The newsletter for the Iowa worker.

Happy National Teacher Appreciation Week and National Nurses Week!

It’s Wednesday, May 8, 2024.

Recent-immigrant Iowans worried, upset, and angry with a new law held vigils in four Iowa cities last week.

Big crowds came out to Davenport, Des Moines, Iowa City, and Waterloo to protest SF 2340, a new Iowa law that deputizes state and local law enforcement to act as federal immigration officials, giving them complete legal immunity to do so.

Screenshot of a video from a rally in Iowa City.

(used with permission from Escucha Mi Voz)

Starting Line’s Ty Rushing has a great recap of the rallies here.

At the rally in Waterloo, Black Hawk County Sheriff Tony Thompson said the law was “unenforceable as it’s written” and he would not be making his deputies “stereotype constituents” and “racially profile random motorists or passersby.”

The law is potentially also illegal under the Constitution: The US Department of Justice said it will file a federal lawsuit against the law if it’s enforced.

What if we *didn’t* make laws that violate the Constitution and make law enforcement’s job harder, and instead made it easier to work legally in a state with a stagnating population and a desperate need for workers?

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Amie Rivers

Community Editor, Iowa Starting Line

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This week’s Iowa worker news:

Voting on a union: Eighteen workers at Starbucks on 53rd Street in Davenport are working to unionize with Starbucks Workers United. The store is one of nine Starbucks stores across the country working to unionize this month (see above), and just the second in Iowa to do so after one in Iowa City last year.
A Tennessee company will pay nearly $650K for employing children at meatpacking plants in Iowa and Virginia, a court has ordered. Fayette Industrial was fined $649,304—a little over $27K for each of the 24 children found illegally working in the two plants—and must have someone review policies to avoid child labor violations in the future.
13 Chilean students won a lawsuit against an Iowa community college for promising them free college, then forcing them into manual labor to “pay off” their tuition once they arrived in the US. Western Iowa Tech Community College in Sioux City approved a $3 million settlement to the students. Separate lawsuits—one brought by Brazilian students and another with the companies involved—are ongoing or pending.
Preparing for a strike: Workers at Plumb Supply in Des Moines who are unionized with Teamsters Local 90 held a practice picket last week after their contract with the company expired. Talks are continuing with a federal mediator, though 95% of workers voted down an agreement last month that would have raised wages by 25 cents an hour, and they’re not opposed to a rolling strike to put the pressure on.
A rightwing think tank is behind Iowa’s basic income ban: In what has become a pattern, Iowa Republicans didn’t actually hear from Iowans clamoring for a ban on local governments contributing to basic income programs; it was a bill handed to them by the Foundation for Government Accountability, which has pushed for the ban in several states.
A bill bad for unions didn’t pass in Iowa (this year): The Iowa Teamsters celebrated after a bill died that would have forced unions to sue their employer every time their employer didn’t provide a list of eligible union employees to the state. “Working people have crushed an absolutely disgusting bill that would have hurt public employees and unfairly targeted unions,” said Alano De La Rosa, Secretary-Treasurer of Local 90 in Des Moines.
The nation’s largest one-day food drive is Saturday: The National Association of Letter Carriers is holding its annual Stamp Out Hunger food drive on May 11. It began in 1993. To donate, simply leave a bag of nonperishable food by your mailbox. All donations stay in the community.