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Off the Top of My Head

Bidenomics: The US Finally Gets an Industrial Policy

by John Lawrence

The Republican policy that the government should be hands off regarding the economy is out the window. Trickle down is a failed policy. Bidenomics gets the government involved in crucial areas of the economy. The export of jobs to parts of the world where labor is cheapest is replaced with a policy of creating jobs within the US. Deregulation is replaced with regulations to protect the environment and combat climate change. The traditional Democratic alliance with unions is back in vogue. Bidenomics is all about building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of from the top down. Bidenomics is about shaping the economy in a way that is propitious for the middle class and the environment. Infrastructure building is more important than accelerating the consumer economy. Putting our house in order is more important than giving away fattening goodies to consumers. People are being put to work doing jobs which actually make US society a better place instead of encouraging jobs in frivolous pursuits. This is not necessarily what the American consumer wants.The American consumer wants more money in their pockets so they can buy more gadgets and aspire to making millions as a pro athlete or an entertainer. They don't actually want to work at the good jobs Biden is creating building infrastructure or making semiconductors. CNN reported:

Trickle-down economics, which was at the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s policies and continues to be the guiding light of Republican lawmakers, typically revolves around tax cuts for the wealthy and large companies. Supporters say the benefits flow down to middle-class and working Americans, boosting economic growth more broadly. But many experts dispute the effectiveness of this practice at lifting all boats.

Biden argues that supply-side, trickle-down economics has cost jobs and hollowed out the middle class. He has long focused on that group of Americans, serving as chair of the Middle Class Task Force when he was vice president in the Obama administration.

“Folks, let me say it as clearly as I can: (The) trickle-down approach failed the middle class and failed America,” said Biden.

To fund Bidenomics, the president once again calls for ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

The problem is that now that the American people have had  a good taste of Democratic programs, they want more: Republican tax cuts. They want their cake and eat it too. They know that Republicans will have no problem with the national deficits and debts as long as they come in the form of tax cuts. So from the American consumer's point of view they have got about all they can expect to get out of Bidenomics. Now they want a tax break to boot.

The Biden administration has focused on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act each include direct funding and tax incentives for public and private manufacturing construction. Biden outlined how states will receive more than $42 billion in federal funding for high-speed internet service, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It is aimed at bringing connectivity to more Americans and closing the digital divide. The administration is comparing it to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act, which brought electricity to homes throughout the country. And 35,000 new projects – including roads, bridges and ports – have received funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the White House said.

E.J. Dionne Jr. said in the Washington Post:

Bidenomics has also gone global. One indicator is the exceptional and ongoing debate Sullivan’s speech provoked in proposing a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships.”

Can the dumbed down and self seeking American people even understand much less appreciate the great things that Bidenomics has brought forth? Biden has changed the narrative on taxes by repeating ad nauseum that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. Big idea: raising taxes doesn't mean raising taxes on everyone and a tax break does nor mean lowering taxes on everyone. The meme about raising taxes which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to Democrats ("tax and spend") and tax breaks which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to themselves has been change by Biden. "Tax the rich" has become the Democrats' motto thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC.The immense inequality that Reaganomics has resulted in is being addressed by Bidenomics. The American people say "Ho Hum". They are more interested in spectator sports which is exemplified by the fact that news programs on TV are routinely bounced in favor of sports events. In short the American people don't appreciate Biden because they don't take the time to understand Bidenomics.

Biden has done much good for America and Americans. He is the least appreciated great President in American history. It's a reflection on the American people themselves that all they're interested in is their own personal situation. If they are well off, they could care less about social programs that help the poor. If they have a good job, they could care less about the unemployed. American have been taught to be totally selfish and not to care about the wider world or about the improvement of society in general. Corporations by law are only supposed to consider the financial well being of their share holders and nothing else. These attitudes in and of themselves preclude the concerns of minorities, whether racial or economic, because the US is a majoritarian society. In politics the majority rules. Concern about the welfare of minorities and of the world in general and in particular the environment is not a consideration. Meanwhile, global warming is taking out individual families who are victims of tornadoes or other particular manifestations of global warming on a daily basis. It has yet to sink in that perhaps concerns for larger interests than just ourselves might be a paradigm change we might have to make.

For the American people, it's not abut how much Biden has done, it's about how much have you done for me lately, Mr Biden, and, more importantly, how much more are you going to do? If there are many more carrots, then maybe I'll vote for you. Otherwise, I'll take the tax break Republicans are offering. The American national character is selfishness personified. Ayn Rand would be proud.

Off the Top of My Head

America Has an Employment Problem, Not an Unemployment Problem

by John Lawrence

Wherever you look from air traffic controllers to fruit pickers to caregivers to teachers to police, there are not enough workers. That is why unemployment is so low - at 3.4%. The Health Services, Professional and Business Services, Trade, and Accommodation and Food Services industries have the highest numbers of job openings. The question is why there is a shortage of workers and what to do about it.The pandemic caused a major disruption in America’s labor force—something many have referred to as The Great Resignation. In 2022, more than 50 million workers quit their jobs, many of whom were in search of an improved work-life balance and flexibility, increased compensation, and a strong company culture. But a closer look at what has happened to the labor force can be better described as ‘The Great Reshuffle’ because hiring rates have outpaced quit rates since November of 2020. So, many workers are quitting their jobs—but many are getting re-hired elsewhere. In a game of musical chairs workers are seeking and getting better jobs, leaving high stress professions like nursing and teaching and getting paid more to do other things.

So America basically has a shortage of "essential workers," workers who do necessary work for traditionally low pay. America has developed so many ways to make money doing inessential work at higher pay so why should anyone who doesn't have to work in an essential job? There are two ways. 1) Pay more for essential work and 2) increase legal immigration because increasingly immigrants are doing the work that Americans who have been Americans longer don't want to do. The worker shortage has empowered workers. They are so to speak in the catbird seat. They are demanding more pay, shorter hours, better working conditions. This is all well and good, but, as the pandemic showed, essential work is necessary for people to live while so many other forms of work, while more lucrative, could disappear tomorrow without affecting much most Americans' quality of life. For instance, Facebook had 86,482 full-time employees as of December 2022, up from just 150 people in 2006. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, nothing essential to life would be lost in my opinion. The same is true for other social media like Tik Tok. In fact considering the effects social media has had on the population, the world might be better off if all social media disappeared tomorrow. Then those workers would be available for more essential jobs.

If the advertising industry disappeared tomorrow, the world might be better off. For instance, I can find anything I might be interested in buying on Amazon. I don't need to be pounded on by TV commercials to be told what I should want or what I should need. In particualar, Facebook makes all its considerable revenues from advertising. It does not manufacture a product essential to life or any product at all. People are getting smart that there are cushier, safer jobs with better work-life balance than essential jobs. Caregivers like Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) are low paid but essential jobs. Anyone who has had a loved one in the hospital for any length of time realizes how essential they are. They do the dirty work like changing patients diapers and cleaning up when they haven't got to the patients' bedsides in time to prevent a tragedy. Nurses and teachers are overworked considering the nurse/patient ratio and the teacher/student ratio. Much essential work is done by non college graduates and, therefore, does not merit the esteem that college graduates' jobs garner. Nevertheless, they are more important jobs in an essential sense, than many jobs that require a college education. When you need a plumber, you will not usually be hiring a college graduate.

About half of Americans who lost their job during the pandemic and are still not working say they are not willing to take jobs that do not offer the opportunity for remote work. However, many essential jobs can't be done remotely. They are "hands on." It is about time that America values its essential workers and makes a distinction between what's essential and what is inessential. It's a question, to some extent, of values, of what kinds of work are valued. This is where unions come in. America cannot function without essential workers. Yet the only way they can get the pay and benefits they deserve is to unionize and withdraw their workforce if necessary to get what they deserve. For sure, they won't get a better paying job otherwise unless they quit and go to work for Facebook.

Amazon workers’ astounding win, and how corporate America is trying to take back power

by Robert Reich

Saturday, April 2, 2022

On Friday, Amazon – America’s wealthiest, most powerful, and fiercest anti-union corporation, with the second-largest workforce in the nation (union-busting Walmart being the largest), lost out to a group of warehouse workers in New York who voted to form a union.

If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, its scorched-earth anti-union campaign last fall in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest.

In New York, Amazon used every tool it had used in Alabama. Many of them are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but Amazon couldn’t care less. It’s rich enough to pay any fine or bear any public relations hit.

The company has repeatedly fired workers who speak out about unsafe working conditions or who even suggest that workers need a voice.

As its corporate coffers bulge with profits — and its founder and executive chairman practices conspicuous consumption on the scale not seen since the robber barons of the late 19th century — Amazon has become the poster child for 21st-century corporate capitalism run amok.

Much of the credit for Friday’s victory over Amazon goes to Christian Smalls, whom Amazon fired in the spring of 2020 for speaking out about the firm’s failure to protect its warehouse workers from COVID. Smalls refused to back down. He went back and organized a union, with extraordinary skill and tenacity.

Smalls had something else working in his favor, which brings me to Friday’s superb jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The report showed that the economy continues to roar back to life from the COVID recession.

With consumer demand soaring, employers are desperate to hire. This has given American workers more bargaining clout than they’ve had in decades. Wages have climbed 5.6 percent over the past year.

The acute demand for workers has bolstered the courage of workers to demand better pay and working conditions from even the most virulently anti-union corporations in America, such as Amazon and Starbucks.

Is this something to worry about? Not at all. American workers haven’t had much of a raise in over four decades. Most of the economy’s gains have gone to the top.

Besides, inflation is running so high that even the 5.6 percent wage gain over the past year is minimal in terms of real purchasing power.

But corporate America believes these wage gains are contributing to inflation. As the New York Times solemnly reported, the wage gains “could heat up price increases.“

This is pure rubbish. But unfortunately, the chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell, believes it. He worries that “the labor market is extremely tight,” and to “an unhealthy level.”

As a result, the Fed is on the way to raising interest rates repeatedly in order to slow the economy and reduce the bargaining leverage of American workers.

Pause here to consider this: The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that corporate profits are at a 70-year high. You read that right. Not since 1952 have corporations done as well as they are now doing.

Across the board, American corporations are flush with cash. Although they are paying higher costs (including higher wages), they’ve still managed to increase their profits. How? They have enough pricing power to pass on those higher costs to consumers, and even add some more for themselves.

When American corporations are overflowing with money like this, why should anyone think that wage gains will heat up price increases, as the Times reports? In a healthy economy, corporations would not be passing on higher costs — including higher wages — to their consumers. They’d be paying the higher wages out of their profits.

But that’s not happening. Corporations are using their record profits to buy back enormous amounts of their own stock to keep their share prices high, instead.

The labor market isn’t “unhealthily” tight, as Jerome Powell asserts; corporations are unhealthily fat. Workers don’t have too much power; corporations do.

The extraordinary win of the workers of Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse is cause for celebration. Let’s hope it marks the beginning of a renewal of worker power in America.

Yet the reality is that corporate America doesn’t want to give up any of its record profits to its workers. If it can’t fight off unions directly, it will do so indirectly by blaming inflation on wage increases, and then cheer on the Fed as it slows the economy just enough to eliminate American workers’ new bargaining clout.

Why the PRO Act is Critical

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Something I’ve just learned about Amazon – one of America’s most profitable and fastest-growing corporations, headed by the richest man in the world: 

According to the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Amazon warehouse workers sustained nearly double the rate of serious injury incidents last year as did workers in non-Amazon warehouses. 

In addition, largely because Amazon failed to provide its workers adequate protective equipment during the pandemic, the corporation admits that nearly 20,000 employees were presumed positive for the coronavirus.

Workers who spoke out about these unsafe workplace conditions were fired.

Amazon boasts of paying its workers at least $15 an hour. But that comes to about $30,000 a year, hardly enough for a family to get by on.

The explosive growth of Amazon’s army of poorly-paid and ill-treated hourly workers is emblematic of the long-term decline of America’s middle class and levels of economic inequality America hasn’t seen since the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age. 

This has strained the social fabric of the nation – fueling anger and frustration, a rising tide of drug overdoses and deaths of despair, even tempting some working-class people to embrace Trumpism and white nationalism. 

The success of Amazon’s “shock and awe” campaign against workers who dared try to bring a union to their Bessemer, Alabama warehouse exemplifies the immense political power the architects of this growing inequality now wield. 

It’s an alarming omen of the future. 

In Amazon warehouses like Bessemer, workers are treated like robots. Algorithms relentlessly impose dangerous production quotas. They get two 30-minute breaks each ten-hour day. Every movement is monitored. 

Amazon delivery drivers report being instructed to turn off their safety apps so they can meet their quotas. 

Others report having to urinate into bottles because of delivery timing pressures. 

Even though public support for unions is as high as it’s been in 50 years – 60 million American workers would join a union today if they could – Bessemer workers were outgunned by a behemoth whose market capitalization exceeds Australia’s GDP.   

The National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal for employers to fire workers for trying to organize a union. But the penalties for violating the Act  are so laughably small (rehiring the worker and providing back pay) that employers like Amazon routinely do it anyway.

Amazon may be the future of the American economy, but if that future is to have room for the kind of prosperous working families that fifty years ago defined American capitalism, unions are critical. 

In March, the House of Representatives passed legislation designed to level the field. It’s called the Protect the Right to Organize Act (PRO Act). The Senate version has 47 Democratic co-sponsors. It needs three more to give the PRO Act a fighting chance of getting to Joe Biden’s desk. 

The PRO Act would end many of the practices Amazon used to defeat the union effort in Bessemer. Real penalties would be imposed on companies and corporate officers who retaliate against union advocates or otherwise violate the National Labor Relations Act.

The PRO Act would make it easier for workers to form a union, with the aim of protecting them from unfair working conditions.

The PRO Act alone won’t end economic inequality or return prosperity and opportunity to America’s working families. But passage of the PRO Act would help. 

It would also send a clear signal that ours is truly a government “of the people” – such as the million people who work for Amazon today, not the one multi-billionaire at the top, and of the vast majority of Americans who are working harder than ever today and getting nowhere, in America’s Second Gilded Age. 

Why Unions Matter to You

by Robert Reich

Monday, March 18, 2019

As I travel around the country, I tell people: if you have a job, join a union. And if you don’t have a union, start one.

You see, it all comes down to the balance of power between business and workers. 

You strengthen the middle class by strengthening unions.

In the mid-1950s, unions were strong, and wages grew in tandem with the economy. Nearly one third of all workers in the United States were unionized.

This gave workers across America – even those who weren’t unionized – significant power to demand and get better wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. 

Yet starting in the 1980s and with increasing ferocity since then, private-sector employers have fought against unions.

Corporate raiders demanded that companies boost share prices by busting unions or moving to non-union states.

Ronald Reagan’s administration fired the nation’s unionized air traffic controllers and launched an all-out assault on workers’ rights, concentrating even more power in the hands of corporate executives.

In short, anti-worker corporations and politicians joined together to stop workers from joining together. 

We now know that as union membership declined, middle class incomes shrank.

The two trends are the exact mirror images of each other.

The wealthy and big corporations continued to take home a larger share of the nation’s wealth, while workers were left behind.  Unions balance the power of workers with corporations, by allowing workers to join forces to get a fair share.

As an individual your voice is limited, but there is power in numbers.  Today, unions are more important than ever to the survival of the middle class.

Corporations have tremendous power over our lives.

They dictate everything from bathroom breaks to health care for millions of Americans.

In the halls of Washington and state legislatures, their political power has allowed them to block increases in the minimum wage, roll back workplace protections, and deny workers their benefits.

Unless workers balance the power of big corporations, the middle class will continue to get a smaller piece of the pie as more and more wealth goes to those at the top. 

Unions are also essential to the workplace of the future.

Workers must contend with the forces of globalization and technological change. With the stroke of a keyboard, executives can send jobs overseas.

Automated technologies threaten to replace workers in every sector of the economy, making jobs less and less secure. Without unions, workers will be completely at the mercy of these trends. 

But this isn’t just a theoretical argument.

The tangible, real-world examples of how unions make workers’ lives better are everywhere you look. 

Hospitality workers were able to secure raises and job protections from Marriott, the world’s largest hotel chain, because of the power of their union.

Disney employees secured a $15 an hour base-pay after years of opposition from management.

JetBlue’s flight crew have unionized to negotiate better wages and more flexible schedules.  

We must continue to expand unions to restore balance to our economy.

In 2017, more than 250,000 additional American workers joined unions, and research shows almost 60 million more workers would like to join–if they had the opportunity.

Public approval of labor unions is at 62 percent, a 15-year high.

That’s why powerful corporations and their enablers in government are trying to squash workers by pushing so-called “right to work” laws and undermining health care, workplace safety, and retirement protections. 

We have the power to overcome these attacks. If you want a better life for you and your children, join a union. And if you want a better America, support unions.

'Can't Survive on $7.25': On Labor Day, Nationwide Calls for $15 Minimum Wage

Published on Monday, September 04, 2017 by Common Dreams

"Rampant racism. Wage cuts. Attacks on unions. It's time to fight back."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

 

 

0 Comments

"We're up before the sun to say, we're not going to take it any more," declared the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, which rallied workers outside of a Burger King. (Photo: Stand Up KC/Twitter)

Marches are taking place in hundreds of cities throughout the United States on Monday to celebrate the achievements of organized labor, call attention to President Donald Trump's war on workers, and demand a living wage and a union.

 "Rampant racism. Wage cuts. Attacks on unions. It's time to fight back," declared Fight for $15 ahead of Labor Day.

Workers in America's major cities are doing just that.

Fast-food workers in Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Chicago are walking off the job to call attention to the industry's starvation wages. Hoisting signs that read "Can't Survive on $7.25" and chanting "This is what democracy looks like," thousands took to the streets early Monday morning to demand economic justice.

"We're up before the sun to say, we're not going to take it any more," said the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, which rallied workers outside of a local Burger King.

Pointing to the Missouri GOP's success in capping the statewide minimum wage at $7.70—which had the effect of overturning wage increases in St. Louis and Kansas City—Bettie Douglas, a mother of two who has worked at McDonald's for a decade, wrote Monday: "What corporations and politicians are doing to me and other working people in St. Louis is obscene. But we refuse to take it lying down."

"Instead, we are taking to the streets—and we will be louder than ever," Douglas continued. "Today—Labor Day—you'll be able to see us out on the strike lines in St. Louis and hundreds of cities across the country demanding $15 an hour and union rights."

Antwan Williams, a McDonald's worker and Fight for $15 organizer, wrote in an email to supporters that the national Fight for $15 is teaming up with unions throughout the country and placing its energy, resources, and power into defeating politicians who use "their power to help corporations and billionaires at the expense of the rest of us."

"Thousands of people are rallying today to kick off this fight," Williams concluded. "We can stop them."

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Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy

by Matt Stannard

Occupy.com/ News Report

 

Published: Sunday 4 May 2014

 

Worker-owned cooperatives build economic democracy, but how do we build more worker-owned cooperatives? Here are three valuable allies to help us get there.

Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.

For Richard Wolff, whose most recent book is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism, this time-honored form is also the key to arenewed movement for economic democracy. For Wolff, a synergy of labor and the left around worker-owned cooperatives promises to be an “unapologetically anticapitalist” strategy, challenging “the essence of the capitalist organization of production—the employer-employee relationship” and reshaping it in an egalitarian fashion.

And it’s a cause more and more people on the economic periphery – and their allies in economic justice movements – are taking up. More workers are taking the plunge, too, from solar energy co-ops that provide infrastructure for renewable energy, to the 25 worker cooperatives in Queens, including the newly formed Pa’lante Green Cleaning. Here, people committed to a new economy are practicing and preaching to, as Wolff puts it, “take over the enterprise,” bypass Wall Street and economic oligarchy, and build new economic structures either in defiance of, or alongside, old ones.

In this process of consciousness-building and actual implementation, proponents of worker-owned cooperatives can build solidarity with three potential allies. To some extent, these bridges have already been built, but the movement must step up its focus on each. The movement for worker-owned cooperatives needs organized labor’s insistence on the identity and interests of workers as workers; it needs public banking’s ability to democratize the financial (and not merely the economic) public sphere; and it needs an army of bright, creative humans left out in the cold by the capitalist economy to truly populate the new economy and make it a mass movement.

For momentum to pick up on worker ownership, supporters need to:

1. Keep working with organized labor

Workers have won some important battles since 2008. These upsurges – “working-class mini-revolts” as Jeremy Brecher recently called them – include uprisings in Wisconsin, immigrant rights demonstrations, the struggle for public education in Chicago, “strikes of retail, fast food, and other low-wage workers,” the Occupy movement, and other demonstrations of solidarity where bosses and cops were, to varying degrees, pushed back on their heels.

In another article, Amien Essif lists the winning of contracts for Californian carwashers, Walmart workers winning raises, and Seatac workers securing $15.00 wages in Washington State. Unionizing as an option for exploited college athletes suggests that the path of worker solidarity may be expandable to spheres where the exploitation of labor has previously been kept opaque.

I asked Richard Wolff whether these recent victories suggested anything significant about the position of labor in capitalism, or in the search for alternatives to capitalism. His take was mixed. The victories, he said, do little to alter “the defensive decline that remains organized labor's basic social position.” Wolff pointed out that his own group, Democracy at Work, “is in discussions with certain unions about implementing [a worker cooperative] strategy.” But what remains, he added, is to overcome unions’ “anxiety about collective action among its own members, let alone with others.”

Overcoming that hesitation is vital. When unions play by the rules of corporate capitalism, they start every negotiation from a position of structural weakness. Capital is mobile and can always move somewhere else. While internationalization of the economic justice struggle would solve that weakness, the process is too long-term and tied up with the endless complications of geopolitics and capital-influenced policymaking.

Worker cooperatives were an important part of early union struggles, particularly when labor was losing the battles. Union activists would champion worker-owned cooperatives in response to defeats for labor in conventional industrial workplaces. In the late 1800s, cooperatives in New York, from Troy to Brooklyn, thrived.

A hundred years later, cooperatives like Collective Copies and Maryland Brush Company similarly formed in the wake of labor defeats or business closures. John Clay mentions several historical instances of unions and worker cooperatives synergizing, from 1870s Knights of Labor campaigns to efforts by New York home care cooperatives in the 1980s and beyond.

Overtures and initial partnerships have characterized the relationship between cooperatives and unions for the last several years, certainly through the recession. United Steelworkers initiated discussions with the Mondragon Cooperatives in 2009, while the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) facilitates discussions about cooperatives as alternatives to privatization, and organizations in Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and elsewhere launch union cooperatives regularly.

Barriers in attitude still exist. Union rank-and-file may be skeptical of the seemingly unconventional economic and cultural values of cooperative supporters, and workers in cooperatives may believe they don’t need unions since they have a voice in running their own enterprises.

But overcoming those barriers is mutually beneficial. As John Clay points out, union partnership adds financial resources and community support, increased worker benefits, and an ally when the cooperative model is under attack by retrograde capitalists. And proponents of cooperatives need union leadership to check what one activist has called “the inherent capitalist tendency of individual cooperative businesses” through sustained worker solidarity – which will link workers across various cooperatives.

This may even address some, though probably not all, of the criticism from the sectarian left that cooperatives have to play on a market-capitalist field. In any case, it’s the key for a truly working class path away from the dominance of big capital in our economic relationships, and there is presently no alternative to joint efforts by unions and proponents of cooperatives to build new forms of workplace organization.

2. Invite the public finance movement to fund the new economy

The second natural allies of worker-owned cooperatives are the emergent leading voices calling for public banking, postal banking, and radical reform of America’s financial institutions. Public banking is not just the newest sexy call to action across several political lines. It’s also an enduring idea that can energize myriad economic justice projects. We already know it works,in Germany, Costa Rica and, of course, North Dakota.

Over the past year, the public banking movement's list of endorsers has grown exponentially. Economist Richard Wolff and journalistsMatt Taibbi and Chris Hedges are on board. And activists signing onto the Detroit Statement, published by the Public Banking Institute last month, include Wolff and Hedges along with Margaret Flowers, Gar Alperovitz, Kevin Zeese, Norman Solomon, the Metro-Detroit Chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women, Detroiters Resisting Emergency Management, and dozens of other individuals and organizations. A town meeting initiative in Vermont revealed overwhelming support for public banking, and more than 20 other states are advancing similar proposals.

Public banks need to be part of the equation because they can finance egalitarian projects. Worker-owned cooperatives need to emerge where private sector businesses and public services have failed to deliver to communities. But that can’t happen when worker enterprises – unlikely to be populated by deep-pocketed investors or workers full of personal wealth – lack credit for start-up costs, occasional losses and rough patches, or equipment upgrades.

Big banks aren’t even lending to conventional small businesses, so there is little reason to suspect they’ll extend credit to worker-owned cooperatives. And the cooperatives wouldn’t want the big banks’ credit, with their devastating interest rates, even if they could get it. Just as they kill municipalities, big banks kill small businesses. Public finance, on the other hand, is a natural ally of the worker-owned cooperative. Public banks can give much-needed credit to cooperatives, even structuring their charters to uniquely serve democratically-run businesses, or partnering with municipalities to sustain networks of cooperative businesses.

Banks themselves can be worker-owned cooperatives. That’s why organizations like the Center for Workplace Democracy and theNew Economy Working Group are beginning to include public banking on their discussion agendas. This movement must continue to grow, because sustainable sources of financing are integral to the creation and maintenance of sustainable workplace democracies.

3. Organize the restless to build a mass movement

The third set of critical allies of worker-owned cooperatives are those who have the potential to run them, and run them well: millions of smart, well-educated workers whose dreams have been put on hold through student debt and the contracting capitalist economy. Worker-owned cooperatives can put people to work, building sustainable businesses full of worker-owners who think outside of the box. The cooperative movement can thus create an entirely new culture of work, and with it, sustainable employment practices – flexibility that doesn't penalize the worker, but enhances the opportunity for worker self-management and collective collaboration, and the synthesis of workplace and community space.

Of the millions of Americans who will benefit from this security and creative space, most have been pushed into low-wage jobs, chaotic self-employment, or higher wage jobs helping exploit other workers. According to a report released this week by the National Employment Law Project, low-wage job creation has outstripped growth in better jobs throughout the current “recovery,” with educators and government workers experiencing disproportionate job loss, and private sector absorption of those jobs forcing wages down for everyone.

While “professional” job growth accounted for 9.4% of private sector growth, that's lower than in past recoveries. Wages remain low for educators and health professionals. And above all, there are 35 million people out of work in the United States today in an economy that simply cannot expand enough to accommodate more than a small fraction of that reserve army in the best-case scenario.

Activists and organizers of a new economic paradigm should see each and every one of those people as potential co-creators of a new economic democracy. They should look for opportunities to publicize the benefits of local, sustainable, low-cost worker-run enterprises, encourage communities to fund multiple new businesses and lobby municipalities with empty downtowns to open storefront public-private worker-owned partnership firms. Unions, which have lately learned how to start organizing everybody, and economic justice advocates need to reach out to the unemployed and underemployed “indentured educated class”, a source of untapped energy and creativity in the building of a new economy.

In Bolivia, workers have been authorized since October of 2013 to establish “social enterprises” in businesses that go bankrupt or are abandoned by bosses. Hundreds of workplaces have similarly been taken over in Argentina. More recently, workers in Greece took over a factory. American workers joined this movement when Republic Windows and Doors was taken over in 2012 by laid-off workers in Chicago.

These struggles can transform communities and spur further takeover efforts. Worker-owned cooperatives, long a theoretical model of economic revolution, can also become a rallying cry, winning over millions of adherents who have the drive and work ethic to make a sustainable economy work, but lack the resources promised to them by mainstream economics.

Face-to-face organizing and grassroots agitation is necessary to build mass consciousness about worker democracy. Although groups like the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the American Sustainable Business Council occasionally gain the ears of elected officials (mostly in the Democratic Party), history demonstrates that conventional political support for alternative economic arrangements is fickle and inconsistent. What is needed, as Wolff reminds us, is a radical transformation from profit-driven business models to “macro-level goals” like economic planning, social welfare and income equality. Since we know that worker cooperatives, public finance and community building all work where they are allowed to work, we have living examples to offer the millions of potential recruits currently marginalized by corporate capitalism.

Comments:

TonyP

While the article makes several good points I wonder why recognition of the Industrial Workers of the World, IWW was left out? Here was a union who's idea was to benefit ALL, not just those in the union. Occupy took a lot of their ideas from them. I guess there's just some things that are too big to talk about. But another MAJOR factor in co-op's really taking off is single payer healthcare. And I believe that's the major reason capital has fought so hard against it. Look how many times many of us have stayed in a stupid crappy low paying job because it had benefits? A really good movie to watch about when capital takes off thinking they'll be able to collapse the economy and then come back and buy it all back for pennies on the dollar is "The Take" about the economic collapse of Argentina. And when workers decided to occupy and restart their old plants. It was hard because there was no public banks and no model for co-ops, but it can be done. There are historic models in Germany and Japan where corp's used small shops as co-op's to make parts or sub assemblies to great effect. But you can't use the capitalistic model because it's inefficient, ineffective and completely undemocratic. And that's hard for a lot of people who have been raised and propagandized by this model. And only because it was strictly controlled in the 50's and early 60's did it work. Roosevelt had it right, tax the corp's at 92% and keep them out of politics and the whole nation can prosper, not just the 1%.  But of course you never hear that from the right because they got in the 70's with the help of the Powell memo that they needed to invest in "think tanks" and media to change everybody's memory of what really happened so they could blame the victims for their greed. 

Matt Stannard is editor of politicalcontext.org and Director of Media and Communications at the Public Banking Institute.

Comments:

ari9999

Great article. Thank you!

1. Worker co-ops, including (and especially) startups, face unique and vexing challenges when seeking capital. Conventional investment and lending are built around a conventional concept: one or a handful of owners, with everyone else being non-owner employees. How do you make a conventional loan to a business when there's no one person responsible — when instead everyone in the business is equally responsible? That's why worker co-ops are a round, equitable peg trying to fit in a very, very square hole.

Enter public banking. Its mission is focused on the public interest. Flexible, innovative, experimental solutions might be possible with public banking that would be out of the question — both for business and regulatory reasons — with conventional private banking.

Thus we can all help open up potential new ways to capitalize worker co-ops, an urgent need, by:

a) demanding loud and long that states and cities establish their own banks in the public interest, and

b) clamoring for states and cities to give preferential treatment to worker co-ops, just as they commonly do for businesses owned by women, minorities, and sometimes veterans and people with disabilities.

2. States and cities can amplify their impact by collaborating with regional and local groups — like Austin's great advocacy, education and support nonprofit, Cooperation Texas — to inform and empower people interested in starting worker co-ops.

3. If Congress ever got a collective brain transplant and (gasp) began acting in the public interest, it could enact a law allowing the US Postal Service to offer financial services — an awesome idea proposed by the USPS inspector general and supported by Elizabeth Warren and other leaders. As part of that law, provision could be made for modest experimentation with capitalizing worker co-ops.

 

pitch1934

What you need is a worker owned political party, a Labor Party.

 

Farid Khavari

Matt: You need to do some homework before you write an article: http://publicbanking.wordpress...

Matt: To help you with your homework, read this article: http://www.uncoveredpolitics.c...

Why You Shouldn’t Shop at Walmart on Friday

by Robert Reich

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

A half century ago America’s largest private-sector employer was General Motors, whose full-time workers earned an average hourly wage of around $50, in today’s dollars, including health and pension benefits.

Today, America’s largest employer is Walmart, whose average employee earns $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

There are many reasons for the difference – including globalization and technological changes that have shrunk employment in American manufacturing while enlarging it in sectors involving personal services, such as retail.

But one reason, closely related to this seismic shift, is the decline of labor unions in the United States. In the 1950s, over a third of private-sector workers belonged to a union. Today fewer than 7 percent do. As a result, the typical American worker no longer has the bargaining clout to get a sizeable share of corporate profits.

At the peak of its power and influence in the 1950s, the United Auto Workers could claim a significant portion of GM’s earnings for its members.

Walmart’s employees, by contrast, have no union to represent them. So they’ve had no means of getting much of the corporation’s earnings.

Walmart earned $16 billion last year (it just reported a 9 percent increase in earnings in the third quarter of 2012, to $3.6 billion), the lion’s share of which went instead to Walmart’s shareholders — including the family of its founder, Sam Walton, who earned on their Walmart stock more than the combined earnings of the bottom 40 percent of American workers.

Is this about to change? Despite decades of failed unionization attempts, Walmart workers are planning to strike or conduct some other form of protest outside at least 1,000 locations across the United States this Friday – so-called “Black Friday,” the biggest shopping day in America when the Christmas holiday buying season begins.

At the very least, the action gives Walmart employees a chance to air their grievances in public – not only lousy wages (as low at $8 an hour) but also unsafe and unsanitary working conditions, excessive hours, and sexual harassment. The result is bad publicity for the company exactly when it wants the public to think of it as Santa Claus. And the threatened strike, the first in 50 years, is gaining steam.

The company is fighting back. It has filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board to preemptively ban the Black Friday strikes. The complaint alleges that the pickets are illegal “representational” picketing designed to win recognition for the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. Walmart’s workers say they’re protesting unfair labor practices rather than acting on behalf of the UFCW. If a court sides with Walmart, it could possibly issue an injunction blocking Black Friday’s pickets.

What happens at Walmart will have consequences extending far beyond the company. Other big box retailers are watching carefully. Walmart is their major competitor. Its pay scale and working conditions set the standard.

More broadly, the widening inequality reflected in the gap between the pay of Walmart workers and the returns to Walmart investors, including the Walton fammily, haunts the American economy.

Consumer spending is 70 percent of economic activity, but consumers are also workers. And as income and wealth continue to concentrate at the top, and the median wage continues to drop – it’s now 8 percent lower than it was in 2000 – a growing portion of the American workforce lacks the purchasing power to get the economy back to speed. Without a vibrant and growing middle class, Walmart itself won’t have the customers it needs.

Most new jobs in America are in personal services like retail, with low pay and bad hours. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, the average full-time retail worker earns between $18,000 and $21,000 per year.

But if retail workers got a raise, would consumers have to pay higher prices to make up for it? A new study by the think tank Demos reports that raising the salary of all full-time workers at large retailers to $25,000 per year would lift more than 700,000 people out of poverty, at a cost of only a 1 percent price increase for customers.

And, in the end, retailers would benefit. According to the study, the cost of the wage increases to major retailers would be $20.8 billion — about one percent of the sector’s $2.17 trillion in total annual sales. But the study also estimates the increased purchasing power of lower-wage workers as a result of the pay raises would generate $4 billion to $5 billion in additional retail sales.

This seems like a good deal all around.

Senator Bernie Sanders Lays It Out on Jobs and More

 

The Verizon Strike as the Next Wisconsin

Published on Saturday, August 13, 2011 by Dissent Magazine

by Mark Engler

The picket lines are up. This past weekend 45,000 Verizon workers on the East Coast, represented by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), went on strike. The cause of the strike was the company’s attempts to win massive concessions from the unions. Verizon argued that the employees should give up gains they had won over many years of struggle and negotiation in previous contract fights.

As the Wall Street Journal put it, “Verizon Communications Inc. is seeking some of the biggest concessions in years from its unions.” Demands include the weakening of health-care benefits, cuts in pensions, reduced job security, and elimination of paid holidays such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. This despite the fact that the company reported billions in profit last year, and that, in the words of New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, “Verizon’s top five executives received a total of $258 million in compensation, including stock options, over the last four years.” The unions argue that Verizon has made some $20 billion in profit in the same time period, and Citizens for Tax Justice has pointed out that the company has done so while paying little to nothing in corporate income taxes.

Without a doubt, this is a conflict of national significance. As Bob Master, CWA District 1 legislative and political director, explained Wednesday in a conference call with supporters,

 

This is an enormously profitable company, which we believe is trying to take advantage of an anti-union environment and, in a sense, to replicate at a giant private-sector corporation what the governors of Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin have been trying to do to the public sector. Our members feel very strongly that we need to draw a line here.

 

The parallel to Wisconsin is apt for several reasons. First, like the Republican elected officials in their attacks on unionized schoolteachers and other public employees, Verizon is taking aim at one of the last bastions of the American middle class. As a main strategy in its public relations, the company is trying to stoke resentment about the fact that the CWA and IBEW workers actually have living-wage jobs. It is hoping that “I don’t have a pension, why should they” logic will carry the day.

Accordingly, on Wednesday Verizon took out a full-page ad in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggesting that a typical employee makes $80,600 in annual pay and $42,000 in benefits. The union disputes this claim, contending that salaries are generally in the $60,000 to $77,000 range, and that benefits are less costly than the company would suggest. But, regardless, the debate over numbers misses some critical questions: What’s wrong with workers sharing in the profits of a healthy corporation? Isn’t that the way our economy is supposed to work?

(On a side note, it’s always a treat when companies plead poverty at the negotiating table and then turn around and spend big bucks on media spots, anti-union consultants, and pricey PR firms—but that’s another story.)

The fate of 45,000 middle-class jobs is a big deal for all of America. Last month, the entire U.S. economy had a net gain of only 117,000 jobs. Not only is that for the whole country, it represents a pretty decent month given the numbers from the past year. Furthermore, almost all of the new jobs now being created are low-wage. Given these realities—and the fact that concentrating all wealth in the hands of the rich is a very bad strategy for creating the kind of demand the economy needs to rebound—what happens to the Verizon workers is a matter of broad public concern.

Bob Master is right that Verizon’s aggressive bargaining stance, like Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector power grab, is the product of a political climate in which corporate interests feel they can do whatever they want to working people, and employees will have no recourse. The Verizon strike is unfortunately akin to Wisconsin in that it is a defensive battle—an effort to stop tragic rollbacks in previously established standards of fair employment.

The background for the contract dispute is that Verizon is now making most of its profits from its wireless services. While a small number of wireless technicians are involved in the strike, that part of the company is mostly non-union. In an ideal world, CWA and IBEW would be able to “bargain to organize,” balancing any concessions at the negotiating table for current union members with agreements that the company will remain truly neutral and allow workers at Verizon Wireless to make their own decision about whether or not to unionize. But this is not an ideal world. Like in Wisconsin, labor and its allies face a difficult fight merely to stave off the worst of a rabidly anti-union assault.

That said, there is a case for hope. The mass protests in Madison earlier this year gave some cause for optimism that a new type of energetic, broad-based, community-labor mobilization might become a lasting force in that state’s politics—and become a model for movements in other parts of the country. Wisconsinites’ success this week in recalling some Republican State Senators (although not as many as hoped) suggested that the struggle will be a long one, but that progressive efforts could have some real legs.

As for the strike, all those who have been wondering when working America will be fed up enough to finally stand up and fight should not sit this one out. If the Verizon strike becomes a rallying point in this country for a movement against runaway corporate power and for a fairer economy, it could have much broader implications than what contract terms are ultimately hammered out for those now walking the picket lines. That these workers are not rolling over in the face of company insistence on concessions is important and courageous. And they deserve widespread support.

***

Those on the East Coast can find a picket line to visit here.

Supporters all over the country will soon be able to “adopt a Verizon Wireless store” in their area and help to organize pickets at that location.

Finally, without even leaving your computer, you can sign the petition in support of the 45,000 CWA and IBEW workers on strike.

© 2011 Mark Engler

 

Mark Engler is a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus and author of How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website http://www.DemocracyUprising.com

Why the Republican War on Workers’ Rights Undermines the American Economy

Published on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 by RobertReich.org

by Robert Reich

The battle has resumed in Wisconsin. The state supreme court has allowed Governor Scott Walker to strip bargaining rights from state workers.

Meanwhile, governors and legislators in New Hampshire and Missouri are attacking private unions, seeking to make the states so-called “open shop” where workers can get all the benefits of being union members without paying union dues. Needless to say this ploy undermines the capacity of unions to do much of anything. Other Republican governors and legislatures are following suit.

Republicans in Congress are taking aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which issued a relatively minor rule change allowing workers to vote on whether to unionize soon after a union has been proposed, rather than allowing employers to delay the vote for years. Many employers have used the delaying tactics to retaliate against workers who try to organize, and intimidate others into rejecting a union.

This war on workers’ rights is an assault on the middle class, and it is undermining the American economy.

The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

For three decades after World War II – I call it the “Great Prosperity” – wages rose in tandem with productivity. Americans shared the gains of growth, and had enough money to buy what they produced.

That’s largely due to the role of labor unions. In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.

With the decline of unions came the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. Middle-class purchasing power depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral.

But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.

Some say the Great Prosperity was an anomaly. America’s major competitors lay in ruins. We had the world to ourselves. According to this view, there’s no going back.

But this view is wrong. If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.

Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).

What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.

How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.

That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.

Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.

The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Part of the answer is, as in Germany, stronger labor unions — unions strong enough to demand a fair share of the gains from productivity growth.

The current Republican assault on workers’ rights continues a thirty-year war on American workers’ wages. That long-term war has finally taken its toll on the American economy.

It’s time to fight back.

© 2011 Robert Reich

Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written twelve books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His "Marketplace" commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes.

The Warped US Tax System: Taxpayers Subsidize Their Own Destruction

by Allison Kilkenny, the Nation, April 24, 2011

One of the more interesting battles being waged right now is between labor and Boeing, the aerospace and defense corporation. The National Labor Relations Board accuses the company of illegally retaliating against its largest union when it decided in 2009 to put a second 787 Dreamliner assembly line in a nonunion plant in South Carolina.

Originally, Boeing intended to construct the Dreamliner in Washington, but only if the state approved a twenty-year, $3.2 billion package of tax credits. Officials ultimately conceded, but Boeing took its toys and went to play elsewhere anyway when South Carolina lured it across state lines with the promise of a whopping $900 million subsidy package aka taxpayer dollars, and a non-union plant to set up shop in.

Boeing also happens to be one of the shining examples of government-subsidized businesses that pay meager amounts of state and local taxes. In 2010, Boeing received a net tax refund of $137 million from state and local governments despite earning more than $4 billion in pretax profits.

The company has always defended these kinds of practices by claiming it’s a great jobs generator. Of course, one need only glance at South Carolina’s jobless statistics, which are well above the national average, to see that claim stands on shaky legs. In a state that provides some of the least generous jobless benefits in the union, it’s difficult to see just how shelling out massive subsidies to an anti-union company like Boeing provides for a majority of South Carolinians.

Endless mini-bailouts that the state calls “subsidies”—some of them deemed illegal—and harsh austerity measures won’t pay off for citizens, or corporations, in the long run. South Carolina legislators plan to cut $700 million from the state budget by hacking away at Medicare and education programs. Meanwhile, the detrimental ripple effects of education cuts are likely to far outweigh any temporary benefits the state might have gained from luring Boeing into its borders. Citizens will obviously suffer, but so too will business. For example, Boeing isn’t going to be super-eager to hire the products of a failing South Carolinian educational system to work in its plants.

Conservatives constantly exalt the glories of the free market, except there’s nothing free about taxpayers subsidizing the anti-union behavior of companies like Boeing. This kind of corporate welfare system is rigged to force citizens to bankroll their own destruction. If every company followed the Boeing model, there would be no unions, no collective bargaining and no assurance for the majority of poor workers that they can have any protection from their corporate overlords.

Quite simply, Boeing wouldn’t be able to prosper without the state, and by default, its taxpayers. It’s time they show a little respect for the people assisting the company’s copious growth. 

The United States Has Mexico….and Sweden Has Us

Published on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by David Macaray

Who would have imagined that Sweden—of all countries—with its heavily unionized workforce, its social programs, its liberated sexual attitudes, its minimum wage of $18 per hour, and its 5 weeks of guaranteed paid vacation, would dare treat the United States the way….well, the way the United States treats Mexico?

Yet, bizarre as it sounds, that scenario is unfolding before our eyes. Based on what has occurred during the last three years at Ikea’s Danville, Virginia, manufacturing plant, it is now evident that Sweden regards the U.S. as little more than an advanced Third World nation—a geographical area capable of providing a reliable pool of low-wage workers to assemble Ikea’s furniture. They regard us the way we regard Mexico.

It was only three years ago that state and local officials offered the high-profile Swedish company $12 million dollars in tax breaks and subsidies to lure it to Virginia. For a region as economically strapped and desperate as Danville was, signing up a big-time, respected manufacturer like Ikea was considered a monumental coup. It was a dream come true.

But that dream soon turned into a nightmare. Indeed, Ikea has transformed itself from savior to villain. The company has done things in Danville that it never, ever would have considered doing back home in Sweden, not only because those things would have spoiled the company’s domestic image as an enlightened and munificent employer, but because, in fact, those things would’ve been violations of prevailing labor laws.

To put it bluntly, Ikea’s Danville plant has turned into a grotesque, Scandinavian version of a modern day sweatshop. When the IAM (International Association of Machinists) made a run at unionizing the facility, Ikea went into a full-blown defensive posture, hiring the law firm of Jackson Lewis, an aggressive, anti-labor outfit that specializes in keeping unions out. Again, this putatively generous and worker-friendly company has stunned everyone—both in the U.S. and Sweden—by doing an imitation of Wal-Mart.

Without a union to protect the employees, Ikea has done all those things non-union shops typically do. They lowered the starting hourly wage from $9.75 per hour to $8.00 per hour (the federal minimum is $7.25) , and began forcing people to work inordinate amounts of overtime. In fact, there is so much mandatory overtime being assigned—much of it on short notice—that people are actually quitting. Eight dollars an hour and never knowing when you’re going home doesn’t offer much incentive to stay.

In Sweden, Ikea employees are not only well-paid and well-benefited, but overtime is worked on a strictly voluntary basis. No Ikea employee in Sweden has to work over unless they want to. But in Danville, Virginia, it’s a different story. The plant’s 335 employees can only go home when they’re permitted to. As for vacation, Ikea employees in Sweden get 5-weeks paid leave per year; in Danville, workers get 12 days—eight of them assigned by the company.

Moreover, several EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) racial discrimination lawsuits have already been filed by African American workers, charging that they were arbitrarily placed on less desirable jobs and assigned to less desirable shifts. And why wouldn’t they be? Who’s going to prevent that?

The Danville episode clearly illustrates two truths: First, without a built-in safety net (either in the form of a union or rigid labor laws—the kind the U.S. lacks) workers are going to be at the mercy of their employer. And second, Ikea’s reputation as a noble, enlightened and magnanimous employer is pure bullshit. How do you say “exploitation” in Swedish?

David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep. He can be reached at [email protected]

more David Macaray

Statewide Poll Shows Strong Public Support For Teachers, Public Employees and Their Right to Bargain Collectively

by Staff on April 11, 2011, from the OB Rag

in: California, Civil Rights, Labor

Tulchin Research / April 5th, 2011

A recent statewide poll, commissioned by the California Federation of Teachers, finds a solid majority of likely voters in California have a favorable opinion of public employees and support their right to engage in collective bargaining.

From the CFT’s press release:

In the aftermath of major demonstrations by labor unions on Monday to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death and to bring attention to working families, the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) today released new polling results showing that 56% of California voters have a favorable view of public employees and 61% support their right to bargain together. With public sector workers under assault and major battles over union rights in Wisconsin, California voters also sided with the Wisconsin public employees (56%) over its governor (37%).

Public employees were viewed favorably across the political spectrum.

• Democrats hold public employees in the highest esteem, with nearly two-thirds (63%) perceiving them in a positive light and only one out of ten (10%) in a negative light.
• Among decline-to-state and third party voters, six times as many voters hold a favorable opinion of public employees as holds an unfavorable opinion (54% favorable to only 9% unfavorable), with 33 percent neutral and the remaining unsure.
• Republicans also view public employees favorably by a margin of better than 2-to-1, with nearly half of GOP voters (46%) saying they had a favorable opinion to slightly less than one out of five (19%) who viewed public employees unfavorably.

…

Voters Blame State Budget Woes on Wealthy and Corporations Not Paying Their Fair Share – Not On Public Employees.

When it comes to California’s fiscal challenges, our poll finds that most voters feel that the wealthy and corporations not paying enough in taxes is a much bigger problem facing the state budget than public employee salaries and benefits. Specifically, more than half of likely voters (52%) say the wealthy and corporate interests not paying their fair share was the bigger problem affecting the state’s budget woes, while less than one-third (32%) thought the bigger issue was public employee compensation.

Voters See Tax Disparity As Bigger Budget Problem Than Employee Compensation

“Which is a bigger problem facing California’s budget right now?”

Public employee salaries, pensions and benefits - 32%

The wealthy and corporate interests not paying their fair share in taxes – 52%

Both - 8%

Neither – 5%

Don’t Know / No Answer - 4%

*Totals may not add up to 100% due to rounding.

Go here for the remainder of the poll.

Breaking News: Democrat Ousts Incumbent in Wisconsin Election to Supreme Court in a Rebuke to Gov. Scott Walker's Union Busting Initiatives. Significance: Democrats Have Majority on Supreme Court and Will Have Final Word

Challenger wins in Wisconsin proxy union fight

from Reuters

Wed Apr 6, 2011 5:10pm EDT

* Election for judge seen as referendum on union law

* Democratic-backed candidate claims win, recount expected

By Jeff Mayers

MADISON, Wis, April 6 (Reuters) - The Democratic-backed candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court judge claimed victory on Wednesday in an election seen as a referendum on a law curbing union power with implications for cash-strapped U.S. states.

Challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg beat Republican-backed incumbent Judge David Prosser by slightly more than 200 votes out of 1.4 million cast on Tuesday, according to local media.

"We owe Justice Prosser our gratitude for his more than 30 years of public service," Kloppenburg said. "Wisconsin voters have spoken ... . I will be independent and impartial and I will decide cases based on the facts and the law."

Prosser, a former Republican leader of the Wisconsin legislature seeking his second full 10-year term, said there was "little doubt" there would be a recount with the vote totals within half a percentage point of each other. The state would pick up the cost of a recount.

Tuesday's election was the first statewide vote since Republicans passed restrictions on the union rights of public workers and the race became a rallying point for supporters and opponents of the law.

Voters turned out in large numbers in what is usually a quiet election for judge because of the heat generated over the law backed by Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"The 50-50 split proves how evenly divided the state is over the Walker agenda. And the turnout shows how deep the feelings run," said Charles Franklin, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

SPENDING RECORD

The Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University Law School, which monitors campaign ad spending, said $3.5 million had been spent on TV ads in the campaign, making it the most expensive contest for judge in Wisconsin's history.

The supreme court's makeup will carry added significance because it may take up how the union bill passed the legislature last month, which was challenged by Democrats.

A lower court judge has temporarily blocked implementation of the law on the grounds the Republican majority in the legislature may have violated the state's open meetings law in maneuvering to pass the measure. Democratic senators had fled the state to try to deny Republicans a vote.

Republicans have appealed the judge's ruling, and an appeals court said the case belongs with the state supreme court where Prosser is part of the court's 4-3 conservative majority. Kloppenburg would give liberals a majority on the court when she takes the post in August.

The bill sharply restricted workers' collective bargaining rights and increases employee contributions for health care and pensions. Anti-union bills have also passed in Indiana and Ohio where Republican dominate the legislatures.

Union supporters view the measures as disguised efforts to undermine a key Democratic constituency, while Republicans said the laws are needed to control costs as states cope with gaping deficits. The acrimony sparked huge protests and recall efforts against veteran Wisconsin state senators from both parties.

Kloppenburg, a longtime assistant attorney general, and Prosser have said they would not prejudge any decision on the law.

Governor Walker signed a companion measure to the union law -- part of the "budget repair bill" he introduced in February -- that closes a deficit in the current budget. (Additional reporting by David Bailey; Writing by James B. Kelleher and Andrew Stern; Editing by Xavier Briand)

Ohio Union Bill Signed Into Law By John Kasich

From Huffington Post

First Posted: 03/31/11 03:15 PM ET Updated: 04/ 1/11 12:44 AM ET

 
(AP) CLEVELAND - Gov. John Kasich on Thursday signed into law a limit on the collective bargaining rights of 350,000 public workers, defying Democrats and other opponents of the measure who have promised to push for repeal.

His signature came a day after the measure was approved by the state House and Senate, which are led by his fellow Republicans.

The measure prompted weeks of pro-labor protests by thousands of people amid a national debate over union rights, keyed by a similar bill passed in Wisconsin and signed by the governor there.

The 350,000 public workers covered under the law can still negotiate wages and certain work conditions - but not health care, sick time or pension benefits. The measure also does away with automatic pay raises and bases future wage increases on merit.

It applies to teachers, nurses and many other government workers, including police and firefighters, who were exempt in the Wisconsin measure.

Kasich, a first-term governor, has said his $55.5 billion state budget counts on unspecified savings from lifting union protections to fill an $8 billion hole. He and his GOP colleagues argue the bill will help city officials and superintendents better control their costs at a time when they too are feeling budget woes.

Democrats opposed the measure but offered no amendments to it. Instead, they delivered boxes containing more than 65,000 opponent signatures to the House labor committee's chairman.

Many Democrats, along with other opponents, have vowed to lead a ballot-repeal effort if the measure passes. Backers of a ballot challenge have 90 days after Kasich signs the bill to gather 231,148 valid signatures from at least half Ohio's 88 counties to get it on the ballot.

The bill signing comes two days after a House labor committee added GOP-backed revisions that make it more difficult for unions to collect certain fees.

The committee changed the bill to ban automatic deductions from employee paychecks that would go the unions' political arm. They also altered the measure to prevent nonunion employees affected by contracts from paying so-called "fair share" fees to union organizations.

Unions argue that their contracts cover those nonunion workers and that letting them not pay unfairly spreads the costs to dues-paying members.

Thousands Attend Downtown L.A. Labor Rally

By Kurt Streeter, Los Angeles Times

March 27, 2011

Police estimate 5,000 to 8,000 teachers, nurses, Teamsters, electricians, actors and others marched to support their peers in Wisconsin and oppose any similar organized-labor restrictions in California.

Alarmed by recent union losses in a Wisconsin labor battle, thousands of organized workers marched through downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, vowing to fight a similar fate here in cash-strapped California.

Police estimated between 5,000 and 8,000 people attended the protest, which ended in a packed rally at Pershing Square. The event comes in response to the Wisconsin Legislature's approval of a bill this month that curtails the collective bargaining rights of many unions and follows a weeks-long battle.

Marchers cheered speakers such as Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa; Maria Elena Durazo, secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor; and Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin bill, which was signed by Republican legislators without the support of Democrats, exempted firefighters and other public safety workers. However, Mitchell told the crowd that his union still opposes the action.

"This is a direct attack" on all unions and the entire middle class, Mitchell shouted, warning that similar policies could soon be introduced by politicians in California, which is grappling with an estimated $26-billion deficit. "An injury to one is an injury to us all!"

Mitchell's words were met with loud cheers, chants and beating drums. Flags and placards waved in the air, many of them bashing wealthy corporations and conservative politicians.

Protester Ruben Najara, 49, said he has been working at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power for just over two decades. A Covina resident who holds an associate's degree from a trade college, Najara said the union job has given him a secure, working-class life and the ability to comfortably raise three children.

He said he fears that on the heels of the Wisconsin law, union collective bargaining power will be steadily eroded throughout the country. "We are willing to make concessions," he said. "But you have to have two sides at the table to bargain."

The march began just outside Staples Center, which served as a staging area for thousands of union members. Leading much of the procession was a sea of burly, black-shirted Teamsters. Behind them, stretching back several city blocks, were nurses, telephone technicians, electricians, truckers, screenwriters, actors, longshoremen, teachers and others.

Among those who showed up to voice support were a group of parents whose children attend Eagle Rock Elementary — a facility they said suffered from inadequate funding.

"Enough is enough," said Amanda Millet, who has two kids at the school. "This year we stand to lose some of our best teachers, the very best. It's amazing that the teachers and their union are being blamed for what is happening with the economy right now.... I see a lot of very nice new buildings housing the LAUSD administration. They should get out of those offices and see what's happening at a school like ours, a place that needs to keep all the good teachers it can."

[email protected]

Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times

Buried Provision In House GOP Bill Would Cut Off Food Stamps To Entire Families If One Member Strikes

by Zaid Jilani

From ThinkProgress, March 23, 2011

All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking middle class Americans to pay for budget deficits caused mainly by a recession caused by Wall Street; they are attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, which has provoked a huge Main Street Movement to fight back.

Now, a group of House Republicans is launching a new stealth attack against union workers. GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (OH), Tim Scott (SC), Scott Garrett (NJ), Dan Burton (IN), and Louie Gohmert (TX) have introduced H.R. 1135, which states that it is designed to “provide information on total spending on means-tested welfare programs, to provide additional work requirements, and to provide an overall spending limit on means-tested welfare programs.”

Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer:

 

 

The bill also includes a provision that would exempt households from losing eligibility, “if the household was eligible immediately prior to such strike, however, such family unit shall not receive an increased allotment as the result of a decrease in the income of the striking member or members of the household.”

Yet removing entire families from eligibility while a single adult family member is striking would have a chilling effect on workers who are considering going on strike for better wages, benefits, or working conditions — something that is especially alarming in light of the fact that unions are one of the fundamental building blocks of the middle class that allow people to earn wages that keep them off food stamps.

With a record 42 million Americans on food stamps during these poor economic times, it appears that the right is simply looking for more ways to hurt working class Americans.

OB Rag Supports American Workers

from the OB Rag, March 18, 2011

 

Hamilton High School Students Walk Out to Protest Cuts, Teacher Layoff Notices

From the Los Angeles Times, March 18, 2011 | 11:25 am

 

At least 1,500 students at Hamilton High School walked out Friday morning to protest layoff notices being issued to some of their favorite teachers.

Students packed the sidewalks around the high school in a show of support for teachers and support staff who were among about 7,000 L.A. Unified School District employees to receive layoff notices recently as the district grappled with cutting its budget.

“It has been extremely peaceful,” district spokeswoman Ellen Morgan said of the protest.

The district said about 1,500 students participated in the demonstration; others doubled that estimate. The school’s marching band led banner-waving student protesters in a march around the campus before listening to a series of student leaders address the gathering on the need to fight to keep their educators.

Although cuts have not been finalized, the directors of two popular and successful Hamilton programs -- the humanities magnet and the music magnet -- have been informed by L.A. Unified that their positions are being eliminated.

Like school districts across the state, L.A. Unified has prepared for the worst and sent out "potential" notices. "Teachers here are amazing," senior Naomi Hecht told Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez. ("L.A. students fight for quality education as their teachers get layoff notices.")

-- Richard Winton and Irfan Khan

Photo: Hamilton High School students sit in a grassy area in front of the school during a walkout Friday g to protest layoff notices being issued to some of their favorite teachers. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Trade Unions in City Confront a Rise in Nonunion Projects

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

Published: March 18, 2011 by the New York Times

A luxury apartment building is rising at 23rd Street and 10th Avenue, and, across town, one is being created inside an old Salvation Army building overlooking Gramercy Park. Other residential buildings and hotels are going up on 11th Avenue, West 18th Street and East 23rd Street.

All are signs that New York City’s real estate industry is clawing out of the recession. But they are noteworthy for another reason: they are being constructed without any union labor.

For most of the last century, the city’s construction unions were a symbol of labor strength in a pro-labor town, and their involvement in large projects was almost never in doubt. But just as public employees’ unions across the country are in the fights of their lives, the city’s major building unions are facing their own moment of reckoning.

While they are still a major presence, their share of the city’s $20 billion to $30 billion in annual construction work has dropped significantly in recent years. There are no official statistics; according to unionized construction companies, two out of five construction jobs in the city are now nonunion, though unions put the number at one in four. All agree that for many years, at least 85 percent of building jobs were union ones.

And the companies and unions are about to enter what may be their most tense contract negotiations in years, with the employers demanding large concessions and already angering labor leaders by taking their campaign directly to the workers with a Web site and in small group meetings around the city; subway ads may also be forthcoming.

“There’s enough pressure on everybody,” said Bobby Bonanza, business manager for the Mason Tenders District Council, which represents about 13,000 workers affected by the contracts. “We don’t need another Wisconsin in this town.”

The employers have backed off an initial demand for wage cuts, but they are still aiming for a 25 percent cut in labor costs, by reducing benefits and changing some work rules. They say these changes would allow them to better compete with nonunionized companies, which are winning jobs from developers because their costs are 20 to 30 percent cheaper.

“A combination of market erosion and the recession has permanently changed the financial structure of real estate in New York City,” said Louis J. Coletti, president of the Building Trades Employers’ Association. “This is not about a race to the bottom. It’s about our common enemy: nonunion contractors.”

All told, the negotiations involve 30 different unions and as many as 60,000 steamfitters, ironworkers, crane operators, laborers and carpenters. Union leaders say they have made numerous concessions since the recession started, including wage freezes on non-Manhattan projects, that have reduced overall labor costs by as much as 20 percent. But, they say, employers are now trying to increase profits by cutting benefits and exaggerating the loss of market share at a time when the national political climate has turned against unions.

Not so long ago, starting a large construction job, particularly in Manhattan, with nonunion labor was considered a provocation likely to ignite a pitched battle with carpenters, ironworkers and laborers intent on closing down the job. But during the building boom of the late 1990s and most of the last decade, there was enough work to go around that union workers were not terribly bothered if some jobs went nonunion.

But as the cost of land and construction materials skyrocketed, some developers began to become more cost-conscious and began looking for savings in labor costs, particularly by choosing cheaper nonunionized contractors. And lenders began to scrutinize costs more closely.

The unions and unionized employers argue that union laborers are more skilled and safer than nonunion laborers, and that it is far easier to mobilize large numbers of workers when they are organized. But over the last few years, nonunion construction companies like Flintlock became skilled in putting up midsize 10- to 30-story buildings, the kind of building where, along with interior finishing and renovation, the unions have been losing most of their market share.

Unionized contractors still have a lock on megaprojects like big office towers, including those under construction at the World Trade Center. But union leaders, construction executives and developers are closely watching a project in Long Island City, Queens, where H. Henry Elghanayan, a residential developer whose company traditionally uses union contractors, is expected to select a nonunion outfit to build a large complex with 700 apartments.

“If traditional construction managers that stuck with the unions start losing nine-figure jobs,” said one executive of a union contractor, who refused to be named so as not to further anger the unions, “that’s a game changer.”

Mr. Elghanayan said in an interview that he had yet to select a contractor. But, he added, “Everyone’s pressing to get total development costs down.”

David Von Spreckelsen, vice president of Toll Brothers, said his company built the first of two towers at its Northside Piers project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with union contractors. But as construction costs escalated in 2008, Toll Brothers turned to a nonunion contractor for the second tower, prompting unions to protest with five giant inflatable rats. The company now has three apartment buildings under construction in Manhattan with nonunion labor.

And this week, the developer of the Atlantic Yards megaproject in Brooklyn said it was seriously considering using a prefabricated method to build its residential high-rise. While most of the workers would be unionized, there would be fewer of them and they would earn less money because much of the labor would be done in a factory, where wage scales are lower than on the site.

The construction unions have long been the backbone of the city’s blue-collar middle class. A journeyman carpenter, for example, is now paid $46 an hour, with health, pension and other benefits bringing the total cost to $85. The total compensation for mason tenders, a less skilled position, is $58.

“We make a good salary, probably more than most office workers,” said Marc Spring, a union plumber for 25 years whose father was a union plumber for 40 years. “But we work harder than they do, out in the elements.”

 Mr. Spring acknowledged that “times were tough,” one reason that his local had already made concessions. Still, Mr. Spring said, he resents the constant talk of givebacks. “I don’t see how the developers aren’t making money,” he said.

Besides some benefit reductions, the employers want changes in some decades-old work rules, beginning with overtime. Workers now earn double pay for overtime; the construction companies want to reduce it to time and a half.

On most jobs, the workday starts when workers arrive at ground level, but on large jobs with many men sharing a hoist, it can take another half-hour to reach the actual work site on a high floor, and another half-hour to descend at the end of the day. Employers are proposing that workers be paid only from the time they reach their station to the time they leave it, and some unions have already agreed to this change.

They also want to end a requirement by the operating engineers, who operate cranes, bulldozers and other heavy equipment, that three workers be in place to work even when only one is needed. Although they are a tiny fraction of the work force, they are the highest-paid, often earning well over $200,000 a year, including overtime.

James Conway, an official of Local 14 of the Operating Engineers, declined to comment.

The employers, however, are wary of pressing too hard, because a strike by just one union could be enough to shut down many of the city’s major construction projects.

And despite the animosity among the unions and their employers, Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center who studies unions, said they have an important common ground. “Once you allow nonunion, lower-cost bidders to undercut the unions, it threatens everybody,” Professor Milkman said. “So there is a mutual interest at work here.”

Wisconsin Protesters Storm Washington

by Andrew Leonard, from salon.com

A Republican fundraising event gets an unwanted surprise: Boisterous solidarity for embattled public sector workers

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker may have won the first round of his battle against public sector unions, but judging by the energy visible in this video, the war is a long way from over. On Wednesday, hundreds of protesters crashed a fundraising event for the Wisconsin Republican Party in Washington D.C. A Salon videographer caught the action.

My favorite part: an interview with two Wisconsin high school girls, one of whom flashes a bright smile through her braces as she proudly notes that she's already participated in "around 30" protests so far.

 

 

Naomi Klein on Union Busting Bills: "A Frontal Assault on Democracy, a Corporate Coup D’Etat"

  

Also see Paul Krugman's "Shock Doctrine, USA."

The Republicans Creed: “To Hell With The Common Folk”

by Frank Thomas

Did I hear correctly that Wisconsin passed legislation aimed at eliminating the bargaining rights of workers? If true, it’s clear the ultra-right is determined to turn America into a governing autocratic anachy with the common folk being common servants at slave wages to serve the viscious avarice of the Kochs and like company. If this isn’t symptomatic of the war being declared on working class Americans, then I don’t know what is. It’s the Republican game plan of shifting the blame, shame, and pain onto the middle-class for systemic economic breakdowns caused by the upper class. I’m very sad for my country!

That the money-influenced bought Gov. Scott Walker and his  promotion of ending the basic rights of unions to represent workers as a way to reduce a state deficit he helped create is disgusting beyond words. The situation  we have now of other crony Republican Governors humping this solution to structural deficit problems – whose  primary origin lies in other directions – reminds me of the film, “Saving Private Ryan” in WWII. George Marshall initiated the assignment of an Army Ranger team to rescue Private Ryan since his three brothers had already been killed in battle actions. The code name given this very dangerous mission by the rescue team was “FUBAR.”

FUBAR meant, “F****d Up Beyond All Recognition.” This is exactly how I would describe the state of our governmental affairs today in handling deficits and a steady trend – that has been accelerating the last three decades (see my study of historical job growth) – of destroying and minimum-wage Wall-Marting of middle class jobs.

Wisconsin is setting a destabilizing societal divisive precedent of entrenching the upper 10% class that owns +85% of all wealth while placing all other blue-collar Americans in a fight to simply economically survive, and this struggle is only made worse without fair, effective union  representation. Is this what thousands of Private Ryan common folk soldiers nobly fought and died for in WWII? An expanding Have and Have Not Divide making us all ultimately the LOSERS ?

People, including the President, will get just what they deserve if they cannot muster the courage to stand up to the monied-interests’ rape  of our democracy by, among other ways, eliminating the average working man´s collective bargaining rights for obtaining a decent standard of living and job growth prospects. Until people unite and say, “Enough is Enough,” cannibalizing middle-class social nets such as Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid will be next on the ultra-right’s hit list. Gov. Scott Walker´s trampling on worker-bargaining rights in concert with job and benefit cut threats is just more nails in the coffin on America’s already sad state of social-cultural cohesion and equity for ALL citizens.

Yes, the right word for our current chaotic, brain-dead approach to  “Saving Our Nation’’  and solving in a banking, fiscally and economically balanced, creative fashion (like North Dakota) the nation’s short and long-term structural deficits can also best be described as  “FUBAR:  F****d Up Beyond All Recognition.”

Benjamin Disraeli (British Prime Minister and Novelist, 1804-1881) long ago principally captured admirably our race to institutionlizing an increasingly morally corrupt, massively class divided society based on money and survival of the fittest:

"Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws." "You speak of -- " said Egremont, hesitatingly, "THE RICH AND THE POOR." 

Frank Thomas
The Netherlands
March 15,2011

When Republicans Take Over the House, the Senate and the Presidency in 2012, What Happened in Wisconsin Will Happen on the National Level Only Worse

by John Lawrence

With the stroke of a pen Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin ended collective bargaining rights for workers in Wisconsin. How is it possible that 50 years worth of hard fought for rights can be ended with the stroke of a pen? Well, the Republicans control both houses of the bicameral legislature and the Governorship in Wisconsin. They can do whatever they want. If tomorrow they wanted to sell off state owned assets to their cronies, they could do it. In fact that's already in the budget bill that they're getting ready to pass next. The only reason that any of this has even come to national attention is that the 14 Democratic Senators, one of whose prescence was required to establish a quorum, left the state so that the original budget bill couldn't be passed. Now that they're back, Republicans have their quorum and can proceed to pass whatever they want. If tomorrow they want to pass a bill declaring that the moon is made of green Wisconsin cheese, they can do it.

These same battles are being fought out in every state in which Republicans have control of the political structure - namely, Ohio, Michigan, Florida and New Jersey among others. Voters, are you happy now? Governor Walker's bill also gives power over the state's Medicaid system known as BadgerCare to a political appointee taking it away from the legislature where it currently resides. Poor people kiss your health care good-bye in the state of Wisconsin. Other states will seek to follow suit. A little talked about provision of Walker's bill is that it would cut off $834 million in funding to the public school system. This would effectively cripple public schools already underfunded and double class sizes. Voters, are you happy now? But wait there's more. 

The Walker Budget bill expands the school voucher program to rich kids who want to attend private school and have the state government pay for part of their tuition. The voucher program was a poison pill started ostensibly to help poor black kids get a better education. But Walker's bill would let anyone regardless of income get a government voucher for private school tuition at the same time he is defunding the public school system. This is from the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

Voucher advocates have made clear for more than 20 years that their goal is to replace public education with a system of universal vouchers that includes private and religious schools. The heartbreaking drama currently playing in Milwaukee - millions of dollars cut from the public schools while vouchers are expanded so wealthy families can attend private schools in the suburbs - may be coming soon to a school district near you. ... The voucher program started in 1990, billed as an altruistic effort to help a few struggling community schools serving mostly poor black kids. There were only seven schools and 300 students, with the program costing $700,000. To most legislators, it seemed a worthwhile effort, sort of like throwing a few dollars in the church missionary basket. Even then, however, backers, such as Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation, envisioned a full-scale voucher program. Michael Joyce, the late head of the foundation, made no secret of his belief that public schools were akin to socialism. Vouchers were his free-market alternative. Bit by bit, budget by budget - as part of a long-term strategy - the program grew. The expansions always were couched in fine-sounding rhetoric that cloaked the program's harm to public education. This year, taxpayers are paying $131 million for the private school tuition of 21,000 students - making vouchers, in essence, one of the state's largest school districts, on par with Madison, Racine, Kenosha and Green Bay. With the expansion, vouchers will become the state's second-largest district, just behind Milwaukee. All along, hard-core voucher proponents were using poor black kids as pawns in their voucher chess game. More than a decade ago, a strategy paper for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation likened vouchers for low-income children to a "viable beachhead," a way "to win and hold new ground in the long march to universal school choice." Today, in Milwaukee, that long march is just about over. Vouchers are to be open, eventually, to any Milwaukee family, no matter how rich, to attend a private school anywhere in the county. The children of Milwaukee millionaires could conceivably receive $6,442 next year to help pay the $20,423 high school tuition at the private University School. The Walker budget goes out of its way to help voucher schools and harm Milwaukee Public Schools. While voucher funding will increase, with no limit on how much, MPS faces untold millions in budget cuts. Some of those cuts are directly due to vouchers, which reduce the amount of state aid MPS otherwise would receive. Milwaukee taxpayers, meanwhile, are forced to pick up the tab for more than a third of the voucher bill; already they pay $50 million a year. Overall, Walker is cutting $834 million in public education - eliminating state funding for school nurses, Advanced Placement courses, alternative education and children at-risk programs. There are also significant cuts in programs such as the school breakfast program, Head Start and bilingual aid. Funding for special education and other essential programs is flat, with no additional money even if need increases. ... Taken as a whole, the Walker budget is a blueprint for expanding private schools and destroying public schools. And there's nothing to stop this tragedy from spreading to the entire state. Unless, of course, legislators do the right thing and protect the American dream of a free and public education for all children.

So in addition to busting unions and privatizing the state's power plants, Walker's stealth plan includes defunding public schools and using the state's supposedly limited resources to fund an unlimited voucher program that pays part of a wealthy kid's tuition at a private school. Of course, poor kids will hardly be able to take advantage of Walker's Brave New World voucher program as they won't be able to afford the rest of the tuition. They will have served their purpose as "beachhead establishers." Again government taxpayer funds are used to help the wealthy at a time in which there is supposedly a budget crisis. But wait there's more. Walker's ginned up, phony "financial crisis" was brought on in the first place by his having given $140 million in tax cuts to corporations just after taking office. Then like Chicken Little he rushed out to announce that there was a $137 million budget deficit and draconian measures including busting unions, privatizing power plants and the public school system, screwing with BadgerCare and making elected state officeholders political appointees would of necessity have to be taken. Er, Walker you could rescind those tax breaks to your cronies... Just a thought.

Well, what does all this have to do with my main theme that Walker's power play of union busting and privatizing will look like child's play compared to what will happen on a national scale after Republicans win big in 2012? Simply this: if with a stroke of a pen Walker could reverse 50 years of progress in workers' rights, with the stroke of a pen the new Republican President backed by a Republican House and Senate (not to mention a Republican Supreme Court) can with a stroke of a pen put an end to Social Security and Medicare. The precedent has already been established that, despite a worker's having paid into social security over a lifetime, he or she has no constitutionally protected right to any of that money. Congress has the right to change the laws governing Social Security and Medicare at any time that they so choose.

This is from the Supreme Court's ruling in the Flemming vs Nestor case:

"The fact that workers contribute to the Social Security program's funding through a dedicated payroll tax establishes a unique connection between those tax payments and future benefits. More so than general federal income taxes can be said to establish 'rights' to certain government services. This is often expressed in the idea that Social Security benefits are 'an earned right.' This is true enough in a moral and political sense. But like all federal entitlement programs, Congress can change the rules regarding eligibility--and it has done so many times over the years. The rules can be made more generous, or they can be made more restrictive. Benefits which are granted at one time can be withdrawn, as for example with student benefits, which were substantially scaled-back in the 1983 Amendments.

"There has been a temptation throughout the program's history for some people to suppose that their FICA payroll taxes entitle them to a benefit in a legal, contractual sense. That is to say, if a person makes FICA contributions over a number of years, Congress cannot, according to this reasoning, change the rules in such a way that deprives a contributor of a promised future benefit. Under this reasoning, benefits under Social Security could probably only be increased, never decreased, if the Act could be amended at all. Congress clearly had no such limitation in mind when crafting the law. Section 1104 of the 1935 Act, entitled 'RESERVATION OF POWER,' specifically said: 'The right to alter, amend, or repeal any provision of this Act is hereby reserved to the Congress.' Even so, some have thought that this reservation was in some way unconstitutional. This is the issue finally settled by Flemming v. Nestor.

"In this 1960 Supreme Court decision Nestor's denial of benefits was upheld even though he had contributed to the program for 19 years and was already receiving benefits. Under a 1954 law, Social Security benefits were denied to persons deported for, among other things, having been a member of the Communist party. Accordingly, Mr. Nestor's benefits were terminated. He appealed the termination arguing, among other claims, that promised Social Security benefits were a contract and that Congress could not renege on that contract. In its ruling, the Court rejected this argument and established the principle that entitlement to Social Security benefits is not contractual right."

So these rights could go out the window with a stroke of a pen regardless of whether or not it had even been an issue in the campaign. And, although it is unthinkable to the average middle class American, Social Security benefits could be abruptly ended for everyone including current recipients with the stroke of a pen. It's not unthinkable, and the thinkable is definitely possible. Did Scott Walker make union busting a campaign issue? Of course not. The plan was to bust the unions, privatize the power plants and school system on a stealth basis before anyone knew what hit them. Thanks to the 14 Democratic Senators who absconded from Wisconsin, it didn't quite turn out that way. But that will not prevent Republicans from abolishing Social Security and Medicare when they gain control over the national governmental apparatus in 2012.

So voters and Tea Partiers, I ask again will you be happy then? After you have given total control of the US government to Republicans and they have ruined the public education system, privatized everything they can get their hands on and ended Social Security and Medicare? Of course they will be happy because Rush Limpballs, Glenn Beck, Fox News and assorted hate mongers will tell them that they have practically entered the Promised Land of Low Taxes and Small Government (except for the military-industrial complex). The billionaire Koch brothers will use their billions to run ads convincing voters of how happy they will be if only they will elect a Republican President in 2012 along with Republican majorities in the House and Senate. And like lemmings, Tea Partiers will follow them off the cliff. And all those mooches on taxpayer's money - the welfare queens, seniors and poor people - forget them. They are losers who should go out and get a job.

Undaunted! More Than 100,000 Wisconsinites Rally "To Take Our State Back!"

Published on Sunday, March 13, 2011 by The Nation

by John Nichols

"Wow! You go away for a couple of weeks and look at what happened!" shouted state Senator Jon Erpenbach, as he surveyed a crowd that organizers estimated at well over 100,000 that had rallied to welcome home Wisconsin's dissident senators.

Erpenbach and 13 other senators fled the state Capitol in mid-February, when Governor Scott Walker and his Republican allies were using their legislative majorities to strip state, county and municipal workers and teachers of their collective bargaining rights. That move blocked a vote on the legislation for three weeks, before the Republicans finally adopted a "nuclear strategy" to force adoption of the anti-union measure.

While opponents of the bill suffered a momentary legislative defeat, they enjoyed a dramatic political victory -- as a mass movement built, attracting hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites to mass rallies in Madison and communities across the state and causing the collapse of Walker's approval ratings even in Republican-sponsored polls.

That movement now proposes to recall at least three Republican state senators who backed the bill, shifting control of the chamber to the Democrats and restoring a system of checks and balances to what is now one-party government in Wisconsin.

Ultimately, the movement seeks to remove Walker from office. And its plans no longer seem unreasonable, as poll numbers suggest that the governor would be defeated by virtually any Democratic challenger in a new election.

The political dynamics are intense, and even the most optimistic critics of the governor understand that there is much work to do.

But, on Saturday, they celebrated the return of the senators.

It was a remarkable scene.

Madison Firefighters Local 311 members marched through the crowd, with pipes and drums blaring. The Rev, Jesse Jackson, actress Susan Sarandon and actor Tony Shalhoub (a Wisconsin native) joined the line of march as the firefighters wove their way through a crowd that filled the Capitol Square. Outside a hotel opposite the Capitol, the 14 senators appeared.

The deafening roars of approval shook Madison's downtown before the firefighters led the senators through the crowd to a stage set up at an entrance to the Capitol. A procession that should have taken minutes took an hour, and when the group approached the stage it was almost impossible to move. But, finally, they arrived to chants of "Thank you! Thank you!"

Their messages, passionate and pointed, suggested support for the removal of their Republican colleagues and a sense of solidarity with a movement that has made the rights of workers central to a broader message about democratic renewal.

"We are going to take our state back. We are going to take our rights back," declared state Senator Julie Lassa, a central Wisconsin Democrat who told the crowd, "I have never been prouder to be a Wisconsinite."

That was a common sentiment Saturday.

And there was a lot of pride to go around at the biggest rally yet -- a gathering that former Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Ed Garvey put at close to 150,000.

It was the largest political rally ever in Madison.

And it was one of the largest pro-labor rallies in American history.

From the start, the numbers have told the story of Wisconsin’s resistance, and its resilience.

The tens.

The hundreds.

The thousands.

The tens of thousands.

The hundreds of thousands.

Wisconsinites from every background, every religion, every politics and every job have filled the Capitol Square for the past month.

Their message has been clear and unequivocal. They oppose Scott Walker’s assault on working families. They oppose the lawless actions of legislative leaders who are more determined to advance the governor’s political agenda than to respect their colleagues or to serve the interests of the whole state.

This has been an exhilarating, frustrating, depressing and empowering time.

Emotions have soared and collapsed.

But Wisconsinites are a resilient people. Nothing Scott Walker does to the citizens of the state will be as long-lasting or meaningful as what those citizens will do for the state when they remove him—and those who have supported him—from office.

Wisconsin’s resilience is rooted in its traditions. Wisconsinites learned to work hard in factories and on farms.

Most Wisconsinites can trace their roots to a homestead on a country road. The is and will always be “America’s Dairyland,” a farm state with a regard for those who work the land.

So when the farmers of Wisconsin arrived Saturday, on tractors that rolled in from across the state, Wisconsinites brought this movement full circle.

The tractorcade, organized by the Wisconsin Farmers Union and Family Farm Defenders, began a day of rallying at the Capitol that drew the largest yet—and that signaled the determination of Wisconsinites to keep fighting the Walker agenda.

“The governor wants to divide us,” explained western Wisconsin farmer Joel Greeno, who will ride his tractor into the Capitol Square this morning. “But that won’t happen. The governor’s got his corporate contributors. But the state employees and the teachers, they’ve got us. Farmers understand that when you cut funding for road crews and schools, our rural communities get hurt. And we’ve been hurt enough.”

Wisconsin workers and farmers have, in the words of the tractorcade organizers, decided to “Pull Together!” That’s a slogan that recalls the historic organizing of the farmer-labor movements of the upper Midwest, which had their expression in Wisconsin in the Progressive Party that sent Robert M. La Follette Jr. to the US Senate and elected Phil La Follette as governor in the 1930s.

It has been a long time since Wisconsin has been this united, and since the farmers and workers of the state have spoken in so loud and clear a voice.

On Saturday, one of the returning senators may have put it best. Referring to the decision of the senators to leave for Illinois in order to open up a broader debate, Bob Jauch, a Democrat from northern Wisconsin told the crowd: "We did not weaken democracy when we went to the land of Lincoln. We strengthened it."

Then tens and tens and tens of thousands who were listening to him roared their approval, chanting what has become the slogan of the movement: "This is what democracy looks like!"

© 2010 The Nation

John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols is also author of Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders' Cure for Royalism.

more John Nichols

Collective Bargaining Essential to Democracy

By Bruce T. Boccardy

Posted Mar 05, 2011 @ 06:33 PM

Last update Mar 05, 2011 @ 08:51 PM, from The Herald News

Political events in Wisconsin have questioned the necessity of collective bargaining. The governor of Wisconsin notwithstanding, collective bargaining is recognized as a human right in international conventions, constitutions, and courts.

Our Constitution addresses the right of collective bargaining in the thirteenth amendment. The amendment appears to refer to only the issue of slavery. However, according to the Supreme Court in 1911, the purpose of the thirteenth amendment was not simply to eliminate slavery, but release one person’s labor from the exploitation of another.

The Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932 was the primary statute that declared the right of collective bargaining. This was followed by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Both confirmed that right.

Today, corporate power is strangling the natural American impulse of political democracy. Collective bargaining is an extant instrument that ensures at least a modicum of fairness for employees.

Corporate billionaires pay swarms of lobbyists to influence legislators to enact anti-union legislation. This cohort also transfers gobs of cash to legislators as the Koch brothers did for the governor of Wisconsin. Additionally, they finance reactionary think tanks that churn our staggering amounts of false data. Individual employees are obviously no match for such corporate power. Unions are essential to balance that asymmetrical relationship as a “countervailing power,” as coined by economist John Kenneth Galbreath.

The other power facing employees is government power. Like corporations, they wield an enormous amount of economic power over a vast workforce. Moreover, public sector union employees are subjected to the same work issues as private sector employees. It is hypocritical to deny them the same protections that private union employees have won.

Our history is replete with patterns of employer abuse absent a union with the collective bargaining instrument. Employees were routinely underpaid, overworked and dismissed unjustly at the caprices of employers. Their lives were arbitrarily disrupted and sent into financial and personal chaos. The issue of collective bargaining crystallizes our justification to provide a serious voice for those who perform the work in our cities and towns.

Decent work standards that facilitated the growth of the middle and working class emanated from collective bargaining. These included the 40-hour workweek, the weekend, vacation time, employer-supported health insurance, pensions, family and medical leave, and basic safety and health protections in the work environment. A union contract can prevent splenetic supervisors from unfairly unleashing their wrath on employees.

When unions improve the work conditions of their members, there is a concentric effect that can benefit all working people. The non-partisan Economic Policy Institute released a report in August 2003 concluding that unions have contributed to employment standards and practices adopted throughout the nation. The record shows that when unions are strong, wages and salaries increase for all. Health care coverage and pensions are strengthened. When private and public unions are weak, the quality of life for our families and communities is jeopardized.

Moreover, unions have contributed to legislation and standards that benefit all working people such as the Occupational and Safety and Health Act of 1970 and the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993.

Finally, there is no correlation between states that have collective bargaining rights and states burdened with large deficits. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in January this year and the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities this February confirmed this. States that deny employees bargaining rights such as Nevada, North Carolina, and Arizona have huge deficits of over 30 percent. Others states that possess bargaining rights such as Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Montana have smaller deficits of less than 10 percent.

State budget deficits are not the product of collective bargaining, but largely reflect the disastrous impact of our latest recession. The test for states now is to provide essential services to cities and towns with fair budget and tax policies that do not break the backs and spirits of middle and low income folks.

Unions are demonstrably imperfect entities. However, without collective bargaining rights, employment conditions are flagrantly rigged for corporations and governmental bureaucrats. Collective bargaining is the sine qua non for union members. It is an instrument to ensure some measure of economic democracy. Our cherished institutions of political democracy require an authentic economic democracy to achieve the just aspirations of all working people.

Bruce Boccardy is the president of Local 888, of the Service Employees International Union, representing public employees throughout Massachusetts.

Michael Moore's Speech in Madison, WI

 

Governor Walker's Budget Bill Proposes to Sell Off State Power Facilities to Private Investors on a No-Bid Basis

by John Lawrence

Not only does Scott Walker of Wisconsin want to bust the public workers' unions, he wants to sell off state facilities to private investors on a no bid basis and for any amount he deems appropriate. Needless to say they will be give aways to cronies and campaign contributors including Koch Industries. He took a phone call recently from a  David Koch impersonator. David Koch is a billionaire and big campaign contributor who is in the power and oil business. What a good way to reward him! Here is the language from Walker's Budget Bill:

16.896 Sale or contractual operation of state−owned heating, cooling, and power plants. (1) Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state−owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).

Notice that Walker is proposing to privatize the state's power plants by selling them to anyone he pleases for any amount he chooses. This is precisely how crony capitalism works. Public facilties are sold off to cronies for practically nothing thereby enriching campaign contributors and other financial backers. This is how it was done in Iraq, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia and other countries influenced by US policies. Now Republican Governors are proposing to do it here. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, explains how countries (and now states) are privatized practically overnight by ramming through legislation. Certainly, in the case of Wisconsin, Governor Walker's aim was to ram through legislation with no discussion which a) busted public service unions, b) defunded the public education system to the tune of $900 million and c) privatized the state's power plants among other things. If it weren't for the fact that 14 Democratic Senators took flight to prevent the establishment of a quorum, the bill would have gone through and Wisconsonites would have awakened to find themselves living in a vastly different state than they thought they lived in.

Here is the video:

 

It wasn't too long ago that California privatized its power system to Enron. Remember the Enron - one of whose confiscated emails purported to "screw California Grandmas"? The privatization of California's power plants caused energy prices to increase 800% and caused rolling blackouts as Enron traders took plants offline during peak periods in order to increase the wholesale price of electricity. That wasn't that long ago - just about 10 years. What happened to California could well happen now to Wisconsin if Scott Walker's Budget Bill gets passed.

Scott Walker's Budget Bill is nothing more than the Shock Doctrine writ large and applied to Wisconsin to be followed by the same procedure in other states with Republican Governors. First they will ram the legislation through busting unions, privatizing public facilities, converting civil service positions to political appointees, eliminating environmental controls. All these things and more are done by Scott Walker's bill. The only thing is that Scott Walker did not figure that any of this would come to the light of day until it was too late. If it weren't for the 14 Democratic Senators leaving, none of this would have received any publicity at all. That was the plan. Instead, regardless of the outcome, the American people are starting to wise up. Scott Walker created his own budget crisis by giving huge tax breaks to corporations and then trying to take this money out of the hides of union workers, the school system and by selling off public assets. This would have resulted in the Enronization of the state of Wisconsin. Fortunately, Enron was put out of business thanks to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, even though Enron bit the dust, this doesn't mean that Republicans today aren't pursuing their quest to privatize everything, bust unions and gut regulatory agencies such as the SEC. Unions are the largest contributors to the Democratic Party. Union busting will do much to eliminate the Democratic Party as a serious contender in American politics.

Lack of Coverage of Saturday’s Rally Displays the San Diego Union Tribune's Tea Party Favoritism and Spurs Letter Writing Campaign.

by Frank Gormlie on February 27, 2011 from the OB Rag

in: Civil Rights, Media, Popular, San Diego

The total lack of coverage by the San Diego U-T of Saturday’s 1000-strong demonstration in support of the Wisconsin protests here on the steps of the County Admin Building displays the local daily’s favoritism toward the tea parties.

And it has spurred us to mount a letter-writing campaign to the U-T. (See below.)

Here is the OB Rag’s coverage of the rally from yesterday.

In today’s (Sunday, Feb. 27) Sunday edition of the Union-Tribune and in its online SignOnSanDiego, there is coverage of protests in Libya, of course, and even of nation-wide protests in support of the Madison unions, with a few words of how a thousand people rallied in Denver, CO, and briefly of how there were rallies in New York City and even in Los Angeles.  But still not one word nor one photo of the San Diego Labor Council sponsored event on Saturday the 26th.

The U-T did have coverage of the Black  History Month Parade and that a couple hundred people watched it, but nothing about San Diego’s unions and progressive organizations holding the largest non-electoral demonstration within San Diego in months, and how up to a 1,000 people attended.

Our local daily, historically conservative despite significant demographic changes in its home town and new ownership that vowed to represent the community, did not publish one word, not one tidbit about the demonstration. Yet on last Wednesday of this past week, it carried an article and photo of a local tea party event where less than twenty people attended.  Plus on Friday, they published a reference to that same event, its sponsor and spokesperson.

So the “new” U-T covered a tiny tea party thing but intentionally ignored a labor-sponsored event fifty times the tea party event size. What do you call this, besides favoritism toward a politics that holds onto a radical, far-right agenda?

The U-T is supposed to represent all of us, and inform the community at-large about important news and events. Yet a large progressive event that does not set well with the editorial policies of its owners gets no mention. This must be countered! We must do something!

What to do?

We have something … – please join us …:

We are today mounting a letter-writing campaign to the San Diego U-T !

Write a letter to them complaining of their lack of coverage – and then send us a copy – or leave a comment here below.  Please send us a copy so we can keep track – send it to us at our email:  [email protected]

Here is the U-T‘s letter-writing requirements, reprinted verbatim:

San Diego UT
http://www.signonsandiego.com/letters-commentaries/#letters

To be considered for publication, a letter must include a daytime phone number and, if faxed or mailed, be signed. E-mail it to [email protected], or fax it to (619) 260-5081. You can also send it to Letters Editor, The San Diego Union-Tribune, P.O. Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191.

Yes, America Still Needs Unions

Posted on Feb 23, 2011 by truthdig

By Joe Conason

“There was once a need for unions, but they’ve outlived their purpose,” said a nice lady interviewed on the radio in Tennessee just the other day. Annoyed by the spectacle of tens of thousands of teachers, firefighters, cops and other public employees rallying to protect their rights in Wisconsin, she was saying what more than a few Americans think about the labor movement.

They ought to think again—unless they want their children and grandchildren to become the peons of a corporate oligarchy.

Behind the vague notion that unions are somehow obsolete is the suggestion that workers—and their families—are amply protected by the law’s provisions prohibiting child labor and mandating minimum wages, safe working conditions, overtime pay and all the other standards that we now take for granted.

But if you listen carefully to “conservatives” of the ilk of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and billionaire financier David Koch, you’ll learn that they want to do away with most if not all of those advances, hard won by the labor movement and its allies over the past century. Their core belief is that the state should never interfere with capital—and therefore every law defending workers or consumers is a constitutional abomination. Their ultimate project is to return this country to the absolute dominion of the wealthy that existed before the rise of the Progressive Movement and the New Deal.

Politicians like Walker know better than to articulate their goals so unappealingly. Invariably, they prefer to talk about fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets, hoping that nobody will notice (in Wisconsin or Washington) how they squander vast sums on tax breaks for the wealthy while demanding “sacrifice” from the middle class and the poor. Breaking unions is the only way, they tell us, to restore jobs and ensure prosperity.

But if you thumb back through the pages of our economic history over the past hundred years or so, a number of obvious facts stand out. First, the United States enjoyed a far better distribution of income and a steady improvement of our productivity and power when the labor movement was strong. Second, labor always struggled to expand human and civil rights for everyone, whether or not they happened to belong to unions. And third, the success of labor’s effort toward a more equitable society ensured broad prosperity for decades. As labor’s power diminished, income and wealth skewed upward—and helped drive the economy into stagnation and recession.

So Americans not only display ingratitude when they denigrate unions, which have done so much to improve the lives of ordinary people, but ignorance as well. Even in its terribly weakened condition, the labor movement remains a bulwark against the kind of corporate tyranny that would swiftly make serfs of the rest of us.

This week, a prankster pretending to be David Koch phoned Gov. Walker and recorded their chummy, obnoxious, highly revealing conversation. Hearing the governor eagerly agree as his top contributor rambled on about union “bastards” was like listening to a conversation between a robber baron and a servile politician of the Gilded Age. Here was the new version of the unvarnished “conservatism” that ruled us before our forebears learned to stand upright, join together and fight for democracy.

It is more than a funny coincidence that the Wisconsin uprising echoes the revolutionary democratic fervor currently sweeping across North Africa and the Mideast.

Common to every dictatorship, from the fascist and communist despots of the 20th century to their counterparts in today’s authoritarian societies, is the impulse to forbid workers from organizing. The legacy of those who established those rights with their blood and toil, both here and abroad, is not ours to surrender to bullies such as Walker and Koch. Like all of our liberties, it is a trust to be guarded—by every means available.

© 2011 Creators.com

 

It’s Time to Support Our Employees

By Rocky Neptun

The greatest threat of the 21^st Century is not terrorism or religious fanaticism or nationalism….. it is concentrated power – both political and economic – within the corporate state. That very power, concentrated in an elite, an oligarchy, whether national or local, is an interlocking system of wealth, politics, media, and corporations whose major purpose is to destroy the ability of individual citizens to organize together for the common good through the mechanism of government.

   Their goal is unregulated greed, poverty wages, the right to pollute, the ability to sell dangerous drugs and unsafe products, the isolation and powerlessness of each citizen to vote or bargain or even plead in the media for a better life for their children. Theirs is a feudal world, where the rich and CEO’s are the new Barons and Earls, and people are trapped in stratified classes, almost castes, without access to education or economic opportunity.

    They seek hierarchy, where they and their children will always be on top of the pyramid. A return to the social tyranny of Dickens’ day, when to be poor was a moral sin, a personal failure and a crime against society. They pretend to favor a “market” system, knowing full-well there is no more competition in monopoly capitalism, where large corporations have bought off most politicians and judges and, like Wal-Mart, have the power to overrule city councils.

   God bless the rich, is their motto; no one should have enough to eat, a warm place to sleep, medical aid, a good education, unless they have the money to pay for it. They see virtue in selfishness, weakness in sharing.  They would fight social responsibility, whether it’s feeding a child or saving our human species from extinction because of global warming.

   From Washington, D.C to Madison, Wisconsin to San Diego, the goal of the corporate state is to destroy community government and its regulatory power for the common good. Martin Luther King, Jr. is long gone, the Civil Rights movement tamed, the national unions defanged and almost irrelevant with over 40 years of corporate bought anti-union legislation and managerial intimidation, the Democratic Party, run by opportunists and political whores has drummed its left-wing into submission or flight, people of faith who once fought systemic injustice, what St. Paul called “social sin” as opposed to individual sin, now hide, writing an occasional check for charity and what was once the “liberal class,” as Chris Hedges calls it, has become a useless hodge-podge of designer causes, identity ghouls and mouse warriors fighting injustice in their underwear with e-mails.

   The last bulwark against the corporate state, the last vestige of an organized group of people of conscience, who see value in the public commons – whether it is libraries, free recreational facilities, public schools, health clinics, public transportation, unadulterated food, safe working conditions, clean air and water, or a safe haven for those to fragile, mentally or physically, to survive in dog-eat-dog corporatism – are the public employee unions. That is why they are under attack in Madison and San Diego.

   The newly elected Governor of Wisconsin, elected with millions of corporate dollars, taking a playbook from the oligarchy in San Diego, has blamed that state’s budget deficit on public employee unions. But unlike our city, where the unions were tamed at the turn of the Twentieth Century, when organizing Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) were murdered by police, tarred and feathered by vigilantes and run out of town by the hysteria of the wealth based media, both the city of Madison and the state of Wisconsin have a grand history of struggling for workers. Most of the rights we enjoy today as employees were first secured in Wisconsin.

   For the right-wing governor to propose that public employee unions lose the right of collective bargaining guts the whole purpose of a union - an alliance of employees to secure safe and just working conditions by uniting for a common purpose. This very notion of individuals alone, isolated, powerless in the workplace is what the corporate state has in store for us all – it is their fundamental neo-liberal dogma. To organize for the common good, whether employees for decent wages or citizens fighting pollution in a nearby stream, is bad for business and the mechanism which allows for a social consciousness must be crushed. The very thought of communal responsibility or action for anything that threatens the corporate state, whether it is safe medicine or protection for our neighborhood mom and pop stores, must be made to seem not only impossible, but radical and outside the parameters of the personal capability of any individual.

   San Diego’s Attack on Unions

   San Diego’s oligarchic assault on its public employee unions was by stealth. The Republican game plan, helped by a few self-serving Democratic city council members, was to slowly squeeze every dime into corporate welfare over the years, subsidizing ball parks, hotels, golf courses, infrastructure projects for hundreds of corporations and call it “redevelopment” while under-funding their legal, contractual obligations to pay into the pension accounts of their employees and then, when the whole bait and switch game was discovered blame it on “greedy” city employees.

   It was a win-win situation for the radical right. Bankrupt the city with corporate welfare; then, proclaim the only solution is to turn the services and assets of the city over to the very snake oil salesman and corporate crooks who benefited from the shell game (privatization or outsourcing, they call it) and crush the public employee unions under an Orwellian campaign of media lies and distortions.

   Over and over, like an unattended car alarm, loud, viciously intrusive, repeat the lie. The talking heads parroting the politicians parroting the lobbyists parroting the journalists parroting the accountants parroting the attorneys and back again. An endless chain of articles, sound bites at 10, political speeches, official pronouncements, all designed to inculcate the citizen, like a drill sergeant, to penetrate his or her very psyche: then, in military cadence, repeat the chant …."sound off…who’s at fault..1-2-3….sound off…the unions…1-2-3….” until it reverberates through the consciousness rhythmically and ceaselessly. 

    The real problem with our city, unlike Wisconsin, is that there is no real solidarity between people who work, unionized employees and the struggle against pitiful wages in the San Diego labor market – the worst cost of living to wages ratio of any major city in the nation. Where were the public employee unions when the grocery workers went on strike in 2003? Where has the AFL-CIO Labor Council been all these years as the average San Diegan’s wages have stagnated and lost ground due to inflationary pressures? Jerry Burkiewicz, head of the Council for many years, can take a flush job with Sempra Corporation, which exploits its monopoly energy position, lies to government regulators and bribes Mexicans politicians so they can pollute without penalty, but he has never agitated or called for a living wage for all who work in San Diego.

   The problem with unions in San Diego is that unlike the Wobblies, who say an injury to one employee is an injury to all employees, most unions follow the corporate model of bottom line economics and “what’s in it for me” advocacy. First, the union officials take care of themselves, then their members, and then political allies. And the rest of us who work for a living; well, we’re on our own, isolated, without any bargaining power – just like the governor of Wisconsin wants for his employees.

   But in spite of the limitations and often myopic view taken by union leaders, the rank and file members of the public employee unions are our teachers, librarians, nurses, trash collectors, lifeguards and hundreds of other taskers whose collective responsibility is to build our common capital, the life blood of society which cannot be commodified. It is neighborhood spirit, history, culture, attitude, a shared narrative of belonging and apportionment as members of a community, compassion and empathy, fairness and justice, and, ultimately, a sense of subjective purpose, personhood which cannot be bought and sold in a corporate state.

   Public employees work for us, not Wal-Mart. As their employers, we should follow the Golden Rule, not the corporate rule, and treat them as we would want to be treated. In San Diego, we have been silent far too long in defense of these wonderful, vital community members.

      *****

Rocky Neptun is director of the San Diego Renters Union.

From the Front Lines in Madison, WI

Published on Sunday, February 20, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

by Kristine Mattis

As someone who has been involved in the protests in Madison for the past six days, I find the news media coverage of the momentous events in this town to in no way portray the reality of what is going on here. In their attempts to constantly be balanced, the news media seem to have lost all ability to be accurate.

The mass protests by unions and their allies that have occurred in Madison, WI, resulted after an abrupt announcement by Governor Walker late last Friday, Feb. 11, that he was introducing and fast-tracking a so-called “Budget Repair” bill, which would not only deeply cut benefits to public workers, but effectively strip unions of all of their collective bargaining rights. The response to the Governor’s move was rapid and in no way orchestrated or long-planned – there was absolutely no possible time for that. By late Monday, Feb 14, the WI state legislature announced a hearing of the bill in the Joint Finance Committee which was open for public testimony. It was then that unions and affected public sector workers began to try to organize to fight the bill.

Interestingly, members of the public, including myself, arrived early Tuesday morning to have our positions heard in the committee hearing on the bill. When the public testimony began, numerous media outlets were present to cover the proceedings. The media portrayed the hearing as a chance for “both sides” to have their voices heard, as if this were an even dispute between two viewpoints with equally numbered constituents. That was not the case. The clerk’s office documented testimony against the bill versus for the bill to be roughly 20 to 1, at least. Moreover, I know first hand that many of the bill supporters who spoke before and after I did had not been waiting in line with the rest of us. Where did they come from? They seemed to be placed into the queue somehow, conveniently, very early in the day when the media was present. As the proceeding wore on, few if any supporters of the bill were present at all.

These six days of protests have been completely non-violent and peaceful. There have been rumblings that protesters have “trashed” the capitol. That is completely false. Members of unions, particularly the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) and the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants’ Association (MGAA), have been regularly organizing volunteer crews to clean up trash and litter.

As crowds swelled from approximately 13,000 on Tuesday, to around 70,000 (some estimate 100,000) on Saturday, the media finally began to take notice. But curiously, most media outlets only began to show up when the Tea Party announced it plans for a counter-rally on Saturday. Contrary to sources, these Saturday rallies did not consist of a meeting of disputing views in virtually equally numbers, nor were they a “clash.” The Walker supporters numbered roughly 700-1000 at most, while the anti-bill, pro-union activists outnumbered them nearly 100 to 1. Furthermore, there was no violence and no confrontation between opposing sides. (But interestingly, it was the first day that the capitol police posted signs on the capitol building stating “No Firearms Allowed.”) The Tea Party contingent barely made a blip with their paltry turnout.

As far as the actual issue at hand, most media outlets merely mimicked the talking points repeated ad infinitum by Governor Scott Walker, and did no investigating into the veracity of his claims, nor any critical questioning about the situation in Wisconsin. Here are some facts:

1. The state of Wisconsin is not facing a financial crisis. Though specific numbers have been continually disputed and some even claim that the state faces a surplus at the end of the 2009-2011 budget, what is clear is that Wisconsin’s financial woes are moderate at most, and do not constitute a dire situation. The $3.6 billion shortfall that Walker keeps repeating is based on the State Budget Office Analysis which calculated the 2011-2013 biennial figures based on agency requests. These requests always exceed actual monies allocated. The 2011-2013 actual budget has not even come out yet. Walker is misrepresenting these details. Moreover, Governor Walker was unconcerned about budget matters when he offered over $140 million in tax incentives to out-of-state multinational corporations, but now he is suddenly unable to afford to take care of his in-state workforce. The “crisis” is manufactured.

2. The government employee unions bargained for and ratified contracts late last year that provided numerous concessions, including but not limited to freezes in compensation for two years and increased health insurance premiums. Unions are not opposed to “sacrifices”; in fact, they had ALREADY agreed to them.

3. The erosion of collective bargaining rights has nothing at all to do with the contrived “Budget Repair.” Stripping unions of their freedom to negotiate will do nothing to help alleviate deficits.

4. The workers in the private sector have not been voluntarily sacrificing for the public good; pay cuts and loss of benefits have been thrust upon them without any say on their part, precisely because they do not have unions to support them.

5. The rhetoric spewed by the right, such as “I lost my pension, so should you” is akin to saying “My legs were cut off, now yours should be, too.” Unionists would prefer that our legs not be cut off – and we would like to see all non-union workers walking again too. Our battle is for the rights of ALL workers, and our victories are YOUR victories. This is trickle-up economics – and it actually works.

6. Union workers are not lazy slackers; indeed they do some of the most difficult jobs imaginable, such as being home-health care workers, factory laborers, and teachers.

7. The gap between rich and poor started to increase in the 1970s and has reached its widest margin today. Coincidentally, during that same time period, massive tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthy have been mounting.

8. The people who have not sacrificed are the wealthy and corporations. They have the ability to repair these purported budget deficits, yet those who can barely make a decent living are instead called upon to lose what little they have. All the while, Wall Street flourishes and the rich continue to accumulate more and more of the financial wealth of the nation.

9. The struggle in Wisconsin is not about my union or any other union; it is class warfare, plain and simple. It is a battle for decent human rights and against the systematic, concerted and well-orchestrated effort to remove all the rights of workers in this country. Anyone and everyone who makes less than a six-figure income – i.e. the poor and middle class - should be outraged by this immoral and unjust bill and united in our effort to protect our right to a decent living.

Why is it that those who have never had to worry about money, never had to sacrifice, and never had to fight for anything in their lives continually get more and more while working folks get less and less? And why, inexplicably, do other working folks support this race to the bottom?

The corporatization of America has already occurred; now we are well into the third-worldification of America.

We Wisconsin workers are fighting for you and fighting for this country. We must win.

Kristine Mattis is PhD student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at UW-Madison, and a member of the Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA), the union of graduate employees. She was also previously a secondary school teacher and a member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA). www.rebelpleb.blogspot.com