help with this goal, including continuing public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19, encouraging employers to make accommodations for those with long COVID, increasing access to health care systems (including mental health services), creating a comprehensive subsidy for child care, maintaining funding for free community college, and enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workforce.
“Maine lawmakers have the opportunity to build on the momentum begun by workers themselves and reshape the economy in a way that works for all of us — an economy that fairly compensates workers and ensures all work is respected with fundamental rights,” Myall writes.
Photo: A sign at a rally earlier this year to support the Maine Medical Center nurses’ union | Beacon
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.
High staff turnover rates in restaurants also make it difficult to maintain worker power to establish organizing committees and maintain it through the long drawn out process of getting workers to sign union cards, winning the secret ballot election and negotiating a contract, as employers often drag their feet until a year passes and they can run a decertification campaign. Employers will also exploit divisions between dining room and kitchen staff.
It has been deeply inspiring to witness the efforts of workers at Starbucks in Biddeford and Chipotle in Augusta to organize their workplaces in an industry that is notorious for low wages and a difficult work environment. But as these union drives have shown, corporations will go to extreme lengths to stop employees from organizing, including firing organizers and closing the business in blatant violation of our weak labor laws.
That’s why it’s so impressive that food service workers in Maine and across the country are winning union elections against all odds. But this isn’t the first time restaurant workers in Maine have risen up and organized and it certainly won’t be the last.
A History of Struggle
As early as the 1890s, Maine restaurant and hotel workers began organizing and forming worker organizations known as “labor and benefit” orders, according to labor historian Charlie Scontras. In 1919, members of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees’ International Alliance and Bartenders’ International League of America (HERE) established locals in Augusta and Portland. Then in 1928, the Portland local brought HERE’s international president, Edward Flore, and an organizer to the city where they were reportedly “met with good success, adding several new houses to the fair list and strengthening the Local.”
Two years later, in 1930, the Portland Central Labor Union, a precursor to the Southern Maine Labor Council, funded an organizer to help establish a HERE local, but it failed to survive “due to the lack of interest in this class of workers.”
However, union activity in Maine dramatically increased with the passage of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which created the fundamental right of workers to organize, and the Maine State Federation of Labor (MSFL), a precursor to the Maine AFL-CIO, successfully convinced HERE to send another organizer. The Teamsters in Portland even passed a resolution at that time refusing to patronize non-union restaurants in the city.
The main driving force for organizing efforts in the 1930s was that wages were incredibly low and Maine still didn’t have a minimum wage law. Jesse W. Taylor, Maine’s Commissioner for Labor and Industry, observed in 1939 that many workers in restaurants and other female-dominated industries in Maine earned just $5 a week ($106 adjusted for inflation) for 54 to 64 hours of work. At the very least, Taylor argued that the state should establish a 25-cent per hour minimum wage law for women and minors.
The Federal Fair Labor Standards Act didn’t cover restaurant workers, and Maine was one of the last states in New England to pass a minimum wage law in 1959, but it still didn’t cover restaurant servers.
Just like today, wage theft and blacklisting were very common in the restaurant industry. Taylor pointed to one case where a restaurant owner refused to pay a young woman who worked 72 hours in one week because, the employer argued, she was leaving the job.
“We had proof she had worked over time. The books at the restaurant can be checked,” said Taylor. “She went in court and testified. It cost the employer $36 in court and she was blacklisted and could not get a job anywhere in the city. Violations have been going on elsewhere. They would like to go to court, but do not dare to.”
Speaking to the MSFL Convention in 1954, Maine’s Labor Commissioner lamented the state’s failure to pass minimum wage legislation and said that workers didn’t come out and testify in support of it in great numbers because they were likely afraid of losing their jobs.
HERE continued to support union organizing drives throughout the 1950s, but the anti-union legal system unfortunately chilled the momentum. In 1954, workers established HERE Local 390 at Theodore’s Lobster House in Portland (later DiMillo’s Lobster House) which led to a court injunction banning picketing of the establishment that was later upheld by the Maine Supreme Court. This blatant suppression of free speech ignited the labor movement to demand a state level Labor Relations Act to protect restaurant, hotel and retail workers, who were not covered under federal labor laws.
At the 1954 MSFL convention, workers claimed that the Portland Chamber of Commerce had even sent letters “asking all restaurants apparently to keep labor organizations away from their doors.” The convention voted to drop Portland from its list of recommended convention sites in 1956 in solidarity with restaurant workers.
One HERE worker organizer in Portland noted that restaurant workers earned as low as 22 cents an hour and that the Eastland Hotel even imposed “fines” on workers that “sometimes completely consumes the weekly pay.” In a letter to a state legislator in 1965, the organizer wrote:
“The State of Maine is called ‘Vacationland.’ A vacationland needs tourists and these tourists need accommodations. We, the workers of the Hotel and Restaurant Industry provide the services needed for these accommodations. Yet, we are the most sorely neglected citizens of this state. We work a 54-hour week for as little as $.25, $.35, and $.50 cents an hour.
Are we not as good citizens of our country as they are? Must we receive less pay because we work in Maine? Because of a few who have the financial power … must we remain 65 years behind the rest of the country?”
In the late 1970s, there was another resurgence of organizing in the restaurant industry. As one supporter of the unionization effort wrote in Maine Labor News:
“Would you like to work for exactly one half the legal minimum wage? Would you like overtime being at 46 rather than 40 hours per week? Would you like to work on a piecework system largely at the mercy of supervisors who play favorites?
Would you like to be sent home without pay because there isn’t ‘enough work’ on your shift without compensation? Would you like to have no pension plan, no medical benefits, no paid holidays or sick pay? If you enjoy the terms of such employment you could work for a job as a waitress or waiter anywhere in the state.
Would you like to sink hundreds of dollars into an education at a trade school in culinary arts only to find that you are not making enough money on the Job after graduation to pay for your education?
Would you like to wash dishes, clean motel rooms, scour pots, or bus tables for $2.30 an hour? If you have answered ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, you, too, could qualify for work in the hotel or restaurant business.”
The most successful union drive of the 1970s was on August 3, 1977 when servers, bartenders and kitchen staff at the Roundhouse Motor Inn in Auburn voted to form a union with HERE. In the 1980s, it was sole unionized restaurant in the state and union workers often patronized it, including holding meetings there during the International Paper Strike of ’87-88.
However, workers trying to organize the Portland Red Coach Grille and Convention Center in 1976 faced much more difficult odds after the business fired a lead organizer, setting off a year of unfair labor practice complaints, appeals, staff turnover and rampant union busting that culminated in a defeat for the union. With the anti-union climate of the 1980s and 90s, it wasn’t until the 21st century that restaurant workers briefly began organizing again with the establishment of the Southern Maine Workers Center in the mid 2000s.
But given the increasing passion of restaurant workers for collective action in the 2020s, perhaps we can look forward to patronizing more unionized restaurants and hotels in Maine in the near future!
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on the Maine AFL-CIO’s blog. Most of the information in this article was gathered from the book “Maine Labor in the Age of Deindustrialization and Global Markets: 1955 – 2005” by Charles Scontras.
Andy O’Brien is the communications director for the Maine AFL-CIO, a statewide federation of 160 local unions representing 40,000 workers. However, his opinions are his own and don’t represent the views of his employer. He is also a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445.
Photo: Workers at the Augusta Chipotle | Courtesy Maine AFL-CIO
Originally published in the Beacon on July 19, 2022
Workers at a Maine-based Chipotle argue the corporate fast-food chain is engaging in union-busting after the company announced Tuesday it is closing the Augusta restaurant where employees filed to form a collective bargaining unit.
On Tuesday, Lisa Zeppetelli of the Chipotle northeast region corporate office informed workers that the Augusta restaurant at 1 Stephen Drive would be permanently closing, effective that day. In the message, Zeppetelli claimed that while the company had spent considerable time and resources on the store, “we don’t have management necessary to reopen.” The store originally closed temporarily in June after employees expressed concerns about staffing levels.
Workers rallied Tuesday afternoon in protest of the decision to permanently close the restaurant, urging Chipotle to reverse the decision. In a news release announcing that protest, employees at the restaurant said the timing of the closure is revealing. Last month, a majority of workers at the Augusta restaurant filed to form a union — a first among Chipotle workers nationwide — called Chipotle United. That came after employees protested working conditions at the restaurant by walking off the job earlier in June, arguing that persistent understaffing and a lack of training was creating an unsafe environment.
“This is union busting 101 and there is nothing that motivates us to fight harder than this underhanded attempt to shut down the labor movement within their stores,” Chipotle United member Brandi McNease said of the company’s decision to close the Augusta restaurant. “They’re scared because they know how powerful we are, and if we catch fire like the unionization effort at Starbucks they won’t be able to stop us.”
McNease added that the company waited until the morning of a hearing to determine the next steps for the union election to announce that the store would be shut down.
“Since we announced our intent to unionize, they’ve tried to bully, harass and intimidate our crew to prevent them from exercising their right to have a collective voice on the job,” she said. “But we remain united, our solidarity is strong and we won’t bend. We are sticking together and our customers have our backs. We are fighting this decision and we are building a movement to transform the fast food industry and ensure the workers who create all the wealth for these corporations are respected and no longer have to struggle to support their families.”
McNease pointed out that Chipotle gave its CEO a massive bonus in 2020, arguing that the claim the company couldn’t bring in enough workers to keep the Augusta restaurant open doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. She said Chipotle has the money to “attract workers and pay them living wages” if the company wanted to.
In her email to workers on Tuesday, Zeppetelli said workers will be paid for any scheduled shifts through July 24 and will receive four weeks severance based on hours they worked over the past two weeks. Chipotle benefits will continue through July 30 and workers can keep getting benefits through the COBRA program for a period of time, she said. The company also pledged to assist workers in finding another job.
In a statement to Beacon, Laurie Schalow, chief corporate affairs officer at Chipotle, reiterated the arguments made by Zeppetelli in her email, writing that the company went to “extraordinary lengths to try to staff the restaurant, including deploying two recruiting experts dedicated to this one restaurant.” However, she said those efforts were unsuccessful and that the staffing issues meant reopening the restaurant wouldn’t be profitable. Schalow did not address a question about whether Chipotle was attempting to bust the workers’ union.
The announcement that the Augusta store will be shut down comes as the effort to unionize Chipotle workers has spread. The organizing committee for the Augusta restaurant union said it has received communications from employees at other Chipotles in Maine and around the country asking for advice on forming a collective bargaining unit. And earlier this month, workers at a Chipotle in Michigan also filed to form a union.
Such efforts are part of a labor movement that has shown renewed strength in Maine and across the country. Organizers have recently won union elections at an Amazon warehouse and myriad Starbucks locations as workers seek to force companies to treat employees better, pay them a higher wage and put in place additional protections amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com
How far off the charts has compensation for America’s top corporate CEOs soared? Let’s use Peter Drucker as our reference point.
Management theorists today generally give Drucker, a refugee from Nazism in the 1930s, the credit for essentially laying down “the foundations of management as a scientific discipline” after World War II. Drucker’s classic 1946 study of General Motors established him — for leaders throughout business and academia — as the nation’s foremost authority on corporate enterprise effectiveness.
That effectiveness, Drucker believed, had to rest on fairness. Corporations that compensated their top execs at rates that far outpaced worker pay created cultures where a systematic commitment to organizational excellence could never take root.
In the two decades after World War II, America’s leading corporate chiefs by and large accepted Drucker’s perspective. They may have felt they didn’t have much of a choice. From distinguished thinkers like Drucker outside corporate boardrooms came exhortations for fair-minded pay policies. From unions inside the nation’s most powerful corporate empires came fierce pressure to share the wealth.
And that wealth did get shared. In 1965, the Economic Policy Institute notes, major corporate CEOs in the United States were only realizing 21 times the pay their workers were pocketing. That gap would remain fairly modest over the next dozen years, only reaching 31 times in 1978.
But this relatively slight upward nudge unsettled Drucker. Corporate outliers, he believed, were beginning an about-face from America’s post-war corporate pay consensus. A relative handful of top corporate execs, Drucker noted in a 1977 Wall Street Journal analysis, were actually taking in pay packages nearing an until-then unimaginable $1 million a year.
For Drucker, the rationales corporations offered for these new enormous pay packages amounted to “nonsense” and “pure hokum.” Companies faced no unforgiving “need” to pay “market price” for their execs. Stock options did not “promote performance.”
Those options and other maneuvers designed to escalate executive take-homes, Drucker added, were doing “enormous damage.” Excessive rewards for top executives, he explained, nurture the bureaucratic structures that undercut organizational effectiveness.
How so? In any bureaucracy, every level of hierarchy must get compensated at a higher rate than the level below. The more levels, the higher the pay at the summit. Endless levels of hierarchy would remain appealing to executives, Drucker argued, as long as they prop up and push up executive pay. His solution? To make bureaucratic hierarchies less appealing to top execs, limit executive pay. No executives, Drucker believed, should be allowed to make more than 25 times the compensation of their workers.
“A ratio of 25 to-1 is not ‘equality,’” Drucker acknowledged. “But it is well within the range most people in this country, including the great majority of rank-and-file workers, consider proper and indeed desirable.”
Drucker lived long enough — he died in 2005 at age 95 — to see Corporate America make a mockery of his 25-to-1 standard. But research since his death has consistently reaffirmed his take on the negative impact of wide CEO-worker pay differentials on organizational effectiveness.
The mockery of Drucker’s contribution, meanwhile, continues, as the just-released 28th annual edition of the Executive Excess report details in eye-opening detail.
This year’s Executive Excess zeroes in on the 300 major U.S. corporations that pay their median — most typical — workers the least. At these 300 companies, CEO pay last year jumped an average $2.5 million to $10.6 million. Typical worker pay at the 300 firms increased on average as well, but the increase still left median annual worker earnings at the 300 companies under $24,000.
Overall, CEOs at the 300 major U.S. corporations with 2021’s lowest median worker pay averaged 670 times the annual earnings of their most typical workers, up from 604 times the year before.
Workers at over 100 of these firms did far worse than the average figures. In 106 of the 300 corporations, median worker pay didn’t even keep with inflation.
“Did the workers at these 106 companies lose ground to inflation because their employers lacked the wherewithal to make sure wages kept up with rising prices?” the new Executive Excess report asks. “Hardly. In fact, 67 of these firms spent many millions last year buying back their own shares. These repurchases totaled $43.7 billion.”
So what can we do to restore the reasonableness in corporate compensation that Peter Drucker spent six decades of his life working toward? The new Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report offers up a list of concrete steps that could make a fairness — and effectiveness — difference. Given the current make-up of Congress, most of these steps have no shot at near-run enactment.
But Executive Excess 2022 does highlight one step that the Biden administration could implement — to great effect — via executive action. The administration could use that action “to give corporations with narrow pay ratios preferential treatment in government contracting.”
Various federal programs already offer a leg up in contracting to targeted groups, typically small businesses owned by women, disabled veterans, and minorities. These programs sometimes involve set-asides, other times give up to a 10 percent credit in bidding competitions. All these existing preference programs, the new Executive Excess notes, tap the power of the public purse “to level the playing field and expand opportunities for the disadvantaged.”
“Using public procurement to address extreme disparities within large corporations,” the report adds, “would be a step towards the same general objective.”
And a step in that direction, as Peter Drucker told Wall Street Journal readers back in 1977, would do honor to the great achievement of American business in the middle of the 20th century: “the steady narrowing of the income gap between the ‘big boss’ and the ‘working man.’”
Care worker Phoebe Shields with South Portland resident Ruth. | Beacon
Touted as one of the top achievements in a $1.2 billion supplemental budget passed last month, state lawmakers say they are countering Maine’s severe shortage of trained direct care workers to care for seniors and people with disabilities by finally funding a long-sought wage increase.
But some directors of state-subsidized congregate living facilities say the state’s plan to raise wages to $15.94 an hour, or 125% of the state’s minimum wage, is essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul, as the wage boost will come at the expense of their other program costs.
“We see all the rhetoric out there around how they have finally and ultimately fulfilled this 125%-of-minimum-wage initiative. It’s not true,” said Todd Goodwin, CEO of the John F. Murphy homes, which runs 37 group homes in the Lewiston-Auburn area. The agency is the largest group living provider in Maine.
Direct care professionals, many of whom are women and people of color, care for seniors and people with disabilities in their homes or group settings and are some of the lowest paid employees in the state. Low reimbursement rates from MaineCare, the state’s Medicaid program, often leave agencies without enough funds to adequately pay their employees. That low pay, combined with often having to work far more than 40 hours a week to cover staffing shortages, has led to an extremely high turnover rate among care workers and uneven services for those in need.
A multi-year legislative campaign to address the high turnover gained steam in January 2020 when the Commission to Study Long-Term Care Workforce Issues issued its report recommending that direct care workers be paid at least 125% of the minimum wage. In 2021, a bill introduced by Rep. Jessica Fay (D-Raymond) to adopt the recommendations put forth by the commission, including a pay raise, was supported by group home agencies and their workers and passed the legislature.
The bill wasn’t funded until this year, however, when it was included in the bipartisan supplemental budget signed by Gov. Janet Mills on April 20. Lawmakers said agencies will receive back pay retroactive through January 2022 when Fay’s law went into effect.
‘Bait and switch’
But group home managers who Beacon spoke with say the wage hike is partially being funded by shifting money from their operations budgets. They explained that it is because the state switched to a new funding model late last year without notifying them.
From 2007 until Fall 2021, group home agencies were funded through MaineCare based on what is known in the industry as the Deshaies funding model. Under the model, a per hour reimbursement fee is paid out in a lump sum to each agency, 40% of which must be allocated for staff wages, 18% for payroll taxes and benefits, 25% for program costs and 11% for administration costs, along with a 6% provider tax.
Under the old model, agencies received a total reimbursement rate of $29.28 per service hour, 40% of which allowed only for a $11.71-an-hour wage for direct care workers. This left agencies with $17.57 per hour for all other program costs.
But under the new model adopted by the state last year, the allocation for other program costs has shrunk. The total per hour reimbursement rate was raised to $32.13, but subtracting the higher wage of $15.94 an hour from that rate leaves the agencies with $16.19 per hour for program costs.
That seemingly small difference between the remaining $17.57 per hour under the old model and the $16.19 per hour left under the new model will yield significant impacts on an agency’s annual budget, explained Ray Nagel, the executive director of the Independence Association, a community in Brunswick for people with intellectual disabilities.
“That is a lot of money,” he said. “In one year alone, just for my agency, that’s a difference of about $360,000.”
Goodwin echoed Nagel, saying that in order for the state to fully fund the pay raise and not cut into their other programing funds, the total per hour reimbursement rate for agencies would need to be raised to $39.85, not the $32.13 currently set by the state.
Goodwin maintains that the state did not inform group home agencies that they were no longer using the Deshaies funding model. He said he and other providers have made records requests under the Maine Freedom of Access Act to find out more about the state’s new funding model.
“Absent a published methodology upon which to check claims, there is nothing about this that doesn’t stink,” he said.
Rep. Michele Meyer (D-Eliot), who serves as the House chair of the legislature’s Health and Human Services Committee, gave this response when Beacon asked her about the agencies’ concerns over cutting operation costs as a result of the state’s new funding model.
“There are many providers in Maine and we were glad to hear from them during the public hearing process for the supplemental budget,” she said in a statement. “The HHS Committee prioritized their needs and asked the Appropriations Committee to fund them. The law we passed requires that impacted rates include a minimum of 125% of minimum wage for the labor component of the rates. Please note, providers must choose to pass that on to their staff.”
Nagel agreed that there has been a lack of transparency from lawmakers about the new funding model. “They’re just trying to baffle people by saying, ‘We put millions of dollars here, we put in this and this and that,’” he said. “But when you look at the details, that’s 100% wrong.”
He continued, “They essentially reallocated the rate so that now our agencies are paying for the labor portion at the expense of the programming. We’re extremely upset. We think it’s a bait and switch.”
Wages need to continue to rise, advocates say
Alan Cobo-Lewis, a professor at the University of Maine who serves as head of the school’s Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies, said raising direct care worker wages is critical to eliminating large waitlists for various home or community-based care services. Several thousand Mainers in need of care are currently on such lists.
But Cobo-Lewis, whose son has a disability and relies on daily-living support services, said the controversy about how the state has funded the wage boost is ultimately beside the point, as even the long-sought raise to $15.94 an hour can’t compete in today’s labor market against less demanding jobs.
“125% of minimum wage was a pre-pandemic recommendation,” he said. “I think that the state needs to invest in getting direct care worker wages up to around $20 an hour. Anything less devalues direct care workers and the people with disabilities who they support.”
He added that other state initiatives to recruit new direct care workers are likely to be unsuccessful unless workers are provided a living wage. “All the money being spent on one-time incentives, career lattices, websites to promote direct care worker jobs, etc., isn’t going to address the crisis unless hourly wages also go up,” he said.
Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com
Photo: A day of action organized by the Maine Poor People’s Campaign in Bangor in 2021 | Photo courtesy of Maine Poor People’s Campaign via Facebook
Mainers from across the state will travel to Washington, D.C., next month as part of a march to demand that those in power stop ignoring the 140 million poor and low-income people living in the U.S and work with them on a moral agenda of justice and equality.
The event, called the “Moral March on Washington & to the Polls,” will take place June 18 at 9 a.m. in the nation’s capital. The rally is being organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a national coalition building power across marginalized communities to change the moral narrative in the U.S. and demand an end to a series of interconnected injustices. The organization is based on a campaign of the same name created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s to unite poor and impacted people around the country.
In Maine, the state chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing to bring hundreds of people down to D.C. to participate in the June march.
“There’s going to be impacted speakers from across the country,” Joshua Kauppila, a Bangor-based organizer working with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said of the event. “We’re going to be lifting our moral agenda up to those down in D.C., and really highlighting how these interlocking injustices of systemic poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the war economy, ecological devastation and that distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism are all part of the problem that we need to solve and that those solutions need to come from poor people.”
Kauppila said the event will feature speeches, music and cultural arts, and a voter registration drive as well as the opportunity for people across the nation to connect over shared issues of injustice.
“We’re facing just crisis after crisis and … poor and low-income people are so often shoved aside,” Kauppila said.
Along with building power through community connections and solidarity, Kauppila said the event will also serve as a way to advocate for the policy priorities the Poor People’s Campaign is pushing for. Some of those political goals include comprehensive COVID-19 relief that prioritizes essential workers and marginalized populations, quality health care for all, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and universal guaranteed housing.
Traveling to D.C.
Kauppila said the Maine Poor People’s Campaign is working with the bus share system rally.co to get people down to D.C. for the event. According to that site, there will be bus pickup locations in Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, Dover-Foxcroft, Lewiston, Portland and Waterville in the evening on Friday, June 17, to bring people to Washington. Kauppila said participants would return to Maine on Sunday morning, the day after the rally.
More information on the bus schedule can be found here. Information on how to RSVP for the event can be found here.
Kauppila said the group has raised funds to ensure that those who can’t pay for a bus ticket or other associated costs of the trip can still go, as the group wants as many low-income Mainers as possible to attend to demonstrate the potential political power of poor people.
“We recognize that group of voters has not been activated for the primary reason that their issues are not being addressed and the politicians who claim to promote their issues don’t follow through,” Kauppila said.
Marcella Makinen, treasurer for the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, added that the mass gathering in D.C. has the potential to be transformative in terms of demonstrating the reality of a U.S. system in which inequality has continued to skyrocket.
“It’s important to be changing the narrative on why people don’t have enough resources to eat and don’t have enough resources to pay their rent. It’s too easy to blame oneself and then that leads to depression,” Makinen said, arguing that “discovering that there’s a system where rich people get richer for not doing anything can be really liberating in and of itself.”
Willie Hurley, another organizer with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said he hopes the June rally will help connect disparate grassroots campaigns together in a shared push for justice.
“We have all these separate tiny little movements and organizations all working on their different things. This is an opportunity to bring all those things together,” Hurley said. “It’s 40 percent of the country, poor people. It’s the sleeping giant.”
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.
Photo: A day of action organized by the Maine Poor People’s Campaign in Bangor in 2021 | Photo courtesy of Maine Poor People’s Campaign via Facebook
Mainers from across the state will travel to Washington, D.C., next month as part of a march to demand that those in power stop ignoring the 140 million poor and low-income people living in the U.S and work with them on a moral agenda of justice and equality.
The event, called the “Moral March on Washington & to the Polls,” will take place June 18 at 9 a.m. in the nation’s capital. The rally is being organized by the Poor People’s Campaign, a national coalition building power across marginalized communities to change the moral narrative in the U.S. and demand an end to a series of interconnected injustices. The organization is based on a campaign of the same name created by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the 1960s to unite poor and impacted people around the country.
In Maine, the state chapter of the Poor People’s Campaign is mobilizing to bring hundreds of people down to D.C. to participate in the June march.
“There’s going to be impacted speakers from across the country,” Joshua Kauppila, a Bangor-based organizer working with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said of the event. “We’re going to be lifting our moral agenda up to those down in D.C., and really highlighting how these interlocking injustices of systemic poverty, systemic racism, militarism, the war economy, ecological devastation and that distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism are all part of the problem that we need to solve and that those solutions need to come from poor people.”
Kauppila said the event will feature speeches, music and cultural arts, and a voter registration drive as well as the opportunity for people across the nation to connect over shared issues of injustice.
“We’re facing just crisis after crisis and … poor and low-income people are so often shoved aside,” Kauppila said.
Along with building power through community connections and solidarity, Kauppila said the event will also serve as a way to advocate for the policy priorities the Poor People’s Campaign is pushing for. Some of those political goals include comprehensive COVID-19 relief that prioritizes essential workers and marginalized populations, quality health care for all, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and universal guaranteed housing.
Traveling to D.C.
Kauppila said the Maine Poor People’s Campaign is working with the bus share system rally.co to get people down to D.C. for the event. According to that site, there will be bus pickup locations in Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, Dover-Foxcroft, Lewiston, Portland and Waterville in the evening on Friday, June 17, to bring people to Washington. Kauppila said participants would return to Maine on Sunday morning, the day after the rally.
More information on the bus schedule can be found here. Information on how to RSVP for the event can be found here.
Kauppila said the group has raised funds to ensure that those who can’t pay for a bus ticket or other associated costs of the trip can still go, as the group wants as many low-income Mainers as possible to attend to demonstrate the potential political power of poor people.
“We recognize that group of voters has not been activated for the primary reason that their issues are not being addressed and the politicians who claim to promote their issues don’t follow through,” Kauppila said.
Marcella Makinen, treasurer for the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, added that the mass gathering in D.C. has the potential to be transformative in terms of demonstrating the reality of a U.S. system in which inequality has continued to skyrocket.
“It’s important to be changing the narrative on why people don’t have enough resources to eat and don’t have enough resources to pay their rent. It’s too easy to blame oneself and then that leads to depression,” Makinen said, arguing that “discovering that there’s a system where rich people get richer for not doing anything can be really liberating in and of itself.”
Willie Hurley, another organizer with the Maine Poor People’s Campaign, said he hopes the June rally will help connect disparate grassroots campaigns together in a shared push for justice.
“We have all these separate tiny little movements and organizations all working on their different things. This is an opportunity to bring all those things together,” Hurley said. “It’s 40 percent of the country, poor people. It’s the sleeping giant.”
Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. He then worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper before joining Beacon. Evan can be reached at evan@mainebeacon.com.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE (Site Under Renovation) 