News Stories for December 24, 2011
Bloomberg
The National Labor Relations Board issued a rule that will lead to speedier U.S. union elections, a measure fought by business groups and Republicans.
The regulation, which will take effect April 30, will simplify union-election procedures and shorten the deadline for balloting after employees request a vote. The board, which resolves disputes between labor and management, adopted the change in a 2-1 vote.
“This rule is about giving all employees who have petitioned for an election the right to vote in a timely manner and without the impediment of needless litigation,” NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce said today in an e-mailed statement.
Republicans in the U.S. House and business groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers have said the labor board has created “ambush elections.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it sued the board to block the rule. The U.S. House on Dec. 1 passed legislation curbing the powers of the agency on the union-vote rule.
“It will still deny access to a fair election process, limit employer free speech, and restrict worker free choice,” Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in a statement. The board is “determined to advance an activist, pro-union agenda at any cost,” he said.Read the source story here.
Teamster.org
The following is the official statement from Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa about the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s final hours of service rule for commercial motor vehicle drivers:
“We said all along that an hours of service rule has to protect highway safety and our truck drivers’ health. We are reviewing the new rule, and in the coming weeks we will meet and discuss it with our allies and, if necessary, determine our next course of action.”Founded in 1903, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters represents 1.4 million hardworking men and women in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. For more information go to www.teamster.org or follow us on Twitter at #TeamsterPower.
Read the source story here.
Teamster.org
The Teamsters Union, which represents art handlers at Sotheby’s Auction House [NYSE: BID], has created an online petition that asks Sotheby’s to end its five-month-long lockout.
Sotheby’s locked out its staff of 43 art handlers in July. These workers, most of whom are minorities, have been without paychecks ever since. The auction house hired notorious union-hostile law firm Jackson Lewis to attempt to starve its workers into giving up their job security and accepting wage cuts.
The workers, who are represented by Teamsters Local 814 in Long Island City, N.Y., will lose their health insurance coverage on January 1 because of the lockout.
The petition says, in part, “Dear CEO William Ruprecht: Sotheby's just celebrated its most profitable quarter in the company's history, and yet you have locked out your hardworking, loyal art handlers--some have worked at Sotheby's for more than 40 years. Not only are your employees now forced to face the holidays without jobs, but they will also be forced to ring in the New Year by losing their health care.”
The petition can be signed here. A video “How Sotheby’s Stole Christmas” can be viewed here .Read the source story here.
Politico
This time, there was no discussion. This time, House Speaker John Boehner didn’t take the chance of losing another deal to a caucus with a tendency to self-immolate.
And so when Boehner delivered the news that he had struck a deal on a Thursday afternoon conference call with House Republicans, the technology was in place to prevent rank-and-file lawmakers from voicing the kind of angry dissent that scuttled a Senate-passed payroll bill on Saturday. The five-day drama that exposed both the political naiveté of the freshman-heavy Republican Conference and the sharp limits of Boehner’s power over them ended in silence.
Read the source story here.
Buzz Flash
Ever since Occupiers started pitching their tents, critics and supporters alike have been fretting about the budding movement's lack of demands. Without a clear set of actionable policy goals, it seems, the Occupy movement is dooming itself to irrelevance.
But these criticisms of the Occupy movement miss the point. Far from being a weakness, the movement's perceived lack of specific demands is actually one of its greatest strengths.
The role of broad transformative social movements like Occupy is not to generate specific demands. It is to identify fundamental injustices and to refocus political debate on those injustices. And the Occupy movement has done this very well. Its central slogan of "We are the 99%" has articulated a unifying vision that has resonated with millions of people, who have protested, marched, and camped in hundreds of cities in over eighty countries around the world. Moreover, the movement has fundamentally reshaped our national political discussion. Whereas talk this summer was solely about how much to slash the federal budget, the discussion now is about the fundamental injustice of an economic system that allows the top 1 percent of the population to control 40 percent of the wealth. "They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism," admitted Republican messaging guru Frank Luntz to a recent gathering of the Republican Governors' Association.Read the source story here.
The Washington Post
Most major Occupy encampments have been dispersed, but they live on in a flurry of lawsuits in which protesters are asserting their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly and challenging authorities' mass arrests and use of force to break up tent cities.
Lawyers representing protesters have filed lawsuits — or are planning them — in state and federal courts from coast to coast, challenging eviction orders and what they call heavy-handed police tactics and the banning of demonstrators from public properties.
Some say the fundamental right of protest has been criminalized in places, with protesters facing arrest and charges while doing nothing more than exercising protected rights to demonstrate.
“When I think about the tents as an expression of the First Amendment here, I compare it to Tahrir Square in Egypt,” said Carol Sobel, co-chairwoman of the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee.
“Our government is outraged when military forces and those governments come down on the demonstrators. But they won’t extend the same rights in this country,” she said. “They praise that as a fight for democracy, the values we treasure. It comes here and these people are riffraff.”Read the source story here.
The Political Carnival
Harry Reid is feeling friskier these days, if this article from The Hill is any indication. He just can’t quit the idea of a millionaire surtax, and for that I am grateful.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Friday named four Senate Democrats to negotiate a full-year extension of the payroll tax holiday and said a surtax on millionaires is back on the table in the discussions. [...]
Reid said several Senate Republican colleagues have told him privately that they could support raising taxes on the wealthy to defray the budget impact.
The quick move by Reid to float the millionaire tax suggests Democrats are prepared to play hardball with the GOP in the next round of talks on the payroll package.Read the source story here.
Crooks and LiarsIn the video linked to at left, an Occupy Albany member struggles to breathe, and suffers a seizure after being hit with pepper spray, while fellow occupiers plead for an ambulance.
After a move by Albany city officials to obtain an eviction order from a New York Supreme Court judge, referred to by occupiers as a "legal ambush," ended in a melee at Academy Park Thursday night, and a brutal assault by local police.
When all was said and done, there were four arrests, two protesters, two police officers and a News 10 ABC cameraman suffering minor injuries, a city councilman who was pepper-sprayed in the face along with protesters, including one who after being hit with the spray seemed to suffer a seizure afterward and was taken away in an ambulance.Read the source story here.
The New York Times
The Justice Department on Friday blocked a new South Carolina law that would require voters to present photo identification, saying the law would disproportionately suppress turnout among eligible minority voters.
The move was the first time since 1994 that the department has exercised its powers under the Voting Rights Act to block a voter identification law. It followed a speech this month by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that signaled an aggressive stance in reviewing a wave of new state voting restrictions, largely enacted by Republicans in the name of fighting fraud.
In a letter to the South Carolina government, Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney for civil rights, said that allowing the new requirement to go into effect would have “significant racial disparities.”Read the source story here.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
At the outset of Wisconsin’s historic recall fight, GOP Gov. Scott Walker and his allies are outspending the other side on television by a margin of roughly 4-to-1, an advantage he’s expected to maintain in the weeks ahead.
The governor has already aired more than $1 million in broadcast ads since he hit the airwaves in mid-November, according to the ad-tracking firm Kantar Media CMAG.
When you include cable ads and time bought for spots that haven’t aired yet, Walker’s TV spending easily exceeds $2 million, according to two political sources tracking media buys.
Walker’s ability to dominate the opening phase of the race on television could be a key factor in a contest with huge national overtones -- America’s third-ever gubernatorial recall election, taking place in a battleground state in a presidential year.
In big-money races (this one will cost tens of millions) an early advertising advantage can sometimes be decisive in framing the choice for voters.
But the circumstances of this contest are so unusual that the impact is harder to predict.Read the source story here.
The Progressive
As the political crisis was brewing in Wisconsin last winter, Governor Scott Walker rebuffed former governor Tommy Thompson's advice to reach a compromise with public employee unions, according to a state senator as well as a friend of Thompson's who was involved in the political drama at the time.
"Tommy was beside himself that Walker was so dogmatic," says the friend. "We had lots of conversations about this--about how it was going to do nothing but cause chaos, and it was bad for the state. Businesses aren't going to move here in the middle of all this conflict."
Thompson, along with other moderate Republicans, reached out to Walker, the friend says, and urged him to sit down with union leaders and seek a compromise before Walker pushed through a law curtailing public employees' collective bargaining rights--the issue that sparked mass protests and a the state's first ever recall campaign against a governor.Read the source story here.
Labor Notes
Retail employees expect the holiday season to be hectic, but workers at big-box stores report a galling combination: unpredictable shifts but not enough hours to pay the bills or qualify for health coverage.
“I’m working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thanksgiving, then coming back at 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Black Friday,” reported Johnny Becerra of Duarte, California, on a Walmart workers’ Facebook group. “Thanks, Walmart, for a Thanksgiving to remember.”
Walmart’s U.S. sales are flat, but profits keep rising thanks to new initiatives to squeeze workers, according to John Marshall, a staffer with the Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
Company founder Sam Walton’s six heirs now have more wealth than the bottom 30 percent of Americans combined, but the corporation’s cost-cutting is relentless. It’s energizing workers to speak up.Read the source story here.
We Party Patriots
Often unmentioned in the broader political mess of the past decade is the foreclosure crisis. What happened across the country in many cases was pure fraud. Houses were illegally taken away by companies who did not have the proper authority to do so. In many cases, the same people that set up the predatory loans that caused people to lose their houses also worked for companies who foreclosed.
But the millions of lost homes are now being treated as crime scenes by state Attorney Generals such as Connecticut’s Beau Biden, Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Matthew Stoller has been adamant about revealing the true horror of the foreclosure crisis and recently penned a POLITICO piece on the matter:
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley recently filed the first broad civil suit against five major banks and the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems for foreclosure fraud. Her suit alleges that mortgage servicers routinely backdated and falsified documents to expedite foreclosures. In many cases, they foreclosed on loans they did not even own.Read the source story here.
[...] Bank regulators have now found that up to 5,000 military families may have been foreclosed on illegally, as The Financial Times reported last month. Yet the Justice Department settled with Bank of America for alleged violations of the service member act. BofA, like JPMorgan, doesn’t have to admit to wrongdoing — but it says it is very sorry anyway.
Center for American Progress
[...] Why do conservatives believe it doesn't matter if everyday Americans pay more in taxes next year so long as a few wealthy Americans don’t pay a little extra? Sen. Jon Thune (R-SD) said that millionaires shouldn’t be taxed lest they decide not to create the jobs on which the rest of us depend. And House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) says, “You can’t tax the very people that we expect … to create jobs.”
Are the wealthy really “job creators?” To be clear, everybody would have paid normal taxes on incomes up to $1 million under the bygone Senate plan, but those with an income of $1,000,001 or more would have paid a small surtax on just those incremental dollars. This little extra, conservatives say, would be a real jobs killer. But the idea that job-creating power resides with the wealthy is about as false as the idea that feudal landlords “created” the farmed goods produced by peasant serfs.
Holding people in one’s employ, even by the thousands, is a very different thing than creating jobs in our economy. No one is a job creator by virtue of wealth. Jobs are created when there is a demand for the productive labor of workers and when some creative, enterprising individuals figure out a way to meet that demand. Millionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer gets what career-politician Boehner seems not to understand. “If no one can afford to buy what I have to sell, my business will soon fail and all those jobs will evaporate,” he wrote last month.Read the source story here.
Washington Monthly
Paul Krugman, in his column today, highlights a series of blatant lies from Mitt Romney, and notes that the Republican presidential candidate “seems confident that he will pay no price for making stuff up.”
It’s what happens when we enter an era of “post-truth politics.”
Why does Mr. Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t believe. […]Read the source story here.But won’t there be some blowback? Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be right.
Oh, Mr. Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a minor misstatement.
- American Progress:
The Economywide Benefits of Unemployment Insurance Are Crystal Clear - In These Times:
New NLRB Rule May Be High-Water Mark for Obama-Era Labor Reform - The Week:
The payroll tax cut deal: 3 reasons the GOP caved - In These Times:
Happy Holidays? Not for 200 Pacific Steel Workers in California - Teamster Nation:
Protest At The World Bank - AFL-CIO Now Blog:
6,000 Bay Area Nurses on One-Day Strike - We Party Patriots:
VIDEO: NH, ME Ironworkers March for Local Jobs on Memorial Bridge Project - Talking Union:
Throw the bankers in jail ! - The American Independent:
Industry groups call on Congress to defund EPA water rules - In These Times:
Oil Workers Rise Up in Kazakhstan, Face Brutal Crackdown - AFL-CIO Now blog:
Wisconsin Workers Urge Lawmakers to Restore Jobless Aid - The Seattle Times:
GE Funding to pay $70 million to resolve complaint - Buzz Flash:
Newt Gingrich and Citizens United: It's All About the Money - The Political Carnival:
"How long can we remain a first-world country with a third-world mind-set?" - The Progressive:
Berkeley Occupy Violently Destroyed: An interview with Corporal Nick Anthony Shaw - Working America:
Things You'll Find on Scott Walker's Money Trail - Huffington Post:
Republican Payroll Tax Disaster - The News Tribune:
Tacoma labor leader chastizes interim city manager over job