I'm a single mom and have worked for the state of California for 32 years. All my life, I've been self sufficient and careful to live within my means.

Then the California budget crisis hit and public employees had to take a 14 percent pay cut to help fill the budget gap. We worked hard before the crisis. And we continue to work hard to keep our state running. But now we're doing it with fewer staff and higher workloads.

I bought my home in Sacramento 21 years ago and never missed a payment before last year. But I couldn't afford my mortgage payments because I was making 14 percent less. I had to choose between paying my mortgage and feeding my daughter.

I fell behind in my mortgage last summer and my home entered foreclosure. Doing everything I could to save my family's home, I negotiated a mortgage modification with Wilshire, the lender. But then Wilshire sold the mortgage to Bank of America and I was told I had to start the process all over again.

Instead of renegotiating, Bank of America raised my mortgage payment by $200.  This is the same Bank of America whose reckless actions crashed our economy and caused the budget crisis that put me in this situation in the first place. Now the bank wants to put me and my daughter on the street. 

I'm not alone. Many of my co-workers have already lost their homes because of the paycuts and are sleeping their cars. 

The most important step I've taken to save my home hasn't been working with Bank of America--it's been confronting them head on. The bank was silent for months and months about my modification until I joined dozens of clergy, community members, and other Americans facing foreclosure as a part of a vigil in front of Bank of America's New York City Tower. Two days later, I received a package in the mail to start the modification process again and the bank postponed the sale date of my house.

The only way we can end this foreclosure crisis is for ordinary Americans to stand up to big banks and pressure them to give us a fair shake.

This Labor Day, I'm committed to holding Bank of America and the rest of the Wall Street firms accountable for the economy they crashed, the budget crisis they caused, and lives they've ruined. Including mine.

Labor Day 2010: "I'm committed to holding Wall Street accountable for the economy they crashed, the budget crisis they caused, and lives they've ruined. Including mine." originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

When a lot of people think about foreclosures, they get the image of unemployed spendthrifts who cheated their way into adjustable rate mortgages.

That's not us. We work four jobs. My wife Connie and I both work at a local hospital, she as an anesthesia supply technician and me as a warehouse receiver and distributor. I also manage a liquor store on Mondays and Saturdays. And we run a karaoke business. We should be able to support our family on four jobs--but it hasn't always been enough.

Like most Americans, the economic crisis took a tool on our finances and we started falling behind on our mortgage payments. We bought our house 20 years ago with a fixed rate mortgage. But even with the fixed rate, our payments had gone from $468 a month 20 years ago to $1,473. Our incomes have not quadrupled. Connie's in the second year of a wage freeze and my paycheck has barely changed over the past few years. Right now, I'm looking at retiring when I'm 80.

Luckily, we renegotiated our mortgage. But that was after months and months of phone calls to countless Bank of America representatives. Each time we called, we'd have to reexplain the entire situation again--we weren't sure if anyone was really listening. It was clear they just wanted to take possession of the property and resell it at a higher price.

I wish I could just sit down with Brian Moynihan, Bank of America's CEO, and ask him what we did wrong. I don't think he'd have an answer.

This Labor Day, I'm committed to making sure Americans hear the real story of how Bank of America paid CEO Brian Moynihan a $6 million bonus last year: by robbing middle class Americans of their homes and their dreams.

I remember growing up, my mother and father were able to buy a house, put food on the table, and send us kids to college on a single paycheck. We weren't rich by any means--but we were able to get by and own a piece of the American Dream.

I'm committed to restoring fairness to our economy. We need to demand good paying jobs. We need to demand safe schools and neighborhoods. We need to create a better future for our children.

Related:

• Read more from Mark in a Financial Times story about the destruction of America's middle class.
• Watch Mark and his wife discuss the economy on MSNBC.

Labor Day 2010: "I'm committed to restoring fairness to our economy." originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

You are deep in mandatory overtime (which you don't get OT pay for) and you're so exhausted that you start making really bad mistakes - dangerous mistakes.

We've all been there in one way or another in our working lives, but what if you were a patient and the exhausted worker making the mistakes was your resident physician? Obviously it can be a life or death situation for you. Resident physicians work shifts as long as 30 hours as often as three times a week, which can lead to physician fatigue and medical errors.

"As future physicians, we greatly value the well-being of our patients and know that we can serve them better if we are well ourselves," says Sonia Lazreg, health justice fellow with the American Medical Student Association (AMSA).

Dr. Charles Preston, a researcher with Public Citizen's Health Research Group and preventive medicine resident at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health says, "After a busy night on call, I remember a couple of times when I literally fell asleep on my patients standing up during morning rounds. I'd fall asleep while writing my patient progress notes. And driving home, I was careful to turn up the radio or blast the air conditioning so that I would at least have something more to keep me awake." Can you imagine?

So, why is this dangerous system still in place?

Despite evidence that excessive work hours contribute to depression, car crashes, needle stick injuries and even premature labor for pregnant physicians, there are no Occupational Safety and Health Association (OHSA) rules protecting residents from these risks.

OSHA, which is part of the Department of Labor, is responsible for enforcing safety and health legislation, and it just doesn't have the doctors-in-training on its radar ... yet!

To get the OSHA radar blipping, consumer and health advocacy organizations delivered a petition to the agency today. You can read the petition here, and at the bottom of this entry you can see the full list of those petitioning OSHA.

The federal government already regulates work hours and sets rest-period requirements in a variety of industries, including the highway, aviation, railroad and maritime transportation industries, because fatigue plays a major role in transportation safety. In none of these industries are workers allowed to work hours even remotely as long as these physicians. Resident physicians deserve to have similar protections from excessive work hours that don't give them adequate rest.

"OSHA must intervene so that physicians in training are no longer at risk for needle stick injuries, car crashes and other hazards that we know stem from chronic sleep deprivation." says CIR/SEIU Healthcare President Dr. Farbod Raiszadeh.

Please get involved with this important situation. It will help you at the same time as some hardworking people.

First: Call up your Twitter account and send a Tweet to the Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. The goal is that she'll push OSHA a little to get this moving.

Here's one you can use:
@HildaSolis Exhausted overworked doctors are dangerous. How about some regulation to keep us all alive? http://bit.ly/bLLlEf

Second: Sign into your Facebook account and become a fan of the Department of Labor. Once there drop Ms. Solis this note (or any that you'd like):

Secretary Solis, resident physicians need regulated work hours. 24-hour shifts are dangerous for my wellbeing as well as the physician's. http://wakeupdoctor.org/

Get involved and help make a difference!

Those petitioning OSHA include:
* Public Citizen
* The Committee of Interns and Residents/SEIU Healthcare
* The American Medical Student Association
* Dr. Charles Czeisler, Baldino professor of sleep medicine and director of the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School
* Dr. Christopher Landrigan, assistant professor of pediatrics and medicine at Harvard Medical School
* Dr. Bertrand Bell, professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Basic federal labor regulations would definitely help originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

The janitors who were let go from their jobs at JPMorgan's Century City Towers are hardworking Americans, already struggling in a tough economy. They were fired simply because their employer is looking to cut corners and stack extra work onto the remaining employees. Fifty-seven of those remaining workers walked out in protest, and were subsequently suspended.

JPMorgan Chase has argued that the firing of janitorial staff has nothing to do with their company, saying, "The dispute is between a vendor and employees, not Chase." The janitors were hired, and fired, by ABM Industries, one of the many contractors that companies hire to provide services in their facilities.

But the buildings these janitors clean aren't owned by ABM; they're owned by JPMorgan. The floors these janitors vacuum have the imprints of JPMorgan executives' expensive leather shoes. And JPMorgan's ignorance of the issue just further shows how little one of America's largest banking and investment companies actually cares about the average American worker.

L.A. Times Columnist Tim Rutten wrote in a recent column,

"It's hard not to be struck by the contrast between that lack of empathetic generosity and the courageous solidarity shown by their 57 fellow janitors who risked their own jobs in an economy with rampant unemployment. These people make $13.50 an hour; the tenants in that building have blazers on which every button costs three times that."

The 500 protestors and 13 arrested community activists who joined the janitors in Los Angeles show you just how great the divide has grown between the Wall Street wealthy and the rest of us. While JPMorgan Chase has paid out $9 billion in executive bonuses and received $95 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts, more and more of those same taxpayers are finding themselves unemployed, struggling to pay their bills, and worrying about whether they'll lose their homes. And ABM, the contractor, isn't exactly struggling - in 2009 the company had an annual revenue of $3.5 billion.

A single executive's salary at JPMorgan could most likely pay for an entire parade of janitorial workers at Century City Towers. Even the roof would be spotless. But they're not asking for big bonuses or more staff - they're simply asking for their jobs back.

"It's unjust the way they earn so much money. What I earn in one year they earn in five hours," said Rosa Mirna Cruz, who works at 2000 Avenue of the Stars. "How is that fair and how is that good for our country? They are leaving us and our families without food and without a way to pay for rent, and they are taking jobs away from our city. They get billions and we struggle to survive. All we are asking is that they stop unfairly laying off workers."

In his column, Rutten adds,

"These janitors ask nothing more of us than to support their families by doing the backbreaking job of cleaning up after some of the wealthiest and most privileged people in America. In return for their labor, they have been thrown out on the street, like the refuse their putative employer profits by collecting."

And so the janitors at 2000 Avenue of the Stars will keep fighting, as will service workers across the country, to prove that losing their jobs isn't just a happenstance of a recession when their employer isn't struggling.

This week janitors will protest in New York City, where JPMorgan is spending more of their money to sponsor the U.S. Open. I wonder how many hourly wages a single VIP ticket to the U.S. Open would pay for...

Read Tim Rutten's quoted column on the L.A. workers' plight in its entirety here.

You can add your own voice by writing to the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jaime Dimon. Click here to learn more.

When Cutting Corners Means Cutting Valuable Jobs originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

I'm left to wonder how I will pay my rent and feed my family. I am a single mother of a teenage son and I take care of my eighty year old mother. I don't want to tell my son who dreams of going to college that there won't be any money for him to continue his education. But if I don't have a job, he will have to work to help our family survive.

If JPMorgan executives were in my shoes--suddenly losing their job for no good reason--I wonder how they'd handle it? How would they tell their children that they'd have to put their dreams on hold?

Some people would feel all alone if this happened to them, but now I know I am not. In an amazing show of support, 57 of cleaners who work in the JPMorgan building risked their jobs and stopped working to support me and my laid off colleagues.

Together, we protested what the company did to us. We fasted and lived in a tent city outside the building to remind them to think about the workers at the bottom. We had a rally that shut down traffic to make people notice what is happening to all workers in this country. Hundreds of people showed up to support us. UNITE-HERE workers who clean rooms and serve food at the Century Plaza hotel across the street walked off the job to show their support. Their solidarity was just another reminder t me of what workers can accomplish when we link arms and support each other.

This Labor Day, by standing up and telling people how JPMorgan Chase is hurting me and my co-workers, I'm also standing up for the workers everywhere who are losing their jobs. We don't have the luxury to wait for others to stand up for us. We have the power to say that we deserve
better. The only way we will be able to create better lives for our children is to stand up now.

Read more about Zoila and her co-workers who are standing up for all workers against big corporations.

Labor Day 2010: "The only way we will be able to create better lives for our children is to stand up now" originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

Labor Day 2010: "I am committed to fighting for public services that keep our communities safe and our children healthy" originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

Last week, Sieger skipped bail and was arrested in a Miami Beach hotel where she had spent thousands of dollars under an assumed name. She was supposed to be arraigned in a Bronx courtroom on bail-jumping charges, but was taken to a medical facility at Rikers Island. She said she was not well enough to go to the hearing, which has been rescheduled for October. 19.

Helen Sieger was the first person in New York to be arrested under a law making it a felony not to provide employees with workers compensation insurance. In 2008, 1199SEIU members at Kingsbridge Heights went on strike after Sieger stopped making payments into the 1199SEIU benefit fund and their health insurance was terminated. Overall, Sieger failed to have workers' compensation coverage for over one year (from May 31, 2007 to June 26, 2008).

They returned to work 7 months later, after U.S. District Judge Denise Cotes said that Ms. Sieger engaged in "serious and pervasive unfair labor practices," and ordered the employees back to work under the terms of their old contract. Also, the state Department of Health revoked her license to operate the nursing home and the state placed the nursing home into receivership.

"This was a nursing home operator who held our members in contempt, thought they were stupid," said Mike Rifkin, executive vice president and nursing home division director of 1199. "At the end of the day, our members have kept their dignity. They're working and she's in jail."

Originally published on 1199SEIU's website here.

Former nursing home owner who engaged in unfair labor practices goes to jail originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

I immigrated to the United States almost two decades ago and later earned my United States citizenship. Today, I am proud to say that my son Jesus recently finished medical school and is starting residency, my daughter Claudia graduated from college this year and is pursuing graduate school, and my youngest daughter, Carolina, is still in middle school and working hard to follow in her older siblings footsteps.

I was born in a small town outside of Lima, Peru. It was here that I first developed a passion for social justice as a university student organizing protests and workers' unions. Two decades later, as a janitor in a Connecticut factory and a member of SEIU, I am still working for justice.

For me, social justice is a family affair. During the 2008 campaign, both Jesus and Claudia joined me on the campaign trail. Jesus knocked on doors in Pennsylvania, Claudia campaigned in New York and I attended rallies in Virginia.

When President Obama won, I not only felt part of the electoral victory, but I also felt a part of the change in this country. I believed, for the first time, that we might finally be able to fix our broken immigration system.

As a leader of my local union, fixing our broken immigration system is really about making sure workers are treated fairly on the job. I became a shop steward because I saw the employer treating employees unfairly - a practice that is kept alive by a broken system and that erodes working conditions for all workers.

This Labor Day, I am committed to bringing workers out of the shadows, into the mainstream and helping to ensure that all workers - native and foreign born, alike - have a voice on the job.

Labor Day 2010: "I am committed to bringing workers out of the shadows, into the mainstream and helping to ensure that all workers - native and foreign born, alike - have a voice on the job" originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

I might be frustrated, but I am not helpless.

I spent this summer in Washington, D.C. with seven other SEIU Members talking to our elected officials about the issues facing working families like mine. You see, I've always voted and I've always paid attention to politics, but until this summer, I never believed there was room for my voice in Washington.

But I learned the tools and proved myself wrong.

When the Senate was considering legislation this summer that not only preserved critical Medicaid programs but also protected one million jobs, I knew what I had to do. I had to make sure Ohio politicians knew exactly how I felt. As far as I am concerned, politicians like Ohio Senator Voinonvich work for me and every other citizen of the state. So when I ran into the Senator in the halls of the Capitol Building, I explained exactly why Ohio needed his support on the legislation.

When it came time to vote, Voinivich turned his back on working families and voted no. As disappointed as I was, the Senator just gave me one more reason to come back to Washington and make sure my voice is heard.

This Labor Day, I am committed to making sure that my politicians can hear my voice. Loud and clear.

Labor Day 2010: "I am committed to making sure that my politicians can hear my voice." originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.

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New Report: Jobs Well Done originally appeared on SEIU.org on Thursday, Sep 2, 2010.