Labor Union Blog

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lia href=http://www.laborradio.org/node/10391The Waves Of Job Cuts Continue – Worldwide 51 Million Could Lose Jobs In 2009a//li
lia href=http://www.laborradio.org/node/10392United Healthcare Workers West Announces Formation Of A New National Uniona//li
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pBy Doug Cunningham/p
pAs SEIU International takes control of United Healthcare Workers West in a trusteeship, the big California local is responding by trying to leave SEIU to form a new national union. UHW President Sal Rosselli./p
p[Rosselli]: About a hundred of our elected leaders through teleconference between Los Angeles, California and Oakland California collectively decided to resign our membership in the Service Employee International Union./p
pThe new union is called the National Union of Healthcare Workers. UHW nurse Angela Glasper announced the founding of the new union during a press conference by UHW leaders./p

pMore job cuts in the United States were in the headlines for most of the day on Wednesday, as the United Nations released a report that projected a global loss of 51 million jobs by the end of the year. Jesse Russell reports:/p
pThe International Labor Organization, an agency with the United Nations, projected a worst case scenario this week that 2009 could end with 51 million jobs lost globally. If numbers push that high the year will end with a global unemployment rate of 7.1 percent up from 5.7 percent just two years ago. The study comes as Wednesday saw yet another wave of job cuts in the United States./p

Hoping to put the brakes on an economy spiraling downhill and out of control, the House today passed (244-188) an $825 billion economic recovery package that could create or save as many as 4 million jobs. Said President Barack Obama, shortly before the vote:

When we it comes to rebuilding our economy, we don’t have a moment to spare.

With the jobless rate at 7.2 percent and expected to worsen for much of the year, and the loss of 2.6 million jobs last year—the biggest one-year job loss since 1945—AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:

It would be impossible to overstate the trouble our economy is in. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is absolutely essential to turning around this downward economic spiral. This is no time for weak excuses—Congress must act decisively to create jobs and rescue the economy.

The bill includes $550 billion for investments such as ready-to-go infrastructure projects, help for states that are facing record budget shortfalls that threaten vital services such as education and health, and assistance for the nation’s tens of millions of unemployed workers. It also provides $275 billion in targeted tax relief for families and businesses.

The Senate is expected to vote on its version of the recovery package next week. But the Senate bill is more heavily weighted toward tax cuts rather than job-creating investments. As reported by the Senate Finance and Appropriations committees, it contains $365 billion in targeted investments and some $500 billion in tax cuts.

(Click here to tell senators to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act now.)

In a letter to House members, AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director Bill Samuel says the bill’s $550 billion in targeted investments will create new jobs and prevent others from vanishing.

Investments in infrastructure and energy would provide millions of good-paying jobs that cannot be off-shored, while helping us move toward a cleaner, greener future. Investments in schools would help us educate our children and help struggling school districts make up for budget shortfalls caused by the collapse of their property tax base. States and localities would be better able to meet budgetary pressures caused by increasing demand on the important programs they administer.

A study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows the bill will provide immediate help to the economy. Says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.):

According to the CBO, about two-thirds of the plan’s recovery investments will come on the first 18 months…[it] will create jobs, help end the recession sooner, provide tax relief to millions of Americans and make critical long-term investments to lay the foundation for a stronger economy.

Click here for a detailed summary of the bill.

Today’s vote mostly broke along party lines despite Obama’s call for bipartisanship, including traveling to Capitol Hill yesterday to meet with Republican House and Senate leaders.

The whole world has hailed the professionalism and heroism of flight attendants aboard US Airways Flight 1549 who were instrumental in the safe evacuation of 150 passengers after the plane made an emergency water landing in New York’s Hudson River. But just days later, flight attendants at another airline were being disrespected and insulted by their own corporate employer.

Flight Attendants-CWA President Patricia Friend wrote Spirit Airlines Inc. CEO Ben Baldanza this month to condemn the carrier’s new ad campaign that she says is demeaning to women.

If your intent was to insult and demean your customers, employees and future customers, you may well have succeeded. I feel as though I have entered a time warp and I am reliving the battles for respect and justice for women that we fought 40 years ago.

The ads, which promote the airline’s discount specials, are laden with cheeky sexual innuendos and double entendres. One touts how proud the airline is of its “DDs,” an abbreviation for its “Deep Discounts.” Another runs in big letters “M.I.L.F.: Many Islands Low Fares” with a picture of a blond woman in the foreground. Persons who use text mail a lot will recognize the abbreviation for a more sexually provocative phrase. Friend says the ads not only insult the hardworking flight attendants at Spirit, but all flight attendants and anyone who respects women workers.

She says she also has received complaints that some of the ads are offensive to members of the Jewish faith.

Friend is urging flight attendants and anyone who believes in justice for women to let Baldanza know how outrageous the airline’s actions really are by sending him an e-mail at ben.baldanza@spiritair.com.

Piling on even more insults, the airline is proposing to force flight attendants to wear in-flight aprons with an alcoholic beverage logo, a move Friend says “must be reversed.” In the letter, she writes:

The proposed aprons diminishes the primary and federally mandated role of flight attendants as safety professionals and our roles as first responders on board, not to mention the offense the aprons carry for employees with strong religious convictions.

Friend calls on Baldanza to

immediately pull these campaigns and instruct your marketing department to develop a professional, respectful program of advertising. I am confident I will joined in this request by many other interested parties.

Expressing outrage at Spirit’s moves, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker says:

With the focus placed this last week on the heroic actions of the US Air pilot and crew whose experience and expertise saved the lives of the passengers, I think it is most appropriate that we speak out on this. Airline safety should certainly sell over sexual innuendos.

The Obama administration has a golden opportunity to reframe and reform U.S. trade policy to reflect what is good for America and its workers, not multinationals that send jobs overseas.    

Speaking at a forum on trade at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., three trade experts said the nation’s trade policy, especially trade with China, has benefited multinational corporations and financial institutions while working families suffered from millions of lost jobs, stagnating or falling wages and a growing inability to sell U.S. products abroad. 

For decades, the nation’s leaders have substituted corporate interests for the country’s interests when it comes to trade, says Robert Cassidy, former assistant U.S. Trade Representative during the Clinton administration, but now it’s time to put the nation’s interests first.  

That will require the Obama White House to be more assertive than previous administrations and take strong action against currency manipulation by countries like China and aggressively enforce existing laws against dumping and illegal subsidies. 

We also must figure out new ways to be competitive in a global economy that corporations have engineered to suit their goals of cheap labor and free flowing capital, Cassidy says. 

We need to examine how the United States can remedy competition from countries with low or no labor standards. We need to abandon the race to the bottom.   

One way to do that is to include more players in making decisions about trade  policy, AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee told the audience. 

Corporations’ interests are different from workers and companies trying to do business in the United States. The labor movement has been a critic of our trade policies for a long time, not because we want to stop trade. We just ask that trade policies be part of a broader national plan of industrial policies, education and training and rebuilding our infrastructure. 

Multinational executives don’t worry about education and infrastructure. They live in gated communities; their children go to private schools and they can take helicopters to work. But the rest of us have to make the country work.

Mark Levinson, chief economist for UNITE HERE, told the forum that workers in China and the United States face the same problems, like two sides of the same coin. While a small elite in China is growing rich, the majority of workers are faced with stagnant wages. On the one hand, corporations like Wal-Mart squeeze suppliers to cut costs and then use the threat of moving jobs to low wage countries to force U.S. workers to take pay cuts. 

Cassidy summed it up best by saying: 

Trade has to be a leader in the economic recovery. But trade has to be fixed in a way that benefits more than just corporations. 

The ILO predicts worldwide poverty will rise as the global economic crisis worsens.

The global economic crisis could throw as many as 50 million more workers out of jobs worldwide in the next year and lead to a dramatic increase in the number of working poor, according to a new report by the International Labor Organization (ILO).

In its annual Global Employment Trends report, the ILO, an arm of the United Nations, says global unemployment between 2007 and 2009 could rise by 18 million to 30 million workers-and possibly by more than 50 million if the world economy continues to deteriorate. As a result, some 200 million workers, mostly in developing economies, could be pushed into extreme poverty. Click here to download the report.

ILO Director-General Juan Somavia says we are facing a global jobs crisis.

Many governments are aware and acting, but more decisive and coordinated international action is needed to avert a global social recession. Progress in poverty reduction is unraveling and middle classes worldwide are weakening. The political and security implications are daunting.

Somavia called on leaders of the top economic powers who are meeting in London in April to

urgently agree on priority measures to promote productive investments, decent work and social protection objectives, and policy coordination.

The report predicts the global unemployment rate could rise to 6.1 percent in 2009 compared to 5.7 percent in 2007, resulting in an increase of the number of unemployed by 18 million. But if the economic situation deteriorates even further than expected, the global unemployment rate could rise as high as 7.1 percent and result in an increase in the number of jobless of more than 50 million people.

The report also says the number of working poor-people who are unable to earn more than $2 a day may grow to 1.4 billion, or 45 percent of all the world’s employed workers.

The report also found:

• Last year the highest unemployment rates were in North Africa and the Middle East at 10.3 percent and 9.4 percent respectively, followed by Central and South Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.
• While South Asia had one of the lowest unemployment rates at 5.4 percent, it also stood out as one of the regions with the highest shares of working poor.
• In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia combined, some 80 percent of employed workers were still classified as working poor in 2007.

The report calls for more nations to enact the goals in the ILO’s Decent Work agenda, including increasing coverage of unemployment benefits and insurance; providing skills training for workers; protecting pensions from devastating declines in financial markets; investing in infrastructure, housing and green jobs; and supporting small businesses.

For the second year in a row, the percentage of workers who belong to a union grew, according to the annual survey of union membership released this morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In 2008, union membership grew by 428,000, increasing the percentage of union members in the workforce to 12.4 percent, up from 12.1 percent in 2007. Overall, 16.1 million workers carry union cards.

Union membership, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says, is especially valuable to working families as the nation’s economy is in the worst recession in decades.

Today’s numbers confirm what many working people already know: that if given the chance, American workers are choosing to join unions in larger numbers. Workers in unions are much more likely to have health care benefits and a pension than those without a union; in today’s economy, that’s the difference between sinking and swimming.

The BLS survey also reports on the union advantage workers receive on payday. In 2008, full-time union workers earned a median weekly salary of $886 while nonunion workers were paid 28 percent less per week, $691.

Some 60 million workers say they would join a union if they had the opportunity. But when workers try to form unions through the flawed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process, employers routinely respond with threats, intimidation, firings and harassment.

Of the 311,000 new workers who joined unions in 2007, the latest year for which such figures are available, only 70,000 workers were able to form a union through the NLRB process. Today, most workers who form new unions do so after their employer has agreed to recognize their union through a majority sign-up process—a major provision of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Employee Free Choice Act would restore the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain for a better life. While some 78 percent of the public support the legislation, Big Business is waging a multimillion-dollar disinformation campaign against the bill.

On top of that, congressional Republicans are vowing to kill the workers’ rights legislation. They have even gone so far as to threaten to block President Barack Obama’s choice of Hilda Solis as secretary of labor. Says Sweeney:

In today’s economy, America’s working men and women need a fair shot at forming a union, now more than ever. The Employee Free Choice Act will give workers the freedom to bargain with their employers for better benefits, wages, and job security, and it will allow them—not their company—to decide how to form their union.

Union growth was broadly shared across demographic lines and occupations. Growth was strongest in the public sector, among Hispanics, and in Western states.

Click here for the full report, including a demographic breakdown of union membership by occupation, race, gender, state and more.