Labor Union Blog

Fair Elections Ohio has turned in more than 318,000 signatures  to put the state’s new voter suppression law, HB 194, on the ballot for a  citizens’ veto–a move that puts the law’s provisions on hold for the 2011 and 2012 election cycles. The signatures collected far exceed the 231,000 required to get the measure on the ballot, according to Leadership Conference on Civil  Rights President Wade Henderson.

HB 194 would  have restricted early voting, barring counties from sending out unsolicited  absentee ballots and limited the days and ways people can vote before Election Day.

Read more about this here and here.

Working families in Maine are also in the process of fighting extreme political attacks on voting rights.  Earlier this month, Mainers turned in more than 70,000 signatures to get a measure on the ballot that would overturn same-day registration.

In June, Ohio’s working families delivered 1.3 million signatures to put on the ballot Gov. John Kasich’s law taking collective bargaining rights from more than 350,000 public employees. Now a broad coalition is mobilizing Ohio voters to “Vote No on Issue 2” to overturn the law.

This just in from the Center for American Progress:

HOUSE GOP BUDGET LAUNCHES FULL ON CLASS WAR – Dave Jamieson: “In addition to blocking President Obama’s health care law and slashing funding for job training, the budget plan presented by House Republicans for health and labor programs this week would scuttle several worker safety protections put forth by the Department of Labor…The budget also takes aim at an obscure but notable Labor Department rule intended to reduce the death and maiming of construction workers who toil on rooftops. The department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had planned to ramp up the enforcement of harness rules for roofers working on residential construction sites. In a move that will likely please the construction lobby, the Republican plan forbids the agency from doing so.”

Some of  New York City’s largest unions and community groups are joining the “Occupy Wall Street” protests. For three weeks a core group of 200 to 300 people have kept a constant vigil on Wall Street to hold the financial industry accountable for the schemes and reckless games that led to the economic collapse. (Follow the action on Twitter with the hashtag #occupyWallStreet.) You can support the protestors by donating so they can buy pizzas to keep up their campaign. To donate, click here.

This morning, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka expressed support for the protests. Earlier this week, more than  700 uniformed pilots, members of the Air Line Pilots (ALPA) , took to the streets outside of Wall Street demanding better pay.

The executive board of the New York Transit Workers Union/Transport Workers Local 100 voted unanimously to support Occupy Wall Street. Local 100 has 38,000 active members and covers 26,000 retirees, according to its website. 

Responding to a question after his speech at the Brookings institution this morning, Trumka said:

I think being in the streets and calling attention to issues is sometime the only recourse you have because…you can go to the Hill, and you can talk to a lot of people and see nothing ever happen.

Wall Street is out of control. Calling attention to it and peacefully protesting is very legitimate way of doing it. I’ve done it thousands of times myself and I’ll do it again.

Next week, the U.S. Senate will take up consideration of a bill to address Chinese currency manipulation. The Republican-controlled House is holding up its version of the legislation, even though it passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2010, with 99 Republicans supporting it.

Unlike other currencies, the Chinese yuan does not fluctuate freely against the dollar but is artificially pegged in order to boost China’s exports. Bringing the Chinese yuan to its equilibrium level—a 28.5 percent appreciation—is essential to creating much-needed jobs in this country. The Alliance for American Manufacturing says addressing Chinese currency manipulation would lead to:

•    The creation of up to 2.25 million American jobs.
•    An increase in U.S. GDP of $285.7 billion (1.9 percent).
•    A $190.5 billion reduction in our annual trade deficit.
•    Annual deficit reduction of $71.4 billion, or between $621 to $857 billion over 10 years, if sustained.

New data show that 2.8 million American jobs were lost or displaced over the past decade due to the growing U.S. trade deficit with China—fueled by currency manipulation.

Writing at Firedoglake, Dave Dayen called the China currency bill, A No-Cost, Bipartisan, Long-Term Jobs Measure. We know what that means: If a measure might actually work to create jobs with little cost to taxpayers, Republican extremists in Congress will block it.

Speaking to Next Up participants on the State of the Union were (left to right) Alison Omens, Winston Lofton, Ben Waxman and Tahir Duckett.

Ja-Rei Wang, a fellow in the AFL-CIO Public Affairs Department, is taking part in the AFL-CIO Next Up Young Workers Summit and sends us the latest.

What kind of America do we want to live in? This was the big question raised this morning during the State of the Union plenary, part of the second national Next Up youth summit hosted by AFL-CIO in Minneapolis. Panelists urged the 800 young workers, organizers and students in the room to work together to define their vision for the kind of economically just world they want to live in and to fight for it.

Speakers told the audience to look beyond the current attacks on working people and to recognize the incredible opportunity we have to make change for the better. Ben Waxman, from the AFL-CIO, said to participants:

This is your moment. Take back the country you love.

Speakers also urged participants to use the youth summit to connect to each other and work together to hash out a collective vision for a more economically just world.

Winston Lofton, from the Roosevelt Institute, asked participants to think long-term about what they stand for, and what they want to see happen 30 years down the line:

What are the values that bind this room of 800 leaders and potential leaders? What are the outcomes we want to see that are driven by those values? What are the policies that can get us there?

United Steelworkers (USW) Education Director Lisa Jordan argued that some of the policies need to be good economic policies that substantively re-regulate our financial markets, help us invest in infrastructure and education and create a progressive tax structure. Jordan stressed that the recession didn’t happen randomly and that “the economy is NOT like the weather.” Rather, it can be understood by the history of policies that have shaped it, and can be changed for the better with policies that actually support working people.

Alison Omens, director of AFL-CIO Media Outreach, had a similar message for participants regarding the role of media in telling the story of the labor movement. She pointed out that corporate-owned media has generated most of the content about the labor movement and continues to perpetuate its negative stereotypes. She urged participants to think about “how we tell the story of our movement to our friends, colleagues and the next generation” and to use new media tools to communicate with one another and to tell their own story.

Many people across the country are ready to hear those stories, Working America field coordinator Tahir Duckett reminded participants. While going door to door to talk meeting with working Americans about their needs and concerns, Working America discovered that a majority of Americans want to fight to take back the country and rebuild the middle class.

The remainder of today will include workshops that enable participants to come together and articulate their visions and to discuss the tools to achieve them.

Lisa Jordan, USW education director, told Next Up participants that any real economy recovering requires restoring manufacturing jobs.

Hundreds of young people from across the country will march through downtown Minneapolis this afternoon to call for good jobs and a middle-class economy. Starting at 5 p.m. CDT, the group will march from the Hilton to the City Government Plaza Light Rail Station. 

The young working people, students and activists are among the 800 participants at the second national Next Up Young Worker Summit hosted by the AFL-CIO. They will deliver the message that workers didn’t create the economic mess we are in, but we are poised to fix it.

This economic crisis has disproportionately impacted young people and will have long-term repercussions on their ability to raise families, buy homes and live the American Dream. But as a panel of young activists this morning told participants, young people can help make needed change.

Lisa Jordan, education director for the United Steelworkers (USW) said the short-sighted economic policies of the last 30 years that favored deregulation and privatization cost the nation millions of manufacturing jobs. We lost millions more in industries that supply and support manufacturing, she said. Any real economic recovery will require restoring the manufacturing base, she said.

Young people are the most technically savvy generation in history and that technology should be used to challenge the narrow image that the mainstream media has painted of working people, said Alison Omens, the AFL-CIO director of Media Outreach. Only six companies control most of the content on our airwaves and only one in five newspapers is locally owned, she said.  But workers can get their message out through various media, including social media. After all, “unions are the original social media,” she said.   

 The Young Worker Summit, which ends this weekend, is part of the AFL-CIO’s outreach program to working people under the age of 35. The conference will focus on the current economic crisis and pathways to building a just economy as well as the ongoing attacks on workers’ rights from state legislatures.

America is facing historic choices that will shape our economy, our society and our democracy for decades to come, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said today.

Speaking at the prestigious Brookings Institution, he said, “Our nation does not have a debt crisis. We have a jobs crisis.”

America isn’t broke. Our nation’s basic promise—an ever-rising, ever-widening prosperity—is being broken.

It is being broken by three decades of a contradictory economic strategy based on low wages and consumption, he said. As a result, the rich have gotten much richer, the poor have gotten poorer and those left in the middle are struggling to hang on. U.S. trade policies have decimated our nation’s manufacturing base and our tax policies promote inequality.

Now we see conscious and coordinated efforts to delegitimize government and destroy unions in order to eliminate countervailing powers to corporate interests.

The nation has lost nearly 7 million jobs since December 2007—and another 4 million jobs should have been created as people entered the labor force, giving us an 11 million jobs hole in our labor market, he said.  And this is not an equal opportunity recession, Trumka added. The official unemployment rate is 16.7 percent among African Americans, 11.3 percent among Hispanics and 23 percent among teenagers.

To rebuild our economy and create jobs, we need to rethink some of the assumptions that have distorted the debates and decisions of the past three decades or more, Trumka said.

First, we need to understand that many multinational companies want to be treated as American institutions, “while they treat the stars and stripes as a flag of convenience.”

The big brand name companies that employ a fifth of America’s workers cut their U.S. workforces by 2.9 million during the 2000s—while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million.  Public policy should be focused on improving our competitiveness as a nation, and not on improving the cash flows of global enterprises that are ultimately indifferent to our fate as a national community.

It’s also time to have a 21st century, reality-based trade policy, he said.

We can talk all we want about free trade, comparative advantage and free markets. But our competitors, to their credit, are consciously pursuing national economic strategies, while we are borrowing almost half a trillion dollars every year from the rest of the world, just to buy the goods we used to make here.

We also need to reconsider the economically baseless idea that deficits are the problem and austerity is the answer, he said. America has a massive jobs crisis caused by collapsing demand. Austerity will make it worse, he added.

Trumka also outlined six policy changes that are needed to create jobs:

• Rebuild America’s schools, transportation and energy systems.
• Revive American manufacturing and stop exporting good jobs overseas. We need to end currency manipulation by China and other countries. We need to reform our trade policies and end the tax incentives that encourage the offshoring of manufacturing jobs.
• Put people in the hardest hit communities back to work—especially in communities of color—with direct, targeted government hiring.
• Provide more aid to state and local governments to prevent cutbacks in public services.
• Reform Wall Street so Main Street can create jobs.
• Restore consumer demand—and jump-start our economy—by extending unemployment compensation and keeping homeowners in their homes.

If policymakers are indifferent to the deepening suffering, the public will look for answers anywhere they can be found, Trumka warned.

Purveyors of irrational hatred will step into the void, making it more difficult to solve the very problems that are polarizing our politics.       

What’s ultimately at stake is the oldest question in American history—whether “we the people” can bring our country’s course closer to our interests and values.

Andy Richards on our Field Communications staff files this report.

The jobs crisis is so urgent that working families in New Mexico are literally going to new heights to get the message out that lawmakers need to be focused on creating and protecting good jobs.  This weekend, as part of the huge Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, jobless New Mexicans and workers from across the state will launch a hot air balloon every day during the nine day festival draped with a 40 foot banner brandishing a message all Americans agree upon:  “America Wants to Work:  Good Jobs Now.”

LeRoy Apodaca, an unemployed Working America member and active participant in New Mexico Wants to Work – a program that has been organizing unemployed workers since January – will be one of the dozens of jobless New Mexicans who will be there Saturday.

I have been unemployed for over 2 years. I want to work, but finding a job these days is difficult. We are asking our elected officials to focus on job creation and make that their most important issue.

Sadly, Apodaca’s story is similar to millions of other jobless workers across the country.  Nearly 45 percent of unemployed workers – more than 6 million Americans – have been out of work for over six months, a travesty that forced Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to call a “national crisis” in a speech Wednesday.  Bernanke went on to say:

This is unheard of…This has never happened in the post-war period in the United States. They are losing the skills they had, they are losing their connections, their attachment to the labor force.

Bernanke’s comments come after the AFL-CIO launched our America Wants to Work action plan earlier this month and is joining with the growing grassroots movement across the country to put pressure on lawmakers to set aside politics and take bold action to get Americans back to work.  Other events are scheduled in New Mexico and across the country in the coming weeks. 

To find an event near you, visit the AFL-CIO’s We Are One website.