Labor Union Blog

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and Don Mathis, executive director of the U.S. Community Action Partnership, rallied to support the Occupy movement in McPherson Square.

Occupy Wall Street marchers arrived in Washington, D.C., today after walking for 10 days from New York City to deliver the message that Congress should stand with the 99 pecent, not the 1 percent.

Despite the abysmal weather, AFL-CIO  Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker led a contingent of union members to McPherson Square to meet the marchers and rally in support.

Holt Baker joined Don Mathis (left), executive director of the U.S. Community Action Partnership, in sending a message to Republican presidential wannabee Newt Gingrinch, who yesterday said Occupy members should “go get a job after you take a bath.” Gingrich, who has attacked mortage companies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, turns out to have raked in at least $1.6 million while under contract to Freddie.

As Mathis’s sign says:

Hey, Newt! I had a bath today. When will you come clean?

Insurance giant Allstate is terminating profitable long-standing agents who aren’t meeting arbitrary performance goals according to a lawsuit filed in a New Jersey court by the National Association of Professional Allstate Agents (NAPAA).

In August, NAPAA voted to affiliate with the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU) and OPEIU is supporting the agents’ fight with a pledge to match dollar for dollar contributions from individual, up to $25,000.

NAPAA Executive Director Jim Fish says that after decades of happily taking the profits that its agents generated, and terminating agents only for compliance issues or egregious conduct, Allstate has upped the ante by demanding more and more production from its agents in recent years.

Allstate is terminating an unprecedented number of agents for failing to meet its arbitrary performance goals.

The lawsuit is designed to subject Allstate to New Jersey’s demanding franchise laws—which prevent termination of ‘franchise’ without good cause and that prohibit ‘unreasonable standards of performance’—as well as to scrutinize, and hopefully reform, the company’s unreasonable ‘Expected Results’ quotas.

Click here for more from NAPAA and here for more on its affiliation with OPEIU.

You might call it an “unpopularity contest.”  Brave New Foundation (BNF) wants to know who you think are the worst of the worst of the 1 percent who are doing the most to damage the economy and destroy democracy.

They’ve put together a rouges gallery of 30 bankers, politicians, corporate big wigs, hateful pundits and other assorted characters who are using their wealth and power to exploit the 99 percent.

There is no shortage of bad men on the list (and yes, they are all men). There’s Hugh Grant, for instance — not the actor, but the CEO of Monsanto, a company that produces “Frankenfood” and conquers family farms nationwide.  Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary company Blackwater makes the list as do, of course, the Koch Brothers. There are also the likes of Bank of America’s Brian Moynihan, Rush Limbaugh, former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship and one of my all-time favorite evil does, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Click here to see the list of the nominees and their dirty deeds and vote. You can chose one thumb down for ho-hum or go all the way to a full five thumbs down for pure evil.

Once those of us in the 99 percent speak out, BNF will produce a video of the worst of the worst of the 1 percent. It’s sure to be a hit on the horror circuit.

The Ironworkers today send us this video of their action at the South Capitol Street Bridge in Washington D. C., with the Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT) during last week’s AFL-CIO’s Infrastructure Investment Day of Action. The actions highlighted dozens of bridges across the nation in desperate need of repair and called on Congress to put millions of Americans back to work rebuilding the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads.

We noted yesterday that Newt Gingrich wants “get rid of unionized janitors” and hire poor kids to clean the schools in low-income neighborhoods. Today AFSCME says it’s time to tell Gingrich that his ”model” to lift kids out of poverty is outrageous dangerous and downright hogwash.

Click here to sign a letter that reminds Gingrich that

“doing janitorial work in a school entails sanitizing toilets, handling hazardous cleaning chemicals, and scrubbing floors hunched over a mop for hours. It’s hard to imagine a nine-year old doing any of those tasks. Come on.”

You can also tell the oh-so- brilliant Gingrich—at least in his mind—that when he fires all those janitors,

a lot of them are parents. That job puts a roof over kids’ heads, food on the table, and provides them with health care and the chance to get an education. That job is the only thing between a kid and poverty. Firing someone’s mom and hiring the kid for less money isn’t exactly the “process of rising.”

Click here to tell Newt he’s out of his mind and click here for a video look at his plan.

This evening’s announcement that the Super Committee on the federal deficit was unable to reach an agreement shows that the Republicans on the committee “have once again shown that if they can’t get their way, they take their marbles and go home,” says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

“Getting their way” he says, means making the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, letting the top 1 percent off the hook on deficit reduction.

Getting their way means driving the economy further into a ditch—letting Wall Street run amok, refusing to take responsibility for their actions, and blaming everyone else. This, in a nutshell, is how our economy got broken in the first place. 

Trumka says “If we want to fix our economy and put America back to work, we have to start focusing on the 99 percent, not the 1 percent.”

Now is the time to start investing in infrastructure that puts people to work right away while laying the groundwork for broadly shared prosperity in the long term.  And we have to defend and strengthen the Social Security, Medicaid, unemployment, and Medicare benefits that the 99 percent depend on.  The last thing we should do is make the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent.

AFSCME President Gerald McEntee says the Republicans on the Super Committee “once again, were unwilling to stand up to Grover Norquist and the Tea Party to find solutions our country’s needs.”

Cutting programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would have a perilous impact on future generations.  Congress must now refocus their energy on the jobs crisis in this country and defend the middle class instead of gouging them even further.

Tas, Super Committee, federal deficit, AFSCME, Bush Tax Cuts

When the U.S. Census Bureau retooled its formula for determining the number of poor people living in the United States, the number the bureau estimated to be living in poverty shot up from 46.1 million to 49.1 million. Now that reformulation is shining a light on the vast numbers of people who appear to be middle class but who actually fall into a category called the “near poor.”

The new numbers reveal a grim portrait of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, often without access to health care, many behind the middle-class exterior of a suburban home. According to the new data, some 51 million Americans receive incomes that are just 50 percent higher than the official poverty line—a figure that is 76 percent higher than the previous measure, according to The New York Times, which reports:

All told, that places 100 million people—one in three Americans—either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

Roughly half of the people who fall into the “near poor” category live in the suburbs, and half live in households headed by a married couple. A sizable number—28 percent—work full time.

Yet conservatives in Congress continue to push for cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—cuts that could push the “near poor” over the poverty line, and further increase the ranks of the poor, especially among the elderly.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers continue to refuse to raise taxes on the richest Americans, who pay a much smaller share of their income in taxes than middle-class taxpayers. Among the expenses now calculated as part of the new poverty formulation—expenses previously omitted under the old formula—is an individual’s tax burden. After adding that, along with the cost of medical expenses, transportation and other life necessities into the formula, the numbers for those in the “near poor” category exploded.

The new numbers on the “near poor” have yet to be published by the Census Bureau. The numbers were crunched at the request of the Times, whose editorial staff suspected a larger story lurked in the new numbers. But the results, the paper reports, shocked even the Census Bureau’s chief poverty statistician, Trudi J. Renwick, who said:

These numbers are higher than we anticipated. There are more people struggling than the official numbers show.

As we reported last week, among the findings yielded by the new formula, which takes into account the cost of taxes, medical care and housing, was a higher level of poverty among Americans above the age of 65 than had been previously thought: 16 percent.