LA Progressive » Labor

Labor Pains: A Fable for Our Times

Walter M. Brasch — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:28:03 +0000

Once, many years ago, in a land far away between two oceans, with fruited plains, amber waves of grain, and potholes on its highways, there lived a young man named Sam.

Now, Sam was a bright young man who wanted to work and save money so he could go to school and become an electrician. But the only job open in his small community was at the gas station. So, for two years, Sam pumped gas, washed windshields, checked dipsticks and tire pressure, smiled and chatted with all the customers, gave them free drinking glasses when they ordered a fill-up, and was soon known as the best service station attendant in town.

But then the Grand Caliphs of Oil said that Megamania Oil Empire, of which they all had partial ownership, caused them to raise the price of gas.

“We’re paying 39 cents a gallon now,” they cried, “how can you justify tripling our costs?” they demanded.

“That’s business,” said the Chief Grand Caliph flippantly. But, to calm the customer fury, he had a plan. “We will allow you the privilege of pumping your own gas, washing your own windows, checking your car’s dipsticks and tire pressure, and chatting amiably with yourselves,” said the Caliph. “If you do that, we will hold the price to only a buck or two a gallon.”

And the people were happy. All except Sam, of course, who was unemployed.

But, times were good, and Sam went to the local supermarket, which was advertising for a minimum wage checkout clerk. For three years, he worked hard, scanning all groceries and chatting amiably with the customers. And then one day his manager called him into the office.

“Sam,” said the boss, “we’re very pleased with your work. You’re fired.” From corporate headquarters had come a decision by the chain’s chief bean counter that there weren’t enough beans for their executives to go to Europe to search for more beans.

“But,” asked Sam, “Who will scan the groceries?”

“The customers will,” said the boss. “We’ll even have a no-hassle machine that will take their money and maybe even give change.”

“But won’t they object to buying the groceries, scanning them, bagging them, and shoving their money into a faceless machine?”

“Not if we tell them that by doing all the work, the cost will be less,” said the manager.

“But it won’t,” said Sam.

The manager thought a moment, and then brightly pointed out, “We’ll just say that the cost of groceries won’t go up significantly if labor costs were less. Besides, we even programmed Canmella the Circuit-enhanced Clerk to tell customers to have a nice day.”

Now, others may have sworn, cried, or punched out their supervisor, but this is a G-rated fairy tale, and it wouldn’t be right to leave Sam to flounder among the food. By cutting back on luxuries, like food and clothes, Sam saved a few dollars from his unemployment checks, and finally had enough to go to a community college to learn to become an electrician. After graduating at the top of his class, an emaciated and homeless Sam got a job at Acme Industries.

For nine years, he was a great electrician, often making suggestions that led to his company becoming one of the largest electrical supplies manufacturers in the country. And then one day one of the company’s 18 assistant vice-presidents called Sam into a small dingy office, which the company used for such a day. “You’re the best worker we have,” the AVP joyfully told Sam, “but all that repetitive stress has cut your efficiency and increased our medical costs. In the interest of maximizing profits, we have to replace you.”

“But who can do my job?” asked Sam.

“Not who,” said the manager, “but what. We’re bringing in robots. They’re faster and don’t need breaks, vacations, or sick days. Better yet, they don’t have union contracts.”

“So you are firing me,” said Sam.

“Not at all. We had to let a few dozen other workers go so there would be room for the robots, and we won’t be hiring any new workers, but because of your hard work, we’re reassigning you to oil the robots. At least until we design robots that can oil the other robots.”

For three years, Sam oiled, polished, and cleaned up after the robots. Sometimes, he even had to rewire them. And then the deputy assistant senior director of Human Resources called him into her office.

“No one can oil and polish as well as you can,” she said, but the robots are getting very expensive and we still have several hundred workers who are taking lobster and truffles from the mouths of our corporate executives, “so we’re sending all of our work to somewhere in Asia. Or maybe it’s Mexico. Whatever. The workers there will gladly design and assemble our products for less than a tenth what we have to pay our citizens.”

“You mean I’m fired?!” said a rather incredulous Sam.

“Not fired. That’s so pre-NAFTA. You’ve been downsized.”

“Downsized?!”

“If you want, we can also say you’ve been outsourced. How about right-sized. That’s a nicer word. Would you prefer to be right-sized?”

By now, Sam was no longer meek. He no longer was willing to accept whatever he was told.

“The work will be shoddier,” said Sam. “There will be problems.”

“Of course there will be,” said the lady from HR. “That’s why we hired three Pakistani goat herders to solve customer complaints.”

“Our citizens won’t stand for this,” said a defiant Sam.

“As long as the product is cheaper, our people will gladly go to large non-union stores and buy whatever it is that we tell them to buy.”

And she was right.

Walter Brasch
Wanderings

Walter Brasch is an award-winning journalist and former university professor. His latest book is the social issues mystery novel, Before the First Snow, available at amazon and other book dealers.

Unemployment: Shadows and Reality

Kathleen Peine — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:00:40 +0000

The unemployment report came out recently, and Punxatawny Phil saw a service sector job — that means six more years of growth. Or something like that. It’s all very complicated.

Actually what’s complicated is the trickery involved. The unemployment rate that we have delivered to us from the usual outlets/suspects is not the same creature it was prior to 1994. Back then, people who flat gave up looking for work were still counted in the numbers. Now they are invisible.

The carefully titrated rate also doesn’t include the underemployed—individuals who perhaps want to work full-time but aren’t provided that option. As individuals fall off the rolls they fall into a void.

Our single-digit unemployment rate is actually around 22% if measured in the pre-1994 reality-based math. If you aren’t already aware of the site, shadowstats.com does a marvelous job exhibiting the gritty truth.

I think if you try to follow what I’m saying, you’ll realize that by subtracting the permanently discouraged job seeker, and ignoring the partially employed poverty level toilers, you’ll realize the only uptick in job growth was in oiled up slave boys for Madonna’s half-time show. I was embarrassed to know that, but it doesn’t stop me from bringing you the facts because I care. Sadly by the time the vo-tech greased up slave boy programs graduate their newly inflated classes (excited about the potential jobs) – most benefit to cost ratios will be gone due to the glut in the market. It’s all glamorous until you’re forced to take the 14 hour a week job cleaning pools with a gold plated codpiece (that rusts — it’s not real gold). You’re there dragging the skimmer as you wonder how you’ll pay that $94,000 to Sallie Mae.

But perhaps you will look for a sympathetic ear from your president. President Obamney (really, like it matters which one wins. Let’s just call ‘em Obamney). If you tell him your sad tale, he might say “interesting” in regard to your plight. That’s what happened when the current president fielded questions from the populace the other night.

Jennifer Wedel was gauche enough to ask the president why H1-B visas were still being provided for foreign workers in areas such as engineering, when citizens like her husband (a semi-conductor engineer) could not find work. As you may have heard, Obama found that to be “interesting”. He was under the assumption that job growth was a’booming in those areas. He really used that bland word in response to the woman’s question.

What I find “interesting” is that with the overall colossal increase in worker productivity over the last several decades, the time needed to be invested in work—that is, to obtain food and shelter, has not reflected any benefit to the more productive employees. Hell, shouldn’t a person be able to work 20 hours a week with those advances – with available employment for all those who desire it? No. Of course not. Because all of the advances and toil has only equaled a boon for the very top. The extra money freed up has only trickled upward.

Believe it or not, Kellogg cereal company implemented a 30-hour work week back in 1930. By many accounts, individuals enjoyed the increase in time with their family and became more involved in the community. But that was 1930. This is 2012. Of course, things should get worse all the time! Well, that 30 hour per week notion was erased by World War 2 and the subsequent frenzied boom years. But it’s amazing that this is such a buried experiment in the annals of labor. It’s been treated as something of a natural law, akin to gravity, that workers are to become more productive, but never are given the reward of less work. The hamster wheel turns faster and faster. We all know people who work a couple of jobs, sometimes by necessity, sometimes not. You have to wonder about the deathbed realizations that entire swaths of real living weren’t achieved, but 60-hour workweeks were.

I’m pretty certain that Obama does find it “interesting” that unemployment is rife even in the engineering field. It seems highly unlikely that this is an accident. Just as it is with lower skilled jobs, an influx of foreign labor serves to create a downward pressure on wages. We now have a terrified workforce, one that will largely not complain, and will tolerate increasing loads because “at least we have a job”. I would bet this is why something akin to the Depression era WPA hasn’t been created. It certainly doesn’t seem to be due to fiscal responsibility.

We bleed money on foreign soil, losing funds and ethics as the military-industrial complex adds rolls of fat. Frenzied spending still goes on even with superficial “cuts” to defense. The cuts that do seem to keep coming with regularity and depth are the ones that hit social safety nets. Those serve to enhance the fear in the populace. The workers become more docile and horrified of unemployment. A WPA program would exert pressure in the opposite direction and we can’t have that. It’s all very…..interesting.

But here’s to hoping…hoping at some point there’s a realization that people are more than cogs of production to be manipulated by fear and social Darwinism. And we are all guilty of viewing people as a subset of their occupation — that’s kind of been the American way. There is that omnipresent question “what do you do?” As if that’s the core defining feature of a human.

With rampant unemployment, perhaps those boundaries will blur. That along with a person’s worth being measured in ever increasing “productivity”– with the casting off of those ragged, unemployed outliers. people that they don’t even bother counting any longer.

But for now, the gluttonous use of natural resources extends to what they consider the aptly named human resources. It’s a short-sighted, soulless plunder that has to stop. And I’m sure at some point it will.

Kathleen Peine
Dissident Voice

The Right to Shirk

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:29:06 +0000

Indiana’s proposed “Right to Work” Act is not just anti-union, it is anti-democratic. Under the law if a majority of workers in a plant vote for a union, those who opposed the union would not have to contribute dues to the union. Indiana Republicans are touting the law as giving individuals freedom not to have to join a union and thus leading to more jobs in Indiana.

The connection between not joining a union and more jobs in Indiana is not spelled out, but is understood by most people. The “Right to Work” law will discourage unionization and thus companies looking for cheap labor, few or no benefits, and few worker-rights associated with non-unionized workers will flood into the state-providing lots of low-wage, low-benefits jobs.

There is more to this story. I know people who objected to the War in Iraq by refusing to pay their income tax that went towards the war. I did not join this protest because I believe that even if a war was wrong, in a democracy, one has a responsibility to contribute taxes to policies supported by the majority.

One certainly has a right to protest those policies and to vote and protest against them, but I do not think one gets to pick and choose which policies the majority support that you actually fund. “Right to Work” Laws support a world where one gets to avoid paying for what the majority voted.

But the Right to Work Laws are even more problematic. Imagine that the Republicans in Indiana voted to build a bridge between Indiana and Kentucky, and to pay for the bridge they added a toll on the bridge. Imagine you opposed the bridge and were pleased that the bridge would be paid for by a toll rather than state taxes you had to pay. If it were a simple toll bridge, you could avoid paying the toll by refusing to use the bridge. Something you did not support to begin with. You took the ferry across instead.

Now, following the logic of the Right to Work Law, Indiana legislators decided that only those who wanted to pay the toll had to pay. After watching others simply cross the bridge while you were taking the ferry across, you began to use the bridge. But because the toll was not mandatory, you continued to refuse to pay the toll despite the fact you used the bridge. Fair enough! Except as you cross the bridge without paying, others also figure why pay if you do not have to since one can still have the advantage of the bridge. As Mitt Romney has shown us all, in general, one does not pay what one does not have to pay even if it would have been fairer if one did.

Soon no one would pay the toll and the bridge would become unsafe until it finally fell into the water. Many people, including you, would lose the use of the bridge. But the ferry companies would be very happy. And it turns out that the plan to make paying the toll voluntary was supported all along by the ferry companies. For some, it might become apparent that that was behind idea of the voluntary tolls — was a plan to make the bridge fail.

That is the story of “Right to Work” laws. They make maintaining a union extremely difficult. They came into being specifically to inhibit union growth, particularly in the South. The Republican “Right to Work” plan for Indiana is a plan to cripple unions so that companies looking for a non-union, cheap labor source will come to Indiana. And existing unionized companies could more readily break the union.

The Indiana Republican plan is not about the right to work it is about the right to shirk. In a world of angels, all would pay their union dues whether they had to or not or whether they supported the union or not because the majority voted for it and because everyone gains the benefits of the union. Hoosiers may be nice, but I do not think they are all angels.

John T. Cumbler

John T. Cumbler is a history professor at the University of Louisville and the author of a half dozen books on American history, three of them about labor and economic history. He has been involved in the labor movement and Jobs With Justice for many years.

Mitch Daniels Is a Scab

admin — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 17:59:10 +0000

After a brief stint mismanaging the nation’s budget for the George W. Bush administration, the soft-spoken Mitch Daniels was elected governor of Indiana in 2004. His presidential hopes dashed by a “kinder, gentler” approach to hot-button social issues, Daniels has now joined the ranks of scab governors Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and Jan Brewer, among other anti-worker scab state chief executives scattered around the country, by signing into law legislation that made Indiana the 23rd “right-to-work’ state.”

‘Right-to-work’ sounds good on paper when we have 8.6 percent unemployment nationally and 9 percent unemployment in the Hoosier state, but “right-to-work” laws don’t give anybody the right to a job. “Right-to-work” really is the right-to-work-for-less.

Under the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a scab Congress over the veto of President Truman, a state may pass a “right-to-work” law exempting workers from having to pay union dues if they work in a union shop, effectively outlawing the notion of a union shop in the first place.

If you live in one of the 23 states that have right to work for less statutes, you can thus work side by side with union members without being a member of that union or paying union dues while still benefiting from the wages and benefits that union negotiates with your employer. To add insult to injury, these laws also require unions to represent all workers in the plant beyond the bargaining table when it comes to disciplinary and other issues, allowing non-union workers and your employer alike to have their cake and eat it too.

Mitch Daniels and his scab colleagues are perfectly fine with these freeloaders because they help them undermine collective bargaining and drive a wedge among co-workers. I think the use of the word “scab” to describe these folks is entirely appropriate in this context because it we’re talking about clowns who will literally do anything to make a dollar, either in the form of increased profits (on the business side) or increased campaign contributions (on the political side). Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul (despite his supposed love of “state’s rights’”) all favor a national right-to-work-for-less law and prominently display their support on their respective websites.

Daniels and Christie, however, are a much more dangerous kind of scab than your garden variety Republican. Media darlings both and probable 2016 contenders (should Mitt Romney not add yet another house to his collection), Daniels and Christie both have the ability to mask a radical right-wing agenda with an air of ‘respectability’ or ‘straight-talking’ than the boorish Romney, the serial adulterer Gingrich, or the bigots Rick Santorum and Ron Paul do not.

Daniels’ term expires at the end of the year and he’ll probably spend the next four years running for President; Christie is up for re-election next year, with the rest of the scab administrations that took office in 2010 facing recall or re-election in the next two years. Defeating these scab administrations and their allies in the scab-laden U.S. House of Representatives – and, of course, stopping a scab politician from taking the White House — should be the number one priority of the labor movement and the Democratic Party going forward.

Devin Griggs

Devin Griggs is a junior at Murray State University, where he is secretary of the College Democrats. The recipient of the 2011 Kentucky State AFL-CIO Youth Award, he is the son of Cliff Griggs, a member of USW local 9447-5.

Rick Santorum: “The Most Dangerous Man in the Room”

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:00:05 +0000

The not so decisive victory of Mitt Romney in Tuesday’s Iowa caucus has a lot of people talking about the guy he almost lost to, a certain former Senator from Pennsylvania named Rick Santorum. Whether or not Santorum has the ability to capitalize on his strong showing in Iowa going forward in the Republican presidential primaries is something I’ll leave to the pundits and the Republican rank-and-file, but there is something to be said about the candidate himself going into the general election, whether or not Santorum is the Republican nominee or not.

Although universally pinned as the “anti-birth control, anti-abortion, and anti-gay marriage ” candidate representing the Republican Party’s hard-right, none of those monikers really help explain why Santorum did so well in Iowa. What does is the continued emphasis that Santorum has put on rebuilding the United States’ declining manufacturing base, which, although it has shown some signs of life over the past few months, is still in a state of relative decline compared to where it was when Santorum entered the House of Representatives in 1991. Santorum talks a good game about manufacturing and this probably helped him in a state that has a relatively strong manufacturing sector and, like the rest of the country, a working class majority concerned with the erosion of American manufacturing and fears concerning China’s rise as an industrial power.

Make no mistake – Santorum is no friend of labor. Like the rest of the Republican field, he is an avowed enemy of the labor movement and of its aims. While a member of Congress, he racked up a 0 (zero being the worst, one hundred being the best) lifetime rating from the AFL-CIO on worker’s issues. He has consistently voted in favor of unfair trade deals (voting in favor of favored trade status with China, the Central American Free Trade Agreement, free trade with Chile, Singapore, Oman, and Andean nations, among others), voted twice against raising the minimum wage (in 1999 and 2005), supports the privatization of Social Security, and voted against ending tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.

His website declares that he wants to sign “5 free trade agreements ” his first year (God forbid) as President of the United States. With this kind of record, it seems ludicrous that Santorum has any appeal at all among blue collar voters, but the fact that he’s bringing manufacturing and industrial policy back on the agenda for this year’s election makes him the most dangerous man in the room from my perspective as an Obama voter.

Let’s not be fluid with the facts here – American manufacturing is making a bit of a recovery under President Obama, and it would be unfair to assert that Obama’s policies haven’t had anything to do with it. Under President Obama, we have made great strides towards actual enforcement of trade law and have had a miniscule (but still important) debate on the effect of Chinese currency manipulation on our industrial base. But it would be wrong and foolhardy for the Democrats not to counter Santorum’s appeal and ignore the issue of manufacturing. Santorum knows this, and that’s why he’s doing everything he can to use the issue as a bludgeon against not only the President, but against his own party’s likely standard-bearer, Mitt Romney.

The best way for Democrats going forward is to make manufacturing and good paying American jobs a priority for 2012 and beyond. Santorum’s voters don’t like Mitt Romney, but they’re going to have to have a good reason for them to pull the leaver for Obama over him in November. What better way to do that then to focus on American manufacturing as the centerpiece of the Democrats’ plan for economic recovery?

If Obama can follow up on the rhetoric of the campaign with actual, pro-manufacturing legislation (which would of course be generously helped out by a progressive majority in the House), he can win these voters back to the Democratic Party after long, painful decades in the political wilderness. America’s blue collar majority deserves better, and while it won’t get that under a President Santorum, it can certainly get it under a President Obama with a progressive majority in the House willing to do the right thing for the American worker.

Devin Griggs

Santorum Loves Unions — in Iran

Berry Craig — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:36:29 +0000

“I believe in the American worker,” says Rick Santorum, the new anti-Romney in the food fight for the GOP presidential nomination.

A hero of social conservatives, Santorum claims he’s a blue collar sort of guy, too. The ex-senator and congressman from Pennsylvania promises he can make factories boom again.

Santorum says he has a plan that “frees business from the constraints of burdensome regulations and taxes that do nothing but hold back the American spirit of innovation.”

Santorum also thinks unions are bad for business. He cheered New Hampshire Republican lawmakers for trying to override Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto which killed their right-to-work-for-less bill.

Santorum commended House Speaker William O’Brien and the other GOP union-busters “for standing up to the union bosses and their Democrat cohorts who are hijacking our economy,” according to the Coralville, N.H., Courier online. Santorum vowed that if he becomes president, he “will proudly sign a National Right-to-Work law.”

Santorum loathes public employee unions even more than he hates private sector unions. In the Fox News-Google presidential debate, he said he didn’t believe local, state or federal government workers “should be involved in unions.” He added, “And I would actually support a bill that says that we should not have public employee unions for the purposes of wages and benefits to be negotiated.”

On the other hand, Santorum, maybe taking his cue from his hero, President Ronald Reagan, is all for unions in Iran. The Gipper busted the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ union stateside while praising the anti-communist Solidarity union movement in Poland.

“We should have several avenues of getting money into Iran to help striking labor unions, to give them money so they can keep out on strike and disrupt the government and try to create the revolutionary atmosphere there,” Talking Points Memo quoted Santorum.

Santorum, who was in the House from 1991 to 1995 and the Senate from 1995 to 2007, was one of the most anti-labor lawmakers in Washington.

The AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education, or COPE, scored Santorum “right” on votes on union issues just 13 percent of the time.

Berry Craig

A Warm Holiday Meal Brought by Your Gas Workers

admin — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:27:01 +0000

As President of the Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA) I have seen first-hand how corporate greed has destroyed our economy and middle class jobs in America. I have also seen how corporate domination of our political system both helped to support corporate greed and is now powerless in the face of that greed.

Sempra Energy/SoCal Gas, is part of the problem. The energy giant symbolizes the corporate power and greed people across the nation are questioning. We, the workers at Sempra, are conversely a symbol of the other 99% of the population is now fighting back.

As gas utility workers we provide a valuable public service. We make sure our homes have safe and efficient natural gas to keep our homes warm, have hot running water and with safe gas stoves and ovens. Many of us may take this for granted as we warm our homes and cook our meals this holiday season.

For our work we have done well, especially considering our current recession. Too well, says the bosses at Sempra Energy. The 5,000 members of my Union and our sister Union the International Chemical Workers Union (ICWU) have been working without a contract since October 15th of this year. While other gas workers across California have settled fair contracts Sempra (So Cal Gas’s parent company) continues to insist on below standard wage increases and cuts to our retirement and medical.

It is an outrage that at a time of remarkable corporate profits Sempra would insist on takeaways from those of us who do the work. Sempra has reported close to $4 billion in profits since 2008. The top five executives at Sempra have paid themselves $91 million during this time.

Sempra has made these profits, in part, at the expense of customers. Sempra has expanded part time work, increased our workloads and relaxed response times to service calls. As a result, gas customers wait longer for inspections, leak reports, and appliance lighting. This even as the State has put greater scrutiny on gas service since the deadly San Bruno explosion of 2010.

As a public-private partnership Sempra has an obligation to treat its customers and workers fairly. Instead they make billions, pay themselves millions while cutting services to customers. But the workers are fighting back and we will protect our jobs and not let Sempra hold us back.

We are standing up to Sempra not just for our families, but also for gas customers and as an example to workers everywhere. If at a time of great corporate profits we can’t maintain our standards of living, or even get ahead, then when can we?

It is time for the 99% to hold the 1% accountable at work. What better way to start? Thus on behalf of the 5,000 hard working professionals that delver the natural gas to warm your home and light your stove for your holiday meal we say, ‘Happy Holidays’ and ask for your support in our fight against corporate greed and for good jobs and stellar public service.

Art Frias
President, Utility Workers Union of America Local 132.

‘Right to Work Is a Cancerous Ideology’

Berry Craig — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:08:31 +0000

GOP leaders in the Republican-majority Indiana General Assembly say passing a right to work law is their top priority in the 2012 session.

Unions call “right to work” the “right to work for less.”

“Right to work is a cancerous ideology,” longtime Hoosier labor leader Russ Stilwell warned the recent 29th biennial convention of the Kentucky State AFL-CIO in Louisville.

Stilwell, 63, is a 41-year UMWA member and vice president of the Indiana State AFL-CIO’s Executive Board. “If the Republicans succeed in Indiana, right to work will spread like a cancer to other states,” he adds.

Mitch Daniels, Indiana’s Republican governor, also favors a right to work law. The GOP holds the most seats in the House and Senate.

Stilwell, from Boonville, sought union support in Kentucky, Indiana’s southern neighbor. Kentucky is not a right to work state.

About 160 union delegates from across the Bluegrass State welcomed Stilwell’s remarks with a standing ovation.

Daniels and the Republicans failed to get a right to work law earlier this year after all but one Democratic House member left the state for 35 days and thousands of union members and supporters from Indiana and other states, including Kentucky, thronged the capitol in Indianapolis. Since then, the legislature passed a law levying $1,000-a-day fines against boycotting legislators.

“The battle is far from over, and we’ve got a tough fight ahead,” Stilwell says, admitting that the term “right to work” can fool even some union members.

Meanwhile, supporters of right to work laws in Indiana and elsewhere make three basic arguments:

They bring “democracy” to the workplace by giving workers a choice of whether or not to join a union.
They create “good paying jobs.”
They “free” workers from making “compulsory” contributions to political campaigns.

All three arguments are false.

Unions are not forced on workers. Workers vote unions in, and they can vote unions out. (Majority rule would continue under the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. The measure, the AFL-CIO’s Internet website points out, would “allow workers to form unions and bargain once a majority signs authorization cards….The Employee Free Choice Act would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain by enabling workers to form unions without the fear, delay and coercion inherent in our current system. Majority sign-up is a long-established way to form a union, dating back to passage of the National Labor Relations Act.”)

Simply put, right to work laws are designed to weaken large unions, destroy small unions, and keep unorganized workers from unionizing.

Right to work laws undermine unions by prohibiting union security agreements between unions and employers. Under a union security agreement, all non-management workers belong to the union. Or they pay the union a service fee or an amount equivalent to union dues.

In other words, the union supports the workers. In turn, the workers support the union.

But workers don’t have to support political candidates their unions endorse. “Political contributions by union members are voluntary through dues check off,” Stilwell says.

Likewise, workers who pay service fees or money equal to union dues can request that none of their money go for political action, he adds.

Stillwell says right to work supporters always focus their fire on union security agreements.

But the union can’t force a union security agreement on an employer. Union security agreements are bargainable. Union and management agree to them. The union can’t dictate them.

Thus, he thinks it’s ironic that the GOP, which has also declared holy war on “big government,” wants government to dictate labor-management contracts by outlawing union security clauses.

These are the same folks who consistently tell us that government needs to get out of our lives.

Republicans also claim to be big fans of “rugged individualism” and pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps.

Yet right to work laws encourage freeloading. Under a right to work law, workers at a jobsite with a union contract can enjoy union-negotiated and union-won wages and benefits without joining the union or paying a service fee or the equivalent of dues. Even so, unions must represent these non-union employees when they have trouble with the boss.

In addition, right to work laws don’t produce good paying jobs. They are geared to drive down wages.

Paychecks in right to work states are a lot skimpier than they are in non-right to work states.

“In 2009, average pay in so-called ‘right to work’ states was 11.1 percent lower than in states where workers have the freedom to form strong unions,” the AFL-CIO’s website also says, citing numbers from the nonpartisan U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Absent unions, wages, of course, go down. That’s why unions label “right to work” the “right to work for less.”

Meanwhile, Stilwell, a combat veteran of the Vietnam War, says Indiana unions aren’t giving up the fight against right to work.

If these greedy, mean-spirited Republicans succeed, it won’t just be Hoosier workers who get hurt. Republicans will look to Indiana and start pushing right to work in other states. So if we lose, all workers lose.

Berry Craig

Nasty Bosses on College Campuses

Vijay Prashad — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:39:57 +0000

I’m With You In Pomona

“After 23 years @pomonacollege fires Felipa Sanchez for not showing her papers.”

– Leigh Shelton, UNITE-HERE Local 11.

When I got to Pomona College in the mid-1980s, the issue on the table was apartheid in South Africa. The movement began at the University of California campuses as Campuses United Against Apartheid (an early leader was Ron Dellums, most recently the Mayor of Oakland). We had our sights on the investments made by our college campuses in South Africa (for California colleges, the main conduit was the Bank of America, which we called Bank of Apartheid).

Barack Obama, a student at Occidental, was not immune from these pressures. He gave one of his early speeches against Oxy’s investments in February 1981. “There’s a struggle going on. It’s happening an ocean away. But it’s a struggle that touches each and every one of us,” said the young Barry. It was a struggle, he underscored, “between dignity and servitude. Between fairness and injustice. Between commitment and indifference. A choice between right and wrong.”

Taking our cues from the wider movement, those of us at Pomona decided to set up a shantytown outside the college president’s well-appointed house. The president, David Alexander, who had been at his post since 1969, had the demeanor of a patrician, carrying his Tennessee birth as close to his heart as his Oxford education. During the height of the Vietnam War, Alexander affirmed the importance of the liberal arts, “Our task now is to winnow from the welter of changing values those transcendent values for which this college exists, so that while trying to move with society, Pomona College will help move society through education.”

No wonder then that one night he came out to talk to the students. I remember him telling us that our presence was an irritation to his garden, and he hoped that we’d let him have at least one unbroken night of sleep. When he walked away he winked at me and said he was proud of our commitment to our beliefs. Pomona eventually divested (the first college to do so was Hampshire, in 1979).

My college day was evenly divided between classes, activism, hanging out with friends and working at my several jobs (including as a film projectionist for the poet and musician Dick Barnes). The most time-consuming jobs were in the cafeteria and in the library. The cafeteria and library brought me into direct contact with the workers who helped reproduce the life of the campus. I heard of their lives and labors, and enjoyed their irreverent stories about the campus, which I had otherwise seen only from the standpoint of a student. My teachers developed my mind, but my co-workers helped reshape my heart.

For two decades now, the administration of Pomona College has been at loggerheads with the workers in the dining hall. In 1999, when Aramark ran the dining services, the workers intensified their struggle to create a union to fight poor working conditions. On May 1, 2000, the workers blockaded Alexander Hall (named for the former president). Pomona cashiered Aramark and took over management of the dining hall, turning over management of the workers to the notorious Sodexo. By March 2010, the workers once more revived their struggle, calling for the creation of a union. Pomona then removed Sodexo, and took charge of labor management.

All this is the normal course at colleges – with endowments at astronomical levels, colleges continue to pick on dining hall and buildings & grounds workers by cutting their pay, hours and health benefits, and by hiring union-busting lawyers and consultants to do their dirty work. At Pomona, the dining hall management even banned workers from talking to students, including during their breaks. To top it off, in early December, Pomona College decided on the dirtiest anti-labor technique: to check the immigrant status of the workers (looking at their I9 forms). When seventeen workers were not able to hand in their document at a deadline, the College fired them.

Paul Efron, of Goldman Sachs, heads the Trustees at Pomona. He wrote a letter trying to assert that the immigration verification has nothing to do with the labor disputes. The moral sleight of hand tried out by Efron and by the administration reeks of the dirty tricks tactics that are now familiar from corporations (why do they bother to have ethics courses in business school!).

It was evasive to suggest that the labor struggle and the anti-immigrant tactics were separate when it is clear to even the most doltish among us that the working-class in Southern California draws from avast catchment area of immigrants, several of whom have creative paperwork. It was a clear-cut tactic of bringing the law into a labor dispute to chill the fired up workers. Michael Teter (class of ’99 and a law school professor in Utah) wrote a letter to the trustees, “The decision to conduct an audit of the I-9s demonstrates, at best, overzealousness and, at worst, a fundamental disregard for the dignity and privacy of every employee. To seek to justify the College’s actions by referring to a discredited allegation and to federal law is disingenuous.”

Students had been involved in the labor dispute since the 1990s through Workers for Justice. Over the course of the past few years, the students have been alert and active (I have been in touch with several, who contacted me as an alumnus). When news of the firings came, the students took action under the banner of Concerned Students of Pomona College. They organized a boycott of the dining halls, set up a tent to provide support and food, and then produced a protest where they hoped to have seventeen among their number arrested.

Faculty members stood up, as did alumni across the country. Values are taught not just in the classroom but in the very bones of an institution. How it treats its workers sends a message to the student body about what is acceptable in our society. The administration failed its students (or properly taught them about mainstream values in our society, depending on your perspective). The students, from history’s margins, rescued the best of our values. They know that the struggle is between dignity and subservience. They vote for dignity, leaving the administration to stand for subservience.

Vijay Prashad
Counterpunch

Republished with permission.

The Jobs Report: Don’t Break Out the Champagne

Robert Reich — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 06:41:29 +0000

In brief: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ household survey shows unemployment at 8.6 percent, and the payroll survey shows 120,000 new jobs in November (140,000 from the private sector, and a loss of 20,000 in the public sector). BLS also revised upward its job numbers for September and October.

What does it mean? We’re not out of the woods but we might be seeing some daylight.

Maybe. Here’s what you need to worry about:

First, this rate of job growth is barely enough to keep up with the growth in the working-age population. So we’re not making progress on the backlog of more than 13 million jobless Americans, and another 11 million working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs.

Second, retail jobs constituted a third of new private-sector employment in November. Retail jobs tend to be unstable, temporary, and low-paying. Although the BLS is supposed to adjust for seasonal employment (i.e. Christmas), it doesn’t take account of the fact that more and more Americans have been pushing up their Christmas buying to before Thanksgiving. So some of these jobs may not be around very long.

Third, the jobless rate fell partly because around 315,000 people who had been looking for jobs dropped out of the job market in November. Remember: If you’re not actively looking, you’re not counted as unemployed on the household survey.

Fourth, hourly earnings are down, as are real wages. So to some extent Americans have been substituting lower wages for lost jobs – either by accepting lower wages at their current place of employment, or getting the boot and settling for lower wages elsewhere. A job is better than no job, of course, but a job with a lower wage isn’t nearly as good as a job with at the same or better wage.

Fifth, another reason for November’s job growth is that American consumers – whose spending accounts for about 70 percent of the economy – increased their spending. But this can’t continue because, as noted, wages are dropping. They spent more by cutting into their meager savings. Don’t expect this to last.

Finally, there’s the wild card of the rest of the global economy – the European debt crisis and the high likelihood of recession in Europe, the slowdown in China and India, slower growth in developing nations. Some of our jobs depend on exports, which will drop. Others are keyed to the financial sector, which is being hit directly.

Two final wild cards closer to home: The Fed, and Congress. The Fed meets in two weeks to decide on further monetary easing. With today’s report, the odds of easing are down, unfortunately. Believe it or not, several Fed members are worried about inflation.

And if Congress refuses to extend the payroll tax cut and/or unemployment benefits by December 30, it will create another drag on the economy. When people ask me what Congress is likely to do I always say the same thing: The odds are in favor of nothing.

So while today’s jobs report is in the right direction, it’s way too early to break out the champagne.

Robert Reich
Robert Reich’s Blog