Kicking Underdogs When They're Down
Daily Kos
Posted February 21, 2012
In a nation enamored of underdogs, the sudden surge of right-to-work (for less) legislation is confounding. Right-to-work (for less) laws are perks for the wealthy, for the top dogs. These laws facilitate destruction of unions. The concerted action of a labor union is a tool that workers use to win fair wages, benefits and conditions from the powerful, from the likes of massive multi-national corporations. At a time of dwindling union membership, at a time when labor union participation is so small as to be nearly negligible, state legislatures across the country are taking up right-to-work (for less) laws that will further decimate union ranks. They’re kicking the underdog when it’s down.

[...]Despite the derisive “big union boss” label that right wingers throw at labor leaders, unions are not the big dogs. Union representation in the United States has declined steadily since the 1950s, following federal legislation in 1947 impeding unionization. Just after World War II, about 35 percent of workers belonged to unions. And those who didn’t benefitted from the higher wages and good benefits that union workers negotiated because non-union employers felt compelled to provide competitive compensation. Last year, the percentage of U.S. workers in unions fell to 11.9, the lowest in more than 70 years.

As unions atrophied and the recession raged, the median income of working Americans declined.  Meanwhile, at the top, the big dogs who run corporations continued awarding themselves colossal compensation and bonus packages. Median compensation for executives quadrupled over the past four decades. Last year, most executives got big bumps, whether their companies did well or not. Now, income inequality is greater than at any time since the robber baron days of the 1920s.
Read the source story here.

Walmart Tries to Pay Workers in Walmart Vouchers
The Stranger
Posted February 21, 2012
In Mexico (via Reddit):

The Mexican Supreme Court of Justice on Thursday ruled that Wal-Mart de Mexico may not pay employees in part with vouchers redeemable only at its stores. The court nullified the employment contract of a worker who challenged the voucher payments, finding that they violated Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution, which guarantees the right to "dignified and socially useful work."

The sad part is, I could totally see conservatives justifying this kind of practice in the United States if they could get away with it. This is why regulations and "activist judges" are important.
Read the source story here.

Obama to unions: See you later
Salon
Posted February 21, 2012
On Tuesday President Obama signed a bill that will make it harder for workers to form a union.  This bill, the FAA Reauthorization Act, passed Congress last week despite an outcry from major unions.  Dozens of House Democrats voted for it, as did most Democratic senators.

To appreciate what that means, try to imagine a Republican president and Republican Senate majority leader signing off on a bill with pro-union language despite thundering objections from most big businesses.  Your imagination may not be good enough to picture that, which tells you everything you need to know about the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to labor.

The signing of the FAA bill ends a long-running legislative fight.  It began with something President Obama did right: He appointed members to the National Mediation Board who, in 2010, adopted a new rule governing elections for railroad and airline workers seeking to unionize.  Such workers are covered by the 1935 Railway Labor Act, rather than the National Labor Relations Act that covers most American workers.

[...] On Jan. 20, with both parties saying it was time to resolve the issue once and for all, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced a compromise with the GOP: The FAA bill would stay silent on how union election votes are counted – meaning the NMB rule stays in place until future NMB appointees reverse it.  But labor will face a steeper obstacle earlier in the process.  Rather than being required to submit signatures from 35 percent of workers in a bargaining unit to trigger an election (as had been required), unions would have to submit signatures from a majority just for a vote to be held.  It wasn’t immediately obvious what was so bad about this; in most cases, filing for a union election without a strong majority committed to vote yes is organizing malpractice.  Many unions were slow to issue reactions, and a few voiced support.But the devil was in the details. 
Read the source story here.

Mitt Romney tries to tie Rick Santorum to labor. Union leaders say 'no, thanks'
Daily Kos
Posted February 21, 2012
Working-class voters don't like Mitt Romney. Rick Santorum is trying to capitalize on that by positioning himself as the blue-collar, everyman alternative to Rich Uncle Pennybags Mitt. This dynamic is producing a certain amount of comedy, with Romney attacking Santorum as "big labor's favorite senator" and Santorum deciding he's going to embrace that for the moment:

“I have no problem with private-sector unions,” the former Pennsylvania senator said. “From my perspective, unions are frankly one of those median institutions and have served in America a legitimate purpose over time in the private sector. I don’t feel quite as warm and fuzzy about public sector unions.”

Simon van Zuylen-Wood takes a look at Santorum's actual record on labor issues and relationships with union leaders in his former home state of Pennsylvania:

Jack Shea, the head of the Allegheny County Labor Council, said, "I can't remember him being an ally to labor ever,” adding, “Just by voting against the minimum wage twelve times—it was seared in our minds.” [...]

Rick Bloomingdale, the president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, told me Santorum “will go whatever way the wind blows.” Bill Ehman, a local steelworkers union chief agreed: “I’ll be honest with you. He was pretty much like he is now. A political whore.”

Read the source story here.

Bonuses to union workers at GM, Ford, Chrysler and Boeing lift local economies
Daily Kos
Posted February 21, 2012
Bonus checks have already gone out or will soon be going to auto workers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler and machinists at Boeing, as their companies see profits rebound. GM workers are getting up to $7,000 in profit-sharing, while Chrysler workers got an average of $1,500 and Ford workers will average $2,450. These workers needed that good news, as many of them have gone years without hourly pay raises—the contracts the UAW and the auto makers ratified last fall included raises only for the lower-paid second-tier workers, with higher-paid, longer-term workers having to rely on various types of bonuses.

Local and state economies are also benefiting, as workers whose pay has been frozen for years are able to make purchases they'd been delaying:

The windfall might be enough to lift the economy of the Midwest, especially states such as Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky, which are home to union auto factories, economists say. States dependent on the auto industry have already been improving faster than the U.S. economy in general.

Read the source story here.

Michigan Unions Look to Amend Constitution to Block Anti-Labor Bills
Labor Notes
Posted February 21, 2012
Michigan’s top union leaders are meeting behind closed doors to decide whether to take on the huge fight it would require to amend the state constitution to block right to work, with a ballot initiative this November.

Al Garrett, head of statewide AFSCME Council 25, said the amendment would prohibit the legislature from crafting new laws that infringe on collective bargaining rights in the private or public sectors. Language is under discussion.

United Auto Workers (UAW) President Bob King surprised Detroit community activists February 2 when he revealed the plan at a small forum. Some audience members had been active in gathering signatures to put a different issue, the state’s emergency manager law, on the November ballot.

Passed last year over heated objections from unions, that law allows Snyder to appoint overseers for cities or school districts operating in the red. They have the power to cancel union contracts, sell off local assets, and remove elected local officials.

In Wisconsin, unions were instrumental in gathering more than a million signatures to recall the anti-union governor. In Ohio, they did the same to repeal an anti-collective bargaining law.
Read the source story here.

NLRB's top lawyer still feels fallout from Boeing, union case
The Seattle Times
Posted February 21, 2012
Last year, just before the National Labor Relations Board accused Boeing of illegally punishing strike-prone Puget Sound-area Machinists by building a new 787 assembly plant in South Carolina, that state's senior senator privately warned the agency's top lawyer of "nasty, very very nasty" consequences if he didn't yank the complaint.

Otherwise, Sen. Lindsey Graham pledged, he would go "full guns ablazing," according to notes taken at the time by Lafe Solomon, the NLRB's acting general counsel.

Nine days later, in April 2011, Solomon greenlighted the unfair-labor practice case against Boeing. Graham — along with many of his fellow conservatives — was furious.

Republicans in South Carolina and in Congress accused Solomon of colluding with the Machinists union and the White House to undermine employers' rights. Mitt Romney slammed the NLRB as a "rogue agency."

Solomon was compelled to testify in a congressional hearing in North Carolina under threat of subpoena. He was called a job killer and faced a thinly veiled specter of disbarment after he balked at turning over documents to House Republican investigators.

Solomon, a genial Arkansas native, found himself in the center of a maelstrom he did not entirely expect and which continues to dog his agency even now — more than two months after Boeing and the Machinists forged new labor peace with a four-year contract extension.
Read the source story here.

David Koch on Wisconsin: I'm helping Scott Walker
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Posted February 21, 2012
The Palm Beach Post has published a remarkable story about billionaire David Koch, who tells the newspaper in a rare interview that he is working to help Gov. Scott Walker.

Koch and his brother, Charles, have been the main financial backers of Americans for Prosperity, an advocacy group that has been running television ads in Wisconsin in support of Walker.

In the story, David Koch admits that his group is "hard at work," especially in Wisconsin.

"We're helping him, as we should," Koch says of Walker. "We've gotten pretty good at this over the years. "We've spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We're going to spend more."

The story suggests the group has spent $700,000 in Wisconsin.

A year ago, a blogger prank-called Walker pretending to be David Koch. Koch told the New York Times that he didn't even know Walker's name.

Now, Koch is a Walker supporter.

"What Scott Walker is doing with the public unions in Wisconsin is critically important. He's an impressive guy and he's very courageous," Koch told the Post. "If the unions win the recall, there will be no stopping union power." 
Read the source story here.

Romney's One-Night Stand With Massachusetts Police Unions
We Party Patriots
Posted February 21, 2012
The GOP Presidential candidates are hard at work on the campaign trail attempting to out-anti-worker each other. Mitt Romney has asked voters repeatedly not to vilify him for taking extreme advantage of capitalism (i.e. placing profit over people) while Rick Santorum continues to drivel and backstep about a National Right-to-Work law.

Of course, nobody in labor takes any of this seriously — especially Mitt Romney calling Rick Santorum “labor’s favorite Senator” — as both men represent a reprehensible disrespect for, disinterest in, and distance from real worker issues.

But in this weekend’s Boston Globe, a story of Romney shacking up with a Boston police union surfaced. Naturally, the aim of revealing such an instance is to paint Romney as a back-stabbing flip-flopper:
Read the source story here.

Surge in temp workers reflects fundamental change in American workplace
The Washington Post
Posted February 21, 2012
The nation’s unemployment rate is falling faster than expected, but what counts as a job has become increasingly murky.

More than a quarter of people who have found jobs since the recession ended have landed in temporary positions, according to government data, though private estimates range far higher. The numbers reflect a fundamental change in the way Americans work, with neither businesses nor their employees expecting to stay together for life.

That is raising new questions about the sustainability of the drop in the unemployment rate as workers cycle through jobs more quickly. It also leaves them more vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust — temporary workers are usually the first hired and first fired — and forces them to shoulder the responsibility of paying for health care and retirement.
Read the source story here.

Restaurant industry screws women, while $2.13 tipped worker minimum wage makes it worse
Daily Kos
Posted February 21, 2012
Restaurant workers who make the federal minimum wage for tipped workers are pretty well screwed: That minimum wage is just $2.13 an hour, the theory being that tips will be enough for these workers to get by. When tips don't bring workers up to the full federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, their employers are supposed to make up the difference, but in practice, that's an invitation for bosses to pressure workers to just accept below-minimum wages. That's not the only abuse of this rock-bottom minimum wage, though, and as a new report from the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United shows, these abuses and high poverty rates fall most heavily on women.

The statistics pile on top of each other in creating the picture of just how badly women in the restaurant industry have it:

• "The median wage for restaurant workers in 2010 was $9.02, meaning that well over half of these workers earned less than the wage of $10.75 that a family of four needs to remain out of poverty."

Read the source story here.

Manufacturing Revival a Worthy Goal, but Obama's Timid Plans Won't Get Job Done
In These Times
Posted February 21, 2012
MILWAUKEE—President Obama's appearance last Wednesday at the Master Lock plant here—during which he repeatedly highlighted the company's decision to bring back about 100 jobs from Mexico and China and called for the restoration of America's manufacturing sector—uncorked a lot of hope among local workers.

A crowd of about 1,000 Master Lock workers (the plant employs 412 members of UAW Local 469) and guests roared in approval as the president described the fundamental changes needed in the American economy. He thundered:

Milwaukee, we are not going back to an economy that's weakened by outsourcing and bad debt and phony financial profits. We need an economy that is built to last, that is built on American manufacturing, and American know-how, and American-made energy, and skills for American workers, and the renewal of American values of hard work and fair play and shared responsibility.

But if Obama does win a second term, it will be fascinating to see how working-class Americans respond when the president's soaring rhetoric, which is rekindling dreams of a manufacturing renaissance, collide with the cold reality of Obama's timid progam.
Read the source story here.

Four out of five economists agree: The stimulus created jobs
The Washington Post
Posted February 21, 2012
The latest Chicago Booth poll of economists focuses on the 2009 stimulus. The first question asked whether the stimulus increased employment by the end of 2010. Eighty percent of the polled economists agreed. Four percent disagreed. Two percent were uncertain.

The second question asked whether, over the long run, the benefits would outweigh the long-term costs (like paying down the extra debt). Forty-six percent agreed. Twelve percent disagreed. Twenty-seven percent were uncertain.
Read the source story here.

Targeting the Unemployed by Saying You Can Make Them Disappear
We Party Patriots
Posted February 21, 2012
Without a significant effort among politicians to work out a bipartisan jobs plan, union organizers are more charged than ever with the task of bringing together unemployed workers. Problematic for organizers is that many of the “unemployed” do not wish to identify themselves as such. In her article, “Can labor organize the unemployed?,” writer Jenny Brown looks into what organized labor is doing to help the unemployed in the early stages of the election cycle.
Read the source story here.

Occupy protesters rally against prison conditions
The Raw Story
Posted February 21, 2012
Hundreds of anti-Wall Street demonstrators and prison reform activists joined forces outside the gates of a prison in San Quentin, California on Monday to protest high incarceration rates and harsh living conditions.

Speakers rallying at the San Quentin State Prison said the state’s sentencing laws are too strict. They called for an end to solitary confinement and the death penalty and said children should not be tried as adults.
Read the source story here.

Gov. Mark Dayton Calls Out ALEC By Name, Is A Model for Other Democrats
Crooks and Liars
Posted February 21, 2012
Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) specifically called out the American Legislative Exchange Council in a recent speech, taking on one of the key operatives on the right wing in a way that few other Democrats have done in recent years, despite ALEC's rising power in state legislatures across the country. ALEC has repeatedly attempted to push pro-corporate, anti-working family legislation in numerous states and has managed to largely fly under the radar in the media and with the public. The more high profile politicians like Dayton call them out, the more pressure the organization will face from working families and their allies.
Read the source story here.