Labor Union Blog

Read the AFL-CIO Executive Council statement honoring America’s 911 Heroes here.

Working people across the country today are participating in community service and remembrance events to honor those who lost their lives in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the first responders who worked tirelessly to rescue the survivors.

These events, which cap a “summer of service” called for by President Obama, come just two days before the AFL-CIO begins its 26th constitutional convention in Pittsburgh, just 80 miles from Shanksville, where United Airlines flight 93 went down eight years ago.

From Anchorage, Alaska, to Peoria, Ill., to Nashville, Tenn., working people are organizing food drives, blood drives and other service events. AFL-CIO central labor councils have conducted more than 300 community-based service projects across the country throughout the summer. Local labor groups from across the country also have conducted activities to help the growing number of unemployed Americans in San Francisco, Dallas and dozens of other communities.

Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:

Six hundred union members were among those killed on September 11. There isn’t a better way to honor their lives and the lives lost by so many others than by continuing to support our communities and strengthening the neighborhoods they called home.

In Las Vegas, the AFL-CIO Community Services agency of the Nevada State AFL-CIO is offering assistance to the city’s disadvantaged elderly seeking low-cost prescription drugs. In another example, nearly 200 volunteers from AFT and the Philadelphia Council of the AFL-CIO gathered enough school supplies to fill an entire school bus. The donated supplies were given to children living in Philadelphia homeless shelters.

Also, today at Ground Zero, the New York State AFL-CIO and New YorK City Central Labor Council joined together to press for immediate passage of the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act (HR. 847/S.1334), which would establish a medical monitoring and treatment program for the Sept. 11 first responders and the community around the site of the attacks.

A recent study found nearly one-quarter of a sample of firefighters and other first responders and construction workers exposed to the toxic mix of chemicals and debris at Ground Zero during Sept. 11 rescue and recovery operations continue to suffer from persistent lung problems.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, seen here with AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, CNA/NNOC Co-President Deborah Burger (left) and CNA/NNOC nurses, will premiere his newest film in Pittsburgh Monday.

Pittsburgh isn’t just hosting the AFL-CIO Convention next week: The city also will host a special showing of Michael Moore’s latest documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story,” Monday night.

Moore, who most recently directed “Sicko,” now turns his lens on the U.S. financial and economic crisis. On Monday, Sept. 14, following the second day of the AFL-CIO Convention, AFL-CIO delegates and guests will get a chance to see the film.

Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC), says that the film is:

the best major labor film in years…an unabashed advocacy of working people and critique of an unjust system and the financial misdeeds that have led to the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Mark Weisbrot from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) says “Capitalism—a Love Story,” “doesn’t just go after the seamy side of the American economy.”

Moore has bigger targets in his sights: He is questioning whether the whole incentive structure, moral values and political economy of American capitalism are fit for human beings. Although this will not seem so radical in Europe, where most countries have had governments in the post-World War II era that at least called themselves socialist, or in most of the developing world, where socialist ideas have plenty of popular appeal, it’s pretty much unprecedented for anything that can reach a mass audience in the United States.

CNA/NNOC partnered with Moore during the release of his last movie, “Sicko,” which looked at the failures of the U.S. health care system. CNA/NNOC members toured the country advocating for health care reform that covers everyone.

“Capitalism: A Love Story” will open nationwide on Oct. 2.

When the G-20 summit meets in Pittsburgh in two weeks, the world leaders will hear how the city has rebounded after the demise of the steel industry and made itself into a center for higher education and medical research. But the hidden truth is that the ed-med revolution has passed many Pittsburghers by and only benefits the Steel City’s wealthy and highly educated citizens, said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard.

At the same time, Gerard warned, the problems in Pittsburgh are representative of what’s happening across the nation as policymakers cling to policies that continue to send jobs overseas, decimating working families’ communities.

Speaking to the biennial convention of the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA), meeting Sept. 10-12 in Pittsburgh, Gerard said our trade policies reward companies that move jobs overseas and our trade deficit with China has made us the world’s biggest debtor nation. (See a video clip of Gerard’s remarks on our AFL-CIO Convention 2009 site.)

Unless we revamp our economic policies, Gerard says, the nation will never completely recover from the global economic crisis. That means we must start making things again and decrease our dependence on basic products made abroad.

If we don’t make things, we will have nothing to export and no jobs to create.

He cited the USW’s recent complaints against the illegal dumping of Chinese tires and the large number of Chinese imports by retailers like Wal-Mart.

The impact of those economic policies on Pittsburgh have been devastating. Two weeks ahead of the G-20 summit, ILCA has created a 48-hour “media center” to serve as the nerve center to tell the truth about Pittsburgh’s workers without the hype. The reports will be uploaded to ILCA’s website.

At a briefing this morning by Pittsburgh activists, the journalists found out the collapse of manufacturing, especially the steel industry, has decimated the city and its communities. Dewitt Walton and Stephanie Domike, members of the USW, pointed out that two communities, which depended on the steels mills, have suffered the most: African Americans and small steel mill towns.

Domike says the mill towns are not coming back. The mills that closed have now been turned into shopping malls, but the people in the towns can’t afford to shop there. All the customers come in from the suburbs.

Walton said in the African American community, middle-class neighborhoods are declining as more and more people are losing jobs and those who are employed have to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. He estimated that the real unemployment level—the jobless, the underemployed and those who have given up looking for work—is about 50 percent.

A recent study by the Institute for America’s Future points out that manufacturing in Pittsburgh lost a quarter of its workforce over the past 10 years. Many manufacturing jobs were replaced by high-end jobs in education or medicine. But many were replaced by waiters and hotel clerks—jobs that never paid as well and proved even more vulnerable in the recent downturn. Some manufacturing jobs were never replaced at all. Click here to read the study “Pittsburgh: The Rest of the Story.”

Also, public workers are losing jobs as the city’s revenue drops. To make matters worse, 25 of the 26 largest corporations in the city pay no local taxes nor do the large number of universities that are driving the ed-med revival. Further complicating the picture: Most of the people who work in the city live in the suburbs and pay only a token $110 annual commuter tax.

Walton pointed out that the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI) has taken an active role in training Pittsburgh public housing residents in various building trades skills to help them build better lives. He says such programs are one way unions can help communities now while still agitating for policy changes.

Some 43,000 airport screeners at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) yesterday moved another step closer to winning “long overdue” collective bargaining rights and other workplace protections.

By a 19-10 party-line vote, the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee approved legislation (H.R. 1881) restoring the workers’ rights that the Bush administration stripped away in 2003. In addition, the bill grants the screeners—also known as Transportation Security Officers (TSOs)—and other TSA workers “whistle-blower” rights and the same civil service protections enjoyed by other federal workers.

Committee chairman Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) says the restoration of collective bargaining rights is “long overdue” and will help the agency

deal with the high attrition, low morale and severe workplace injury rates that have plagued the agency since its creation in 2001.

In 2003, President George W. Bush took bargaining rights away from TSOs and other workers at the TSA in one of the first shots in his war on America’s workers. Both the House and the Senate approved bargaining rights for TSOs in 2007, but that provision was dropped in conference after Bush threatened to veto the bill.

Although TSOs have been denied the freedom to bargain collectively, AFGE represents 10,000 TSA workers nationwide and regularly represents these employees before the TSA Disciplinary Review Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Congress and in the courts.

Says Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.):

The right to bargain collectively would be on any list of basic American rights. And it would be on any list of denials you would expect in an authoritarian state.

In July, the House Homeland Security Committee approved the bill and backers hope for a full House vote by the end of the year.

In a related development, President Obama announced he will nominate Erroll Southers as the new TSA administrator. Southers currently serves as assistant chief for the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department’s Office of Homeland Security and Intelligence.

AFGE President John Gage praised the nomination for filling a “dire need” at the TSA.

The question of bargaining rights at TSA is not a matter of “if” but “when.” We are confident that the appointment of Mr. Southers as administrator will help put that matter to bed.

For nearly eight years, TSOs have had to deal with issues of health and safety, discrimination, selective hiring practices, nepotism, management intimidation and reports of lax oversight at the agency with only AFGE to stand between them and an arbitrary and capricious management. With a new administrator and full workplace protections, they will have the full weight of civil service due process rights and labor law to add to the union protections AFGE has secured throughout the past years.

As union members get ready for the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, Pride At Work (PAW), an AFL-CIO constituency group, is among several union-related organizations meeting in Pittsburgh to plan for the future.

It’s the 10th anniversary for PAW as an official constituency group of the AFL-CIO. PAW focuses on the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) workers. Co-president Nancy Wohlforth said this morning that she’d never have believed how far the organization would come and how much they’d be able to accomplish—but that there are still many challenges ahead.

Wohlforth, who will step down this year as co-president, said PAW members have proven themselves a valuable asset in working family campaigns across the union movement and, in turn, they’ve been able to make great strides in educating and assisting unions about LGBT issues. Thanks to the efforts of PAW, unions across the country are making sure that contracts offer nondiscrimination provisions, as well as health and pension benefits for domestic partners. Unions also are stepping up to fight for equality not just in the workplace, but in state policy.

Now that we have a new administration in the White House, Wohlforth said, we need to work even harder to pass bills at the national level that protect all workers, like the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. PAW will need to mobilize to make sure Congress takes action on these bills and gets them to President Barack Obama’s desk:

We have an opportunity right now—we can’t just do business as usual. We can change millions of workers’ lives if we work on a national level.

We can increase our influence by being active in our central labor councils and state federations, by getting out there on other people’s picket lines and by designing our ideas in ways people will understand.

We’re in this because we really care about making changes in people’s lives.

T Santora, PAW’s other co-president, said he’s proud to have been involved in building the strength of PAW and connecting the union movement and the LGBT movement. He agreed we can’t just sit back because we helped Obama win the election—we need to create the environment that will allow a positive agenda for workers to pass Congress. There’s potential for real change, Santora said, but it has been unrealized.

As a sign of how far the union movement and the LGBT movement have come over the past decade, PAW Executive Director Jeremy Bishop will be heading to the Department of Labor for a job as a special assistant. Bishop, who was recognized this morning for his years of service to PAW, said he hopes to continue to fight for real improvements in the lives of all workers:

We’re all fighting for the same thing—we all need respect on the job and we all need to be treated with equality and dignity.

Jim Gillis, an AFSCME retiree from Rhode Island, said he’s interested in what Pride At Work has done in relation to pensions and health care:

I’m here at the Pride At Work convention because there may be some things I can bring back to District 94. We have a lot of gay and lesbian retirees (see video).

Over today and tomorrow, the dozens of union members attending the PAW convention will elect new officers and do in-depth strategic planning to strengthen the ties between the LGBT movement and the union movement.

New data out from the U.S. Census Bureau yesterday show a nation on the decline: Millions more Americans are in poverty and hundreds of thousands more are without health insurance compared with a year ago—and our median household income is now the lowest since 1997.

As Time’s Justin Fox puts it:

I don’t know how much of this was bad luck and how much was bad policy (nobody does), but there’s really no getting around the fact that the Bush presidency was an economic debacle. Americans got poorer on his watch.

(Thanks to AFL-CIO Labor Standards Policy analyst Christine Silvia-DeGennaro for pulling together this info.)

• The number of uninsured Americans increased by 683,000 in 2008, rising from 45.7 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008.
• The number of people with employment-provided health insurance fell by 1.1 million in 2008, from 177.4 million in 2007 to 176.3 million in 2008. This decline comes after four years of increases in the number of people with employment-provided health insurance.
• The percentage of Americans with employment-provided health insurance has declined for several years. This is the first year in four years the actual number of people with employment-provided health insurance has fallen.      

As the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) report, the  number of uninsured didn’t go up dramatically because public programs are increasingly providing coverage to people without insurance. Some 3.1 million more people were covered by Medicaid/State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) in 2008, a 7.8 percent increase over 2007. As a comparison, in 2007, the number of people who were covered by Medicaid/SCHIP increased by 3.3 percent over the number of people covered in 2006.

• After adjusting for inflation, median household income in 2008 was lower than any year since 1997. In 2008, median household income fell to $50,303, a 3.6 percent real decline in income from 2007, when median household income was $52,163 (in 2008 dollars). This is the largest single year decline in household income since the series began in 1967.
• In 2008, median earnings for workers who worked full-time, year-round were $41,030, down 2 percent (in inflation adjusted terms) from 2007, when earnings were $41,869. This is the largest drop in real earnings for full-time, year-round workers since 1981. EPI reports the number of full-time, year-round workers in 2008 fell by an incredible 4.2 percent over 2007 employment, representing a loss of 4.6 million full-time, year-round workers. As EPI states:
  • In 2008, median earnings for men who worked full-time, year-round were $46,367, a real decline of 1.0 percent from 2007. Full-time, year-round working men are worse off than they were in 2000, when median earnings were $46,576 (in 2008 dollars).
  • In 2008, median earnings for women who worked full-time, year-round were $35,745, down 1.9 percent from 2007 when earnings were $36,451 (in 2008 dollars). This is the largest drop in real earnings for full-time, year-round women workers since 1981.

This erosion in full-time, full-year workers was equally due to a loss of full-time work (shifting to part-time) and an erosion of weeks worked. The consequence of both of these trends—lower real earnings and eroded work-time—was a record decline in the annual inflation-adjusted earnings.

And as wages deteriorate, poverty is increasing dramatically.

• 39.8 million people were poor in 2008, 2.6 million more than in 2007. 
• The poverty rate in 2008 was 13.2 percent, up 0.7 percentage points from 12.5 percent in 2007. The poverty rate is at its highest level since 1997.
• The child poverty rate increased to 19 percent in 2008, up from 18 percent in 2007. 14.1 million children were poor in 2008, up from 13.3 million in 2007.
• 10.3 percent of families were poor in 2008, up from 9.8 percent of families in 2007.

Even worse: This isn’t the worst. EPI reports this is just the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the impact of the recession on these indicators.

On the eighth anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, the AFL-CIO’s Stewart Acuff takes a look back at the tragedy’s impact on working families and calls for all of us to move forward in attaining the goals that will improve the lives of America’s workers.

It is so important to remember 9/11 and the union brothers and sisters who died that day. As you know, a lot of union brothers and sisters died that day—members of HERE who worked in the restaurant, SEIU members and every first responder was a union member—bus drivers with ATU and TWU, more than 100 union cops, 25 union electricians and 373 union firefighters who went into those towers of fire and death knowing they’d never come out, never go home again. Doing their jobs like union folks do every damn day.
Every single person who answered that 911 call that day was a union member.But let us also not forget the aftermath of one of America’s greatest tragedies.

George Bush and his right-wing administration set up the Department of Homeland Security with 160,000 folks from other agencies and took away their collective bargaining and union rights. Then they set up the Transportation Security Administration and denied 30,000 workers their collective bargaining and union rights. And without explaining themselves, they said that collective bargaining and unions are a threat to the security of America.

A threat to our nation’s security? We answer every call for our country. It is the kids of workers who fight our wars, trade their blood for oil.

Unionism a threat to our security—this from a vice president who took five deferments to avoid Vietnam and a president who was so busy getting high and drunk he couldn’t show up for the National Guard, which conveniently lost his records. 373 union firefighters, 100 union cops and 25 union electricians died on 9/11 doing what we all do—fulfilling our responsibilities, doing our jobs.

And we are the ones who stand up to the greed and arrogance of the corporations who have ripped off our country for 30 years who believe they have a right to live like kings on the backs of America’s workers.

And we are the ones who had the hard, brutally honest conversations all over America in white communities and neighborhoods, in union halls, on front porches, at worksites about why white workers had to put aside prejudices and biases and elect a brilliant, compassionate, pro-union President Barack Obama—the most pro-union president since Harry Truman—who talks about unions and says unions are not the problem, that unions are the solution.

And I don’t know about you but he made me damn proud Wednesday night, telling the nation and the radical right he is going to enact our—your labor movement’s health care reform! Lower the costs of your Taft-Hartley funds, force ABC rats to pay for health care and allow good union employers to better compete with rat bastards.

Do you know the biggest reason for the bankruptcies of the American auto companies—health care costs. It costs $1,500 more per vehicle for the Big 3 to make than foreign competitors because the Big 3 pays for health care.

Organized workers always have been and always will be the best defenders of democracy.

Let me remind you, please, that the labor movement created the modern American middle class in the 1940s and 50s. Because workers won the right to organize in 1935, 12 million went out and formed unions, and we became the first country in the history of the world where if you made your living by the strength of your back or the hardness of your hands or the sweat of your brow you could aspire to raise your kids in the dignity of the middle class.

And we were proud of that—so proud that after World War II when we sent money to Europe and Japan to rebuild, we also sent union organizers and said if you want to stop totalitarianism from ever coming back, if you want to stop Nazism from ever coming back in Germany or Austria or Facism from coming back to Italy or Imperialism from coming back to Japan, build strong unions. Organized workers always have been and always will be the best defense of democracy.

Now our love for our country and our people is being tested again. Our people, our country, and our democracy desperately need real health care reform and the restoration of the freedom to form unions and bargain collectively.

Our economic crisis was created by insatiable corporate greed, government deregulation, allowing corporate power to run wild and our country forgetting basic truths. For 30 years we’ve allowed corporations and the radical right wing to convince us that 4,000 years of human history, human wisdom and our sacred teachings are wrong. My Bible says greed is the worst part of human nature. They said greed is good. Jesus said—Are you not your brother’s keeper? They said you’re on your own. In Matthew 25, Jesus said “Whatsoever ye have done unto the least of these, ye have also done unto me.” They said workers and the poor don’t matter—only profit matters—and the stock market. That’s why Jesus, the construction worker, the Carpenter said, “Its easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

And now because the rich and powerful have had their way for 30 years, there just isn’t enough consumer demand, Americans don’t have enough money to lift our country out of recession and power the great American economic engine.

That is just one reason that we must pass the Employee Free Choice Act as soon as possible. Our country and our economy need workers to have the freedom to bargain for better wages, for a fairer share of the wealth we create, to bargain for more buying power.

And our country needs stronger unions and more union members to ensure our country remembers human history and human wisdom and what the labor movement never forgot—that we are all in this together, that an injury to one is an injury to all, that we are one people with one Almighty God who commands us to love one another, that we are our sister’s keeper and our brother’s keeper, that when we organize we lift everyone up together, everyone’s kids, everyone’s family, we ensure everyone’s future and everyone’s justice on the job.

So while Rush Limbaugh and Dick Armey and the Chamber of Commerce and the rat ABC and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and every other rat bastard does all they can to stop change, to lie and intimidate and confuse people to stop the change America and our people need, let me remind you that America did not become great because Americans were afraid of change. The history of America is the story of average workers like you and me uniting and fighting for the common good—from the mechanics guilds in Philadelphia with Tom Paine and the earliest unions in Boston with Sam Adams who laid the foundation for the American Revolution to those who joined with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to end slavery to the women who marched with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to win the right for women to vote to A. Philip Randolph and Dr. King and the Rev. James Orange who freed African Americans to our labor forebears who lifted millions of workers from poverty and created the American Dream.

This is now our moment, brothers and sisters to change America, to do our part to form a more perfect union, to take our place alongside other workers who made America great, who said we won’t let fear and greed and hatred stop us.

Keep on brothers and sisters. Fight on. Don’t lose faith. Don’t lose hope. History is made by people like us. Health care for all. Employee Free Choice Act. Let’s make history.