Labor Union Blog

Economic Report: Nonunion workers more likely to have frozen pension plans.

Newly-released data by the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that it is down right cold in the world of pension plans. Nineteen percent of private sector workers with traditional pensions and 10 percent of government employees with traditional pensions are in frozen plans. And if you are a new employee, good luck getting on board. Nonunion workers are more likely to have frozen plans at 24 percent compared to union workers at 10 percent.

Workers at a Mott’s apple juice plant have gone on strike due to a request by the company to accept wage cuts that will set some workers back four years. Jesse Russell reports:

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By Doug Cunningham

A campaign for a Living Wage Act in New York City kicks off today. Stuart Applebaum is President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

[Applebaum]: “For too long we’ve been sending public dollars to private developers helping them to enrich themselves, and only getting in the bargain poverty wage jobs. That can’t continue.”

Bruce Ventimiglia is co-chair of BALCONY- the Business and Labor Coalition of New York. He says with New York facing a budget crisis the likes of which it has never seen, BALCONY is endorsing a 20 percent reduction in the stock transfer tax rebate. That would erase nearly a third of the state budge deficit.

[Ventimigilia]: “It would equate to nearly $2.9 billion dollars in additional tax revenue to help us offset nearly a third of the projected budget deficit.”

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If members of the U.S. House of Representatives support creating jobs and putting Americans back to work, as they so often claim, they’ll vote this week for a bill that creates jobs and makes Wall Street pay, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Saying it’s “crunch time for putting Americans back to work,” Trumka tells lawmakers: “If you’re not for this bill, you’re not for jobs. Period.”

Join us in pushing hard for passage of the jobs bill and take action now. Call 877-442-6801 and urge your representative to vote for H.R. 4213 to create and save jobs and make Wall Street pay. Tell your representative a vote against the bill is a vote against jobs.

The Promoting American Jobs, Closing Tax Loopholes and Preventing Outsourcing Act of 2010 (H.R. 4213), could be up for a vote as soon as tomorrow. The bill addresses many points of the AFL-CIO’s Five-Point Plan for Creating Jobs by:

• Extending unemployment benefits and COBRA health care subsidies through the end of the year;
• Providing critical aid to cash-strapped states by increasing the federal share of Medicaid, which can stop layoffs and cuts in services;
• Funding more than 300,000 summer jobs; and
• Financing local infrastructure projects.

The jobs bill also will start the process of making Wall Street finally pay to restore the millions of jobs the Big Banks and financial institutions destroyed with their reckless and risky practices. It closes a tax loophole that allows rich Wall Street hedge fund managers to pay lower tax rates on their income than ordinary wage earners. It also closes a similar loophole on corporations that ship jobs overseas.

Critics of the bill say the nation’s budget deficit does not allow spending to create jobs. Says Trumka:

The people who are always saying “No” to jobs because of the deficit are often the same people who voted to squander our hard-earned budget surpluses so they could shower undeserved tax breaks on rich people during the Bush years. Apparently, spending money on rich people is perfectly okay, but investing in jobs for working class Americans sets off alarm bells.

With Wall Street banks, investment firms and corporations lining up against the jobs bill, lawmakers have a chance to back up their rhetoric about jobs with action says Trumka.

It’s time for members of Congress to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Vote for jobs. Now.

More than 35,000 people—including workers from dozens of unions and activists from more than 100 community groups—last Saturday told New Jersey’s Republican Gov. Chris Christie that he cannot balance the state’s budget on the backs of the middle class.

The “Stand Up” rally, one of the largest-ever protests at the state capitol in Trenton, sent a clear message that New Jersey working people reject Christie’s budget cuts and believe the path to getting the state back on track is through job growth and doing more to help the state’s most vulnerable families.

Carrying signs with messages such as “Restore The Cuts” and “Christie’s Budget Cuts Hurt the Vulnerable, Helps the Millionaires,” marchers filled the square in front of the state House as far as you could see. 

35,000 people rallied against New Jersey Gov. Christie’s budget cuts.

New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech said Christie’s budget and “tool kit” (a package of 33 bills the governor wants enacted to “rein in” the cost of government):

constitute an unprecedented attack on collective bargaining and workers. 

Wowkanech says the rally is only the beginning of a unified effort to oppose the governor’s policies.

Together, we demonstrated our renewed strength and resolve, to work toward fair and sensible solutions for New Jersey.

Christie is proposing bills to cap increases in public employee wages and benefits at 2.5 percent annually, which would be more than eaten up by the rising cost of health care. Christie’s legislative package also would:

• Place a 2.5 percent cap on local government budget increases, which would stall or eliminate investment in infrastructure projects.
• Allow local governments to opt-out of civil service via referendum and remove certain employees from civil service outright.
• Prohibit negotiations on such issues as furloughs, and change arbitration rules for police and fire by requiring awards to not exceed the 2.5 percent cap and force arbitrators to include the impact of contracts on property taxes.

Barbara Keshishian, president of the New Jersey Education Association, summed up the goals of the marchers when she told the crowd:

There is a time to fight and that time has now come. 

For more information on the rally, click here and here.

The month may be nearly over but union leaders, students, teachers and activists are taking advantage of new resources to keep telling our story and building our future beyond May, which is officially Labor History Month.

The American Labor Studies Center, www.labor-studies.org, offers links to materials from the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the National Archives, the Labor Department, the AFL-CIO, top university labor programs and much more.

“Labor History Links,” a site developed by labor historian Rosemary Feurer, provides a comprehensive bibliography of information, documents and links to U.S. labor history sites. The interactive site also allows users to recommend links. Click here to visit the site. The website includes teachers’ lesson plans, information organized by date and topic, biographies and oral history, labor culture through films, songs, literature, art and photos, listings of state and local historical sites and much more.

The Labor Heritage Foundation offers a Labor History Time Line that includes important historical references to the labor movement’s actions, triumphs and challenges. Click here for more information.

Also don’t forget to check out the AFL-CIO labor history and culture site here for a list of resources in film, books and other materials that tell our story.

This is a cross-post by Terrance Heath from the Campaign for America’s Future.

When the jobs-focused plenary panel at America’s Future Now [1] convenes—with Angela Glover-Blackwell, Rich Trumka, Jared Bernstein, and Bob Herbert—it’s likely they will continue a discussion America desperately needs, and that tea party conservatives want desperately not to hear. It’s time, past time, to address the black and brown “canaries” in our economic coal mine, by protecting the social safety net and taking direct action to create jobs.

Less than six months ago, leaders of six progressive groups came together to warn that the country’s jobs crisis could cause severe and lasting damage to generations of Americans [2]—especially people of color—unless immediate action was taken. That warning came with a notice that the African American and Latino canaries in our economic coal mine were in poor shape.

Janet Murguia, president and CEO of National Council of La Raza, and Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, echoed this concern about many minority groups already seeing Depression-level rates of joblessness but also cautioned against viewing the problems of black and Hispanic communities in isolation.

“Black people in the U.S. are the canaries in the coal mine,” said Jealous. “What we get tends to hit everybody later.”

Last month I noted [3] that the complaints of the overwhelmingly conservative white, male, well-off and well-educated tea party members weren’t that different from the 82 percent of the country, many of whom are worse off. That post started off with a question: What if the tea party was black? There are many ways to answer that question, but in this post I want to offer just two.

If the tea partiers were black:

1. They’d be eve worse off than they are.
2. If they’re as consistent as their star candidate from Kentucky, the wouldn’t want anyone to care or do anything about it.

On the first point, they’d definitely be worse off in this economy, because they’d be a lot poorer. This week, a Brandies University study [4] proved Jealous right, finding that years of deregulation and an increase in high-cost loans quadrupled the wealth gap between white and black Americans [5].

A disturbing new study shows African American families have fewer economic resources to fall back on during this economic crisis than do white families, mainly due to discrimination and tax policies that favor the rich.

The study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University reveals that the wealth gap between blacks and whites has more than quadrupled over the course of a generation from $20,000 to $95,000. The researchers studied the same set of families over 23 years (1984-2007) and found that white families were able to build assets-what you own minus what you owe, excluding home equity—while blacks essentially lost assets. In fact, a typical white family is now five times richer than its African American counterpart of the same class.

That means blacks had little or no money to start businesses, send children to college or ensure a secure retirement, the authors say. In fact, because many low-wealth families are forced to turn to high-interest rate credit for emergencies, about 25 percent of all African Americans owe more than they own. Read the entire study here.

Many minority families end up turning to predatory lenders because they have no other option, the study says. Also African Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes, the study says.

The reason is directly related to 30-plus years of conservative policymaking [7].

The big question, of course, is why? Shapiro concludes that the main fault lies in discrimination and the economic policies of the last quarter century. Here is a look at some of the forces that contributed to the wealth disparity.

* Predatory lending. We already know those sub-prime mortgages created a problem for the credit markets and the entire economy when it all came crashing down in 2008. But those loans were disproportionately pushed on African American families—even those who could qualify for and afford better mortgages with lower interest rates.

* Wealth-begets-wealth policies. Families that start with more money have access to better financial products, including tax-favored savings vehicles and less expensive credit. Furthermore, they have more opportunities to make money on their money. White families that started with more assets could afford to save more, invest more, and earn more.

* Bank deregulation. The study’s authors say bank deregulation led to more payday lenders, check cashing stores and other expensive ways to access credit, and fewer consumer-protection controls. African-American families, starting with fewer emergency assets, were more driven to high cost loans in times of emergency. That problem is even worse now, the study’s authors suggest, concluding that more consumer protections are needed. Coincidentally, isn’t the Senate debating that financial reform bill this week? Just sayin’.

In fact, the study’s author says that even the highest-income African Americans have suffered decline.

Not only would the conservative, white, male, wealthy tea party members be worse off, but they have a longstanding historic disadvantage to overcome [8], before they could even reach their “bootstraps.” [9]

The report attributes part of the cause to the “powerful role of persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labour markets. African Americans and Hispanics were at least twice as likely to receive high-cost home mortgages as whites with similar incomes,” the report says.

Although many black families have moved up to better-paying jobs, they begin with fewer assets, such as inheritance, on which to build wealth. They are also more likely to have gone into debt to pay for university loans.

“African Americans, before the 1960s, first by law and then by custom, were not really allowed to own businesses. They had very little access to credit. There was a very low artificial ceiling on the wealth that could be accumulated. Hence there was very little, if anything, that could be passed along to help their children get to college, to help their children buy their first homes, or as an inheritance when they die,” said Shapiro.

…There were also social factors, the study found. “In African American families there is a much larger extended network of kin as well as other obligations. From other work we’ve done we know that there’s more call on the resources of relatively well-off African American families; that they lend money that’s not given back; they help cousins go to school. They help brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with all kinds of legal and family problems,” said Shapiro.

If the conservative, white, male tea partiers were black men, they would face the reality of a 17.9 percent unemployment rate. Not only is that a close to double the 9.1 percent rate of white males, and higher than the 11.2 percent (Figures c/o the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [10]), but more than the 25-year high unemployment rate of 17.2 percent projected for African Americans [11] in general this year.

Their unemployment rate would be driven in part by the kind of “persistent discrimination” even a college degree can’t overcome [12]. In fact, the the educated white men of the tea party were educated black men, they would still face an unemployment rate of 8.4 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for their white counterparts. Even having a name that “sounds black” could hinder job prospects [13].

The same New York Times/CBS poll that revealed the homogeneous demographics of the tea party also suggested that they think too much has been made of all of the above.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters say Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites—compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

So, if they were black, they’d face the reality that tea partiers who are much better off think all of the above requires little in the way of action or attention.

Similar to the health care debate, complete with similar racial disparities, if the tea partiers were black they’d face the political reality that a segment of white Americans with media disproportionate to their numbers oppose any reform or government action that helps, well, the “wrong” people [14]. That is, people who aren’t like them [15].

So, whites either think that only non-whites are poor and uninsured, or they just assume that that health care reform is going to benefit the non-whites regardless of whether whites are uninsured and poor. Either way, it’s a little weird, don’t you think?

…The unusual populist crossfire isn’t actually unusual at all. It’s called right wing populism and it goes like this: Obama has stolen the tax dollars of hard working white people (Real Americans) and given it to the blacks, Mexicans and rich “cosmopolitan” elites on Wall Street. Nothing unusual about that in the least. It’s as old as the hills.

Brownstein doesn’t seem to know that because he goes on and talking about how odd this whole thing is for the Democrats caught in a crossfire as working class whites rebel against the government bail outs and health care (which they believe is going to benefit people who don’t deserve it.)…

And as with health care, it’s likely that all of the above (along with a conservative disdain for government, and the political debate over the role of government) is at least part of the reason why job creation agencies remain off the table [16] in negotiating our way to a recovery—even though agencies like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were part of the government’s strategy for unemployment during the Great Depression.

The problem then may have been worse, but today the fundamental imbalance—too many workers, too few jobs—is essentially the same. The economy is recovering, but the employment hasn’t come back. And in a couple of scattered corners, on the Internet and in academia, this has prompted a question born out of the Great Depression’s legacy of public employment.

“So why aren’t we doing this?” economist and liberal columnist Paul Krugman asked on his New York Times blog last fall.

If we’re going to spend $787 billion on a stimulus bill—and another $18 billion on the latest jobs bill just passed by Congress—trying to prod the private sector to hire, creating infrastructure orders in need of labor and promising tax breaks to anyone who can connect the two, wouldn’t it be better to just spend all that money hiring people directly?

And why isn’t anyone in Washington talking about this?

…Krugman answered his own question in a single word: Politics.

“The Obama administration is fearful of turning to the New Deal as a model for getting out of this recession,” Maher said. “I think they’re very weary of being painted as being even more liberal than they are.”

And that fear, and the distracting discourse on the deficit, is probably responsible for the lack of political will get put Americans back to work [17], and why thus far job creation strategies thus far have been largely focused on corporate tax cuts [18] (and increased taxes on the rest of us via the “value added tax”).

The problem is, the “cut-taxes-and-hope-for-the-best” approach is a conservatives strategy that has yet to work for anyone but the wealthiest. It won’t work for job creation, because you can cut corporate taxes, but you can’t make invest that windfall in job creation.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s understanding, though—in a Keynesian argument often repeated today—was that the private sector could only do so much if people had no money in their pockets. You can offer tax breaks to encourage business to produce goods, but if no one will buy them, what incentive is there to hire workers in the first place?

“You can’t force capitalism,” Rose said. “You can’t force individual businesses to produce something. They do production for profit, and if they’re not going to be able to realize a profit, if they can’t sell what they’re producing, they’re not going to produce it.”

Is the way to get people back to work in the long and short term is direct job creation? It’s worked before, and could work again, if there’s sufficient political will.

There’s hope for a new direction. This Congress and this White House have passed, in just one year, have passed two sweeping reforms—health care reform and financial reform—bigger than any passed in a generation. And though neither is everything Americans needed it to be, both are better than they would have been without progressive activism and engagement.

The canaries in our too-long-deregulate economic mineshaft are gasping for air. We need to act quickly an decisively to get them and us out of the hole we’re in, before we’re all to weak to make the climb.

Summary:

When the jobs-focused plenary panel at America’s Future Now [1] convenes—with Angela Glover-Blackwell, Rich Trumka, Jared Bernstein, and Bob Herbert—it’s likely they will continue a discussion America desperately needs, and that tea party conservatives wants desperately not to hear. It’s time, past time, to address the black and brown “canaries” in our economic coal mine, by protecting the social safety net and taking direct action to create jobs.

Less than six months ago, leaders of six progressive groups came together to warn that the country’s jobs crisis could cause severe and lasting damage to generations of Americans [2]—especially people of color—unless immediate action was taken. That warning came with a notice that the African American and Latino canaries in our economic coal mine were in poor shape.

Links:
[1] http://www.ourfuture.org/http/%252Fwww.ourfuture.org/now
[2] http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/progressive_leaders_warn_of_lasting_damage_from_jobs_crisis
[3] http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010041728/race-reality-pt-1
[4] http://iasp.brandeis.edu/
[5] http://blog.aflcio.org/2010/05/20/study-wealth-gap-between-blacks-whites-quadrupled/
[6] http:///www.ourfuture.org/files/images/ZZ7DF7660C.jpg
[7] http://moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/blog/daily-money/wealth-gap-between-black-and-white-families-more-than-quadruples/587/
[8] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/17/white-people-95000-richer-black
[9] http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/290800.html
[10] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm
[11] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/14/AR2010011404085.html
[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/us/01race.html?_r=3&hp
[13] http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124232&page=1
[14] http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/nj_20100327_7697.php?mrefid=site_search
[15] http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/wrong-people.html
[16] http://www.miller-mccune.com/politics/why-job-creation-agencies-stay-off-the-table-15385/
[17] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/18/AR2010051802218.html
[18] http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010041621/big-fix-hold-your-wallets
[19] http://ourfuture.org/now
[20] https://secure.ourfuture.org/afn10/

The following is an excerpt from the latest report by Bernard Pollack, who is taking a leave of absence from the AFL-CIO to travel through Africa, and Danielle Nierenberg. Read the full post and more at their blog, Border Jumpers.

In the fight against the spread of HIV/AIDS, there is no silver bullet.

As we travel throughout sub-Saharan Africa we are seeing dozens of innovative ways that organizations, governments and individuals are working to fight the disease.

The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, in cooperation with labor unions across Africa, has developed a number of programs to prevent the spread of the disease among workers:

At Johnson Matthey in Germiston, South Africa, where 600 workers assemble catalytic converters for automobiles, the Solidarity Center is working in partnership with the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa (NUMSA) to provide free HIV/AIDS education and HIV counseling and testing to several thousand manufacturing workers a year.

Following the HIV/AIDS education session, many workers voluntarily agree to be tested. At the testing area, we spoke with registered nurse Dorothy Majola, who said that before workers are tested they are given private counseling, and then she administers two separate tests—both with 99.99 percent accuracy—to ensure correct results within 10 minutes of being tested.

A second program involves transport workers. At Katuna, Uganda, one of the cities along the Northern Transport Corridor, which stretches from Mombassa, Kenya, to Djibouti, truck drivers once waited for days for their trucks to be cleared by customs before entering Rwanda.

Boredom—and drinking—often led to unsafe sex with commercial sex workers at the truck stops along the highway. As a result, truck drivers have one of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS in Eastern Africa. Unfortunately, the virus doesn’t stop with them and is often spread to their spouses.

The Solidarity Center and Uganda’s Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU) worked with the government to reduce the amount of time it takes for the drivers’ paperwork to go through, which reduced the amount of free time they have on the border.

The Katuna resource center also offers HIV/AIDS education and free testing to truck drivers and local community members. The Solidarity Center has similar programs in Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.

We also visited an orphanage for children whose parents died of AIDS-related illnesses outside of Harare, Zimbabwe. The orphanage is supported in part by the Solidarity Center’s partner, the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations (ZCIEA). The union also provides HIV/AIDS education and HIV counseling and testing to workers.