Workers Independent News Labor Radio
Internet Radio Program 05/28/10
Producers: Doug Cunningham & Jesse Russell
WIN’s Labor radio is made possible in part by underwriting from the National Education Association & The OPEIU.
Labor Radio Rundown:
1) WIN Newscast
House Republicans are utilizing a questionable email voting system to help determine items to be cut from the federal budget. Jesse Russell explains.
By Doug Cunningham
[Chant]: “Boycott Shaw’s! Boycott Shaw’s!”
Three hundred workers in Massachusetts are in the thirteenth week of their strike against Shaw’s Warehouse, owned by the Supervalu national grocery chain. At a Boston rally following a 60 mile march for a just contract warehouse worker James Gaudette voiced the striker’s resolve to prevail against a big corporation trying to impose cuts on a small group of workers.
The U.S. House decided not to vote on the jobs bill today—and that’s really bad news for America’s jobless workers, especially the millions of long-term unemployed. They desperately need the jobs bill because it extends unemployment insurance (UI) for those who have been without a job for 26 weeks or longer. And while members of Congress head home for the Memorial Day holiday, they will have to explain to their constituents why they didn’t vote on a bill that would create badly needed jobs—but managed a vote that would give them time-off around the Memorial Day weekend.
Without passage of the bill, more than 8 million people will exhaust their benefits by the end of the year, leaving their families with no money for life’s basic necessities such as food and shelter, Economic Policy Institute (EPI) economist Heidi Shierholz predicts.
EPI estimates that the bill’s package of aid to states, infrastructure projects, extension of UI and COBRA benefits, creation of summer jobs, loan guarantees for small business and other provisions will help save or create more than 1 million critically needed jobs.
The EPI report notes that not only will the UI and COBRA extensions benefit “the nearly 10 million Americans who have lost their jobs and are receiving unemployment compensation while they look for work,” but the safety net spending also will benefit “the economy as a whole by circulating cash into local communities and helping businesses avert further job cuts.”
In an economy that is not creating new jobs, extending long-term unemployment benefits is not only the humane thing to do, it makes good economic sense, says Shierholz. She and several labor economists discussed the nation’s long-term jobless crisis yesterday during an EPI forum, “Long-Term Unemployment: Causes, Consequences and Solutions.”
Congressional Republicans are wrong when they say UI prolongs joblessness, said EPI President Lawrence Mishel. It is “distressing” that anyone would even question whether unemployment insurance should be extended, he says.
Mishel said research shows that extending jobless benefits for a year could create or maintain about 800,000 jobs. But the current method of doling out the extensions in “dribbles a month at a time” is doing little to create jobs, he says.
Nearly half—46 percent—of all unemployed workers have been out of work for six months or more—some 6.7 million workers. That is the highest number of long-term unemployed since the 1930s Depression, says Shierholz.
It’s good news that the economy added 290,000 jobs in April, but at that rate, she says, it would take five years just to get back to the levels before the recession began in 2007.
A report distributed at the forum by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) found that a severely depressed job market—not unemployment insurance—is the cause of long-term unemployment. With 5.6 workers for each available job, odds are slim that a worker will be able to get a job quickly, the report says.
Unemployment insurance also is a fiscal stimulus for the economy, says Harvard University economist Raj Chetty. Jobless workers spend the money they receive for essential items—food, college tuition, etc. This consumption helps stabilize the local economy in the communities where these workers live.
Chetty said his research shows the median savings for an unemployed family is less than $250. That means the family needs more income to pay bills that you can’t cut back on, like mortgages and utility bills. Because they are unemployed, they can’t get credit to borrow the money so they cut back on other items such as food, medicine and other items without a fixed cost. So, says Chetty, UI returns far more to the economy than it costs to provide it.
The NELP report also points out that UI enables families to maintain their savings and avoid severe financial hardships. And with long-term unemployment at such high levels, extending benefits would be critical to preventing poverty and even greater economic hardship for the unemployed.
Jesse Rothstein, chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, and Columbia University economist Till von Wachter also spoke at the forum.
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If the U.S. Defense Department awards its $35 billion air tanker contract to European-based EADS over U.S-owned Boeing, it would reward a company that breaks international trading rules, says Loren Thompson of the nonpartisan Lexington Institute.
The contract for the tanker was rebid after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2008 upheld Boeing’s protest of the original contract award. First, EADS and its partner Northrop Grumman said they were dropping out of the bidding. But this spring, EADS announced it would bid alone for the contract.
Here’s what’s at stake. Granting the contract to Boeing would create at least 50,000 family-supporting jobs, save taxpayer dollars and protect fair trade laws. But, if EADS wins 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.
In March, the World Trade Organization (WTO) found EADS has been receiving illegal subsidies from four European governments for years for its A330 airbus, the plane EADS wants to offer in the tanker competition.
Thompson says the illegal subsidies should be a big consideration in deciding which company gets the contract:
Failing to take Airbus subsidies into account…rewards Airbus for competing unfairly and punishes Boeing for playing by the rules. It helps socialism to triumph over free enterprise in securing a $35 billion contract that will be paid for by U.S. taxpayers—taxpayers who are expected to live by the same rules Boeing does.
The government subsidies to EADS have already hurt the U.S. aviation industry, Thompson says. In a recent report, “European Aircraft Subsidies, a Study of Unfair Trade Practices,” Thompson says European governments have given Airbus the equivalent of $200 billion to help capture the global aviation market. And it has worked. Two decades ago, U.S. aviation manufacturers like Boeing provided 85 percent of the market. Today, European companies control most of the market.
To make sure EADS doesn’t gain an unfair advantage in the bidding, Reps. David Obey (D-Wis.) and Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) introduced legislation that would require the U.S. Secretary of Defense to assess all major defense contracts under competition this year to determine whether the costs are realistic and reasonable. The defense chief also is required to provide to Congress an estimate of how many U.S. jobs are created or lost as part of those contract proposals.
Other lawmakers are pushing legislation to require the Defense Department to take into account the WTO ruling in making the contract decision.
In 2008, the AFL-CIO Executive Council praised action by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense that requires the impact on our nation’s industrial base be included in evaluation of the tanker proposals. In a statement, the council said:
Understanding how the use of our tax dollars can make America strong, both economically and militarily, is a sensible requirement that will help ensure the viability of our industrial base and, in this instance, the high-skill, high-wage jobs associated with the aerospace industry.
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A coalition of international unions, shipping associations, insurers and other maritime groups are demanding “concrete action” to end the increasingly violent and brazen Somali piracy “that is putting lives at risk and threatening world trade.”
The pirates’ 2009 attack on the U.S.-crewed Maersk Alabama and last fall’s kidnapping of a British couple still being held for a $7 million ransom have grabbed headlines. But in the past two years, Somali pirates attacked hundreds of ships and kidnapped more than 1,800 seafarers crewing those vessels. Many are still being held for ransom.
The coalition has launched on online petition and is seeking half a million signatures by World Maritime Day, Sept 23. The petition asks governments to dedicate the resources necessary, including stepped up naval protection, to end the attacks and “regain control of the Indian Ocean from a handful of criminals.”
To read and sign the petition, go to www.endpiracypetition.org.
The petition says in part:
Almost every day seafarers are being kidnapped and exposed to an increasing risk of injury or even death. Every day seafarers transport the world’s goods through areas where the risk of pirate attack is increasing.
Every day shipping companies and their insurers have to pay for increasing anti-piracy measures, extra fuel and ransoms—costs that are eventually passed on to the consumer. Every day the risk of a major ecological disaster due to an oil spill caused by piracy increases.
David Cockroft, International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) general secretary, is urging people to sign the petition and then pass the link on to friends around the world.
In this way we can signal our belief that it is past time for all governments to do what has to be done to protect seafarers, ships and the goods that they carry and on which we all rely.
David Heindel, Seafarers (SIU) secretary-treasurer and first vice chairman of the ITF’s Seafarers Section, is asking U.S. union members to sign the anti-piracy petition.
This is an enormously important issue. Lives are at stake, and so are the economies of many nations.
Click here to find out more about Somali piracy and to read case studies and firsthand accounts of pirates’ attacks and kidnappings.
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More than a year into the Obama administration and with November elections just ahead, progressive activists will gather June 7–9 in Washington, D.C., to forge a strategy to build a majority for real change in America.
The America’s Future Now conference, sponsored by the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), traditionally is the largest gathering of progressives in the country. There’s still time to register for the conference. Register now here or click on the America’s Future Now icon above.
Grassroots activists and policy-wonk analysts have gathered at the campaign’s conferences each year for six years to forge an economic agenda for change—and the organizing strategies for taking that agenda to the country.
In 2006 and 2007, then-Sen. Barack Obama spoke powerfully at the conferences as he was building an unprecedented citizen campaign for change. And in 2008, he was elected president, running on many programs championed by the progressive movement.
At the conference, progressives will discuss strategies to take on the corporate lobbies that stand in the way of change, drive the movement for jobs now and devise ways to create a majority for change and challenge both obstructionist Republicans and timid Democrats.
Even though President Obama deserves credit for stopping the economic free-fall inherited from the Bush administration, one of the big questions progressives are asking: “Where is the plan to create the 11 million jobs needed to get the U.S. workers back to work?” This conference will give progressives the opportunity to form plans to move the progressive agenda front and center in the 2010 elections, on Capitol Hill and in the White House.
We’ll join in frank discussions on other key topics for working people such as “Health Care Reform—The Next Step,” “Immigration Reform,” “Working Class Anger—Does It Go Left or Right?” “Next Generation Progressives,” “Holding Congress Accountable” and “Can Congress Work in Polarized Age?” Click here for the full conference agenda.
An all-star list of speakers will address the conference, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Other speakers from the union movement include AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker; United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard; Karen Nussbaum, executive director of the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America; and Larry Gold, AFL-CIO associate general counsel.
Also speaking are Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington; Jared Bernstein, economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden; Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.); Democratic Reps. Alan Grayson (Fla.), Donna Edwards (Md.) and Barbara Lee (Calif.); former White House adviser Van Jones; former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean; NAACP President Benjamin Jealous; and Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza. Click here for the latest confirmed list of speakers.
Did the so-called Great Recession create a lost generation of workers?
In this short video clip from the May 26-27, 2010, forum of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka points out how lawmakers should not back off now on creating jobs—because nations’ economies still are at risk of deeper economic troubles.
So, did the “Great” Recession create a lost generation of workers?
Check out the video (on the left) and find out Trumka’s response.
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