Labor Union Blog

Judy Parkins, AFL-CIO director of Community Services, sends us this report.

Members of Letter Carriers (NALC) Branch 124 in New Orleans and volunteers from The Prince of Wales Social and Pleasure Club pitched in with Rebuild Together New Orleans in October.

The volunteers spent the first two weekends of the month painting a house for a senior who was returning New Orleans some six years after Hurricane Katrina. Stanley Taylor, one of several NALC retirees who wielded brushes and rollers said:

We are involved because of the generosity showed to us in our time of need and our desire to give back in the spirit of “charity begins at home.”

Taylor serves on the AFL-CIO Community Services United Way / Labor Committee in New Orleans.

Today the people of Ohio will decide, in a referendum vote, whether Gov. John Kasich’s anti-worker bill will become law or get tossed out. So when an Ohio union staffer and registered Democrat got a robo-call this morning telling her to vote “tomorrow” — not today, Nov. 8 — she became immediately suspicious. The call was received by an SEIU staff member.

The group sponsoring the robocall is the American Future Fund, a Republican organization led by a member of the Iowa State Senate. Although the call instructed her to vote the Republican-sponsored position in support of Issue 2 — the ballot measure that could ratify of S.B. 5, the bill that would virtually end collective bargaining for public employees — the recipient is a registered Democrat.

Could it be that the American Future Fund was hoping to confuse Democrats about the date of the election, and in a manner that could make it all seem like an innocent mistake?

Anthony Caldwell, spokesperson for SEIU Local 1199, told the Huffington Post:

For a group [American Future Fund] that has coordinated a $1 million mail campaign, I find it highly unlikely they would make a simple clerical error and send out a robocall to non-supporters telling them to vote the day after Election Day.

Here’s the script of the call, via the Huffington Post, which was received by the SEIU staffer at 9:37 this morning:

Hi, I am calling to remind you that tomorrow is Election Day. It is critically important that you go vote and protect the future of our country. Tomorrow, please go to the polls and vote YES on Issue 2, and vote YES on Issue 3. Paid for by American Future Fund and not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. 866-559-5854.

Although polls show wide opposition to the S.B. 5 bill that a “Yes” vote on Issue 2 would ratify, the vote could be much closer than polls predict, as we reported earlier today, especially given the lengths to which anti-labor forces have gone to suppress voter turnout. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka traveled to the state today to urge union members to vote “No” on Issue 2.

The AFL-CIO, NAACP, the Brave New Foundation and several other groups are urging U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to enforce the Voting Rights Act to stop the discriminatory voter suppression laws the right-wing billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have pushed and financed in dozens of states. The Koch Brothers are major funders of ALEC.

You can join in the fight to protect voting rights by clicking here and signing a petition to Holder urging him to use his authority under the Voting Rights Act to protect voters’ rights.

In this video from Brave New Films examining the new voter suppression laws that could disenfranchise as many 21 million Americans, NAACP President Ben Jealous says:

We’re in a moment right now where we are seeing the most aggressive attempt to roll back voting rights in this country than we’ve seen in over a century.

This year alone, state lawmakers introduced 34 so-called Voter ID and voter registration bills with requirements so stringent that the 11 percent of Americans who lack a government-issued photo ID could be barred from voting. Most of those are African Americans, Latinos, students, seniors and people with disabilities.

According to a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee study, here’s who would be affected in Wisconsin where Gov. Scott Walker (R) won a photo ID bill patterned after the model bill ALEC has distributed to right-wing lawmakers:

• 23 percent of Wisconsinites over age 65.
• 17 percent of white men and women.
• 55 percent of African American males and 49 percent of African American women.
• 46 percent of Latinos and 59 percent of Latinas.
• 78 percent of African American males age 18-24 and 66 percent of African American women age 18-24.

Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, says:

The Koch brothers are behind these kinds of laws because they want to cut off the participation of people who are not behind their corporate agenda.

Click here to sign the petition and here for more on ALEC and its corporate partners.

If Congress passed the Robin Hood/financial speculation tax, it would raise more than $350 billion between January 2013 and 2021, according to an analysis released Monday by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation.

The bill, formally known as the Wall Street Trading and Speculators Tax Act, was introduced last week by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.). Says Harkin:

It is hard to argue with this substantial revenue—derived from a tax of $3 on $10,000 of Wall Street trading. Our country needs every dollar possible to invest in infrastructure, job creation, the education of our children and reducing the debt among other priorities. This commonsense tax provides a viable solution.

It is estimated that the Robin Hood tax combined with the projected savings of the drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan would hit the budget deficit Super Committee goal of $1.3 trillion in savings.

The small tax would be aimed primarily at high-volume, high-speed traders who deal in stocks, bonds, foreign currency bets, derivatives and other Wall Street financial products.  Says DeFazio:

This legislation will generate $350 billion in needed revenue for our cash strapped federal government by targeting speculators flipping stocks a thousand times a minute. We need serious proposals to get our country back on sound fiscal footing. $350 billion in new revenue will reduce our deficit and enable federal investments in our future.

At last week’s G-20 summit of the world’s biggest economies, many leaders endorsed the larger financial speculation tax proposed by the European Commission. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who was in Cannes, France, for the G-20 meeting and who met with many of the nations’ leaders, praised Harkin and DeFazio for introducing their bill, but said the AFL-CIO supports a larger tax rate on financial speculation.

In order to maximize revenue and minimize opportunities for tax arbitrage, Congress should pass a U.S. financial speculation tax in line with what has been proposed in Europe.

If you’re a student at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., you’d best not speak with a campus food service worker who’s on break, unless you do so in a management-authorized area.

Will Mullaney, a senior at Pomona who also serves as the communications officer for the student government, said that when he tried to talk to an on-break food service worker in the cafeteria last month, this is what happened, according to an e-mail signed by Mullaney and sent by UNITEHERE!:

I was asked to leave by one of the managers, who cited a college policy that forbids dining hall employees from talking to non-employees while on their break unless they leave the building.  This policy was passed by the administration after cafeteria workers expressed interest in forming their own union.

With the support of pro-labor students, Pomona food workers have been working in alliance with UNITEHERE!, which represents 90,000 food service workers across the country.

Mullaney was shooed away from the workers several days after workers, students and faculty celebrated Food Day, when they cooked a meal together and discussed their support for sustainable food practices, as well as the support workers require to prepare food in a sustainable manner. (Pomona’s on-campus food policy mandates sustainable preparation methods.)

UNITEHERE! is petitioning the Pomona College administration to lift the cafeteria gag rule. You can sign on here.

For more on UNITEHERE!’s sustainable food initiative, check out their new website, Real Food, Real Jobs.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka went door to door in Cleveland, getting out the vote against Ohio’s Issue 2.
Former CWA Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Rechenbach (right), District 4 Vice President Seth Rosen and Linda Hinton, assistant to the vice president.

Deborah Dion with the Ohio AFL-CIO field program sends us this.

Speaking at a Cleveland rally on the eve of Nov. 8, Election Day, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka brought down the house yesterday when he spoke passionately about why we must join together and beat back Issue 2/ S.B. 5. More than 500 union volunteers from 30 different local unions as well as community activists and Columbia University students from New York City rose to their feet repeatedly cheering before hitting the doors to canvass city neighborhoods  to spread the message about voting “No” vote on Issue 2/S.B. 5. 

“No fight is more important than the one right here in Ohio,” said Trumka.

Because no one, no governor, no state legislature should have the power to rob us of the fundamental right to bargain collectively. [Gov.] John Kasich cannot take that away from us. The people of Ohio have spoken and will not stand for it. They want to take away our rights, our dignity, and the ladder to the middle class.

Ohio Federation of Teachers President Sue Taylor, Laborers Local 310 Business Manager Terry Joyce, North Shore Federation of Labor President Loree Soggs and Executive Secretary Harriet Applegate of the North Shore Federation joined President Trumka at the rally. Says Taylor:

Issue 2 is an attempt to break the backs of unions and we’re not going to let them take away our voice.  If we work together, roll up our sleeves, and continue to bring out every vote, we can finish this fight and have a real voice for working people in Ohio.

“Issue 2 is an assault on all workers in Ohio and across America. We are fighting back, all of us together, to rebuild the middle class and create jobs and dignity for all workers,” said former CWA Secretary-Treasurer Jeff Rechenbach.

At the Laborers Hall, Trumka met with 55 students from Columbia University who came to Ohio as a group to fight for workers’ rights and help unions get out the “No” vote on Issue 2. Trumka discussed opportunities for young people to become activists and how to get involved in the union movement, including talking about the AFL-CIO Next Up young worker outreach.

Following the rally, Trumka and Taylor went door to door to talk with Cleveland union members and their families to urge them to vote “No” on Issue 2 and to asked them to make an extra push to talk to their friends, neighbors and co-workers to ensure that everyone they know gets out to vote.

At one home, UAW retiree Bernard Jackson told Trumka that he and three family members had already voted “No” on Issue 2. But Jackson wanted to do more than vote.

I am so excited about winning, I’m going to volunteer tomorrow at the polls.  We must all get out and vote “No.”   

Trumka and Taylor then phone banked, with Trumka making more than 50 calls and thanking phone bankers at the Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU). Over the past two months, CTU members have made more than 525,000 calls to union members to ask them to vote “No” on Issue 2/S.B. 5.

“Nine months ago since the law passed,” said CTU President David Quolke, “we have been waiting for this moment to turn into a movement, and it is just 36 hours away.

We need to work as hard as we did when we began this long haul up to the very last minute to ensure victory. We have had tremendous support at the local, state and from the National AFL-CIO that has been with us during this struggle and battle.

Cherlyane Jones-Williams, a para-professional for the past 40 years at James Rhodes school in Cleveland, says she makes phone calls as often as she can.

I teach special education children, and if Issue 2 passes it would create an unsafe and unmanageable situation for our children because we know Issue 2 will increase class sizes.

Even as working Ohioans are ready to vote “No” today on Issue 2, which would repeal S.B. 5, the bill signed by Gov. John Kasich that takes away the right of public employees to bargain for a middle-class life, the right wing has been hard at work. They are not only ginning up their own base, but using deception and voter-suppression legislation to game the outcome.

On Friday, writes John Nichols at The Nation, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican, ordered county boards of elections to “shut down early voting for…Tuesday’s election.” Earlier this year, the state legislature passed a bill that will greatly reduce early voting and will shut down Sunday voting entirely, but the law is tabled pending a referendum. So Husted appears to have taken matters into his own hands.

Sunday voting often draws a sizable Latino and African American contingent and best serves workers who can’t get time off from their jobs to vote on Tuesday.

Ohio’s voter-suppression legislation and the anti-collective-bargaining legislation—the Issue 2 referendum on which Ohioans will vote on Tuesday—stem from a common source, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, who also fund Americans For Prosperity.

No surprise, then to find Americans For Prosperity behind the ironically-named Building a Better Ohio (BBO), a group that sprung up to support Kasich’s war on workers. Andy Kroll of Mother Jones reports $28,000 in donations from AFP to BBO, which is the group that, as we reported, lifted video footage from a pro-labor group’s ad to make it look as though a great-grandmother who opposes Kasich‘s grab for the labor rights of firefighters who saved her great-grandaughter’s life was in favor  of the right-wing legislation. BBO is expected to have spent up to $20 million in the fight to take rights away from Ohio workers.

And that’s not all. Politico reports that the Alliance for America’s Future, a Virginia-based group led by Liz Cheney (daughter of the former vice president), is papering Ohio with a flier that features a photo of Obama  in which reporter Ben Smith sees a racial subtext:

The contrast—between the shadowed president and the bright white citizens—is hard to miss, and the details of the proposal are buried by the clear anti-Obama message.

Then there are the groups about which no one knows anything, such as the opaque Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes (COAST) that has been urging Ohio voters to call a toll-free number to get the ostensible “real facts” on Issue 2. Greg Sargent, of the Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, reports:

But it turns out the recorded call makes all kinds of lurid claims against a “No” vote in the referendum—and even advances the argument that a “No” vote would be bad for public workers and force layoffs of cops and firefighters.

Read more on Ohio’s Issue 2 referendum here, here and here.

The first-ever New Jersey chapter of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA) was chartered today at a ceremony at New Jersey State AFL-CIO headquarters.

At the signing ceremony, New Jersey State AFL-CIO President Charles Wowkanech said:

Connecting the labor movement with our diverse communities is part of our future, and we are proud to build this future working hand in hand with APALA. As one of the nation’s most diverse labor movements, achieving full participation from all of our diverse communities is a priority of the New Jersey State AFL-CIO.

APALA is one of seven AFL-CIO constituency groups.

Click here for more from the New Jersey State AFL-CIO and here for more photos.

Combine Friday’s dismal jobs report that showed the economy added just 80,000 jobs in October with recent unemployment reports and the evidence is clear that job creation is just not taking off.  If this recovery followed the pattern set by other recessions, the nation should be seeing about 300,000 new jobs every month.

Why are we lagging so far behind?

In a column on MarketWatch, economist Heather Boushey writes that there is a huge gap in demand—people without jobs don’t have money to spend on products and services that would spur the economy. Add to that corporations that are “sitting on several trillion dollars in cash, waiting for sufficient customers to spur higher investment, and job seekers are still waiting for investments to trickle down into jobs.”

But conservatives in Congress—who are determined to slash government spending where it is needed most in infrastructure and in support for state and local jobs, while preserving or enhancing tax cuts for the wealthy—are doing real damage.

Not only are conservatives in Congress blocking efforts to spur private-sector job creation by not making needed investments in infrastructure but they are also refusing to help state and local governments deal with their still-acute fiscal problems, which is continuing to add to unemployment.

Boushey writes that congressional conservatives’ commitment to tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by cuts in government services is “reverse class warfare” that takes precedence over the 1.9 million people who would find work with the jobs created by President Obama’s American Jobs Act that Republicans have blocked.

Click here for the Center for American Progress (CAP) economist’s full column.

There’s a lot of noise leaking from behind the closed doors of the so-called “Super Committee” on the budget deficit, which is a facing a Thanksgiving eve deadline to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion. A lot of that noise sounds suspiciously like threats to cut Social Security.

Contrary to the scare stories, Social Security is not going broke. In fact, it is fully funded by the payroll contributions of America’s workers and it doesn’t contribute a dime to the nation’s deficit. Right now, Social Security has a surplus of more than $2.6 trillion—enough to cover benefits for 25 years or more. On top of that Social Security could pay full benefits for the next 75 years if we could “Scrap the Cap.”

Here’s what we mean. Everyone pays Social Security taxes only on the first $106,800 they earn, which means most people pay Social Security taxes on their whole paycheck. But after $106,800, there are no contributions to Social Security, so a whole lot of wealthy people don’t pay a dime in Social Security taxes on most of what they make.

Social Security could pay full benefits forever if millionaires simply paid the same Social Security tax rate as most other people do. So, click here to sign a petition from the coalition Strengthen Social Security to the Super Committee urging it: Don’t cut Social Security. Scrap the Cap.