Labor Union Blog

The economic and social problems, the hate and the fear we see around us today can only be solved by a fresh generation of committed, smart, tireless and creative activists, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told the nearly 800 young workers, activists and student  at the Next Up Young Workers Summit today.

“And—I’m going to go out on a limb here—but I think you are those people,” she said.

In her keynote address to the conference, which opened today in Minneapolis, Shuler said the situation in the global economy is dire. Massive change is needed to turn it around.  Young workers are being told to “suck it up” and live in a world without jobs, she said.

We’re being told that America can’t afford teachers—but we can afford CEO tax cuts. We’re being asked to accept a society that rewards wealth and punishes work. A society that makes it harder for young people to go to college. A society where hate is growing and targeting people of color, people of different faiths, people who are LGBTQ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer], immigrants–it’s shameful.

Shuler  urged the participants to create coalitions back home to build a movement to take back the American Dream.

None of us can make the change we need alone.  That’s why we’ve gathered here.  We really have to open our arms, work with others in our communities and build a broader movement together. The   AFL-CIO is working at this, forging new partnerships beyond just our union membership—partnerships with working people who don’t have unions…and with some whose jobs aren’t even covered by labor law, so they don’t have basic legal protections on the job. These are the people who really need a voice.

These are some of the most vulnerable working people in our country, often forced by crooked employers to work too many hours for too little pay in dangerous conditions, she said. They work and live in the shadows, outside the view of the agencies and groups that should be protecting them, she added.

So we are partnering with them because they need us. They need the strength of America’s union movement behind them.  But weneed them even more.  We need to learn from their determination  We are inspired by their energy. We are made better by their courage.

Also speaking today at the Summit, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis described how she learned the importance of collective bargaining from her father, a steward for the Teamsters and talked about her dedication to create good jobs and help pass President Obama’s American Jobs Act. By the time Barack Obama got to office, Solis said, the nation had lost 4 million jobs. But instead, Republicans in Congress want to gut the budget and kill even more jobs.

Unfortunately, there are people right now that got elected right now…don’t seem to understand that you can’t just cut your way out of this unemployment. You don’t cut at the heart of education…you don’t cut away at educating our youth.

She asked the young workers to take a leading role in getting out the vote and moving the message to pass the jobs bill and fight back against attacks on education funding, Pell grants and health care.

The Next Up Summit, which runs through Oct. 2, is part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts, led by Shuler, to reach out to working people under age 35. Young activists, including organizers and actors Lucas Neff and RJ Mitte, also will speak at the conference.

Nearly 800 young working people, activists and students from across the country kicked off the AFL-CIO Next Up Young Workers Summit in Minneapolis today by doing what union members do best—helping others in need.  

 The young working people partnered with the service organization Tubman and the AFL-CIO Community Services Network to create back-to-school care packages for children who live in the Twin Cities. Tubman helps women, children and families struggling with relationship violence, substance abuse, trauma and mental health issues.

Tubman also provides safe shelter, legal services, mental and chemical health counseling, youth programming, elder care resources and community education to more than 54,000 people across the Twin Cities metro area.

The summit, which runs through Oct. 2, is part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts, led by Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler, to reach out to working people under age 35. Young activists, including organizers and actors Lucas Neff and RJ Mitte, also will speak at the conference.

Be sure to watch a live webcast of Shuler and U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis as they formally kick off the conference here today, beginning at 5 p.m. CDT. Young activists also will speak in the opening session.

On Friday, the young workers will march through downtown Minneapolis carrying “I Want a Job” signs. In an interview with The Nation, Shuler explains that young workers are facing an economic tsunami:

Youth face an abyss now: coming out of college, not being able to find a job, carrying extraordinary debt, delaying adulthood. More people are living with their parents than any time since World War II. Even if you find a job, it’s at a lower wage rate than before the recession. So you’re starting behind and you never end up catching up.

She said the summit will provide a space for young workers to network and exchange ideas.

It’s an education platform to talk about the issues facing young workers.  It’s also to provide leadership development, because we need it in the labor movement, where we have very few opportunities for young people to ascend to leadership positions.

 Read the entire interview here.

AFL-CIO Community Services Director Will Fischer sends us this report.

More than 90 children received school supply bags through donations of union members in 10 locals from Saginaw County, Mich. AFL-CIO/Michigan Community Services liaison Steven Lamb reports that earlier this month, the unions gave the school supply bags to the YMCA, First Ward Community Center, Salvation Army and the Neighborhood House to distribute to area school children.

Taking pare in the donation drive: UAW locals 668, 699, 467, 6000 and 455; Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 557, Machinists (IAM) Local 557, Ironworkers Local 25, United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 951 and Operating Engineers (IUOE) Local 324. PMN Saginaw Metal Castings also contributed supplies.

The Kaiser Family Foundation”s  latest survey of health care costs shows half of workers at small firms with individual policies now face annual deductibles of $1,000 or more. In 2006, that figure was 16 percent. At large firms, the share has grown from 6 percent to 22 percent over the same five years.

As health care insurance costs continue to rise, Congress should look at ways to curb health care costs rather than leaving it to private employers who have never done a good job of that, says Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation. In fact, Congress has a good example of ways to lower costs right under its nose, Altman writes.

While the conventional wisdom is that private insurance does a better job of controlling costs, the opposite is true.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) says that Medicare spending per enrollee grew at a much lower rate than private insurance between 1999 and 2009 (4.9 percent vs. 7.2 percent for comparable benefits).

You can read Altman’s post, “Rising Health Costs Are Not Just a Federal Budget Problem,” here.

The average family health care policy now costs more than $15,000 per year. Premiums for family plans rose 9 percent in 2011, while workers’ wages grew just 2 percent. Since Kaiser began the survey 13 years ago, worker contributions to premiums have increased 168 percent, while wages have grown 50 percent and inflation 38 percent, Altman says. This reflects a growing trend of employers passing on the cost of health care to workers, he says.  Read the full survey here.

The increase in premium costs is not the result of the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, Altman says.

Most of the law’s provisions don’t go into effect until 2014.  The two biggest changes this year allow young adults up to age 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance policies and require some insurance plans to cover preventive services at no cost to patients.  These are popular provisions that provide real benefits, and combined they account for about one to two percentage points of this year’s premium increase.

What do workers at Amazon.com and the brutal existence of the Joads in the Depression-era “Grapes of Wrath” have in common? Writing at Bloomberg, columnist and MSNBC commentator Ezra Klein makes the connection. Read it here.

Three years into the nation’s brutal recession, America’s workers continue to suffer from massive joblessness, skyrocketing foreclosures and weak buying power. But Wall Street—with corporations sitting on $2 trillion in cash—hasn’t paid for its role in causing the near-collapse of the U.S. economy. 

The European Union (EU) this week moved to change that, with the EU formally adopting plans for a financial speculation tax that would raise 57 billion euros a year. The tax could generate billions in revenue to help our ailing economy, stimulate job growth and discourage the reckless, high-volume/short-term profit, computer-driven Wall Street gambling that led to our current economic crisis.

While the EU proposal still needs unanimous approval from EU states, there has been no legislative movement to do the same in this country. As economist Dean Baker notes, “the intensity with which the country’s leading deficit hawks continue to ignore financial speculation taxes (FST) is getting ever more entertaining.”

While deficit hawks like Wall Street investment banker[s]…never tire of preaching the virtues of shared sacrifice, somehow sacrifice for Wall Street never features as part of this story.

Baker also points out the media’s role in failing to report on Wall Street’s role in relentless pushing to reduce the deficit.

What is most remarkable in this picture is the complete failure of the media to identify Wall Street’s role in pushing this deficit reduction agenda. For example, Erskine Bowles, who was a co-chair of President Obama’s deficit commission, is never identified as a director of Morgan Stanley.

In this country, the National Nurses United (NNU) has been especially out front in demanding Wall Street pay for creating the global economic meltdown, in part through a financial speculation tax, a move the AFL-CIO and the global union movement long have been calling for.

Paradoxically, if reducing the deficit is such a high priority, why isn’t a financial spec tax on the agenda? Baker thinks he knows why.

In short, it is hard to understand why taxing financial speculation never appears on the agenda of the deficit hawks or gets mentioned in budget reporting, if the issue really is deficit reduction. On the other hand, if this is all about using an economic crisis to push a longstanding agenda to cut Social Security and Medicare, then everything suddenly makes sense.

Kurston Cook, with the AFL-CIO, is in Minneapolis and sends us this.

Some 800 young workers from across the country are convening in Minneapolis today through Sunday for the AFL-CIO Next Up Young Workers Summit to discuss topics ranging from the future of the union movement to the future of the economy.  

Young Workers Summit attendees are being asked to take a poll via text message about their views on jobs and the economic situation of young people today, in conjunction with Lake Research Partners. Questions include:  

• -Does the government need to take a larger role in the economy?
• -How concerned are you that you or a family member will be out of a job?
• -Is economic opportunity or economic security more important to you?

One out of every four participants has already responded in the poll and we expect more before it closes this evening. The results of the six-question poll will be released Friday.  

If you are attending the Young Workers Summit, take the poll! Text POLL to 235246 (AFLCIO).

Lucas Neff
RJ Mitte

AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler and U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will kick off the second annual Next Up Young Workers Summit in Minneapolis tomorrow. Hundreds of young working people, including organizers and students from across the country, will meet in Minneapolis Sept. 29-Oct. 2 for the Summit, part of the AFL-CIO’s efforts, led by Shuler, to reach out to working people under age 35.  

You can watch a live webcast of Shuler and Solis here this Thursday beginning at 5:00 p.m. CDT.

 Another highlight of the summit will be appearances by actors Lucas Neff (left), star of the Fox sitcom “Raising Hope” and RJ Mitte (left) from the TV show “Breaking Bad.” Both are members of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA). In March Neff joined actors Susan Sarandon and Tony Shalhoub in Madison, Wis., for an all-day series of rallies that sent a message to Republican legislators and Gov. Scott Walker that the assault on working people will not stand and their struggle is far from over. Neff told the crowd:

This is not the government of Scott Walker, this is not the government of the Koch brothers, this is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. And we the people will not be defeated. 

 Workshops, plenaries and caucuses  for the conference, which is centered on “Educating, Empowering and Mobilizing Young Workers for a Just 21st Century Economy,” will focus on building a collective vision for a new generation of working people in the country. The current economic crisis is a main part of the agenda as well as pathways to building a just economy and the ongoing attacks on workers’ rights from state legislatures.

Check out the final agenda for the summit here and don’t forget to tune in for Liz Shuler’s keynote tomorrow.

Jeffrey Neil Young, an attorney representing (pro bono) the artists suing Maine to reinstall the mural to the state’s Department of Labor, writes today in the Portland [Maine] Press Herald that the now-removed panels depicted are vital reminders of what unions have achieved. Below is an excerpt from his op-ed. If you’re in Washington, D.C., stop by the AFL-CIO where reproductions of the mural are now on display.

Six months ago, Gov. [Paul] LePage ordered the removal of a labor history mural from the lobby of the Department of Labor. Until then, the mural was largely unknown to most Mainers, including LePage himself.

A hearing in federal court is likely to take place soon to finally resolve whether the mural is the artist’s speech protected by the First Amendment or “government speech” unprotected by our nation’s Constitution.

So why all the fuss? Does the mural really matter? I say yes. In the words of the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

The 13 panels of the labor history mural not only teach us about our past, they remind us of our mistakes and inspire us for the future.

Since the mural is currently hidden away, I would like to highlight the actual people and themes depicted in this piece…..

We see the plight of child laborers. Not long ago Maine had a large number of children working long hours for little pay in unsafe conditions. Coincidentally, at the same time the mural was removed, legislation was introduced to loosen our child labor laws. Could we forget so easily?….

We also see the formation of the secret ballot and Maine’s first Labor Day in 1884 — a day honoring workers which we all now celebrate. There is a panel featuring women striking for better conditions. One need only remember the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire where 146 women burnt to death locked inside their factory to understand the importance of this panel.

Another panel highlights Frances Perkins from Damariscotta — Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s labor secretary.

Not only was Frances Perkins the first female labor secretary, but she basically created Social Security, unemployment benefits, welfare for the poor, the federal mininum wage, overtime and the 40-hour work week.

It would be hard to find another Mainer — indeed any American — who has had more influence on workers in this country than she did. That’s why the Department of Labor in Washington bears her name…..

Read the full op-ed here.