ILWU 21: 'We're all going to jail as a union'
The Stand
Posted July 16, 2011
The biggest labor dispute in Washington state — spawning one of the more militant union campaigns in decades — is happening right now in Longview. About 100 union members were cited and arrested earlier this week, and yesterday hundreds more crowded onto railroad tracks to block a mile-long train.

Here’s what’s going on.

EGT Development, a joint venture of Japan-based Itochu Corp, South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean and St. Louis-based Bunge North America, is using non-union labor to handle grain in the testing phase of its new $200 million facility at the Port of Longview. All other grain export terminals from the Columbia River to the Puget Sound have successfully and profitably worked with unionized labor for decades.

Talks between EGT executives and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 21, which has a contract for all longshore work on Port property, about becoming signatory to the area standard contract broke down months ago and the company has refused to return to the table. Instead, EGT has sued the Port in federal court, arguing that the company was not bound by the contract with Local 21 to hire union labor on its leased site. The company claims that keeping the facility’s 50 full-time workers non-union will save EGT $1 million a year.

Now, after months of picketing and attempts to pressure EGT to return to the table, the ILWU members are angry.

“We are going to fight for our jobs in our jurisdiction. We have worked this dock for 70 years, and to have a big, rich corporation come in and say, ‘We don’t want you,’ is a problem,” ILWU 21 President Dan Coffman told the (Longview) Daily News. “We’re all together. We’re all going to jail as a union.”
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Whoa! Hundreds of longshoremen block train in WA
Teamster Nation
Posted July 16, 2011
[...] Teamsters and longshoremen have a lot at stake in this new global order. Multinationals are just dying to reduce all their workers along the supply chain to serfdom. The grain train standoff, the fight over Mexican trucks, the battle with Royal Ahold and C & S Wholesale Grocers, the dispute with BMW -- they're all part and parcel of the same savage attack on workers.

If you haven't gotten educated and involved yet, better hurry up. They're coming after you soon, if they haven't already.
Read the source story here.

Wisconsin Truth Tour Rolls Out
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Posted July 16, 2011
The statewide Wisconsin Truth Tour kicks off tomorrow morning in Green Bay. Sponsored by the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO and community allies and labor partners, the bus tour will give union members and community members a chance to speak out on the impact of Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) devastating budget and union-busting measures. Says Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Phil Neuenfeldt:

Despite slashing education, health care and public services for local communities, Scott Walker, often met by protesting citizens, has been spewing talking points and spin at events around the state.  Now, we have a chance to speak out on how we have been impacted by his devastating policy changes.

During the next two and half weeks, the Truth Tour will stop in seven other cities (see dates below). The tour will also help mobilize support for next round of elections to recall half a dozen Republican state Senators who were instrumental in ramming through Walker’s bill that eliminated the collective bargaining rights of Wisconsin public employees.
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Romney: Jobless Americans Have To Bear Burden Of Budget Cuts Because Corporations Need A Tax Cut
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Posted July 16, 2011
A member of the local Rotary Club stood yesterday to ask former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) a question weighing on the minds of millions of jobless Americans:  At a time when corporations are sitting on record amounts of cash, why are the Americans who can least afford it being asked to shoulder the burden of trillions of dollars in potential budget cuts?

But Romney dodged the question, ignoring the plight of the poor and unemployed, and instead launched into a speech about how American jobs were being outsourced to developing countries with cheap labor and miniscule tax rates because the U.S. has made itself unattractive to major corporations. Instead of sticking up for Americans who are facing cuts to the safety net programs they desperately need, Romney took the opportunity to proclaim that America’s problems could be fixed if it gave corporations yet another tax cut.
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How default would harm homeowners, cities, businesses and everyone else
Ezra Klein, in The Washington Post
Posted July 16, 2011
It’s easy to understand why the government will have more trouble borrowing if it fails to pay its debts, or even has a difficult time paying its debts. It’s a bit harder to see why ordinary Americans, the city of Pittsburgh, hospitals in Iowa, and medium-sized corporations will have more trouble borrowing. But they will. And their trouble borrowing is the main channels through which a default, or even something too close to it for the market’s comfort, could deal a body blow to the economy.

On Wednesday, Moody’s warned that it was putting the U.S. government credit rating on review for a downgrade. But they didn’t stop there. Another 7,000 debt products that are “directly linked to the U.S. government or are otherwise vulnerable to sovereign risk” were also put on review for a possible downgrade. That’s about $130 billion worth of debt. If America tumbles, so do they. But Moody’s still wasn’t done. An unknown amount of “indirectly linked” debt is also getting reviewed.

If America’s credit rating falls, it’s taking a lot more than just Treasury securities with it. It’s going to take the whole credit market with it. Which, as you’ll remember, is exactly how the subprime housing sector took the economy down in 2008.
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Anarchists and Tasseled Loafers
Timothy Eagan in The New York Times
Posted July 16, 2011
[...] I don’t care how rich guys spend their money, or even if a congressman pays as much for a single bottle of wine as some fellow Americans get for their weekly unemployment checks. Ryan is the architect of a budget that gives even more tax breaks for the corporate elite while making the elderly pay for diminished Medicare with coupons. Nobody should be surprised when he drinks $350 wine with people who want continue the policies of economic inequality.

But the dinner is instructive as a picture of power. Throughout these debt ceiling negotiations, I’ve been waiting for the Republicans’ corporate overlords to jerk their chain. And finally, a few days ago, the Business Roundtable, in a letter signed by more than 350 C.E.O.’s, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a dire warning — the game of chicken is up. They said what others who have a large stake in this economy have said: that default could cause a multi-billion dollar crash, affecting everything from auto loans to credit-card debt.

And so, in response to the Tasseled Loafers’ concern, McConnell tried again, saying, “We think it’s extremely important that the country reassure the markets that default is not an option.”

Note who is getting the reassurance from the Senate Republican leader.
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Research Desk: Are government workers overpaid?
Ezra Klein, in The Washington Post
Posted July 16, 2011

Today on the Diane Rehm show, Grover Norquist said that public sector workers earn total compensation roughly twice that of private sector workers, $120K vs. $60K. Is this factual? If not, what are the actual comparative figures?

Norquist also used this talking point in an interview with Ezra in March, and, as Ezra said then, it’s very misleading. Norquist is relying on this USA Today analysis, which estimates that the average private- sector worker made $61,051 in total compensation (wages, health benefits, pension, etc.) in 2009 to the average federal worker’s $123,049, and the average state or local worker’s $69,913. But the USA Today analysis did not take into account differences in level of experience and education between public-sector and private-sector workers. Federal workers tend to be better educated than private-sector workers, and so it would make sense for them to be paid more.

Keith Bender and John Heywood, economists at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, did a comparison of state and local and private sector compensation that controlled for age, education level, experience and other factors, and found that state and local workers are consistently underpaid, and have been growing more so since the early ’90s.
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The New American Economy: Win the Lottery, Get a Job
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Posted July 16, 2011
Stunning, just stunning. Nearly 17,000 people applied for jobs at a Ford plant in Kentucky, according to USA Today. The applications are now going into a lottery and Ford will determine who gets to proceed to be considered for the 1,800 jobs that pay $15.51 an hour.  No doubt not everyone who applied is unemployed, to be sure–but it’s likely a good number don’t have jobs.

So is this what it’s come to for America’s unemployed workers–they need to win a lottery to get work to support themselves and their families?
Read the source story here.

GOP Rep. Steve King Would Reject Debt Ceiling Deal With $3 Trillion In Cuts And Just $8 In Revenue Increases
Think Progress
Posted July 16, 2011
Even as President Obama offers up trillions of dollars in cuts and reforms, Republican intransigence has prevented the two sides from reaching a deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling and stave off a credit default. The threat of a downgrade to the United States’ credit rating has not yet been enough to force a compromise from GOPers, who have thus far been unwilling to see any revenue increases in a debt ceiling deal.

There is no better example of this stubbornness than by Rep. Steve King (R-IA). ThinkProgress spoke with King following a House GOP Caucus meeting this morning. We asked the Iowa Republican, a persistent critic of the president’s policies, whether he could accept a debt ceiling deal that included $3 trillion in cuts and just $8 in revenue increases. King stood firm, telling ThinkProgress, “I’m not for raising taxes.”
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They, Too, Sing America
Charles M. Blow, The New York Times
Posted July 16, 2011
Last week I spent a few days in the Deep South — a thousand miles from the moneyed canyons of Manhattan and the prattle of Washington politics — talking to everyday people, blue-collar workers, people not trying to win the future so much as survive the present.

They do hard jobs and odd jobs — any work they can find to keep the lights on and the children fed.

No one mentioned the asinine argument about the debt ceiling. No one. Life is pressing down on them so hard that they can barely breathe. They just want Washington to work, the way they do.

They are honest people who do honest work — crack-the-bones work; lift-it, chop-it, empty-it, glide-it-in-smooth work; feel-the-flames-up-close work; crawl-down-in-there work — things that no one wants to do but that someone must.

They are women whose skin glistens from steam and sweat, whose hands stay damp from being dipped in buckets and dried on aprons. They are men who work in boots with steel toes, the kind that don’t take shining, the kind that lean over and tell stories when you take them off.

They are people whose bodies melt every night in a hot bath, then stiffen by sunrise, so much so that it takes pills for them to get out of bed without pain.

They, too, sing America. But they’re the ones less talked about — either not glamorous enough or rancorous enough. They are the ones without champions, waiting for Democrats to gather the gumption to defend the working poor with the same ferocity with which Republicans protect the filthy rich, waiting for a tomorrow that never comes.
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Why More Executive Pay May Not Pay Off
Forbes
Posted July 16, 2011
The gap between CEO compensation and that of the average worker continues to grow at an astounding rate. Compensation research conducted by a University of California at Santa Cruz professor and posted by the AFL / CIO illustrates that the median compensation for CEO’s in all industries in 2010 was $3.9 million.  For companies in the S&P 500 it was $10.6 million while for the companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the median CEO compensation was $19.8 million.

Meanwhile, median compensation for workers was about $40,000 (according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics) meaning that CEO’s were paid 100 to 500 times more relative to workers.  What’s most disturbing however is that according to the Institute for Policy Studies CEO compensation in the United States was only40 times greater than that of the average worker in 1960, which means that the gap has become a chasm. This huge discrepancy in pay was even noted by Vice President Biden who remarked that “the average CEO makes $10,000 more every day…than what the average worker makes every year.”
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Meet The Indonesian Workers Who Make Your Nikes: 50 Cent Hourly Wages, Beatings, And Humiliation
Think Progress
Posted July 16, 2011
More than a decade ago, shoe giant Nike came under fire for its use of sweatshop labor in the production of its products. Most of the criticism focused on its Indonesian workforce, where workers, largely young women, were forced to labor under harsh conditions and abusive supervisors. In 1997, filmmaker Michael Moore made Nike’s abuses a subject of his film “The Big One,” and met with Nike CEO Phil Knight. Knight explained that the reason his company was using low-wage labor in Indonesia is because “Americans don’t want to make shoes.” Watch it here.

In 2001, following protests by labor and human rights advocates, Nike pledged a series of reforms following the revelation that some of its developing world workers were children. But a new investigation conducted by the Associated Press appears to find that poor conditions persist in many of Nike’s factories.

At the Taiwanese-operated Pou Chen Group factory in Sukabumi, Indonesia, which makes Converse shoes for Nike, and PT Amara Footwear factory in Jakarta, workers alleged that they are paid ultra-low wages, regularly verbally and physically abused, and even fired for the act of taking sick leave.
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Seniors to Push Lawmakers to Protect Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Posted July 16, 2011
July 30 will mark the 46th anniversary of the Medicare and Medicaid programs and seniors across the country plan to march and lobby to make sure there are many more anniversaries to come.

From July 18 to July 30 members of the Alliance for Retired Americans will participate in nearly 20 events nationwide to let lawmakers know that they do not want the money working people depend on in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security used for another taxpayer handout to Wall Street. The Republican’s budget proposal would replace Medicare with underfunded vouchers for private insurance and cut Medicaid funding.  
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Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick: Failing To Raise The Debt Ceiling Will Create Catastrophe For States
Think Progress
Posted July 16, 2011
Gov. Deval Patrick (D-MA) wrote a letter to Congressional leaders today urging them to raise the federal debt ceiling. “Massachusetts draws down over $200 million in federal reimbursements weekly for programs ranging from Medicaid to food assistance,” Patrick wrote. “Failure by the U.S. government to meet its obligations to the Commonwealth for even a short period of time could create a serious state cash-flow issue. As demonstrated in the latest jobs report, state governments are still reeling from the recession and can ill afford to bear the brunt of such a preventable crisis.” The National Governor’s Association has also urged Congress to increase the debt ceiling.
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The GOP's Minnesota shutdown victory: Did Dems totally surrender?
The Week
Posted July 16, 2011
Minnesota's Democratic governor Mark Dayton and top Republicans have struck a deal to end the longest state government shutdown in recent history. Dayton sent GOP leaders a letter Thursday, saying he would drop his insistence on a new tax on the state's millionaires, and Republicans responded by agreeing to close the $1.4 billion gap between their budget proposal and Dayton's by delaying payments to schools and selling tobacco payment bonds, instead of slashing the state workforce by 15 percent. Was this an even trade, or did Dayton essentially surrender?
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