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/10656Union Workers Take To Capitol Hill Seeking Votes For Employee Free Choice Acta//li
lia href =http://www.laborradio.org/node/10657McClatchy Newspapers Cutting Fifteen Percent Of Its Workforcea//li
lia href =http://www.laborradio.org/node/10658Deere Cuts Hundreds Of Jobs From Construction And Forestry Divisiona//li
lia href =http://www.laborradio.org/node/10659Economic Report: Eighty Percent Of Recession Lay-Offs Have Been Mena//li
/ul

/div
/div/div

pEconomic Report:/p
pMales are being hit hard by the shrinking job market. 80-percent of the laid-off workers since the recession began have been male. In November of 2008 women held 49 percent of jobs in the United States. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics women could soon be the majority workforce in the country. The shift can be attributed to the heavy loss of male dominated jobs such as in construction and manufacturing./p

pThe world’s largest maker of farm machinery has announced plans for more layoffs. Deere and Company will cut 325 jobs from its construction and forestry division. These job cuts come on top of 200 cuts previously announced in February. /p

pThe newspaper industry continues to reel from lost ad revenue and a deepening recession. Jesse Russell reports:/p
pWorkers for one of the country’s largest newspaper chains received a whammy of an announcement on Monday. McClatchy announced it would be cutting 1,600 jobs. This announcement, which slashes 15 percent of the company’s workforce, comes only a handful of months after the previous job cuts by the company in 2008. In the summer of last year McClatchy let go of 2,550 jobs. Executives for the company will have their pay cut by 10 percent and they will not receive bonuses. McClatchy chief executive Gary Pruitt will have his $1.1 million base salary cut by 15 percent. Sacramento, Calif.-based McClatchy is the third largest newspaper chain in the country with 30 daily newspapers. /p

pBy Doug Cunningham/p
pWorkers from the Service Employees International Union are on Capitol Hill to urge lawmakers to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act labor law reform. Mike Kingsbury, a nurse from Colorado, says workers need this reform making it easier to exercise their rights to join unions because it stops anti-union employer intimidation like he experienced./p
p[Kingsbury]: “Within fifteen minutes of my boss finding out that we were organizing the director of nursing, who I had never had a meeting with before and one of the other nurse managers from my unit sat me down in an office and talked with me for an hour and a half and just on and on and on about why unions were bad and why it was a bad idea and how misguided I was.”/p

The wing nuts speaking for Corporate America are getting—well, wing nuttier. Their anti-worker, anti-union lies and distortions about the Employee Free Choice Act have reached just plain bizarre levels.

Now it’s your turn to weigh in: Who deserves the Chicken Little Sky Is Falling Bizarre Corporate Panic over Workers’ Rights Award? The award will go to the corporate mouthpiece that spews the most outrageous claims about the Employee Free Choice Act—proposed federal legislation that strikes fear in the heart of corporate giants because it would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.

Want to link to this survey from your own site? Grab the code for this chicken and use it in your blog!

The members of Ironworkers Local 7 work hard in the cold, windy weather in Boston. But they have found a way to keep their hearts warm and to provide a special gift to hundreds of young cancer patients.

Children who come to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute write their names on sheets of paper and tape them to the windows of the walkway for ironworkers to see. And, each day, the ironworkers paint the names onto I-beams and hoist them into place as they add floors to the building.

So far, the workers have paid tribute to more than 100 children. Last Friday, ABC News spotlighted members of Local 7 and named the children they honor as its “Persons of the Week.” 

Tommy, a 10-year-old cancer patient whose vision has been restored by chemotherapy treatments at the clinic, told ABC:

You put your name on a piece of paper and then hold it up to the window, and the people will see and then they’ll spray paint your name on. Now I know I’m always part of this building.

Click here to see the ABC report.

The Ironworkers began the ritual of the names in 1996 when they were building the Research Laboratories at Dana-Farber. When they began working on this latest project, they resumed the practice. The workers say it’s a way to honor the children.

Michael Walsh, a Local 7 foreman, told ABC:

It was spontaneous. I think one child put their name on a window. One ironworker saw that name, spray painted, ‘Hi Kids,’ and then that name on a beam—and it just grew from there.

“It’s been a tough winter—cold, snowy,” said Walsh, a 27-year ironworker veteran.

But the men have been plowing through because they know they’re going to see the kids. You’re bringing a little bit of joy into their lives. So this job is probably one of those jobs most of us will never forget. There’s a lot of softies up there working for me right now.

This type of kindness and support of those with problems is not unusual for union members, says Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert Haynes:

As a human being, I’m touched by the gestures of these workers.  As a parent, I’m profoundly grateful. As a fellow Local 7 Ironworker, I have to say that as proud as I am of these kindnesses, I’m equally unsurprised. The members of the labor movement perform acts of kindness like this every day. We contribute in ways large and small, symbolic and concrete.

The labor movement hasn ‘t forgotten that it’s all about families, and there’s nothing more important to a family than our kids. As union people, we call perfect strangers brother and sister, and those Ironworkers saw those kids at Children Hospital as if they were their own. That something so simple can have an impact so grand just speaks to the role workers play in making this country as great as it is. It’s nice the press caught on to the good work we do as working people.

Ed Coyle, director of Alliance for Retired Americans

Ed Coyle, director of the Alliance for Retired Americans, describes President Obama’s Health Care Summit in which he participated. 

On March 5, I joined several of my colleagues in the labor and progressive communities at President Obama’s health care summit.

President Obama deserves great credit for putting together a diverse, bipartisan group to sit down together to discuss this issue. There was a strong sense of cooperation from a wide range of elected officials and organizations around the table.

But even with this good start, I believe this is going to be a big test for all of us. The real challenge will come when the details of health care reform are proposed. Make no mistake—sharp lines will be drawn as this plays out in Washington. Retirees and workers must stay educated and mobilized to make sure that every American has access to quality health care.

I believe that any health care legislation Congress passes must strengthen and expand Medicare. Medicare has been a great American success story, helping millions of retirees afford medical treatment and get prescriptions filled. But to truly reform health care, we must strengthen Medicare so it can better help our growing retiree population.

There are several ways we can do this:

• Lower the cost of prescription drugs by closing the “donut hole” coverage gap in Medicare Part D and allowing Medicare to negotiate volume discounts with drug manufacturers. The Veterans Affairs does this and its prescriptions cost 30 percent less.
• Support President Obama’s call to end the wasteful taxpayer subsidies—$176 billion over the next 10 years—to private insurance companies who operate Medicare Advantage plans. We are paying them up to 20 percent more than what it would cost Medicare to provide similar service. Every senior enrolled in Medicare pays an extra $3 per month because of this corporate welfare.
• Provide early retirees, ages 55-64, the option to purchase Medicare coverage.  There are 5.1 million Americans in this age group who lack health insurance, many of them victim of mass layoffs. Just think how our nation’s health care costs would go down if they were to have regular, preventive medical care during this critical period of their lives.

In the 2008 elections, all of us knocked on doors and made phone calls to demand sweeping changes in our health care system. The result: a president, a Congress and a political climate now primed for action. Working together, we can make 2009 the year we turn historic opportunity into lasting change.

The economic crisis started with home foreclosures, and the numbers are getting worse. According to the Center for Responsible Lending (CLR), a non-partisan research and policy group, some 6,600 homes are foreclosed every day: one every 13 seconds. Experts agree that helping homeowners is key to helping the entire economy.

Writing at Congress Matters, David Waldman, aka Kagro X, says new numbers from CLR show that projected foreclosures by congressional district are concentrated in five states: California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. In fact, there’s not a congressional district in the top 50 that isn’t in one of these five states. The most troubled districts are represented by Republicans, he reports. Republicans hold just over 40 percent of the seats in the House, but represent 60 percent of the top 10 most troubled districts.

 And he debunks another myth about foreclosures:

Finally, it should perhaps be noted that despite the claims of many conservatives that the bulk of risky loans, and therefore the bulk of foreclosures, were associated with minority borrowers. Congressional districts with the highest concentrations of racial minorities do not appear to be represented in disproportionate numbers at the top of this list.

Check here to see new foreclosures by state.

The CLR analysis comes after the Obama administration last week unveiled its “Making Home Affordable” plan, a $75 billion loan modification program that could assist as many as 9 million homeowners.

 Also last week, the House passed H.R. 1106, which makes it easier to get court relief on mortgages for financially distressed homeowners. CLR President Michael Calhoun praised the House action:

We applaud lawmakers in the House for passing legislation that is a crucial piece of the broader White House plan to stem foreclosures. The need to put the economy before politics couldn’t be clearer. In 2008, more than a million families joined the ranks of borrowers in default on their mortgage, half of them in the last three months of the year.

Damon Silvers, a member of the congressional oversight committee and AFL-CIO associate general counsel, pointed out that massive foreclosures launched a chain of events

that leads to falling property values, collapsed mega banks, trillion-dollar government bailouts, frozen credit markets, 401-K meltdowns, political crises in foreign countries, closed factories, lost jobs from here to China and back.

No one benefits from home foreclosures, Silvers says. Foreclosed homes typically yield less than 40 cents on the dollar to lenders, while destabilizing neighborhoods and driving down real estate values. He says the nation needs to act now to reform the mortgage and banking systems. President Obama has proposed “spending real money to help homeowners in trouble.” 

Across the country, advocacy groups such as ACORN and political leaders are urging homeowners to fight back against Wall Street and protect their homes.

In a recent interview on the Pacifica news show, “Democracy Now,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) urged homeowners facing eviction to stay in their homes and seek legal help.

The most important thing to do is to get legal help. And what we are finding is that if people receive a notice from a financial institution, their first reaction is fear, rather than getting proper legal representation. There’s a number people can call: 888-995-HOME—to get the proper legal representation, so they can actually have the scales of justice be balanced rather than, now, all the power to Wall Street and none of the justice to Main Street.

If you believe that Wall Street has been deceptive, could have been fraudulent or tried to dupe the public…you need a lawyer. And you should stay in your home. It is your castle. It’s more than a piece of property. It’s your home.

Click here to read a transcript of the interview.

Last month, ACORN members in eight cities kicked off the organization’s Home Staying campaign, a new tactic to fight the foreclosure crisis. Teams of  “ACORN Home Defenders”—volunteers from local communities—are employing civil disobedience as needed to help people who have faced foreclosure to stay in their homes until a comprehensive federal solution has been put in place.

ACORN also is staging protests across the country outside courthouses, where eviction hearings are going on, and providing counseling and support for homeowners who face eviction. 

Maude Hurd, president of ACORN, says:

Finally, the federal government is telling Wall Street that everyday Americans need to get something back for their largesse, and that help will come in the form of rational foreclosure policies. Of course, providing more modifications and starting fewer unnecessary foreclosures will help investors as well as families, neighborhoods, and our economy. This new announcement is far from a bailout for homeowners—it is merely a requirement that the mortgage servicing industry do the job it is supposed to do. The entire industry must embrace these protocols and begin applying them right away.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports the housing crisis is hitting military families particularly hard. Many military couples who bought during the housing boom and must now relocate because of a base closing or transfer are faced with selling their homes at a big loss. Congress included language in the economic stimulus package to compensate service members who sell their home at a loss or have been foreclosed upon because they were forced to move after a base closure, reassignment or a combat wound required them to be relocated near a health facility. The program also covers surviving spouses of those killed in combat.

Sixteen air traffic controllers credited with 11 “saves” in 2008—meaning they assisted pilots in landing safely, avoiding collisions or overcoming instrument failures—were honored last week with the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) Archie League Medal of Safety awards.

Air traffic controllers juggle a variety of variables and complex scenarios. Their ability to adapt to ever-changing situations while keeping their composure is a skill they have mastered. Says NATCA President Patrick Forrey:

Though the men and women these controllers saved call them heroes, for these controllers it was simply a matter of relying on their training and experience—allowing them to react with precision and skill, without hesitation. Heroic yet humble, these controllers represent our profession well, and their commitment to safety inspires everything we do at NATCA.

John Charlton who works the Lake Charles, La., tower was honored with the President’s Award for his work in safely guiding a student pilot on a solo flight to a safe landing in September. Charlton had cleared the Cessna to land, but the student pilot failed the first two attempts. According to NATCA’s summary of the save:

After offering advice for a third attempt that proved unsuccessful, he alerted crash and rescue as a precaution for this risky predicament that had so quickly developed.

He instructed the pilot to do as he said without responding back. This would allow her to focus on his words, and his words alone. He spent the rest of the flight talking her through cross wind correction, keeping proper airspeed and finally through the instructions for cutting power towards descent.

When the aircraft started to settle, he instructed the pilot to add pitch and, after a total of four unsuccessful attempts, the aircraft finally touched down successfully. Before ending the assist, Charlton made sure that the pilot had applied her brakes and taxied clear of the runway in order to not only ensure her safety, but the safety of those around her.

Click here for links to a transcript and audio of the transmission between Charlton and the student pilot. Click here for a complete list of the winners. Audio and transcripts of those saves can be found here.

The award, named for Archie League, the first air traffic controller, salutes controllers who display extraordinary skill to ensure safety in critical situations.