For 34 years, Bill Trowbridge was a sign hanger, one of those guys who puts up billboards.
Five years ago, the media conglomerate Clear Channel bought the company and tried to make a profitable business more profitable. They offered buyouts that cut the 48 employees in Local 391 of the sign workers in half. But that wasn't enough.
Last March, Clear Channel told the remaining workers that they were unilaterally changing their hours, wages, and benefits. Men who were making $24 an hour, working a 40-hour week, were told they would be paid $15 per sign and would have to hustle to do as many signs as they could, safety be damned, with work hours set arbitrarily by management."
In 2004, the AFL-CIO commissioned a report on Clear Channel by Cornell University, It said, “The study also details at length Clear Channel's growing web of influence in the political arena, a troubled history of adversarial labor relations and pattern of scofflaw behavior that has resulted in Clear Channel being sanctioned by federal and state agencies. Chelli Penigree, president of Common Cause, singled out the report's examples of the Clear Channel money trail “which details a carefully crafted, money-driven development of insider connections not only with George W. Bush but with the rest of the Republican-controlled federal government as well."
The entire report can be found at Clear Channel Final Report.
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