Labor Union Blog

This is a cross-post from This Week in Blackness.

Visiting Alabama was something I already had in my mind. In fact, I have this whole elaborate plan on how I will teach my children about the history of being Black in America with trips across the country to cities that are historically linked to our experience. Birmingham, Ala., is one of them.

I don’t believe I can effectively convey the impact of the civil rights experience without bringing them to the place where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth organized, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. penned “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” where four little girls lost their lives with an act of domestic terrorism or the amazing leadership of women like Diane Nash and Lola Hendricks was displayed.

But I don’t have any children yet, and I am not here for a civil rights tour. Instead, I am here because the state of Alabama has enacted legislation that unjustly targets Latino families and subjects them to harassment, employer abuse and other violations of their basic human dignity.

The passage of H.B. 56 in Alabama is but one instance of anti-immigrant legislation across the country aimed at reducing the number of undocumented immigrants in the respective states. But it is arguably the harshest. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state’s new law but there are still a number of provisions that have been upheld in court, including;

• Public schools can verify the status of students and their parents, which resulted in 15 percent of latino students being absent from school out of fear, since the law was enacted.
• Law enforcement officials can verify the immigration status of anyone they “reasonable suspect” of being in the country unlawfully.
• While it is still legal to hire day laborers, all contracts between undocumented immigrants and another person are invalid, which leaves them unprotected if an employer refuses to pay them for their work.

Most Americans are immigrants, whether their ancestors immigrated here generations ago willingly or were stolen and legally smuggled across international waters, the immigrant story is part of our country’s identity. But while we like to hail the positives of the American narrative, we cannot forget that the American story also includes the bigoted history of Jim Crow laws and the ongoing discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities.

I am honored to be among the delegation of union leaders and activists brought together by the AFL-CIO to document the story of those who may be afraid of retaliation and deportation. I hope to use my voice as a descendant of those who were once subjected to harsh legal laws of prejudice in America to shed some light on this egregious law that stands in opposition to the America we were all promised.

This is a cross-post by Kenneth Quinnell from Crooks & Liars.

Citizens for Tax Justice released a report Tuesday that shows anti-union telecom company Verizon not only paid no taxes in the past three years, the company received nearly $1 billion in rebates from the government.

Verizon enjoyed some $14 billion in federal and state corporate income tax subsidies in the 2008-2010 period even though it earned $33.4 billion in pre-tax U.S. income during that time.

At the federal level, Verizon should have paid about $11.4 billion at the statutory rate of 35 percent during the three-year period. Instead, it got $951 million in rebates, putting its federal tax subsidies at $12.3 billion. Its effective federal tax rate was -2.9 percent.

Verizon also has managed to avoid most state-level taxes as well, while pursuing a strong anti-worker set of policies that we have reported on previously. The company has demanded $1 billion in benefit concessions from workers despite paying no taxes and raking in profits. Follow the Unity@Verizon campaign by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) here.

Verizon has been one of the most efficient tax dodging corporations in the country:

At the state level, Verizon should have paid about $2.3 billion in corporate income taxes during the
period but it handed over only $866 million. Its aggregate state rate was only 2.6 percent, far below
the weighted state average rate of 6.8 percent. This gave it state tax subsidies of about $1.4 billion.

Verizon also used a special tax loophole called the ReverseMorrisTrust to avoid paying about $1.5 billion
in federal and state and local taxes on the sale of its landline assets in various states.

Verizon also aggressively seeks state and local tax subsidies through credits, abatements and exemptions. There is no centralized reporting on these subsidies but in this report we document $180 million in special tax breaks and grants Verizon and VerizonWireless received in 13 states….

Despite conservative claims about these types of benefits leading to reinvestment in workers and research and development, Verizon has done the exact opposite, laying off tens of thousands of workers and cutting back on capital expenditures by $1 billion. On top of that, the company’s CEO has made massive bonuses during this same period, completely eliminating any validity to claims that the company is in trouble and has a reason to demand concessions from workers.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka welcomes Poet Laureate Philip Levine.

Introducing the nation’s poet laureate, Philip Levine, yesterday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka described his poetry as cutting through false language and ”unflinching” in exposing the ”raw realities around us.”

In lifting up the truth in our lives, Trumka said, Levine:

“writes about what it is to be human, which is to say that he writes about labor and dignity and the heart of the human condition.”

Levine, who gave a reading of his poetry at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., is best known for his visceral depictions of working life and his volume, “What Work Is.” He has authored 20 collections of poetry, won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critic Circle Awards and received many other honors. He also taught literature and creative writing at California State University, Fresno, for 30 years.

His poems, not easily excerpted, are best read in their entirety, as with his most oft-quoted poem, “What Work Is,” which he read here during the gathering (see video, above). Asked about his source for inspiration during these difficult economic times, Levine offered a sage’s view:

In a way, times have always been hard.

Levine went on to say his inspiration is his memory—of the factory work he experienced in Detroit beginning at age 14 and, most of all, of the people who made those tedious, dirty jobs bearable. The workers who fill his poems carry with them the hope and perseverence that belies their often brutal environments. Even as spiritual beliefs dwell in uncertainty Levine said, there is one constant that carries him through:

I do believe in people.

Brenda Loya in AFL-CIO Media Affairs sends us this from Alabama, where she will report on the delegation of African American labor and civil rights leaders as they investigate Alabama’s recently passed anti-immigrant law. Follow the delegation here.

With the passage of H.B. 56, Alabama has taken a huge step backward, into the 1950s. Today, an African American delegation of labor and civil rights leaders traveled to Birmingham, Ala., to help shed a light on what is seen as one of the harshest immigration laws in the country and how it invokes inhumanity reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.

The delegation will investigate first-hand the impact of Alabama’s H.B. 56 on the lives of Latino working families. National, state and local leaders will hear from the families directly impacted by the law, document the impact of the law on Latino communities, acquire a better understanding of the civil rights implications of the legislation and assess the impact of the law on workers and businesses.

Delegation members will meet with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice to learn about their unprecedented community-driven campaign to repeal H.B. 56. In the company of DREAMers (DREAM Act youth), delegates will tour a trailer park community where many immigrant families have been torn apart and deeply affected by H.B. 56.

A lunchtime meeting with business owners is planned to learn about the impact on the greater Alabama community. Delegation members will participate in a community conversation that will focus on how the law impacts Alabama’s workers and communities and the understanding of  civil rights legacy.

Today and for the next couple of days, we are reminded that for all the differences that divide us, we are in this together. The labor movement has always stood together in solidarity to call out injustices. And what’s happening in Alabama is a grave injustice.

Delegation members include: James Andrews, North Carolina AFL-CIO; William Lucy, Coalition of Black Trade Unionists; Donna McDaniel, Laborers (LIUNA); Terry Melvin, New York State AFL-CIO; Daryl Newman, Michigan AFL-CIO; Gerald Owens, Longshoremen; Elizabeth Powell, Postal Workers; Fred Redmond, United Steelworkers; Kenneth Rigmaiden, Painters and Allied Trades; Yvonne Robinson, Georgia AFL-CIO; Roger Toussaint, Transport Workers; Caniesha Washington, AFGE; Diann Woodward, School Administrators; Kinnard Cumbie, LIUNA; Jerry Foster, RWDSU; Richard Franklin, Birmingham Federation of Teachers; Gerald Norris, AFGE; Vi Parramore, Jefferson County Federation of Teachers; Jerome Peterson, LIUNA; and  Bren Riley, Alabama AFL-CIO.

In corporate boardrooms and right-wing gatherings, so-called “free-market principles” are hailed as the keys to a strong and growing economy, and regulations designed to restrain banks and financial firms from driving the economy off a cliff — as they nearly did four years ago — are maligned as job-killers. In reality, according to the authors of a new working paper from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 was worse in countries where financial institutions got the deregulation for which they lobbied—and that’s also true of the United States.

In “The Economic Crisis: Did Financial Supervision Matter?” economists Donato Masciandaro, Rosaria Vega Pansini and Marc Quintyn look at the banking systems of democratic nations with market economiies, and report:

[T]he degree of banking regulation seems to be particularly significant: more banking deregulation is negatively correlated with countries’ economic resilience….The same seems to be true when considering financial resilience…other things being equal, more restrictions on bank activities seem to have reduced the likelihood of suffering the recent financial crisis.

Yet the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul law continues to be demonized as extreme measures by the Republican presidential candidates and right-wing politicians on Capitol Hill, despite the fact that http://blog.aflcio.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=64637&action=editesteemed economists such as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz contend that the law should have implemented even stricter regulation.

Singled out for special contempt is the Consumer Financial Protection Board championed by Elizabeth Warren, the former White House adviser who is now running for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Designed to protect everyday Americans from  predatory loans and deceptive practices by banks and other financial institutions, the CFPB does not yet have a leader, because Republicans in the Senate are holding up the confirmation of Richard Cordray as its director.

Yet the IMF authors also conclude that having a strong structure of supervising agencies—such as the United States would appear to have in the form of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of Thrift Supervision—is not enough if those agencies are vulnerable to what the authors call “self-capture.” From the working paper:

The same behaviors, documented during previous crises, such as the “not on my watch” approach and the “sweeping of problems under the carpet” have occurred again, sometimes at massive scales.

Acting as the voice of consumers, the CFPB is designed to be a check on the often lax oversight of these other agencies — an idea that finds an echo in the IMF paper, in which Masciandaro, Pansini and Quintyn advocate creating a mechanism of checks and balances by creating two separate regulatory structures, one for the overall financial system and another to govern the activities of individual financial institutions.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., speaking of Republican opposition to Dodd-Frank to Bloomberg Television host Al Hunt, said:

They’re not willing to take on Wall Street.

Read AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s statement on CFPB nominee Richard Cordray here. Read more about business regulation and the economy here.

Download the IMF working paper—”The Economic Crisis: Did Financial Supervision Matter?”—in PDF format, here.

At a time when working families are struggling to make ends meet and Americans are taking to the streets to protest the growing gap between the haves and have-not, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-S.D.) says congressional Republicans “are trying to convince Americans that the National Labor Relations Board—a small federal agency charged with defending workers’ rights—is somehow responsible for our nation’s economic woes.”

In a column published today in The Hill newspaper, Harkin writes:

Instead of continuing to pursue this pointless and distracting political crusade, it’s time for the House to get down to the hard work of rebuilding the middle class and moving America forward…with job-creation proposals that Americans overwhelmingly support.

Click here for the full article.

The Helmets to Hardhats program, the AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) and the AFL-CIO today launched the fourth year of their partnership with the Toys for Tots program sponsored by the United States Marine Corps Reserves.

In 2010, this partnership generated more than $25,000 in contributions to the Toys for Tots program, and it is now listed on the national Toys for Tots Foundation website as an official One Star Partner.

The drive runs through Dec. 15 and donation boxes have been placed in the lobby of the AFL-CIO  and BCTD in the Washington, D.C. area.

Monetary donations can be made via checks made out to: DC Toys for Tots.  Checks can be mailed to:  Helmets to Hardhats; 815 16th Street, NW, 6th Floor, Attn: Lisa Ford.  The program is also accepting monetary donations via PayPal on the Helmets to Hardhats website here.

Rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges and highways is a sure-fire way to create jobs and boost the economy. Thursday, Nov. 17, union members, community allies and jobless workers will take part in a national Infrastructure Investment Day of Action at dozens of bridge around the country that are in desperate need of repair.

Click here to find a bridge action near you.

Repairs on many of these of bridges could be on the way today, but congressional Republicans have twice blocked President Obama’s attempts to put America back to work repairing bridges, schools and other parts of the infrastructure–first when they filibustered the American Jobs Act and then when they blocked the Rebuild America Act.  In addition, congressional Republicans have refused to move on the Surface Transportation Act.

Not only would an investment in infrastructure make critically needed repairs to roads and bridges, it would put millions of jobless Americans back on the job and help rebuild the middle class.

It’s time for lawmakers to put partisan politics aside, stop obsessing with the nation’s long-term debt problems that can be solved by fairly taxing the wealthy and Wall Street, and pass legislation to invest in infrastructure projects that will keep communities safe and create good jobs.

The Infrastructure Investment Day of Action is part of the “America Wants to Work” campaign, which not only calls for investment in infrastructure, but also the extension of unemployment benefits, the revival of U.S. manufacturing, an end to the export of good jobs and Wall Street reform, among other policies to create jobs and restore the economy. Nov. 17 is also a national mobilization day around the many issues affecting the 99 percent.

Today, an AFL-CIO-sponsored delegation of prominent African American labor leaders who are actively engaged in the struggle for civil and human rights will travel to Birmingham, Ala., to see first-hand the impact of H.B. 56 on Alabama’s communities. Members of the delegation will meet with labor and community leaders, families, elected officials, civil rights organizations and educators to observe the impact of H.B. 56 and stand in solidarity with Latino working families and communities that have been harmed by what is seen as one of the harshest immigration laws in the country. Follow the delegation through photos and blogs here and at our We Are Alabama site.

From Alabama, Marvin Bing on the Special Committee on Labor-Community Partnerships sends us these thoughts.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, yhe wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless; tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

These are the words that are placated on the most visible symbol of Freedom in the United States of America. Yet, many people in our country do not believe that should be a reality to all of America’s children. In the past two years we have seen governors and Republican legislatures across our country enact laws that take away basic and fundamental civil rights that each of us deserves—from voting rights, collective bargaining and fundamental social services necessary to make it through these tough economic times.

Beneath a strategic and heartless campaign, there is another issue that has at times shaken the very core of our hearts—immigration. I know immigration is a difficult subject and people have different and strongly held views on the issue. Yet are we to let our political views overshadow our faith and love in human decency or human equality? Alabama’s H.B. 56 that requires public schools to check students’ immigration status, criminalizes giving an undocumented immigrant a ride or even a glass of water and instructs police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop if they suspect the person of being an undocumented immigrant. It may seem that this affects only one group of people but it affects all working people, small business people, seniors, students, low-income people and those of every race, ethnicity and relgious background.

I have the privilege to be on the ground here in Birmingham meeting with many organizations that are standing up against this injustice. Fear continues to spread throughout Alabama’s immigrant community, as many have packed up and fled in fear to nearby states. Others prefer to weather the storm by staying as far underground as possible, leaving home only when strictly necessary. Others have chosen to take their children out of school, to avoid the risk that they’ll be asked about their immigration status—despite the fact that in theory, this provision is not supposed to apply to students who have already enrolled.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote a Letter from a Birmingham Jail outlining what was happening in Alabama and why injustice was something we all must stand against.

Alabama has endured the worst times of this country, but its people have stood against racism and injustice before and we must all stand against this now. I am not in a Birmingham jail cell but this is a different letter with the same content with the same plea for help. Please stand against this law and all laws like it.

“They can take away the tarps and the tents. But they can’t slow down the Occupy Wall Street movement,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka following today’s early morning raid on Occupy Wall Street’s Zuccotti Park site and raids and closures of Occupy sites in Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Denver; Albany, N.Y.; Burlington, Vt.; and Chapel Hill, N.C.

Trumka says the raids have been “orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of the 1 percent.”

But the 99 percent is undaunted. Occupy Wall Street’s message has already created a new day. This movement has created a seismic shift in our national debate—from austerity and cuts to jobs, inequality and our broken economic system.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been committed to peaceful, nonviolent action from its inception. And, says Trumka “it will keep spreading no matter what elected officials tell police to do. But that doesn’t mean these raids are acceptable. In fact, they are inexcusable.”

The AFL-CIO will do everything in our power to make sure the free speech rights of these peaceful protesters are protected.

Click here to send a message of solidarity to Occupy Wall Street protesters.