Labor Union Blog

By Doug Cunningham

Nurses and other health care workers at Temple University Hospital will be on the picket lines Wednesday morning. They rejected the latest contract offer. Health care benefits and pay increases are among the issues. Temple University Hospital has hired hundreds of replacement nurses and other workers to work during the strike – reportedly often at pay that’s higher than what the current health care workers are earning. The Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals represents a thousand RN’s and 500 staffers at Temple University Hospital.

By Doug Cunningham

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By Doug Cunningham

Workers will be suffering over the Spring Break thanks to a move by Republican U.S. Senator Tom Coburn to block a bill to extend jobless benefits. Coburn’s block means no action can be taken by the Senate until April 12th. Because of that people who have been out of work for six months or longer will at least temporarily lose their benefits. Health insurance subsidies for jobless workers will also expire.

Oregon is one of a number of state’s struggling with double digit unemployment and today a forum is being held to try to come up with a solution. Jesse Russell reports:

A public forum is being held in Portland, Oregon today as workers and labor leaders explore ways to deal with the high unemployment in the state. Oregon AFL-CIO President Tom Chamberlain said he is hoping a second economic stimulus package can be passed that focuses specifically on creating jobs trough infrastructure development that could be paid for through a tax.

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Back home in Oklahoma, Republican Sen. Tom Coburn must really be feeling the heat from some of the millions of America’s jobless worked he shafted last week. Coburn, who blocked a short-term extension for unemployment insurance (UI), issued a press release making it look as though Senate Democrats blocked the extension and he was a helpless victim of the vote. He’s also sending out the same info to those who, like some AFL-CIO Now blog readers, sent him scathing letters for his mean-spirited move.

In short, Coburn’s spin is: Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

In fact, Coburn blocked the emergency UI extension bill, effectively killing it until after the Senate returns from break April 12. Some 200,000 jobless workers a week will now lose UI support because of Coburn. Worse, Coburn has said he would continue to block UI extension after the Senate returns.

Coburn also disingenuously states the best solution for jobless workers are jobs.

So why then did Coburn vote against the jobs package passed by the Senate earlier this month?

See, Senator, jobs are a great solution. The problem is, there are more than six U.S. workers for every one job. More than two in every five unemployed workers in this country have been unemployed for more than six months. That means jobs need to be created. And because the private sector isn’t creating them, the federal government needs to step in.

Until there are enough jobs for workers without jobs, workers desperately need a helping hand like unemployment insurance and COBRA, to get by.

One that Coburn isn’t willing to give them.

Here’s Coburn’s online contact page. Drop him a line and tell him if he can’t take the heat…

Contrary to what opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act claim, first contract arbitration does not endanger the survival of businesses, according to a new study.

The study by the non-partisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows when an arbitrator decides a first contract, a business survives at about the same rate as any other.

One of the key provisions of the Employee Free Choice Act would allow either the union or the employer the option of entering binding arbitration after 120 days of inconclusive bargaining. Similar rules already are on the books in several states in the United States and in eight of Canada’s 11 provinces.

The arbitration rule in Manitoba, Canada, most closely resembles the Employee Free Choice Act provisions. EPI’s survey of all the businesses in Manitoba with contract finalized by an arbitrator between 2001 and 2007 reveals that the arbitration had no effect on business success and survival. Of all the Manitoba businesses in which a first collective bargaining agreement was ruled on by an arbitrator, 87.5 percent were still in operation in 2009, compared with 86.2 percent of all businesses.

A recent study by John-Paul Ferguson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows that even after a majority of employees vote for union representation, they only get a first contract about 56 percent of the time. And if an employer resists negotiating by engaging in illegal labor practices, the chance of getting a contract is reduced by 13 percent.

Tomorrow, 1,000 RNs and 500 health care workers at Temple University Hospital in Philadelphia are set to go on strike. The members of Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses and Allied Professionals (PASNAP) have been without a contract since September.

One major issue, according to PASNAP, is hospital management’s effort to include a “gag order” provision preventing the nurses and health care workers from speaking out about patient care in public. PASNAP President Patricia Eakin, a Temple emergency room nurse says:

I’ve been at Temple for almost 27 years, I’ve bargained a lot of the contracts, and I’m simply flabbergasted. I’m astonished that among the many terrible things they are trying to put in the contract, they are trying to insert this terrible gag clause that prevents us from saying anything to the public.

PASNAP is a National Nurse United (NNU) affiliate and at March 26 rally, NNU Vice President Jean Ross told the Temple workers “it is outrageous that the hospital has proposed a ‘gag order’ to silence the nurses and healthcare professionals.”

A core responsibility of a nurse is to advocate for her patient, both at the bedside and in the public arena. No nurse could accept the loss of this vital responsibility, and we are happy to stand by Temple nurses to defend against any threats to the profession and patient care.

A post on DailyKos under the byline National Nurses Movement says management’s moves to prevent nurses and other health care professionals from speaking out about problems in patient care at their facilities is not limited to TUH.   

Temple’s not the first hospital to hope to make its troublesome, formidable nurse corps just shuts up.

Last summer, 200 or RNs at University of California, San Francisco marched and protested when one of their nurse colleagues was fired for protesting an unsafe response to Swine Flu. Last autumn, every nurse in America watched horrified as two Texas nurses were prosecuted by a County sheriff for reporting wildly unsafe actions by a doctor buddy.  Texas nurses have been pushing a law to protect whistle-blowers ever since…Nurses and healthcare professionals need to be able to stand up for their patients, even if it causes criticism of the hospital. They are independent professionals.  

Click here to read the entire post and here for the latest on the situation at TUH. You can send Temple a message here. Follow the Temple workers on Twitter and Facebook.

The Jobs with Justice annual Student Labor Week of Action starts today, and Carlos Jimenez, coordinator for the JwJ Young Worker Project, tells us what it’s all about.

This week, students across the country will honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and César Chávez by working to build on their struggle for jobs and economic justice. As part of our Student Labor Action Project’s annual Student Labor Week of Action, we are using our power and voice to support workers fighting for better wages by taking part in teach-ins, rallies and other actions that highlight the importance of collective action. We want to bring attention to the enormous jobs crisis that is devastating millions across the nation, and its disastrous impact on America’s young people.

The economic future of today’s young workers is at risk because two avenues to the American dream, education and hard work, are slipping out of their reach. A recent survey by the AFL-CIO found that two out of five young adults were delaying further education or professional development due to financial worries, and that more than half of young workers were earning less than $30,000 a year.

The jobless rate for young workers runs dangerously close to 20 percent, and the average college graduate owes more than $18,000 of debt. To break past these barriers, we must look back at the words and actions of transformative leaders like King who once said:

Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.

Thankfully we don’t have to start from scratch, and already we see the power that comes when young people organize. Just last week, the United States Student Association and other student groups joined forces to ensure an historic student aid reform package was included in reconcilliation portion of the health care reform bill. The student loan provision increases grant support to college students and removes the middlemen in private lenders that have for too long profited at student’s expenses.

For those not pursuing a higher education, the labor movement is working hard to identify and support young workers organizing to improve their jobs and working conditions. We know that for many young workers, unions are not part of their daily experiences, but the challenge before us is finding a way to introduce the idea of collective action and bargaining, ideas that Chávez and King championed, into the lives of young workers. As the actions the students and young people participating in the student and labor week of action show, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

We hope you’ll join us.

Learn more about the Student Labor Week of Action at http://www.studentlabor.org.

Today French President Sarkozy reportedly is lobbying President Obama to delay the U.S. government’s decision to award its $35 billion contract for the Air Force’s new refueling tanker. Sarkozy wants the contract for Northrop-EADS, a heavily subsidized French defense firm that recently pulled its proposal from the bidding process. Northrup-EADS now is mounting a huge public relations campaign to get the U.S. government to reverse what it regards as an unfair advantage for Boeing, which says the competition is fair.

If Northrup-EADS won the contract, most of the jobs would be in Europe. The few thousand jobs created here under an EADS contract would be low-paid assembly jobs with no union representation. Meanwhile, there are some 17 million jobless workers in this nation, and as leaders of two AFL-CIO constituency groups point out, granting the contract to Boeing would create at least 50,000 family-supporting jobs, save taxpayer dollars and protect fair trade laws.

In a letter to the Seattle Times, Malcolm Amado Uno, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), writes:

If President Obama wants to keep us moving in the right direction, he’ll stand up to European pressure on the tanker contract and create 50,000 U.S. jobs by purchasing an American-made tanker. Illegally subsidized French companies have no right to tell the Air Force how to spend U.S. taxpayer money.

Clayola Brown, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI), in a letter to the Battle Creek (Mich.) Inquirer, lays it on the line:

We can’t afford to waste $35 billion on a foreign-made hunk of junk that won’t get the job  done. Congress and the Pentagon should buy the Boeing tanker, create 50,000 U.S. jobs and tell Airbus to take a hike.

Even conservatives see the benefit of awarding the contract to Boeing. In a new report, Robert Shapiro, CEO of  the business consulting firm Sonecon, and Aparna Mathur, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, say Boeing would create 10 times as many new U.S. jobs as Northrup-EADS. If Boeing develops and produces the tanker, it should lead to the creation of an estimated 62,605 to 70,706 new U.S. jobs over the life of the contract, the report says. And that doesn’t include jobs created by suppliers and other in the supply chain.

By contrast, if Airbus/Northrop-Grumman developed and produced the tanker, it whould lead to the creation of an estimated 5,113 to 7,080 new U.S. jobs over the life of the contract.

And here’s Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback speaking on conservative talk radio yesterday:

We have tried repeatedly to get the Department of Defense to say look, if you illegally subsidize your aircraft, we are going to add the price of that subsidy onto the price of your aircraft, because this is illegal to do. And if you don’t do that, what will keep other countries from simply illegally subsidizing the development of another piece of hardware in our military system, but then they take away that business from the United States on an illegal basis, and hurting our job creation, and hurting our defense military establishment.

The tanker contract was rebid this year after the Government Accountability Office upheld Boeing’s protest of the original decision to award the contract to EADS and Northrup.

Arrogance allows you to do just about anything and think you can get away with it. For years, health insurers have swaggered about, callously raising premiums through the roof, dropping sick people from coverage and refusing to cover folks with pre-existing conditions. They got away with it. But not yesterday.

After media reports surfaced that big insurance companies claimed a loophole in the new health care reform law would allow them to deny coverage to children with pre-existing conditions, the—well you know—hit the fan. Picking on sick kids is like kicking a dog or stealing Grandma’s purse. It doesn’t sit well with most Americans.

After mounting public outrage and a strongly worded letter from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the insurance industry quickly reversed course and promised to cover kids with pre-existing conditions beginning Sept. 23 as the new law requires. In a letter to the industry group American Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), Sebelius wrote:

Health insurance reform is designed to prevent any child from being denied coverage because he or she has a pre-existing condition…Now is not the time to search for nonexistent loopholes that preserve a broken system.

To ensure that there is no ambiguity on this point, I am preparing to issue regulations in the weeks ahead ensuring that the term ‘pre-existing condition exclusion’ applies to both a child’s access to a plan and to his or her benefits once he or she is in the plan.

In response, AHIP President Karen Ignagni wrote:

We await and will fully comply with regulations consistent with the principles described in your letter.

But she also wrote that insurance companies would be analyzing how much it would cost to comply-code words for “rate hike.”

At FireDogLake David Dayen lays out a likely scenario.

You can pretty much figure out AHIP’s game here. With no restrictions on cost until 2014, the industry can raise their premium prices almost at will. Even the bad publicity suffered from that 39 percent rate hike of Anthem Blue Cross plan has stopped that scheduled increase from taking effect in May. And when outrage is expressed by families facing double-digit rate hikes, AHIP will clear their throats and blame the pre-existing condition exclusion for exclusion for children, forcing the poor insurance companies to take on a sicker risk pool and raise prices to survive.

It takes a long time to beat down world class arrogance.