During the ABC broadcast of the PSU-ND game Saturday night, they ran the obligatory segment on JoePa, including the bit about him punishing the team for their off-field shenanigans by making them clean up Beaver Stadium after home games.
This, naturally, led me to think about Todd Cherkis, brother of Jason and co-founder of United Workers Association down in Baltimore, which last week successfully avoided a planned hunger strike by having Camden Yards agree to pay their cleanup crews a living wage.
The United Workers Association, the Baltimore organization, pressed O’s owner Peter Angelos and state and local officials to get the wage hike. They thought they’d secured the desired raise in 2004, when Angelos told UWA officials that he’d use his own money to make up the difference between what the company with the cleaning contract paid the workers—an average of less than $7 an hour—and the living wage.
When Angelos didn’t follow through on that pledge, the workers and their advocates tried various tactics to force the issue. They tried pre-game picketing outside the stadium where they clean. They chased Angelos around town at the 2006 All-Star Game in Pittsburgh. They held a candlelight vigil on stadium grounds. No luck. Then, earlier this summer, the workers and their advocates declared they would go on a hunger strike beginning this week. [Washington City Paper]
Naturally this makes me wonder about the people who clean up Beaver Stadium when the Lions aren't on double-secret probation, and who picks up the remnants of all those Tony Luke's pork sammiches at Citizen's Bank Park? Knowing Philly, they may be unionized and paid a decent wage, but who knows?
