Labor Union Blog

Keep up with the latest news about Pulte Homes, one of the nation’s largest home builders, on Building Justice’s updated website, http://poorlybuiltbypulte.info/. The site also enables homeowners to complete a survey about their experiences with Pulte.

Building Justice is a partnership of the Painters and Allied Trades union (IUPAT), the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA), the AFL-CIO, Pulte homeowners, community members and elected officials to improve conditions at Pulte developments.

Workers in three Western states employed by contractors hired by Pulte report unpaid wages and overtime, pressure to work through break periods and pressure to bypass safety precautions. They report sexual harassment and discrimination on the job. Some workers also report that appropriate construction materials, safety equipment and potable drinking water are not available.

Last month, 50 angry workers and supporters delivered “lemon awards” to a Pulte executive at a Nevada State Contractors Board meeting. The awards followed release of a new report, “Poorly Built by Pulte, No Different at Del Webb.” The report is based on surveys of 872 Pulte and Del Webb homeowners from Nevada, Arizona and California. 

According to the report, 63 percent of respondents complained that their homes had construction defects, and another 43 percent of respondents reported they would not buy another Pulte or Del Webb home. Click here to read the full report. 

To learn more about the Building Justice Campaign, click here and here.  

You can link your website to the revised Poorly Built by Pulte site here.

Detroit takes another hit as American Axle idles its largest plant in mid-July. The company depends on auto manufacturers. GM accounts for 75 percent of American Axle’s business, Chrysler ten percent. 500 workers are being let go and more work will be transferred to Mexico. After the plant shutdown American Axle will just have 232 employees left in Michigan.

By Doug Cunningham

More than five thousand workers are killed on the job every year in the U.S. Another 50,000 die each year from occupation-related diseases. At the National Labor College in Maryland, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis marked Workers Memorial Day this week by vowing to ramp up safety enforcement for workers on the job.

[Solis]: “When it comes to workplace protection, workplace health and workplace safety. let me be clear – the Department of Labor is back in the enforcement business. Under my watch enforcement of our labor laws will be intensified to provide an effective deterrent to employers who put their workers’ lives at risk.”

Yesterday marked one hundred days for the nation’s 44th president, but in that time, what he has accomplished for workers? Jesse Russell has more:

The AFL-CIO has released a list highlighting a number of landmark moments in President Barack Obama’s first 100 days. One of the stand out moments was the passage of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The act helps level the playing field when it comes to gender pay equity. He established a new task force chaired by Vice President Joe Biden dedicated to raising the standard of living for the middle class. Obama used his executive power to erase setbacks of the Bush administration including reversing an order that limited union representation on federal contracts.

By Doug Cunningham

Workers are still reeling from the economy as new numbers show U.S. gross domestic product contracted by 6.1 percent between January and March. In the final quarter of 2008 is shrank by 6.3 percent. It’s the worst economic decline since 1958. Business capital investment dropped by 38 percent. For workers this means that job losses will continue this year. More than five million workers have lost jobs so far during this recession.

By Doug Cunningham

According to the Associated Press, Fiat will sign the deal forming a partnership with Chrysler. Major banks have already agreed to substantially reduce Chrysler’s debt and the United Auto Workers union has agreed to concessions. All these things were conditions set by the Obama administration for Chrysler to get more federal loans and avoid bankruptcy. GM continues to deal with its creditors in an effort to cuts its debt as it talks with the UAW to resolve outstanding retiree health care and other issues. GM’s bid to avoid bankruptcy hinges on reaching agreements with

Employers who violate workplace safety and health laws—even to the point where workers are killed or injured—now face such minimal penalties that too many ignore the law, witnesses told the U.S. House Education and Labor Committee during a hearing yesterday that coincided with Workers Memorial Day.

They called for tougher enforcement of safety laws and stronger sanctions against law-breaking employers.

Peg Seminario, AFL-CIO director of health and safety, told the panel:

Current OSHA enforcement and penalties are far too weak to provide any meaningful incentive for employers to address job hazards or to deter violations. As a result, workers are exposed to serious hazards that put them in danger and cause injury and death.

The maximum penalty for a serious violation that injures or even kills a worker is $7,000, and $70,000 for willful and repeated violations. But those are rarely assessed. Seminario said that the average penalty for a serious violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) is less than $1,000 and the average penalty when a worker is killed is $11,300.

Rebecca Foster told the committee that her 19-year-old step son Jeremy Foster was killed in October 2004 while working at a sawmill in Ola, Ark. OSHA cited his employer for a “serious” safety violation for improperly modifying a piece of equipment that resulted in his death. Yet the law only allows a fine up to $7,000 for such a violation.

We were appalled to see the amount of the fine: $4,500. Surely this was an error. Shortly afterwards we read in our state newspaper that the fine had been reduced to only $2,250. Did they place a value of our only son’s life at this amount?

Penalties for violating the OSH Act were last updated in 1990 and not indexed for inflation. Since the OSH Act became law 39 years ago, only 71 criminal cases have been prosecuted. But because the OSH Act classifies violations that result in the death of a worker as just Class B misdemeanors with a maximum penalty of six months in jail, the defendants in those cases served only a combined total of 42 months behind bars. Said University of Michigan Law School professor David M. Uhlmann:

Misdemeanor violations provide little deterrence and minimal incentive for prosecutors and law enforcement personnel, who reserve their limited resources for the crimes that Congress has deemed most egregious by making them felonies.

Last week, committee chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) and other committee members introduced legislation to strengthen and modernize the OSH Act. The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067) would strengthen health and safety penalties, bring more workers under the protection of OSHA, protect workers who blow the whistle on employers who break the law and strengthen worker safety rights.

At yesterday’s hearing, Miller noted that “while both civil and criminal penalties are available under the OSH Act,”

criminal prosecutions of egregious violations of the law are only possible when a willful violation leads to the death of a worker. Even then, no matter how bad an employer acted, killing a worker is only a class B Misdemeanor

These penalties for failing to protect workers pale in comparison to the penalties for failing to protect animals or the environment generally. Even maliciously harassing a wild burro under the Federal Wild Horses and Burros Act can bring twice as much prison time as killing a worker after willfully violating the law.

Seminario said:

Action is needed to put teeth into enforcement of the job safety law, and to bring OSHA enforcement into line with the enforcement practices and authorities under other safety and environmental laws.

OSHA can and should take action under the existing law to make enforcement more effective and to enhance penalties for violations that put workers in serious danger and cause death and injury.

The entire OSHA penalty policy and formulas should be reviewed and revamped. The agency should use its full statutory authority to impose meaningful penalties for serious, willful and repeat violations of the law, particularly in cases involving worker deaths.

Click here to read the witnesses’ testimony and for an archived video of the hearing. And here for shorter videos of the testimony.

The World Bank’s decision to revise the controversial labor-market ratings in its flagship publication, Doing Business, is long overdue and a “significant step” in the right direction, global union and political leaders say.

Every year, the World Bank rates nations based on criteria that in principle rank countries’ “ease of doing business.” The bank measures 10 separate indicators. But unions, academics and activists have criticized Doing Business as a one-sided publication, focused almost exclusively on a narrow “private investor” perspective, with little regard for social impact.

One of the key rankings, the employing workers indicator (EWI), ranks countries on such things as maximum hours, minimum wage, severance pay and other non-wage benefits. For the past two years, former Soviet republics with repressive worker laws have received the top scores for worker protections, with other countries receiving lower scores for stronger labor market protections.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in a statement:

We welcome and applaud this significant step, and we commend World Bank President Robert Zoellick for acting to address the concerns that have been raised over the years with respect to the Employing Workers Index.

We also congratulate House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank for his leadership, tenacity, and commitment to ensuring that the World Bank correct and clarify the message it sends to developing country governments about successful and sustainable economic strategies.

Testifying before Congress in 2007, AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee said:

Doing Business is an international disgrace. It classifies most protections for workers as investment impediments. It ranks human-rights abusers as stars, and downgrades democratic countries with strong labor institutions and protections

Doing Business is not simply a neutral set of indices, but rather a powerful policy document, used to determine loan eligibility and to send a message, both to governments and to investors, about “desirable” regulatory reforms.

In an April 27 memo sent to country and sector directors, World Bank management said the EWI does not represent World Bank policy and should not be used as a basis for policy advice or in any country program documents. The World Bank also will remove the EWI from the assessments the Bank uses to establish countries’ overall eligibility for loans and grants.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) welcomed the changes, saying:

The notion that fairness for working men and women is somehow antithetical to good [World] Bank practice makes neither economic nor social sense, and I am pleased that this anti-worker indicator will no longer be promoted by the Bank.

International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) General Secretary Guy Ryder, a longtime critic of the EWI, says:

In the context of the current global economic crisis, where 50 million more workers could become unemployed this year and pressures to decrease wages and workers’ living standards are intensifying every day, it is significant that an important development institution like the World Bank is turning the page on a one-sided deregulatory view on labor issues and proposing to adopt a more balanced approach where adequate regulation, improved social protection and respect for workers’ rights will be given a higher profile.

California interfaith leaders in Los Angeles gathered this week to demonstrate their support for the Employee Free Choice Act.

Steve Smith, director of communications at the California Labor Federation, describes one of many recent actions in California and around the country in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

A broad coalition of California interfaith leaders gathered at a West Los Angeles Wal-Mart this week to demand an end to the Wal-Martization of America and to support a renewed covenant with America’s workers through passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Nationwide, dozens of faith groups have joined with environmental, community and academic organizations in support of the legislation, which would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions.

Speakers, including renowned labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, discussed the fundamental flaws in our corporate-dominated economy epitomized by Wal-Mart, which raked in more than $13 billion in profits last year while refusing to pay many of its own employees a living wage or provide basic necessities like health care. Wal-Mart also is recognized as the most virulently anti-union corporation in the nation and is spending millions of dollars to try and defeat the Employee Free Choice Act.

Bishop Mary Anne Swenson of the United Methodist Church, speaking to dozens of activists, set the tone:

For too long, corporations like Wal-Mart have flourished while their workers have languished in poverty without a voice in the workplace. Together we can change that. We can restore the voice and the rights of workers and move them to a shared prosperity. We must urge our elected officials to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

Lichtenstein, author of the new book, Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism, shared case studies from his research that show just how far Wal-Mart will go to deny workers from having the freedom to bargain collectively for better wages and benefits. Lichtenstein said the Employee Free Choice Act is a critical reform that would make the system to join a union more fair and democratic.

According to Human Rights Watch, when the U.S. State Department evaluates an election in places like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, or the Ukraine, outside observers look not just at the ballot-box on election day, but on the entire run-up to the vote: If there is an atmosphere of intimidation, a government monopoly on the news, threats of job loss and dislocation, then the U.S. government declares the election a sham at best, a tactic in the continued undemocratic governance of that country. When these same standards are applied to companies like Wal-Mart, it becomes obvious that as currently constituted, our labor laws fail to provide for free and fair election choice by American workers.

The Employee Free Choice Act will be a step in making it possible for workers to decide their right whether to form a union or not without intimidation and without having a company executive threatening to fire, demote or harass them should the vote go against management’s wishes.

The event was the latest in many California grassroots actions in support of the Employee Free Choice Act. Since the bill was introduced in Congress in March, more than 30,000 Californians have sent hand-written letters to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, urging her to support the Employee Free Choice. Next week, activists across the state will hold 24-hour vigils under the theme “Now is the time for Employee Free Choice.”