Labor Union Blog

The U.S. Department of Labor is joining forces with Facebook and education and employer organizations to provide crucial employment resources to job seekers through the use of social networks.

A new Facebook Social Jobs Partnership page (click here) highlights available training programs, educational opportunities and job search resources. Also Facebook has made a commitment to drive traffic to the page through targeted online public service announcements that will appear to users in geographic areas experiencing high unemployment.

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis says:

Linking American job seekers with the resources they need to get back to work is a top priority of the Obama administration and my department. By leveraging the power of the social Web, this initiative will provide immediate, meaningful and ready-to-use information for job seekers and employers, and a modern platform to better connect them.

Other partners in the initiative are the National Association of State Workforce Agencies, DirectEmployers Association and the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Those groups will conduct in-depth survey research about how job seekers, college career centers and workforce recruiters are using the social Web effectively; explore how job postings can be shared on Facebook and through other social websites at no charge; and distribute educational materials to recruiters, government agencies and job seekers about the utility of the social Web.

Marne Levine, Facebook’s vice president of global public policy, says:

Facebook is about connecting people, so that they can share what’s important to them, and that is the driving force behind the social jobs partnership. We’ve brought employers, recruiters, college career services and government agencies together to help the millions of Americans who use Facebook to find jobs.

Understanding unions, collective bargaining  and labor laws can get confusing enough without all of the misinformation that’s regularly spread around. But our friends at American Rights at Work have put together Unions 101, a handy guide to what unions do and why workers having a voice matters in today’s economy.

Unions 101 is a great resource for answering the questions your friends, colleagues and family might have about unions. The quick tutorial gives the nuts and bolts about what a union is—and isn’t—from what unions do to why join a union to laws that regulate unions.

Click here to visit the website and here to download a printable PDF of Unions 101.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka today reaffirmed that the AFL-CIO opposes any cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits or to the federal contribution to Medicaid and he criticized Senate Democrats on the “Super Committee” for proposing—according to news reports—hundreds of billions of cuts.

He says that while Republicans proposed even bigger and more harmful cuts to these essential middle class benefits,

these Super Committee Democrats have put all their concessions on the table up front in the vain hope that the Republicans might reciprocate.  But it doesn’t work that way.  In this political climate, concessions beget more concessions—not a workable compromise.

To join in the fight to opposes cuts to Social Security, Medicare and  Medicaid text DEBT to 225568.

The proposed cuts, he says, prove why people around the country “are raising their voices in protest because they’re fed up with a system that is stacked in favor of the richest one percent of Americans — at the expense of the other 99 percent of us.”

The politicians insisting that the only workable solution to their fabricated crisis involves deep cuts to middle-class benefits must not get out into Main Street America enough.  If they had, they would see that the middle class has already given up too much, while Wall Street and the wealthiest Americans have done all the taking.

The AFL-CIO Legal Department has announced a new fellowship opportunity for recent law school graduates. The one-year fellowship will begin in September 2012.

The fellowship offers an excellent opportunity for recent law school graduates to work with experienced union-side lawyers on a variety of issues, including litigation, policy, regulatory and legislative matters, assisting with organizing campaigns and corporate governance issues.

AFL‑CIO’s litigation icludes cases in the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, the NLRB and a small number of state appellate courts.

Also, the AFL-CIO fellow will participate in activities relating to the Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC). The LCC is a national organization of union-side attorneys, which produces publications and holds educational conferences. Activities here will include preparation for attorney conferences, outreach to new labor lawyers and law students, and regular opportunities to attend LCC meetings and conferences.

Click here for more details on the fellowship including eligibility requirements and application instructions.

Workers at the U.S. Army Human Resources Command in Ft. Knox, Ky., voted by a better than 3-to-1 margin to join AFGE. The more than 1,400 workers are Army civilian personnel specialists who provide human resources services to soldiers, veterans, retirees and Army families. They are part of the Army’s Human Resource Command.

AFGE President John Gage says:

Civilian employees in the Defense Department are vital to ensuring our military is ready to go into battle at a moment’s notice and treated with dignity and respect once they return. These HR employees are a critical link in this process and they deserve all of the workforce rights and protections that union membership provides.

The workers were transferred to Ft. Knox as part of the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process, which recommended consolidating all of the Army’s human resources functions at a new Human Resources Center of Excellence at Ft. Knox. Even though the employees already were represented by AFGE, the Federal Labor Authority required a new election be held to determine if the transferred employees wanted to retain their union representation.

Teresa Casertano in the AFL-CIO Organizing Department’s Global Campaigns section sends us this report.

In a recent rally in Mexico City, representatives of communications and IT unions from around the world demanded the giant communications firm, Telefonica, end its efforts to block workers from gaining an authentic voice at the workplace. Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a longtime ally and partner of the Mexican telecom union, the Sindicato de Telefonistas de la Republica Mexicana (STRM), was among the global union leaders who led the march and spoke at the rally.

The workers are employed at Atento, which operates eight call center facilities. The company  prefers an employer-controlled ghost union that has signed a protection contract containing few, if any, benefits for the workers and prohibits them from representing their interests independently through a worker-led organization.

More than a year ago, Atento workers petitioned for an election to choose between the employer-controlled union and the STRM, but the election was conducted with threats and intimidation of workers to keep them from voting for the democratic union, STRM. This week, the Mexican Labor Court voided last year’s election results due to interference by the company to maintain its undemocratic “protection union” that represents the management’s interests and not the workers.

On  Oct. 31, Atento workers will have a second chance to participate in a union election. They face strong challenges with only three days to find eligible voters among workers in eight locations and without any access rights or list of eligible voters. Managers have already restarted their anti-union campaign to keep workers from voting to join STRM. The AFL-CIO and many unions around the world have stepped up to support them in their fight.  

Show your support for the Atento workers by “liking” and leaving a solidarity message on Facebook here.

STRM is a leader in the struggle for independent unionism in Mexico. STRM also holds the shared presidency of the Union Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT). In March 2011, the AFL-CIO and UNT entered into a joint partnership to “resist all forms of anti-union and union-busting  tactics in both countries and to support joint campaigns to build independent and democratic unions in common multinational companies.” The agreement further states:

We especially commit to fight together against abuses by employers and fraudulent unions that hold protection contracts, established without the knowledge or legitimate representation of workers….

The AFL-CIO puts its commitment into action, standing in solidarity with Atento workers as they bravely stand up to a fraudulent ghost union backed by a powerful multinational. Learn about STRM and the union’s struggle for democratic unionism here.

The nation’s postal unions and allies are fighting back against proposals to close post offices and mail processing centers, and change USPS regulations to eliminate overnight delivery of first class mail, and change two-day delivery to three days.  You can join by signing a petition to your senators and representatives to preserve the nation’s mail service. Click here or here to sign the petition.

The petition is part of the Save America’s Postal Service campaign, a joint effort of the Postal Workers (APWU), Letter Carriers (NALC), Mail Handlers, an affiliate of the Laborers (LIUNA), and the Rural Letter Carriers.

Over the next several weeks, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, the “super committee,” is supposed to produce a plan to reduce the federal deficit. It may include a package of proposals to fix the financial difficulties facing the USPS, which could mean drastic cuts in service. Earlier this month, a House committee passed a bill (H.R. 2309) that mandated $3 billion in cuts to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), including closing facilities, reducing door deliveries by as much as 75 percent, and laying off as many as 120,000 workers.

Last month, thousands of postal workers and their supporters held rallies in nearly 500 locations across the country, protesting the proposed cuts in jobs, postal facilities and service.

Click here or here to sign the petition to oppose plans to close post offices and mail processing facilities nationwide, and to reduce service services, which would result in drastic cuts in service to the American people.

Flight attendants at Virgin America are looking for an upgrade of their own. This week, after an overwhelming number of the 650 flight attendants at the airline signed union authorization cards, they filed a petition with the National Mediation Board (NMB) for representation with the Transport Workers (TWU).

The low-coast airline is known for its high quality and innovative onboard service. Ramon Wood, a Virgin flight attendant based at New York’s JFK, says:

We’re very proud that Virgin America wins high marks from travelers, based on the service we provide. We believe we can make service better for passengers and elevate working conditions for in-flight team members by having a voice in our dealings with the company. Right now we’re seldom heard and our concerns are not addressed.

Founded by British media and transportation mogul Richard Branson, the airline began U.S. operations in 2007 and flies to 12 U.S. cities and three locations in Mexico. Flight attendants at Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airlines and subsidiary Virgin Australia have voted to form unions with British and Australian labor unions.

TWU Organizing Director Frank MacCann says:

We’re here to support Virgin America flight attendants in every way we can. We fully expect management at Virgin American to respect the decision made by the majority of flight attendants to seek union representation, and we look forward to a fast and fair election campaign.

The election will be conducted under new democratic procedures approved by the NMB in 2010 which specify that elections will be decided by a simple majority of those voting.  In the past, any worker who did not vote was counted as a “No” ballot. Click here for more the campaign at Virgin America.

Cuts instituted by Congress for the 2011 fiscal year eliminate some 370,000 jobs, while endangering the public and delaying necessary repairs and infrastructure work that will only be more expensive to complete in the future, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP).

In “Creating Unemployment: How Congressional Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession,” CAP Senior Fellow Scott Lilly writes that the loss of these jobs will have ripple effects throughout the economy.

The jobs losses that are a direct result of those actions will have a secondary impact on a wide array of businesses ranging from automobile producers to local restaurants and dry cleaning establishments, causing the disappearance of a significant number of additional jobs.

Already, the cuts to local law enforcement programs—which were cut by $2.5 billion compared to the previous year—are having a negative effect, Lilly reports. As an example, he turns to one California city:

Despite concessions by police officers in San Jose, California to accept a 10 percent pay cut, 66 police officers were forced to turn in their badges in June because of city budget problems. The cuts came in the midst of a recent upsurge in homicides and other serious crimes in the city

Further, with an average 19 percent unemployment rate for construction workers, Congress cut much-needed building repair projects. 

Congress could choose to put Americans back to work in ways that will ensure the safety of taxpayers in their communities. Or it could continue down the path toward greater unemployment and imperiling the lives and health of the people who elected them.

As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said at this month’s Take Back the American Dream conference, right-wing politicians are intent on “ginning up this season’s version of ‘divide and conquer’ — set taxpayers against public employees.” If current trends prevail, taxpayers may soon have a taste of what life with too few public employees means for the country at large.

On Nov. 17, the union movement and our allies are rallying around a day of national action to demand “Jobs, Not Cuts.”

To download the ”Creating Unemployment: How Congressional Budget Decisions Are Putting Americans out of Work and Increasing the Risk of a Second Recession” in a PDF file, click here.

Examining the complaints of some CEOs that they just can’t find qualified workers, economist Dean Baker lays waste to that argument on several fronts, most notably the CEOs’ apparent inability to apply the laws of supply and demand to fulfilling their stated workforce goals.

Baker, who co-directs the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), first crunches some data to show that, in fact, the ratio of unfilled jobs to employment is “down by almost a third from its pre-recession level,” Baker reports in a column titled, “A Generation of CEOs Who Don’t Know How to Raise Wages.” He writes:

According to standard economics, when businesses can’t fill job openings, they are supposed to offer higher wages. If these businesses offered higher wages, then they could lure away workers from their competitors…If these CEOs raised wages high enough, then these workers would be willing to work for their companies.

[...]

Since it would be rude to imply that CEOs are not being honest when they complain about the lack of skilled workers, we should assume that they don’t know how to raise wages. This is a problem that could be easily remedied. The government could offer short courses to CEOs and other top executives that would teach them how to raise wages and why this would be beneficial to their firms.

Of course, CEOs aren’t total strangers to methods of upping compensation packages — when it comes to their own, that is. The AFL-CIO annual PayWatch data shows that in 2010, CEOs of the largest companies received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation last year.  Overall, CEOs of the 299 companies in the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch database received a combined total of $3.4 billion in pay in 2010, enough to support 102,325 jobs paying the median wages for all workers.

In 1964, the apex of performance of the economy, CEO pay relative to average wage-earners was 24 to 1. Now it is 340-1.