News Stories for August 13, 2011
Andrew Cole's Dirty Words
The results are in. Nearly half a year since labor went into revolt following Governor Scott Walker’s February announcement that he intended to bust Wisconsin’s public sector unions – prompting 14 Democrats to leave the state for a month in an attempt to block the legislation – voters went to the polls in six recall elections that unions and their supporters hoped would put the state senate in the hands of Democrats. Despite an absolutely obscene amount of money flowing into the state on behalf of Democrats and Republicans alike, the Cheddar Revolution fell one seat short of its goal. The state senate remains in the hands of the GOP for the time being while angry Wisconsinites set their sights on their primary target: Governor Scott Walker.
[... T]he Democrats are at least as responsible for last night’s frustrating performance as gerrymandered Republican-friendly turf and underhanded voter suppression tactics are. Democrats expected to ride a tidal wave of anger back into power without speaking to the very issue that sparked Wisconsin’s political turmoil:
But most Democrats involved in recall elections have completely ignored the issue of reinstating collective bargaining, even though it is the unions who generated the activists going door-to-door to campaign for these candidates.While conventional wisdom dictates that it was good politics to de-emphasize collective bargaining, Democrats missed a crucial opportunity to change the terms of the public debate on organized labor. Walker and the GOP spent weeks demonizing public workers and the unions that represent them, and instead of hitting back on behalf of the very same people who worked tirelessly to help them seize the senate, the Democrats decided to accept the Republican’s terms. Even if Democrats eventually take both houses and the governor’s office, can labor really count on them to restore their rights?Mike Tate, chair of the Wisconsin state Democratic party, said in a press conference that only the media believe the elections are about collective bargaining.
As Jack Carver, on the Isthmus‘ Daily Page, wrote: “Democrats tacitly play into [Walker's] game. Instead of articulating how unions benefit the general population, they speak in the vaguest terms about the importance of preserving the rights of public workers.”
Read the source story here.
MSNBC
The United States may soon have to replace the expression, "the land of opportunity," with "the land of low wages."
While the job market may still look grim for those looking to replace their good-paying office or manufacturing jobs, opportunities are expected to abound for a host of jobs paying less than $10 an hour, everything from cashiers to home care aides.
"If you look at the job growth distribution of the last two recoveries, it suggests we're going to see growth of a lot more lower-income jobs," said Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy. He said that the lowest net growth was among middle-income jobs, such as manufacturing or office jobs, in the prior two recoveries. It remains to be seen what will happen with this recovery, he added, but "there is no indication this recovery will be any different."
Low-wage jobs have always been part of the economic landscape, but wages have been suppressed for many years now. Part of the reason is supply and demand, Creticos said, as the huge baby boomer labor pool flooded the job market and, thanks to the bad economy, are working longer, many past retirement age.
Creticos calls this phenomenon the "down-waging" of American jobs.
Many of the lowest-paying jobs were once seen as the domain of younger workers who were first starting out in the work world, but increasingly these positions are survival jobs for midcareer folks who have been downsized, said Randall Hansen, a workplace expert with Quintessential Careers.
Read the source story here.
AlterNet
We always hear that unions are in trouble. But that's not the whole story.
While nearly one of every three American workers were union members in 1945, today only 6.9 percent of private sector employees have union representation, a historic low. Tea Party governors like Wisconsin's Scott Walker have pushed anti-union bills through state legislatures. Wisconsin's bill stripped public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights and was the most significant direct attack against unions by a leading politician since Ronald Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers strike in 1981.
Yet despite the odds, over the past few months unions have achieved significant victories around the nation. Workers continue to fight for better wages, job security, safe workplaces, and health care, regardless of the struggles unions face. Their long-term struggles have not changed. But their success rate may be improving.Read the source story here.
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Nearly every day now, we hear about yet another public opinion poll that shows the majority of those surveyed want Congress and the White House to focus on jobs, jobs, jobs.
Constituents across the nation currently are meeting with their congressional lawmakers who are back home and these citizens are conveying one message: jobs, jobs, jobs.
Economists like Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Reserach (CEPR) and many others say the nation should first focus on one thing: jobs, jobs, jobs.
Yet most in Washington don’t get it. As Shierholz says:Lawmakers have crafted a debt ceiling deal that will slow growth further and make joblessness worse.Those who aspire to the U.S. presidency don’t get it, either. At last night’s Republican debate in Iowa, would-be presidents ”claimed faithfulness to the Aesop’s Fables version of tax policy,” as a writer on the Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal community blog put it.
They insist, without any evidence, that lowering taxes on the rich will create jobs, stimulate the economy. And yet, the evidence of the last 11 years disproves such a faith-based notion. Taxes at the federal level have never been so low…and yet unemployment is rivaling that of the 30’s.Read the source story here.
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
Nearly 70 BMW warehouse workers who faced layoffs at the end of August will have a job for at least six more months, their union reported Thursday.
"It's very reassuring that we made it very clear that we want to keep our guys employed," said Gene Rivera, a representative for Teamsters Local 495.
The local, which has its offices in Covina, has spent the past several weeks protesting BMW's plans to replace 68 unionized employees at the automaker's Ontario parts distribution center with those working for a third-party firm.
BMW, which has its U.S. offices in New Jersey, could not be reached for comment late Thursday.Read the source story here.
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Crushing postal workers and slashing service will not solve the U.S. Postal Service’s financial crisis, Postal Workers (APWU) President Cliff Guffey said in response to the announcement today that the Postal Service will seek congressional support to cut 120,000 jobs, break its labor contract signed earlier this year and withdraw from the federal health and retirement plans.
“Congress created this mess and Congress can fix it,” Guffey said.
The USPS economic crisis is the result of a provision of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 that requires the Postal Service to pre-fund the health care benefits of future retirees — a burden no other government agency or private company bears.The legislation requires the USPS to fund a 75-year liability over a 10-year period, and that requirement costs the USPS more than $5.5 billion per year.
Guffey also pointed out that “the federal government is holding billions of dollars in postal overpayments to its pension accounts.”
Read the source story here.
The New York Times, Editorial
There was nothing particularly surprising about the shrill skirmishing at the ideological edges of Thursday night's Republican presidential debate in Iowa. What was shocking were the antics in the center.
In full public view, the party’s mainstream jumped the tracks of reality on issues of spending and taxes, brightly illustrating the ruinous magical thinking that has led to a downgrade of the nation’s credit and invited a double-dip recession. When asked if they would reject a deal to cut the deficit that had 10 times the amount of spending cuts as it had tax increases, the hands of all eight candidates went up. Even a tincture of new revenue, though mixed with huge cuts in government spending, would be too much for the modern Republican Party.
[...] Representative Michele Bachmann, for example, said the credit downgrade was because the government could not pay its debt. Standard and Poor’s actually said it was because lawmakers like her did not take a default seriously. Representative Ron Paul ridiculously claimed that the United States is bankrupt. Tim Pawlenty said President Obama had no plan to reduce social insurance spending, conveniently forgetting that Mr. Boehner walked away from the president’s overly generous offer to reduce that spending in exchange for revenue increases.
The Republican Party has been led into its current cul-de-sac by manipulative officials who would not tell voters the truth about the government’s finances. It will remain there if even its “moderate” leaders refuse to break the pattern.Read the source story here.
Think Progress
Jackie Calmes offers about the closest a newspaper reporter can come to telling the truth about the consequences of congressional Republican priorities:
[M]acroeconomists and private sector forecasters were warning that the direction in which the new House Republican majority had pushed the White House and Congress this year — for immediate spending cuts, no further stimulus measures and no tax increases, ever — was the wrong one for addressing the nation’s two main ills, a weak economy now and projections of unsustainably high federal debt in coming years.She cites Martin Feldstein and Hank Paulson along with a bevy of private sector forecasters as her sources on this. I would throw the right’s embrace of job-killing, output-stifling hard money measures as crucial part of the story.
Instead, these critics say, Washington should be focusing on stimulating the economy in the near term to induce people to spend money and create jobs, while simultaneously settling on a long-term plan for spending reductions and tax increases to take effect only after the economy recovers.
Read the source story here.
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Members of the Alliance for Reired Americans are sponsoring a series of events nationwide to let their lawmakers know the money working people depend on in Medicare and Social Security belongs to those who contributed to the programs, not to politicians in Washington who want to use it as a piggybank. The events come as Social Security celebrates its 76th anniversary Aug. 14.
Alliance members have so far scheduled 27 events in the next weeks to urge lawmakers to protect Social Security and Medicare, including visits to congressional district offices, rallies and celebrations. Click here to find an event near you.
Read the source story here.
In These Times
Late last week, hundreds of cement workers walked off the job at the World Trade Center Site and several other sites in protest of management association The Cement League’s demand that New York City’s cement workers take a 20 percent wage reduction on residential and hotel projects. The contract between 2,700 cement workers represented by Locals 6a, 18a and 20 of the Cement and Concrete Workers of New York and The Cement League had been expired for more than a month.
Walking off the job was a bold move to signal to management that workers were not going to tolerate a 20 percent wage cut. The move was particularly brave since the sites the workers were working at were covered by project labor agreements that outlaw strikes. Thus the strike was not officially sanctioned by the union leadership, in order to avoid any legal charges being filed against them.
The three-day walk-off strike at various sites around New York City was able to successfully bringing the management association back to the table. The two sides now have till August 16 to negotiate a new contract.
Workers are promising a new type of militancy, as NYC construction unions prepare for a showdown with management associations across the city, who are making demands for massive cuts to the various unions that work on construction sites. While union leaders will not publicly say if they will “walk off” again, the three-day walk-off was widely interpreted as a threat that, if issues were not resolved, there would be more work stoppages.Read the source story here.
Think Progress
Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) is set to jump into the presidential race today, bringing with him his beliefs that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unconstitutional “Ponzi schemes.” While Perry likes to brag about Texas’ economic strength, his story is largely a mirage.
One of Perry’s favorite topics is Texas’ job creation, even though, between 2008 and 2010, jobs actually grew at a faster pace in Massachusetts than in Texas, and “Texas has done worse than the rest of the country since the peak of national unemployment in October 2009.” In an interview with The Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, Perry actually showed callous disregard for American workers, saying that he doesn’t believe that any jobs were saved by the government’s rescue of the American auto industry.
Read the source story here.
Greg Sargent, in The Washington Post
Wow, what colossally bad timing. Here's Michele Bachmann at the debate last night, insisting that the Standard and Poors downgrade proved that she was right to oppose raising the debt ceiling:
"I think we just heard from Standard & Poor's. When they dropped — when they dropped our credit rating, what they said is, we don't have an ability to repay our debt. That's what the final word was from them.Unfortunately for Bachmann, Standard and Poors has now clarified that it's actually people like her, who oppose raising the debt ceiling and aren't mindful of the consequences of default, that were a primary reason for the downgrade.
"I was proved right in my position: We should not have raised the debt ceiling. And instead, we should have cut government spending, which was not done. And then we needed to get — get our spending priorities in order."
Read the source story here.
In These Times
The retail giant Target is under fire from all sides, for union-busting at home and labor violations overseas. The reports that have come out in the past several weeks highlight a continuum of cruelty in the global supply chain.
Though WalMart has long served as labor's arch nemesis, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) has lately zeroed in on Target as a new battlefield—with its hundreds of thousands of employees and recent expansion into the supermarket sector. Although UFCW Local 1500 recently lost a vote to unionize a branch in Valley Stream, New York, their campaign deftly exposed Target's arsenal of intimidation and smear tactics, which ranged from anti-union websites to leaflets warning that a yes vote might ruin the company and force the store to close.
Now plastered across the blogosphere, the propaganda campaign has steeled the outrage at the company's resistance to unions.Read the source story here.
The Houston Chronicle
About 100 chanting union workers near George Bush Intercontinental Airport greeted a visiting congressman who led one side of a political standoff that partially shut down the Federal Aviation Administration earlier this month.
U.S. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., chairman of the House Transportation Committee, spoke at a Greater Houston Partnership luncheon fund-raiser for the Alliance for I-69 Texas. The group is pushing to make U.S. 59 an interstate highway that will better link the U.S.-Mexico border with the northern United States.
Mica's visit came a week after Congress reached an agreement on a temporary FAA reauthorization after a two-week shutdown that put more than 74,000 airport construction workers and FAA agents on furlough.
[...] Senate Democrats objected to the subsidy cut, and Mica acknowledged he inserted it as a bargaining tool to force Democrats to negotiate on a long-term measure. The long-term bill includes a provision that would make it more difficult for airline workers to unionize.
But Mica said in a brief interview on Thursday that the subsidies provision, which was removed as part of the temporary extension deal, "had nothing to do with labor" and he blamed the Senate for the delays in approving the bill.Read the source story here.
We Party Patriots
Canadian newspaper, The Globe and Mail, has recently published an excellent article about the need for the United States to raise its taxes, especially on the wealthiest Americans, as part of finding a long term solution to the debt problem.
Simply speaking about raising taxes is enough to throw the average American into a patriotic tizzy. After all, this is a country founded by men who refused to pay higher taxes on their tea. However, America is one of the lowest taxed industrial nations in the world, TG&M asserts, and has room to raise taxes. Among wealthy OECD countries, only Chile and Mexico tax their people and companies less.
“Historically and internationally, the U.S. can’t be categorized as anything other than a low-tax country,” remarked Gordon Betcherman, an economist and professor at the University of Ottawa’s school of international development and global studies.The average American’s tax burden in 2009, when viewed as a percentage of gross domestic product, was 24 percent. This is lower than it was in 1965. This is a number far below that of our international peers.
“Either Americans don’t realize their economy is taxed less than other major economies, or they just have a different standard of what an appropriate tax level is,” said Prof. Betcherman, who spent a decade at the World Bank in Washington.
That (24 percent) compares to 31.1 percent in Canada, 34.3 percent in Britain, 42 percent in France, 37 percent in Germany and 43.5 percent in Italy. The Japanese, Australians and South Koreans all pay significantly more.Read the source story here.
Labor Notes
In a refreshingly straightforward style, Joe Burns argues persuasively that the cause of union decline is our inability to wage a successful strike. That is, one which shuts down production and compels the employer to accede to union demands.
His new book, Reviving the Strike, details the decades of anti-union legislation, National Labor Relations Board decisions, and Supreme Court rulings that have outlawed everything that works: sympathy strikes, bans on replacement workers, secondary boycotts, and other muscular tactics that gave unions a fighting chance.
Every tactic unions have substituted for the production-stopping strike has proved inadequate. Corporate campaigns that focus on investor pressure and media shame tactics aren’t able to bring enough real pressure on decision-makers. Coalitions with community and faith groups, positive as they are, have not proved sufficient to tame multinational corporations and financiers. One-day “publicity strikes” are easy for employers to weather. New organizing to increase union density has proved largely unsuccessful, because employees won’t join ineffective organizations.
To save itself, Burns argues, labor must now defy or circumvent the legal limits and stop production.Read the source story here.
Rise Up America!Talking Union
View this moving video [IT'S DOWN IN THIS PAGE'S VIDEO SECTION!] with soundtrack by Bruce Springsteen. It’s time for a Main Street Contract for the American People. National Nurses United has embarked on a campaign to reverse national priorities and policies that have placed the interests of Wall Street over the crisis facing American families today.
Read the source story here.
- AFL-CIO Now Blog:
Verizon Workers: 'We Need To Draw A Line Here' - The Seattle Times:
Seattle's sick-leave bill gets business-friendly changes - The Raw Story:
Perry: 'I promise to make Washington inconsequential in your lives' - AFL-CIO Now Blog:
United Continental Fleet Workers Choose IAM - Salon:
Finding hope in the results from Wisconsin - The Cap Times:
Final two WI recall elections could lead to state's first tea party senator - Daily Kost:
Verizon and striking workers continue trading misconduct claims; FBI investigating sabotage - Guardian UK:
Police raid Milan offices of Moody's and Standard & Poor's Chief prosecutor of Trani conducts investigation into whether the two rating agencies abide by regulations - The Washington Post:
Romney thinks workers should pay for their own unemployment benefits - Think Progress:
Wasserman Schultz Blasts Romney's Assertion That Corporations Are People: 'Is Exxon Mobil A Person?' - Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Tax Flight Is a Myth Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration - The Chicago Tribune:
Chicago Teachers Union: 'Very high' chance of strike - CBS News:
David Axelrod: Republican candidates are "pledging allegiance to the Tea Party" - AJC News:
Sign of the Times: Thousands line up for free dental services in Woodstock, Georgia - Think Progress:
Nuts-A-Palooza: Rick Perry Says Social Security And Medicare Are Unconstitutional - Democracy Now:
New Exposé Tracks ALEC-Private Prison Industry Effort to Replace Unionized Workers with Prison Labor - Talking Points Memo:
The Next Labor Vs. GOP Fight: Ohio - Boston.com:
'No Jobs Fair' protests cuts by Granite State