Labor Union Blog

The road to economic growth and a full recovery lies in allowing the deficit to grow temporarily and investing in programs that put money in the hands of consumers, two nonpartisan experts said.  

Testifying before the congressional supercommittee yesterday, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf warned that to avoid slowing the economy even further, the deficit must get worse before it gets better:

There is no inherent contradiction between using fiscal policy to support the economy today and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now. If policymakers wanted to achieve both a short-term economic boost and longer-term fiscal sustainability, a combination of policies would be required: changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit now but reduce it later in the decade.

Those policies to stimulate the economy should include tax cuts for the middle class, which increase consumer spending, says Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). In a post on EPI’s blog, Working Economics, Bivens cites a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), which shows the middle-class tax cuts in the stimulus package increased consumption.

Bivens says payroll tax cuts for the middle class are definitely a better stimulus for the economy than tax breaks for corporations. Corporate tax cuts would give a windfall to firms that are already sitting on a load of cash, he said.

But a better way to jump start the economy would be to put money directly in the hands of lower- and middle-class consumers, Bivens said, through increases in programs like food stamps, extended unemployment insurance and creating new jobs to rebuild the infrastructure. He also said increasing aid to state and local governments would create or save thousands of jobs as well.

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report from New Hampshire.

Following weeks of speculation, Bill O’Brien, the Speaker of the New Hampshire House, failed to call a vote to override Democratic Gov. John Lynch’s veto of so-called right-to-work legislation in a special session today after O’Brien realized he may not have the votes needed to override the veto. After Lynch vetoed HB 474 in May, O’Brien has scrambled to catch opponents of the right-to-work-for-less law off guard, holding unscheduled votes, changing the agendas on session days and bombarding session days with roll-call votes in order to ensure that he can push through an override of the veto.

Today the speaker brought up two other unannounced vetoes. State representatives raised multiple objections to O’Brien’s decision to hold an override vote on HB 88, a bill that would let people use deadly force to defend themselves any place they have a right to be. When asked how the public would know when votes appeared on the House agenda, O’Brien replied that he would change the agenda as he saw fit.

Over 50 local activists and workers turned out to lobby Democratic and Republican representatives before the session. Pete Toner, an ironworker from South Acworth, said:

I’m here because I can’t stand to see anybody being run into the ground. I don’t want to see people in this state losing their benefits and their wages.

If HB 474 became law, New Hampshire would be the first state in the Northeast to adopt a right-to-work law, but so far, both Democrats and Republicans have resisted O’Brien’s efforts to impose the law on the state. The New Hampshire House is scheduled to reconvene Oct. 12, so stay posted.

More than 1,000 nurses from National Nurses United (NNU) are in San Francisco for the union’s annual convention that kicks off tonight with an address by Calif. Gov. Jerry Brown (D). The convention runs through Friday.

Tomorrow, delegates will rally at the Federal Reserve office downtown as part of NNU’s ongoing campaign for a tax on Wall Street financial speculation to provide revenue for Main Street reforms, including jobs at living wages, guaranteed healthcare for all and freedom from hunger, homelessness and retirement insecurity.

Additionally, the convention will include an international panel of nurses discussing about the global economic crisis, and international solutions, including a financial speculation tax, similar to what NNU proposes, which has been adopted in more than a dozen other developed nations, and may soon be adopted for the full European Union.

Filmmaker Michael Moore and Linda Silas, RN, President, Canadian Federal of Nurses will address the convention.

Mike Peters, AFL-CIO community services liaison for the Northwest Iowa Labor Council, reports on the Siouxland Food Bank.

This past Labor Day, the Northwest Iowa Central Labor Council presented a check for $6,000 to the Food Bank of Siouxland in Sioux City, Iowa. The donation comes as the need for food bank programs are growing. The donation will help the food bank’s Back Pack program, which provides  nourishing snacks for children who qualify for free or reduced lunches in our school system to take home on the weekends. In some cases, this may be the only thing the kids have to eat over a weekend.

The Back Pack program began in 2006 and now serves 2,000 children from five elementary schools in Sioux City, Iowa, and South Sioux City, Neb., at a cost of $1.80 per snack.

If you would like to help the Back Pack program, send a donation to: Food Bank of Siouxland, P.O. Box 985, Sioux City, Iowa, 51102, or visit us at www.siouxlandfoodbank.org.

The need for the food bank has grown significantly since its beginning in 1989. In 1991 the food bank distributed a maximum of 10,000 pounds of food per month. By 2004, average distribution was 85,000 pounds a month. This year, the food bank distributes, on average, more than 130,000 pounds per month. In just the past two years, there has been a 30 percent jump in demand for food. In fact, the food bank distributed more than 1.6 million pounds of food in 2010. While some of the increase in demand is the result of an expanded effort by the United Way and local companies to reach out to those in need, the major cause of the change is the failed economy.

The food bank works with Feeding America, the largest nationwide network of certified food banks and food rescue operations. Nonprofits of all types use the food bank, including food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, residential facilities, senior programs, day care facilities and many more. Our service area includes eight counties in Iowa and seven in Nebraska.

The food bank receives food from various sources, including donations, food producers and retail outlets, food drives, and we sometimes purchase from vendors.  The food bank also benefits each year from the Letter Carriers’ (NALC‘s) annual “Stamp Out Hunger” drive.

This is a cross-post by Karl Frisch.

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” reads the unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service.

I guess no one ever thought it would be the Republican Party finishing off the Postal Service when those words were borrowed from the ancient Greek and chiseled in granite over the entrance to the James Farley Post Office in New York City on Labor Day in 1914.

Our postal system is quite remarkable if you think about it for a minute.

For just forty-four cents, you can send a Mother’s Day card from anywhere in the United States to the woman who carried you for nine months, providing she lives in the United States and it will arrive in a matter of days. Or as Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart more simply quipped, “Someone comes to your house, takes something you’ve written, and brings it to a person that you want them to give it to anywhere in the world for like fifty cents,” before deadpanning, “oh, but it’s going to take a couple of days.”

The power to create post offices is enumerated in our Constitution. Our Postal Service is even fully funded by the sale of stamps, not through tax dollars. That is a combo that should bring tears of joy to the eyes of tea partiers and Republicans alike.

GOP efforts to cripple the Postal Service predate the current tea party “cut government spending” drumbeat echoing throughout Washington during these difficult economic times.

Five years ago, during the Bush administration, the Postal Service handled the largest volume of mail ever seen in its 236-year history. It was in that year, that the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Postal Accountability Enhancement Act (PAEA).

The legislation’s title certainly sounds pretty great. But, as is the case with so much in Washington, the words chosen were simply window dressing for a very destructive proposal.

As Truth-Out.org’s Allison Kilkenny recently reported, by passing PAEA, Congressional Republicans mandated that within ten years the United States Postal Service would have to fully fund retirement healthcare benefits for the next 75 years. Or to put it more plainly, the Postal Service had a decade to fully fund the retirement healthcare benefits for future employees that will not even be born until 2057 at the earliest.

Of course, if tea partiers succeed in repealing child labor laws (because we all know that little hands are better for cutting stamps) we can probably drop that year to the mid-2040s.

Interestingly, this dreadful law holds a delicious bite of irony in that it requires government-funded universal healthcare benefits for Americans that will not be born for a generation.

Imagine what the right would say if President Obama and the Democrats proposed legislation that required businesses and corporations to fully fund healthcare benefits for all of their current workers and workers who haven not even been born yet.

Socialist. Communist. Marxist. Maoist. Pick any of the ists. They would call Obama a cartoonist if they thought it would kill the bill.

The only reason we keep hearing so much about the Postal Service’s impending budget shortfall is because PAEA requires that on September 30 a down payment be made on the healthcare benefits of postal workers 75 years into the future.  This law has forced the Postal Service into the red for two years running.

In the end, Republicans know the Postal Service is a government agency that works well for Americans. And you know the GOP cannot have an example of good government floating around out there lest it get in the way of their political aspirations.

Why let a self-funding government agency flourish when you can privatize it and make your corporate cronies even richer?

Left to the Republicans, we would probably start receiving our mail intermittently from some smelly, scruffy, raggedly dressed character on horseback like Kevin Costner from The Postman, 1997’s worst picture Razzie award winner.

It is enough to make you go, well, postal.

Rather than collecting federal scalps to appease its insatiable ant-government appetite, the GOP would do better by the American people if it became a Party of philatelists, or stamp collectors for my friends on the right who believe strange sounding words have an intrinsic liberal bias just like the media, science, math, letters, numbers, and the truth.

It is time to pick up that pen and paper and write your representatives in Washington—while you still can.

Throughout September, Organizing 2.0, the online collective of communicators and online organizers working for unions and social justice activists, is offering expert-level pro-bono (free) consultant services on a wide-range of communications/technology/organizing issues.

This is a unique opportunity for leaders and staff with any North American union, labor organization—such as central labor councils and state federations—or grassroots economic justice group.

Organizing 2.0 has lined up dozens of volunteer consultants who are donating an hour of their time for this project to answer questions on web development, social media training, blogging, creating and using online video, new member organizing campaigns, local political campaigns, online small donor fundraising and more.

Here are some few examples of the type of consulting questions the experts can answer for you in the one-hour session.

• Review of your website, social media accounts, campaign plan or training agenda.
• Create a web or email template for your CMS or CRM.
• Help draft or review an RFP or plan for a web project, client side.
• Review work done by another consultant or firm for quality and price.
• Provide training (webinar, conference call, 1:1 coaching).
• Creative brainstorm—look for relevant case studies and examples for your work.
• Assemble the right list of vendors for a future project.
• Discuss which CMS (Drupal, Joomla!, WordPress) is right for your next project.
• Discuss your use of databases (Salsa, Convio, CiviCRM, BSD) for organizing.
• Review copy, past or future.
• Specific, technical advice with your video or podcasting project.
• Tips for using mobile in your next campaign.
• Getting started in Google Apps.

Click here to request you pro-bono consultation. Organizing 2.0 says that if you aren’t sure about your eligibility; fill out our request form anyway. If they can’t offer you a full hour of consulting, they will at least try and point you in the right direction for free resources available online.

This week’s Republican debate has now achieved perverse fame for the “Let him die” moment that occurred when the audience cheered and applauded as Wolf Blitzer asked Rep. Ron Paul (Texas) whether society should just let a sick person die if he can’t afford health insurance.

As do all of us in the union movement, the National Nurses United (NNU) expressed revulsion at the cheering.

NNU Co-President Jean Ross, RN, called the audience’s response “stunning.”

My first reaction is how far have we degenerated as a society? Everything we do is geared toward preventing illness, and getting people well. If no one cares whether our patients get well, what are we doing advocating for them and fighting for them?

A broader question, says NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro, is

one of national identity: Do we have—or even want—a country, a nation of common purpose and support—or just a collection of amoral individuals?

NNU Co-President Deborah Burger, RN, said the idea of “deciding whether someone deserves medical treatment based on their pocket book is abhorrent. Does that mean we should take someone off life support if they are in an accident just because they are uninsured? For nurses that would be unconscionable and should not be part of any society I want to be in.”

DeMoro summed it when she said:

Most of us, other than the most wealthy, are just are one illness away from bankruptcy and lack of health insurance. Nurses do not regard lack of wealth or personal misfortune as a handicap or an excuse to withdraw needed and appropriate medical care. Nor should that ever be acceptable in a just and humane society.  

While nearly 50 million Americans are without health insurance, the number of uninsured young adults and children dropped by about 500,000, according to a report yesterday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010,” showed the total number of people without health insurance was 49.9 million in 2010, roughly one in six Americans, compared with 49 million in 2009. Much of the increase was due to workers losing employer-paid health coverage.  Read the full report here.

The good news, though, is that the number of uninsured young adults between ages18 and 24 dropped to 27.2 percent last year compared with 29.3 percent in 2009. That amounts to an increase of some 500,000 more young adults with insurance in 2010. This change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act, which allows young adults under age 26 to stay on or join their parent’s health plan, said Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee:

Today’s report proves the progress covering young adults on their parents’ insurance plans and shows that health reform is working.

In a blog post, The Commonwealth Fund’s Sara Collins, Tracy Garber, and Karen Davis point out that the Census data reveal that the early provisions of the Affordable Care Act are already having an effect on health insurance coverage.

But the erosion in employer coverage resulting from job losses and fewer companies offering health insurance underscore the need for the full implementation of the law in 2014.

 The report also shows the value of the health care safety net. Although the number of people with job-based insurance coverage declined by 1.5 million people, this was offset by increases in public coverage. The percentage of children covered by Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program increased to 34.8 percent in 2010, up from 33.8 percent in 2009. 

House Republicans backed off their demand—at least temporarily—to end democratic union election rights for aviation and rail workers and voted yesterday to extend funding for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) through January.

After House Republicans forced the shutdown of the FAA by refusing to vote for a clean extension that did not include provisions to overturn the democratic union election rules, the public outcry was enormous.

Workers and community groups rallied at airports and marched outside lawmakers’ offices to protest the shutdown that cost 4,000 FAA workers and 70,000 construction workers two weeks’ pay, halted important airport safety improvements and cost taxpayers some $400 million.

The Republican target in the FAA shutdown were union election rules adopted last year by the National Mediation Board (NMB). Those rules say air and rail elections should be decided by a majority of votes cast. Previously under the Railway Labor Act (RLA), which covers rail and airline workers, each worker who did not cast a vote in a representation election was automatically counted as a “No” vote.

The bill, which also extends funding for federal highway programs through March, now goes to the U.S. Senate.

In the past year, congressional Republicans and right-wing extremists have ramped up their long-standing campaign against federal workers, claiming their pay is too high and their benefits too generous compared to private-sector workers. A new study shows how wrong they are.

According to the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), the federal government pays more than twice as much to private contractors than it would cost federal workers to perform the same work. The government spends some $320 billion a year for services by private contractors.

Groups opposing federal workers cooked the books and used incomplete information—comparing just salaries and not including benefits and other costs—in their studies comparing costs. But POGO General Counsel Scott Amey told The New York Times:

We compared the full compensation paid to federal government and private-sector employees to the billable rates in federal service contracts. Across the board you see that it cost government more to pay for contractors.

The report notes that for “decades there have been increasing political pressures to reduce the size of the federal government.”

In response the government has awarded service contracts, resulting in an expanding “shadow government” that costs hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The focus on comparing federal and private-sector salaries needs to shift because they have nothing to do with what the government actually pays for services. Instead, the focus properly belongs on analyzing the full costs of paying contractors to perform federal services.

Given the nation’s ongoing economic problems, this analysis has become even more relevant—approximately one-quarter of all discretionary spending now goes to service contractors.

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee says the study confirms “privatizing services leads to cost overruns and in most cases a lower quality of services.”

The only ones benefiting from privatization are the private companies and the campaign coffers of the politicians who push for privatization. Study after study shows that privatization does not deliver the savings for taxpayers promised by its proponents.

Click here for the full report.