Labor Union Blog

222 New York City subway booth operators are breathing a sigh of relief today as a judge ruled Friday that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority could not lay off workers without a public hearing. The judge agreed with the union representing the workers saying that the public should be allowed the opportunity to weigh in on the authority’s decision.

New York is close to becoming the first state in the union to have a “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.” The bill waiting to be signed into law by Governor David Paterson grants paid holidays, sick days, and vacation time for nannies. It also grants overtime wages and requires 14 days notice before termination or the equivalent in pay.

New York is close to becoming the first state in the union to have a “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.” The bill waiting to be signed into law by Governor David Paterson grants paid holidays, sick days, and vacation time for nannies. It also grants overtime wages and requires 14 days notice before termination or the equivalent in pay.

With the shuttle programming coming to an end, what happens to all of those highly skilled workers who kept the spacecraft flying all of these years? A $15 million grant by the federal government is intended to assist nearly 3,200 contractors who were involved with the shuttle program. Although, it is expected that 20,000 workers could be out of jobs once the final two shuttle missions are completed by the end of this year. The $15 million grant announced this week will be in addition to a $40 million grant that was established under President Barack Obama.

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Lede: Kaiser Permanente demonstrates that union employer models without destructive confrontations are possible. Doug Cunningham has more.

By Doug Cunningham

By the end of the month 96,000 union workers at the big California non-profit health care provider will vote on whether or not to approve a new contract that leaves health benefits intact and provides raises of six percent over the two-year contract. Les Harris is a Kaiser health care worker and member of SEIU UHW.

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More than 1,900 registered nurses at five Texas hospitals have voted to join National Nurses Organizing Committee-Texas (NNOC-Texas), an affiliate of the 155,000-member National Nurses United (NNU).

The election wins by the nurses took place during the past two weeks, with the latest victory coming last night at the Valley Regional Medical Center in Brownsville. They join the registered nurses who voted for a voice at work at four other Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) hospitals: Corpus Christi Medical Center in Corpus Christi, Del Sol Medical Center and Las Palmas Medical Center in El Paso, Rio Grande Regional Hospital in McAllen.

NNU Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro calls the wins in a predominantly nonunion state, a “historic moment for nurses and patients in Texas and the nation.”

The Texas RNs have broken through in achieving collective action and representation in Texas and opened a door that will never be closed.

Only one private hospital in Texas has been previously unionized, Cypress Fairbanks in Houston, also a NNOC-Texas/NNU facility.

DeMoro also says the Texas nurses’ decision to join the union shows their commitment to improving patient care in a health care system too often puts profits before patients.

RNs are the canaries in the mines in our healthcare system, the most independent, honest brokers for patients, based on their very real-life experience fighting to protect patients at the bedside and to change the healthcare system for all patients and future patients.

NNU Organizing Director David Johnson says the key issues for the Texas nurses at all the hospitals—improved ability to advocate for patients, enhanced safe staffing and upgraded standards for nurses—are “common themes for nurses everywhere.”

Monica Sanchez, an RN at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, puts it this way:

With NNOC-Texas/NNU our voice will be heard so that we will have the power of collective bargaining rights to protect our profession and our patients.

Arkansas AFL-CIO President Alan Hughes says the June 8 U.S. Senate Democratic primary runoff between two-term incumbent Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Lt. Gov. Bill Halter “is going to be very close.”

It was union members, he says, that two weeks ago forced what was once considered a sure win for Lincoln and her Wall Street and corporate backers into a runoff with Halter and his progressive, working family agenda. In an e-mail to union voters, Hughes says:

With your help again, we can defeat Lincoln and truly hold her accountable.

With the runoff just days away and early voting already under way, Arkansas unions, Working America, the Alliance for Retired Americans and other allies are reminding their members about Lincoln’s close ties and big campaign cash from Wall Street and Big Banks, the insurance industry and other corporate interests, and pointing out how her voting record is littered with votes for her contributors. Says Hughes:

During her more than 10 years in the U.S. Senate, Lincoln has repeatedly sided with corporations over working families and left working Arkansans behind. She has taken more than $1 million in contributions from bankers like Goldman Sachs, and she aggressively supported trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that resulted in our jobs being shipped overseas.

A new television ad from the Communications Workers of America (CWA) highlights Lincoln’s ties to Big Oil.

Blanche Lincoln says she works for Arkansas. But for too long she’s been helping oil companies get their way in Washington. While gas reached $4 a gallon, Lincoln took $1.1 million in campaign cash from oil and gas companies—then voted to help oil companies avoid paying taxes with special tax breaks $14 billion worth.

Click here for the full commercial.

On the ground, union members are distributing worksite fliers comparing Halter’s pro-worker agenda with Lincoln’s corporate track record and urging working families to get to the polls. Throughout the state, union-member-to-union member phone banks neighborhood walks are getting the word out about the importance of going to the polls Tuesday.

For more on Lincoln’s record, take a look lincolnexposed.com, and for more on the race, check out these two Arkansas blogs, the Blue Hog Report and Blue Arkansas.

Some 431,000 net new jobs were created in May. A whopping 411,000 of those new jobs were temporary U.S. Census jobs, while private employers added only 41,000 new jobs in May. Overall, the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7 percent, down from 9.9 percent in April, according to a report released this morning by the U.S. Department of Labor.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said the low number of private-sector jobs is further evidence the recovery is still fragile.

The Economic Recovery Act saved us from a second Great Depression, but it was not sufficient to power strong and sustained job growth, and its effects are expected to wane in coming months.

He called on Congress to do more to create jobs and sustain the recovery.

Most immediately, Congress must move quickly to restore health care benefits for the unemployed and provide aid to states to maintain jobs and vital services. We already see state and local governments shedding 22,000 jobs in May. Without further action to offset state budget shortfalls, these job losses will offset temporary gains from federal spending.

The underemployment figure, which includes those who are too discouraged to look for work or are working part-time out of economic necessity, dropped to 16.6 percent in May, from 17.1 percent in April, and some 27 million U.S. workers are without jobs or full-time work. In the private sector, manufacturing added 29,000 jobs; temporary service jobs, 31,000; and mining, 10,000. Construction jobs declined by 35,000.

The May unemployment rate for black workers improved to 15.5 percent and for white men to 8.8 percent.

Writing on Firedoglake, David Dayen points out that

while temporary federal government jobs are rising because of the Census, permanent local government jobs are going away. State budget cuts could lead to as many as 900,000 jobs lost in 2010. And Congress decided last week to do nothing about that, cutting money in a jobs bill for the states to balance their Medicaid budgets.

Economists say monthly job creation must be 350,000 or more just to begin to make a dent in the unemployment rate. Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, (EPI), says today’s jobless report shows “nothing closely resembling the job growth needed to dig us out of our very deep hole.”

The number of long-term unemployed workers continues to grow. In May, some 6.8 million U.S. workers were out of a job for 27 weeks or longer, up from 4 million a year ago. In May, 46 percent of unemployed workers had been without a job for 27 weeks or more.

The long-term jobless figures clearly show how important it is that Congress extend unemployment insurance (UI), a move that is a key part of the AFL-CIO Jobs Agenda. Late last week, the House voted to extend unemployment benefits to millions of long-term unemployed workers who have been jobless longer than 26 weeks. But the Senate failed to vote on the measure before going on recess, meaning up to 1.2 million workers will lost their unemployment insurance by the time the Senate returns from vacation.

Speaking earlier this week at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, President Obama said it is critical lawmakers extend unemployment insurance for several more months

so that Americans who’ve been laid off through no fault of their own get the support they need to provide for their families and can maintain their health insurance until they’re rehired.

Last week, a panel of leading labor economists pointed out that extending unemployment benefits not only would support individual workers who have been unable to find jobs, but also would stimulate the economy and help create more jobs.

At the EPI forum, economists stressed that money sent out in the form of unemployment insurance is quickly returned to the community, effectively supporting local economies. Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty said the median unemployed person had almost no cushion—only about $250 in liquid savings—at the time of job loss, resulting in a sharp drop in spending on essentials, including food.

Jesse Rothstein, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor, summed up the nation’s jobless situation:

If you give money to someone who is unemployed, they are going to spend it the next day.

In his statement, Trumka adds:

America’s workers have paid far more than their fair share for the economic crisis—they’ve paid with their jobs, with their homes and with billions of dollars to Wall Street.

Today’s challenge is jobs. Unless Congress addresses this challenge with the focus and energy they brought to rescuing our banks, not only will a generation of workers be doomed to unemployment and the recovery itself put at risk, but dealing with our long-term fiscal problem will be all the more difficult.