Labor Union Blog

Andrew Pantelis, a Lieutenant with the Prince George’s County Fire and EMS Department in Landover, Md., says that taxing employer-provided health care benefits—a proposal before the so-called budget deficit “Super Committee”—would “hurt millions of working class Americans.”

Pantelis, president of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 1619, spoke at a Capitol Hill conference today where Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.) and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) released a letter to the Super Committee opposing elimination of the current tax exemption of the health care coverage employers receive at work. The letter was signed by 160 representatives of both parties.

Some 60 million Americans would face a bigger tax bill under the proposal. Says Pantelis:

Taxing our health benefits will mean that your neighborhood fire fighters along with police officers, coalminers, steelworkers, and other Americans in dangerous jobs will get taxed the most.

In the letter to the Super Committee the lawmakers write:

Efforts to cap or to eliminate these tax exclusions would have far-reaching consequences that would not only reduce health coverage for millions of Americans, but would also increase long-term federal spending obligations.  Considering these consequences would negate federal tax income generated from the change and would have little impact on reducing our federal debt, we would encourage you to reject proposals to scale back or eliminate tax exclusions for employer-sponsored health coverage. 

During the debate on health care reform in 2009 when the proposal to tax health benefits was brought up, the AFL-CIO’s Gerald Shea told a congressional hearing that taxing employer-provided health care.

is an extraordinarily bad idea that would undermine efforts to stabilize the employer-provided health care system. Employers would likely respond by increasing employee cost-sharing to a level at which benefits would become unaffordable for low-wage workers, or by eliminating benefits altogether.

Taxing health care benefits would not bring down health care costs, either. It would just shift more of those costs onto workers.

Click here for a copy of the Courtney/Cole letter.

The nation’s labor unions play a vital role in “ensuring a strong middle class,” says a resolution honoring the labor movement introduced in the House this week by Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.).

The resolution recognizes the importance of unions in building and maintaining a middle class:

by advocating for more equitable wages, humane work conditions, improved benefits…[and] unions make the middle class strong by ensuring workers have a voice in both the market and in the nation’s democracy.

Payne, who held several unionized jobs before being elected to Congress in 1988 says:

I know firsthand the strong impact unions have made on the workforce. I worked my way through college as a dockworker at Port Newark. I was once a seasonal postal worker and truck driver. I have worked the line and was a forklift operator at a local brewery in Newark, New Jersey.

I also served as a teacher for Newark Public Schools. If it were not for the protections provided by a union in these positions, I may not have succeeded in those positions, which ultimately prepared me to represent labor union interests now as a senior member on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Read more…

With the fight in Ohio to defeat Issue 2 coming down its final days, the Fire Fighters (IAFF) have launched ads featuring firefighters who are war veterans urging voters to vote “No on Issue 2.”  A “No” vote on Issue 2 would repeal S.B. 5, the law passed this spring that takes away the right of public employees to collectively bargain for a middle-class life.

“We didn’t expect this kind of homecoming when we came back,” says Columbus fire fighter David Jarvis, who served in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and served in Operation Desert Storm during the first Gulf War.

More than 1,000 Ohio fire fighters and paramedics are serving in the military, and after putting their lives on the line to protect our national security, these veterans have been stunned to learn that politicians used SB 5 to take away the voices of those who preserve our domestic security. 

Columbus fire fighter and war veteran John Szymkowiak says:

I never expected to have to fight our own government… to have a voice in my own safety and work conditions.

Click on the video above and here for another IAFF ad featuring veterans.

Working familes in Washington, D.C., and Cannes, France (where leaders of the G-20 are meeting), rallied yesterday for passage of a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street. You can join the action by telling Wall Street it’s time to pay its fair share.

The Robin Hood (financial speculation) tax is a tiny pinch that would be felt primarily by high-volume, high-speed traders who deal in stocks, bonds, foreign currency bets, derivatives and other Wall Street financial products. Yesterday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) introduced just such legislation, the “Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act.” 

Click here to call your senators in support of a financial speculation tax. If you complete at least one call, we’ll send you a free “I am the 99%” bumper sticker.

With a tax of only a fraction of a penny, we could raise billions to create jobs, lay the groundwork for long-term economic prosperity and help reduce the national debt. The Robin Hood tax also would discourage risky Wall Street speculation and encourage longer-term investments that would strengthen rather than endanger the economy.

Economists, political leaders, religious leaders, business people and civil society groups around the world all support a financial speculation tax. Prominent supporters include Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero of Spain, Warren Buffett, George Soros and the Catholic Church.

Click here to tell your senators it’s time to put Wall Street to work rebuilding America for the 99 percent (and get a free “I am the 99%” bumper sticker).

We bailed out Wall Street. We are the 99 percent. Let’s demand that Wall Street pay its fair share to put America back to work and rebuild our economy.

In “The State of Young America: The Databook,” the economic experts at Demos demonstrate that by virtually every measure, the fortunes of America’s young people are falling under a deluge of debt, shrinking opportunity, rising costs of living and lack of access to health care. Writing with members of the Young Invincibles think tank, the authors write:

The path that each young person takes during their young adulthood often largely determines whether they end up in the middle class as older adults. Given the nation’s current anemic levels of investment in young people, the existence of our future middle class is severely imperiled.

The Databook looks at the well-being of 18- to 34-year-olds across the span of a generation in such areas as income, higher education and family life. Notable among the findings is that as the business environment became increasingly hostile to unionization, the fortunes of young people fell. Today, the Databook tells us, only 10 percent of young people have union representation, compared with 20 percent in 1980. Consequently, with few exceptions, only those who have attained a bachelor’s degree have seen their incomes rise over the course of the past three decades. (Once exception would be those who find their way into a trade union apprenticeship.)

Among the report’s findings:

Cost of Living

• 41.3 percent of 25-34 year-old households spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
• Levels of credit card debt among those ages 25 to 34 have risen 81 percent since 1989, to an average of $6,255 in 2007.

Raising A Family

• Just 11 percent of all workers had access to paid family leave benefits.
• Child care fees for two children exceeded annual median rent payments.

Higher Education

• Average tuition is three times higher today than in 1980
• The student loan default rate rose 31% over just 2 years.

Health Care & Coverage

• In only 10 years, employer-sponsored insurance dropped by 12.8 percent for workers 18-24 and 8.5 percent for workers 25-34.

The U.S. economy added just 80,000 jobs in October and the nation’s unemployment rate dipped slightly to 9 percent, down from September’s 9.1 percent, according to thelatest figures released this morning by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The nation’s economy needs 130,00-150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with the influx of new workers. As economist Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) puts it: 

At this rate, the labor market will never start putting the backlog of nearly 14 million unemployed workers back to work.  In other words, given the enormous scope of the unemployment problem, this minimal level of job creation will keep us mired in disastrously high unemployment. 

The report comes a day after Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would have put hundreds of thousands of Americans back to work rebuilding the nation’s crumbling highways, bridges and roads and just a few weeks after they killed legislation that would have put  400,000 teachers and first responders back to work  or allowed them to stay on the job.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says:

We need immediate action to jumpstart our economy and provide help to those experiencing tough times. Yet the exact opposite is happening, thanks to Republicans in Congress, who are voting week after week against creating jobs.

Jobs for state and local public employees continue to fall, with 24,000 losing their jobs last month.  

Some 14 million workers remain unemployed, but a total of some 26 million Americans are unemployed, underemployed or have stopped looking for work. The number of long-term jobless (more than 27 weeks) was 5.9 million or 42.4 percent of the total jobless.

Yesterday, legislation was introduced to reauthorize federal unemployment insurance programs for 2012. Nearly two million out-of-work Americans will be cut off from federal unemployment insurance in January alone, unless Congress renews the programs before they expire on Dec. 31, according to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP).  More than 6 million U.S. workers could face premature cut-off over the course of 2012.

Click here for the full BLS report.