Labor Union Blog

div class=flexinode-body flexinode-1div class=flexinode-textarea-2div class=form-item
labelHeadlines:/labelbr /
ul
lia href= http://www.laborradio.org/node/10437President Obama: Unions Are Needed For A Strong Middle Classa//li
lia href= http://www.laborradio.org/node/10438Bailout-Taking CEO’s Will Have To Somehow Make It On $500,000 A Yeara//li
lia href= http://www.laborradio.org/node/10439NYC’s NEW Program Creates Trades Opportunities For Womena//li
lia href= http://www.laborradio.org/node/10440Economic Report: 522,000 Private Sector Jobs Lost In Januarya//li
/ul

/div
/div/div

pEconomic Report:/p
pAll throughout the month of January we were bombarded with news of mass layoffs, but now what was the end total? According to the employment report from ADP, the private sector let go of 522,000 jobs in January with the service sector leading the total with 279,000 jobs lost. Small businesses, or those with fewer than 50 workers, were hit hard letting go of 175,000 employees. Mid-size businesses employing between 50 and 499 employees lost 255,000 employees. The national unemployment rate is expected to jump to 8 percent./p

pAmy Peterson is President of NEW – Non-traditional Employment for Women. It’s a program that helps women get into the union construction trades./p
p[Peterson]: “They get a good entry level wage that then goes up dramatically as they learn their trade. They have a real skill and it transforms their lives. They are able to provide for their families, they do things they couldn’t imagine that they could do when they walk through the door of our program.”/p

pChief executives of companies receiving bailout money could be looking at a pay cut. Jesse Russell reports:/p
pPresident Barack Obama took a shot at chief executives who receive extraordinary pay on Wednesday when he announced a cap on the pay for executives for companies that “receive exceptional financial recovery assistance” from the federal government. Those companies would not be allowed to pay executives more than $500,000 in annual compensation. The decision is not retroactive to companies that have already received money from the $700 billion bailout. Obama said executives at “financial firms” need to “take responsibility.” Wall Street executives paid out more than $20 billion in bonuses during 2008./p

pBy Doug Cunningham/p
p[Obama]: “We know that you cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor movement. We know that strong, vibrant growing unions can exist side by side with strong, vibrant and growing businesses. This isn’t an either/or proposition between the interests of workers and the interests of shareholders. That’s the old argument. When workers are prospering they make the products that make business prosper./p
pPresident Barack Obama as he signed executive orders protecting union workers in federal contracts and making it harder for companies with federal contracts to impede unions. Obama’s attitude toward unions is a stark contrast from his predecessors’./p

Four million low-income kids can now join another 7 million children with health coverage after President Obama this afternoon signed a bill renewing the state-based program for low-income children for another four and a half years.

The White House ceremony came just hours after the House gave final approval (290-135) to the bill and caps a nearly two-year struggle to extend health care coverage to children whose families cannot afford private insurance. With the program’s expansion, 11 million children are now covered.

In signing the bill, Obama said:

Since it was created more than 10 years ago, the Children’s Health Insurance Program has been a lifeline for millions of children whose parents work full-time and don’t qualify for Medicaid, but, through no fault of their own, don’t have and can’t afford private insurance.

Before today’s vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called today “a special day for us in the House.”

We’re going to help 11 million children….In the course of the past two years, we have passed this bill a number of times in the House. Today after we pass it, it will go to the president’s desk.

The move to renew the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and extend coverage to more children began in 2007. But former President George W. Bush first vetoed the renewal in October 2007. After a second bill—revised to meet Bush’s objections to the original bill—passed with bipartisan support, Bush vetoed that bill in December 2007. Congress eventually passed a temporary reauthorization that did not expand coverage to more children and which expires March 31.

This year, the House first passed the children’s health bill Jan. 9, and the Senate followed on Jan. 29. Today’s House vote was required because of some minor differences between the House and Senate versions.

Asela Espiritu, a nurse with Kaiser Permanente, works for one of the employers in the country that allows its workers to form unions without management interference.
Workers and their allies presented to Congress some of the 1.5 million signatures in support of the Employee Free Choice Act in a rally on Capitol Hill, along with union leaders and lawmakers such as USW President Leo Gerard and Sen. Tom Harkin (bottom).

Today on Capitol Hill, thousands of union members and allies gathered to rally for the Employee Free Choice Act, a critical bill to restore the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain. 

They brought along hundreds of thousands of signatures representing workers around the country who are taking part in the fight for the freedom to form unions. During the union movement’s Million-Member Mobilization, 1.5 million people signed on to support the Employee Free Choice Act. Some of those signed cards were delivered to members of Congress today as a show of broad public support.

Sara Steffens, one of the workers who spoke at the rally today, was laid off after helping her co-workers form a union—even though she was an award-winning reporter at the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif.

Steffans said it’s critical that workers have a role in making decisions in the workplace, and she wants to help prevent the kind of abuses that occurred during her struggle to form a union. That’s why she’s working on behalf of the Employee Free Choice Act. 

“A lot of the people who organize unions are people who love what they do and are really committed to it,” she said. “It’s important that workers feel like they can step up and be part of decisions in the workplace.” 

Steffens said she was surprised at the level of intimidation and the misleading campaign waged by her employer, who she never expected to be so hostile to workers’ attempts to form a union. 

“I read the National Labor Relations Act and thought, ‘What a great country we live in.’ I stood by my conviction that they wouldn’t retaliate,” Steffens said. “I thought, ‘That’s against the law.’ I thought it couldn’t happen to me, because I had been a good employee.” 

The workers who spoke at the rally are a small sampling of the thousands who every year are intimidated, threatened or fired for trying to form a union and bargain for a better life. They wanted the power to have a say in their health care, pensions, wages and treatment at work—and they were punished for exercising that right by a corporate-dominated system. The Employee Free Choice Act would restore balance and give workers—not their bosses—the freedom to decide how to form a union.

Asela Espiritu, a nurse with Kaiser Permanente, works for one of the employers in the country that allows workers to form unions without management interference. At Kaiser, nurses are engaged in the process of providing quality patient care, working with—not against—management.

Workers need the Employee Free Choice Act, Espiritu says, so other workers can have the same opportunity she’s had, free of coercion and intimidation and able to bargain for a better life and better conditions in the workplace. 

The Employee Free Choice Act will empower workers within all kinds of industries. They’ll be part of the solution to the crisis we’re in….As unionized workers, we have a voice with management. We’re on equal footing. It helps workers; it helps our patients; and it helps our company. 

Also present at the rally were Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who have co-sponsored the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress in past years.

Miller told the rally:

Time and again, you’ve seen your hard work, your creativity, your ingenuity, your productivity taken from you and given to shareholders, to the elites, to CEOs. Decisions about the workpace belong to the worker…that’s the promise of America. It’s fooish to think we will rebuild this country wirhout the participation of the American worker.

Harkin said:

The right to organize is a basic human right, and we’re not going to let anyone take it away. Everyone benefits from unions. When people are organized, everyone starts doing better.

Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Club, said the Employee Free Choice Act could help protect the environment:

The right to organize will lead to protections for workers and for the environment. We stand with you to deflect attacks on the most basic of rights for workers.

Speaking about the rally today on CNBC, the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff said we need the Employee Free Choice Act to put economic power into workers’ hands where it belongs.

We’ve had 30 years of wage stagnation and decline. That’s one of the reasons we don’t have enough buying power in this economy. We need to restore collective bargaining to strengthen the middle class.

On Fox news this afternoon, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka said the Employee Free Choice Act is necessary to fix a system that puts workers at the mercy of corporations.

You talk about intimidation—that’s the current system. The employer spends billions of dollars hiring outside consultants to determine how people are going to vote, so they can threaten them, they can intimidate them….Let me tell you what intimidation is—when a worker says they want a union, and their employer fires them. Twenty-five thousand people get intimidated today. That’s today’s system…the employer’s in control. The Employee Free Choice Act will put the worker back in control….It will allow workers for the first time to say, “I want a union and we’ll get a union.” 

The Employee Free Choice Act earned bipartisan majority support in both the House and the Senate during the last Congress, but it was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Now, with a larger pro-worker majority in both houses and President Obama in the White House, the bill has a strong chance of being signed into law this year.

It’s time to pass the legislation and give workers the freedom they deserve.

The nation’s economy is in a free fall without a parachute, and Congress needs to act quickly to pass President Obama’s recovery package to begin to reverse the economic spiral, three prominent economists said.

During a press conference today, the economists made it clear that Congress should get over its partisan wrangling and pass a bill that increases spending and puts Americans back to work. Americans United for Change and the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) hosted the press conference call.

(Click here to urge your senators to support the president’s economic recovery package.)

Princeton University Professor Alan Blinder, a former member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve Board, told reporters the stimulus package is urgently needed and that any talk of not passing it could be disastrous.

It would be a tragedy if the stimulus package doesn’t pass. It would be an act of extreme national stupidity not to enact a big stimulus bill, and the sooner the better.

The need for the stimulus is clear in the nation’s unemployment figures, says EPI President Lawrence Mishel:

Eighteen to 19 percent of workers are unemployed or underemployed. And it’s far worse for African Americans, who are 18 percent unemployed and 30 percent underemployed. All that means is lower wages and less income for everyone.

The stimulus package will generate spending and create jobs, Mishel added, through a combination of tax cuts and public investments, especially such projects as infrastructure repair that put money in the pockets of the middle class who will spend it. He warned against increasing business tax breaks because, he said, they don’t really generate much spending or create jobs.

Lawrence Chimerine, former CEO of the WEFA Group, an economic forecasting firm, and Chase Econometrics, said Republican plans to limit tax breaks to the rich will not work.

We’ve never had a recession this large before and as broad-based. Fear is widespread and confidence is very low. This is an emergency. This is a national crisis. We need a large stimulus package that has a large component of spending. It has tax cuts that are going to generate big bang for the buck such as making sure that people who pay Social Security taxes get a tax cut. The House Republicans only wanted to give a tax cut to people who pay income tax, which would leave out about 35 percent of American families who need it the most and would spend it shortly.

Blinder added that the Obama plan is a start on turning the economy around, and after it is passed, the government must pay attention to new measures to keep the financial system afloat, reduce the tidal wave of foreclosures and mend the credit markets.

But no matter how you cut it, Mishel says:

What (Congress) is talking about is sizable. It’s definitely not too large. And it needs to be done now. If it’s not, the American people should hold the politicians accountable for the severity of the recession they’re going to be experiencing.

The United Steelworkers (USW) reached a tentative agreement yesterday with Royal Dutch Shell PLC—the lead company for the oil industry—on wages, benefits and working conditions that will become the minimum standards when local union negotiations get under way.

While agreement on the economic terms was reached, USW President Leo W. Gerard said safety issues remain.

These were tough negotiations, given the economic conditions of an economy still in a total free fall. The oil companies were not willing to work with us fully to improve process safety.

USW Vice President Gary Beevers, head of the union’s National Oil Bargaining program, criticized the industry for placing “so many roadblocks” in negotiations to improving safety conditions. But he also noted that the nation’s collapsing economy hung over the talks.

We certainly didn’t want to contribute to the economic struggles of the American public by calling a national strike and possibly seeing the spiking of gas and diesel prices, home foreclosures of our members or any other hardships.

We opted to reach a tentative agreement on economic issues and withdrew our bargaining demands for the safety language we and the public sorely need. But let it be clear, we are not finished with our struggles for meaningful change in the health and safety arena.

Details of the tentative agreement will not be released until union members have a chance to review the pact.

The oil industry contracts, which expired Feb. 1, cover Shell, along with BP PLC, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., Amoco, ConocoPhillips and 38 independent refineries.

The USW represents about 30,000 workers in the oil industry. If USW locals at Shell approve the tentative agreement, it becomes the minimum standard that must be met in local union negotiations with the remaining oil companies.

Click here for a detailed explanation of oil industry bargaining from the USW.

After eight years of their go-it-alone conservative policies that created the economic crisis we’re in today, congressional Republicans still are playing partisan politics. They’re threatening to scuttle President Obama’s economic recovery package unless they get bigger tax breaks for Big Business and the rich.

The Center for Community Change, a national coalition of more than 300 grassroots organizations, joins many of us in the labor and progressive communities in a drive to convince members of the Senate to pass Obama’s economic recovery and reinvestment legislation.

The center lays out the reasons Congress should pass the bill:

The stimulus bill now in the Senate puts the right emphasis not only on short-term public spending to create desperately needed new jobs but also repair some of the deeper problems we face. President Obama has said that economic stimulus should be “a down payment on some of the structural problems that we have in our economy.”  By investing in green technology, Medicaid and health clinic expansion and public education, the stimulus package not only meets our short-term needs but also helps us achieve our long-term potential as a nation.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said yesterday in a statement:

The future of our nation’s middle class isn’t a blue issue or red issue—it’s a jobs issue, plain and simple, and we need more of them fast. It is time for those who are attempting to obstruct real change to step beyond ideology and partisanship and to think about the families and communities that need help now.

The AFL-CIO is pushing for Congress to quickly and aggressively make a major investment in our country. We must create jobs and invest in renewable energy, energy efficiency, transportation, schools and health care. We also must invest in America’s families and the nation’s workforce by ensuring that states can fund the services they depend on, including health care, public safety and education.

Click here to urge your senators to support the stimulus package.