Labor Union Blog

By Doug Cunningham

GM said this week in a government filing that it’s ready to come up with up to $200 million to help end a 10-week strike at American Axle. The UAW is on strike there after the company demanded wages be cut in half and pensions and health care benefits ended for future retirees.

GM has recently said it would not get involvd in the strike. But American Axle supplies GM with key auto parts and the strike has shut off the flow of those parts to GM factories.

The $200 million GM is willing to spend would go to cushion the impact of reduced wages and fund early retirement buyouts for American Axle workers.

The nearly 600 adjunct faculty at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, Mich., made a strong statement this week for better pay and benefits by voting for the Adjunct Faculty Organization (AFO), an affiliate of AFT.

The faculty members are concerned about low pay scales that maxed out at $1,700 a course, lack of job security and health insurance and no access to office space for preparation work or to meet with students.

Even though AFT represents regular faculty at the college, Henry Ford officials fought the adjunct faculty’s desire for a voice, says Mary Beck, AFO’s interim president. But the workers overcame the school’s anti-union campaign the old-fashioned way: with shoe leather and door knocking.

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for president.

The union, which represents 600,000 federal and District of Columbia government employees, made the endorsement after extensive member polling and a meeting of its national Executive Council.

John Gage, president of AFGE, says Obama’s energetic campaign and support of working families will mobilize voters around the country and help pro-working family candidates up and down the ticket in the fall. Gage said Obama would tackle the challenges facing the federal workforce and all working families, including job privatization and underfunding and understaffing of Social Security and veterans’ programs.

• Housing crisis? What housing crisis? Looking out the White House window, Bush can’t see one, so it must not be there. Because why else would he threaten to veto Democrats’ housing rescue plan, aimed at preventing foreclosures and stabilizing the housing market? Even congressional members of his own party are signaling support for the measure (not that it’s an election year or anything). Yet the Lame Duck-in-Chief is calling the plan to help troubled homeowners “a burdensome bailout that would open taxpayers to too much risk.” Unlike the $5 trillion experts predict we’ll spend on the Iraq war. Or the $30 billion bailout to Bear Stearns.

• If Bush doesn’t think the nation’s homeowners and consumers need help getting by, maybe he should talk with retiree Josephine Powe, a member of the Alliance for Retired Americans. Says Powe: “An extra dollar or two per gallon may not seem like a lot of money to a big oil executive, but to a senior on a fixed income, it is everything. When our costs go up and our income does not, that dollar means you don’t know if you’re going to have enough money to buy food after you fill up the tank.” Powe testified this week on Capitol Hill in favor of the Consumer-First Energy Act, introduced by Senate Democrats, which would lower prices by placing a 25 percent windfall profit tax on any energy company that doesn’t invest in new energy sources and end $17 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil.