The battle between the administration and cleaning workers at Providence
College has been going on for months (with precious little media attention). PC
claims it has no responsibility in how its contractor, UNICCO, which employs
the cleaners, runs its business. It seems to your superior correspondents that
the Catholic Church has a long and admirable history of fighting for the rights
of the poor, alleviating suffering, and aiding those in need. What's so
different about this?
The cleaning crew at PC, represented by SEIU, Local 134, continues to battle
for higher wages. UNICCO is paying the workers an obscene $8.06 an hour. Anyone
who doubts that this is a poverty wage should try living on it (and we're not
even talking about a family, just an individual). At other local institutions
of higher learning, like Brown, Bryant, URI, etc., cleaners get at least $3 an
hour more than the Providence College workers.
Students recently delivered to the PC's president, the Reverend Philip Smith,
a letter signed by US Representative Patrick Kennedy, 19 state representatives
and senators, four PC professors, and more than 500 PC students, urging him to
address these abysmally low wages. Still, the college administration remains
silent. Shame on it.
When we need a hand cleaning out the Boom Boom Room or raking the leaves here
at Casa Diablo, we hire a 14-year-old neighbor at $8 an hour. We checked with
his mom and dad about it, saying, "Gee, do you think that $8 an hour is fair?"
They say it's sufficient for a 14-year-old.
The cleaners at PC aren't adolescents. Many have families, they work hard, and
they're getting shafted. Why won't the PC administration do something?
Screw the workers, pt. 2
And finally, there's an apparent resolution in the four-month-old labor dispute
between the New England Gas Company and Local 12431 of the United Steelworkers.
On Monday, May 20, Governor Almond finally moved in to ameliorate the dispute.
This is good because, from all appearances, PUC Chairman Elia Germani is a
butt-kissing sycophant for the gas company and it doesn't really need two.
That's what they pay Mike Doyle for.
In the recent attempt to give unlicensed workers the go-ahead to do gas
shut-offs and turn-ons, the company, through its mouthpiece, Doyle, would have
you believe that this is a simple matter of turning on a pilot light. Tell that
to the company executive who just got his hair singed trying to service a
customer. The workers who do this go through a five-year program of classroom
and field training with more experienced service workers. Despite Doyle's
claims, the new company doesn't want to bother with the expense of seriously
training its gas service employees.
Here's a little bit of what they do and why it takes expertise and training:
in turning on a pilot for someone, all equipment has to be checked, a disk in
the meter removed, and two new seals inserted. Air must be bled out of the
house's piping and a leak test set up to ensure that the pipes aren't leaking.
Then, if everything is okay, each and every appliance must be turned on to make
sure that the pilot ignites the main burners, that they shut off on properly,
and that the combustion products go up the chimney and not back into the
building.
If the service people are on a call because a pilot went out, they need to
know why. You'll recall the incident in Warwick, in which two people were
killed, because a service company came in and simply relit the pilot. The
furnace didn't have enough air for combustion because it was in a closet and
the air vents were plugged. Well-trained service people know these things and
check for them.
Can we seriously believe that the New England Gas Company's attempts to scrap
this level of professionalism will result in gas customers being safer?
Swinging genius party
June 21 marks the date of the opening festivities for the new luxury hotel at
the Mohegan Sun casino, just over the line from Westerly. According to Neal
Travis in the New York Post, the big "surprise" guest that evening will
be none other than Wet Willie Clinton, heretofore associated with every vice
known to man other than gambling. Also expect Stevie Wonder, Rosie O'Donnell
and Cher.
With this sort of line-up, it's only a matter of time before Ozzy and family,
Michael Jackson, and Liza Minnelli and her wax figurine of a husband are added
to the guest list. Your superior correspondents will go no farther south than
Narragansett that day.
Americanization
Well, for all their fussiness and fancy talk over at Vatican City, it appears
that the Pope's butt boys are buying right into our modern American moral
standards of taking absolutely no responsibility for our actions or those of
our friends.
"From a canonical point of view, the bishop or religious superior is neither
morally nor legally responsible for a criminal act committed by one of his
clerics," the Reverend Gianfranco Ghirlanda, dean of the canon law faculty at
Gregorian University in Rome, wrote last week in the Vatican-approved
Civilta Cattolica. The Reverend Ghirlanda can certainly shade the truth
enough to obviate legal responsibility for the deeds of one's brother in
Christ. But one hopes that more than a few bishops or superiors (behaviorists?)
would take on just a bit of responsibility for letting a colleague be
successively bounced, in between speeches to North American Man/Boy Love
Association national conferences, from tending unaware parishioners in a string
of new neighborhoods
Sad, sad, sad to see how disgracefully little remorse, and so much denial, is
being exhibited by the comforters of child abusers, as well as the utter
arrogance that drives them. Sleep tight, Bernie and Karol.
Ouch!
Always nice to see management at the Urinal caught out, especially when they
get skewered by their own journalistic brethren. In the current Columbia
Journalism Review, the CJR editors give a "dart" to the BeloJo for
their little "truth in advertising" blunder in heralding the New England
Newspaper of the Year metro category award they won from the New England
Newspaper Association.
Noted CJR, "Celebrating itself in a March house ad, the Providence
Journal boasted to its readers, `Only one can be the best. And it's not
the Hartford Courant. It's not the Boston Herald. It's not even
the Boston Globe. The New England Newspaper Association picked the
Providence Journal as the New England Newspaper of the Year in the Metro
Category . . . ' Nowhere did it mention that neither the Herald nor the
Globe had bothered to enter the contest."
The ProJo modified the ad after Phoenix news editor Ian Donnis
exposed the oversight in these pages in March. It didn't help the Other Paper's
cause, of course, when Providence Newspaper Guild members picketed the NENA
awards ceremony, saying they were "astonished" that the group was about to
honor the paper after "a very public dive in quality."
(Speaking of responding to what appears in the Phoenix, nice move on
Quonset point, Sherbet. We knew you'd come around.)
Birth of a nation
The official emergence on May 20 of East Timor (Timor Timur in Indonesian) as
the newest independent nation brought back wonderful memories of a visit we
enjoyed with some East Timorese on a study tour of Rhode Island and the US
about two years ago. The former Portuguese colony was annexed by Indonesia in a
US-sanctioned 1975 bloodbath, under the guise of protecting people from a
Communist takeover (although we doubt the Commies could have done worse than
killing, as did the government and its confederates, 20 percent of the
population).
Among the visitors was the sister of East Timor's first-elected president,
"Xanana" Gusmao, a freedom fighter who spent seven in jail at the end of the
1990s, at the pleasure of the Indonesian powers-that-be, and an emissary of
Bishop Carlos Belo, who along with nationalist Ramon Jorge Horta, won the 1996
Nobel Peace Prize. The East Timorese were intelligent, insightful, and caring,
and incredibly unbowed by the horrors they'd lived through. After our visit
with them, they traveled on to see the Amos House shelter in Providence.
Deb Brayton, then-director of Amos House, later told us that not only did they
stay and eat lunch with the Amos House guests, they wouldn't leave without
making a donation, over Deb's insistence it was unnecessary. It was a touching
gesture from people who live in one of the world's 20 poorest countries --
where people make as little as 55 cents a day.
Welcome to the world community, Timor Timur. We like your style.
Who's zoomin' who?
It increasingly appears that the tight secrecy in which the Bush administration
wraps its affairs is not necessarily to benefit and protect the American
public, but to cover up any number of dirty little secrets and gaffes that have
occurred on its watch.
The latest, of course, surrounds the "what did they know and when did they
know it" questions that arose after it was revealed that the White House had
many specific warnings about the potential for attacks in the country by Osama
and friends. This necessitated trotting out Queen Lotsateetha, Dubya the Dumb's
national security adviser, Condescending Rice, to talk down her nose to the
public, informing us that we just don't understand and never will.
Hard on the heels of this insulting performance is the resurrection of a
Sydney Morning Herald article of November 7, 2001, which was evidently
spiked for "patriotic" reasons -- read: don't criticize Georgie Boy. This
despite the appearance of a "back off" dictate regarding the Saudi royals and
bin Laden family after Dubya got elected. Seems Junior had some past business
dealings with the bin Ladens and their emissaries in which he profited through
oil and other means. Money is green, blood is red. Nice choice, Mr. President.
Send FBI reports, sunglasses, and Pulitzer-grade tips to p&j[a]phx.com.
Issue Date: May 24 - 30, 2002
