Labor Union Blog

Economic Report:

While the recession hasn’t been great for many things, it has made employees more punctual. According to a report from Career Builder only 16 percent of employees say they are usually late once per week in comparison to last year when 20 percent of workers were late once per week. Only eight percent of employees said they are late twice per week, down four percent from the previous year.

American Airlines is moving closer to a possible strike. Jesse Russell reports.

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By Doug Cunningham

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By Doug Cunningham
The U.S. Senate $17. 6 billion jobs bill passed Wednesday with 11 Republican votes will give tax breaks to business that hire workers who have been jobless for 60 days or more. It will also fund highway and mass transit programs this year. It falls far short, though, of providing the stimulus to create the 11 million jobs the AFL-CIO says are actually needed. New York Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer says this is just the first, not the last jobs bill the Senate will put forward.

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Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) who this week launched a television ad slamming working families as “outside interests” is continuing her descent into “yet another hypocritical, flip-flopping D.C., politician,” says Arkansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes.

Lincoln in recent months has piled up a Senate record opposing working families–including voting to send jobs overseas via bad trade deals, reversing her initial support for the Employee Free Choice Act and opposing health care reform legislation with a public health insurance option. Arkansas unions now have endorsed Lt. Gov. Bill Halter (D.) in the upcoming U.S. Senate primary. Says Hughes:

Lincoln has ignored the interests of working people in Arkansas too many times. It’s easy for her to try to paint opponents as outsiders, but working-class voters in Arkansas can see as well as anybody that she has turned her back on us.

Although she’s attacking working families and their unions today, Lincoln sang quite a different tune in 2004 when she was grateful for the backing of the Arkansas AFL-CIO, along with more than $260,000 in working families’ PAC donations. Said Lincoln at the time:

I’m honored to receive the endorsement today from the Arkansas AFL-CIO for my work in the Senate to improve the lives of Arkansas working families.

Her strong support for Wal-Mart, headquartered in Fayetteville, and her silence about the company’s virulent anti-unionism and labor law violations, has earned her the nickname “the senator from Wal-Mart.”

Lincoln was also just one of two Democrats who voted to block President Obama’s nomination of respected attorney Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Says Hughes:

Only someone who has become a career politician in Washington, D.C., could spend 10 years asking for our support, take hundreds of thousands of dollars from blue-collar workers, then turn around and attack us as outsiders because we wouldn’t help her this time around. Those are not the values people in Arkansas believe in.

The U.S. Senate today passed a jobs bill that AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calls a ”good start” in helping the nation’s workers climb out of the 11-million-deep jobs hole dug by the Wall Street greed that propelled the economy’s nosedive.

But he says the bill—which is on its way to the White House for President Obama’s signature—must be the first step of a broad and intensive effort to rebuild the economy.

Much more needs to be done. We need to restore the jobs that were lost to the financial debacle, and Wall Street should pay to create them. We must invest in rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and in the green jobs of the future. We have to maintain funding for vital services by state and local governments and prevent destructive cuts in education, police and fire protection and more.

We must take the additional steps needed to extend unemployment insurance and health care lifelines to the unemployed. We must increase funding for neglected communities to match people who want to work with jobs that need to be done. And we should move right now to use leftover TARP money to get credit flowing to Main Street.

The $17.6 billion bill includes a one-year extension of the federal highway program, an extension of the Build America Bonds program that helps states finance certain infrastructure projects and tax incentives for employers to hire workers.

The Senate first passed the legislation in February, but minor changes by the House forced a second vote on the legislation.

Other pending jobs legislation includes a December-passed House bill that is a more extensive jobs bill with an emphasis on jobs-creating infrastructure projects. The next step for the bill is uncertain—Senate leaders have promised to move further jobs-related legislation, but no time table has been set.  Also this month, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) introduced the Local Jobs for America Act, which would create or save up to 1 million public- and private-sector jobs. Jobs saved would include those such as the firefighters, the police and teachers and others whose jobs are in jeopardy because of local government budget cuts.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was found guilty yesterday of conspiracy to wreck the economy, destroy jobs and the immoral use of taxpayer bank bailout money for millions in Wall Street bonuses.

The courtroom was on a Madison Wis., street in front a JPMorgan Chase bank branch and the jury included dozens of union and community activists. The street theater was part of the AFL-CIO union movement’s two weeks of action across the country to Make Wall Street pay to create jobs and fix they economy they ravaged.

Jim Cavanaugh, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, which organized the curbside drama, says:

We bailed out Wall Street now its time for Wall Street to bail out Main Street.

More than 200 “Good Jobs Now, Make Wall Street Pay” actions are planned through March 25. The rallies and marches will demand that the Big Six Wall Street banks–Bank of America, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wachovia-Wells Fargo–take the following actions:

• Pay their fair share to restore the jobs their actions destroyed.
• Stop their multi-million dollar lobbying blitz to kill financial reform.
• Start lending to communities, small businesses and others starved for credit.

Also yesterday, union members distributed leaflets in front of JPMorgan Chase branch in Baton Rouge, La., and rallied at a Bank of America office in Charleston, S.C. Today union activists in Butte, Mont., will march in the town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade carrying “Make Wall Street Pay” signs and banners. This afternoon, the West Virginia AFL-CIO, along with community allies, staged a rally in front a Wells Fargo/Wachovia Bank in Charleston.

Find out about events in your area here. If you take part in an event, be sure to send us your photo or video here.

You also can tell Wall Street executives to pony up and create good jobs by sending a letter urging them to do the right thing. Just click here.

Ross Hyman, a research analyst for the AFL-CIO Center for Strategic Research, sends us info on this latest support for the Employee Free Choice Act.

“Wool workers and dyers have the right to say: ‘We will all be partners in any business that comes to the city.’ Bakers have the right to arrange their shifts.”

Quoting the above passage from the Tosefta, a rabbinic text written some 1,800 years ago, the rabbis of the Reconstructionist Rabbinic Association passed a resolution March 16 at their annual convention that reaffirms Judaism’s long tradition of support for workers’ rights, union organizing and collective bargaining. Reconstructionism is a denomination of Judaism and is among many faith groups to formally support the Employee Free Choice Act.

The resolution calls on its member rabbis to support legislation, beginning with the Employee Free Choice Act, which strengthens the freedom of workers to bargain collectively, support workers who are struggling with management for their rights.

The Reconstuctionist rabbis join several other Jewish organizations that recently have passed resolutions or endorsements in support of the Employee Free Choice Act and workers’ rights. These include the Jewish Labor Committee, The Progressive Jewish Alliance, The Jewish Council for Urban Affairs, The Jewish Social Policy Action Network, Jews United for Justice, Rabbis for Workers’ Choice, The Shalom Center, Tikkun/The Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Uri L’Tzedek.

In addition, the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly of Conservative Judaism in 2008 set the following as the official halakhic (Jewish law) position of the Conservative movement:

Jewish employers should allow their employees to make their own independent decisions about whether to unionize, and may not interfere in any way with organizing drives by firing or otherwise punishing involved workers, by refusing workers the option for voluntary recognition of their union, or by otherwise threatening workers who wish to unionize.

Rabbis can sign a petition in support of Employee Free Choice and workers rights here.

The text of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association resolution is available at Rabbi Brant Rosen’s blog.