Labor Union Blog

Workers in Washington State were cheering this morning’s announcement by Boeing and District 751 of the International Association of Machinists (IAM) that the company will build the 737 MAX–the next generation of Boeing’s best-selling jet–in Renton, Wash.

The sweeping new four-year tentative agreement came after six weeks of secret negotiations, according to reports in The Stand.org and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and is an endorsement for employer benefits, such as high-quality production, stemming from the collective bargaining process. Workers will vote on ratification next week.

The pact includes a signing bonus and a yearly general wage hike of some 2 percent, and came 10 months early as IAM negotiators pressed to retain the Washington State jobs and Boeing sought labor peace, according to the P-I report.

In the background is Boeing’s decision to in 2009 to choose South Carolina as the site of a second 787 assembly plant. The National Labor relations Board issued a complaint against the company last April, charging Boeing with retaliation against the workers for exercising their right to strike over the move.

Congressional Republicans have since mounted a full-scale attack on the NLRB, threatening to cut funding, block nominations and impose laws curtailing its authority.

It’s not clear yet whether the new agreement may settle the pending NLRB case.

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report.

Workers and union leaders in New Hampshire were ecstatic that months of hard work in New Hampshire paid off today when the state House failed to override Gov. John Lynch’s (D) veto of a so-called right to work bill. Nearly 100 teachers, firefighters, postal workers and others showed up to ask their legislators to support the veto during the high-stakes session day and urged lawmakers to withstand pressure from Republican presidential candidates Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry as well as a rowdy group of Americans for Prosperity volunteers bused into New Hampshire for the day.

“I was confident that the reps on our side would be there, but it was still really nerve-wracking in the House,” said Felicia Augevich, a Fairpoint employee and member of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1400 who helped monitor the session at the Legislature today.

I’m really proud of how everyone came together—Democrats and Republicans, private-sector and public-sector workers. We’re hoping that the victory today will send a positive message to the public, to the middle class, and to all of New Hampshire that collective bargaining really is what guarantees good wages and benefits for Americans. We’ve had one victory, but we still have a lot ahead of us.

Working family allies in the Legislature stood up before the vote to argue passionately against the so-called right to work bill. When the vote was finally called at 11:55 a.m., working people greeted the results with jubilation.

After the House floor cleared, teachers, firefighters and ironworkers gathered on the steps of the Statehouse to celebrate the results of months of collaboration.

“Make no mistake, we triumped because we stood together as a united labor movement,” New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie told the crowd.

Harriet Spencer of AFSCME’s Council 93 agreed.

Today’s vote proved that solidarity is more than a word.

Relations between management and the 1,300 locked-out workers at American Crystal Sugar Co. reached a new low this week, as recordings were made public of company CEO David Berg likening the workers and their contract to a cancerous tumor.

Speaking to shareholders in North Dakota on Nov. 7, Berg told the story of a friend who had a massive cancerous tumor removed. “He was sick for a long time,” said Berg.

We can’t let a labor contract make us sick forever and ever and ever. We have to treat the disease and that’s what we’re doing here.

 Berg later repeated his cancer analogy, saying,

At some point that tumor’s got to come out. That’s what we’re doing.

Listen to some of Berg’s comments here.

Workers responded to Berg’s remarks with outrage. Sarah Gust, a 40-year employee at American Crystal, remarked,

The fact that Dave Berg would refer to our union, our contract, as a cancerous tumor is deeply offensive to me and many of my co-workers. Some of us have had cancer or have lost loved ones to cancer. It’s a tragic, devastating disease. And that’s how Crystal Sugar management sees our union. I tell you, this just shows how much respect Dave Berg and the management have for us workers.

Workers at American Crystal in Minnesota, North Dakota and Iowa have been out of work since management imposed a lockout on Aug. 1, after workers rejected the company’s final contract offer by a more than nine-to-one margin. The company hired replacement workers and says it is moving to the next phase of its “contingency plan” by offering wages significantly below those of locked-out workers. The employees are members of seven locals of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM).

“We’ve seen Dave Berg’s true colors. He is determined to treat contract negotiations as a disease, a tumor to be removed,” said John Riskey, president of BCTGM Local 167G.

We’ve said from the start that we want to negotiate, as long as management comes to the table with reasonable proposals, and not the same take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums.

Workers and the union plan to hold a press conference Dec. 1 to coincide with the company’s annual meeting and to meet with Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton on Saturday.

You also can contribute to the Sugar Beet Workers fund to help workers during the lockout. Make checks out to: Minnesota AFL-CIO, 175 Aurora Ave., St. Paul, MN 55103. In the memo line, print “BCTGM Lockout 2011.”

After months of dirty-trick-maneuvering, New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien (R) got his comeuppance this morning when the House failed to override Gov. John Lynch’s (D) May veto of a so-called right to work bill. The 240 to 139 vote in the heavily Republican chamber failed to get the two-thirds necessary for an override.

Since May, O’Brien has scheduled then delayed votes multiple times and tried to hold surprise legislative sessions, all in an effort to catch Democrats and Republicans who supported the veto off guard and unable to attend and cast their votes.

New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie says today’s vote is a:

clear signal to all of our elected leaders, in New Hampshire and elsewhere, that attacking the rights of everyday Americans isn’t the key to economic prosperity.

Read more here, here and here.

The unprecedented Republican and corporate attacks on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are a direct attack on workers’ rights and an effort to put the nation’s labor laws “into cold storage,” Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) said during a special AFL-CIO forum today examining the assault on the NLRB and workers’ rights.

This is the right wing on steroids….They went to work immediately after the 2010 elections—not on jobs—but on taking rights away from American workers.

Since January, said Kimberly Freeman Brown, executive director of American Rights at Work, congressional Republicans have made nearly 50 separate assaults on the NLRB, from bills to gut its power and funding to hearings and subpoenas.

In fact later today, the House will vote on a bill that would deny workers the right to fair union elections by blocking the modest changes proposed by the NLRB earlier this year in the way union elections are conducted. As AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told the audience:

Make no mistake about it. Their goal is to reduce power of working people across the country and incapacitate the board.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said the real reason behind the effort to cripple the NLRB is to silence the voice of working people.

This is a political attack campaign on what they see as their No. 1 enemy—labor, the only group with the power to stand up to them.

But the attacks on the NLRB and workers’ rights go far beyond union members and impact the entire middle class, said David Madland, director of American Worker Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

There is a strong connection between the right of workers to form unions and collectively bargaining and the strength of the middle class….The inability to protect workers’ rights over the last 30 years is the biggest factor in the growth of income inequality.

Harkin and Madland both pointed to statistics that show in states and in other nations where there is a vibrant union movement there is also an economically strong middle class. AFL-CIO Organizing Director Elizabeth Bunn reminded the packed audience that it was no accident that Poland moved toward democracy after the union movement there took action to restore workers’ rights and freedoms.

Republicans are using the NLRB’s decision to issue a complaint against the Boeing Co., charging it with moving production away from its Washington State facility in retaliation for the workers exercising their right to strike as a central justification for their attempts to limit the NLRB’s power and cut is funding. Professor Julius (Jack) Getman, University of Texas School of Law, said:

This whole Boeing business is a fraud…this is not about the rights of Boeing or the heavy hand of the government, it’s an attack on workers through the labor board.

Panelists noted that while the assaults on the NLRB are being played out in the political arena, corporations and business groups have thrown their strong support behind the attacks. As Bunn said:

At the end of the day, this is about corporate and CEO control of the economy.

However, she said, working people have the ability to fight back and that working families, whether or not they are in unions, have shown they are united when it comes to issue like basic fairness and rights of workers to bargain collectively. Letting the audience finish her sentence, Bunn said:

In Ohio we had a vote on collective bargaining….We got more votes than [Gov. John] Kasich (R) did in the general election. We kicked ***.

The forum, moderated by AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Nancy Schiffer, was sponsored by the  AFL-CIO, American Rights at Work (ARAW) and the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Counterfeit products and stolen intellectual property are estimated to deprive U.S. workers of some 750,000 jobs every year, and more than $250 billion in lost revenue for the U.S. economy. As the holiday shopping season gets under way, the U.S. Department of Justice is sounding the alarm to consumers, with a new ad campaign urging shoppers to “Get Real.”

Launching the campaign at a White House event the day after Cyber Monday—the big post-Thanksgiving online shopping day—Attorney General Eric Holder announced the seizure of 150 domain names for sites found to be trafficking in counterfeit or pirated products. Holder was joined by White House Intellectual Property Enforcement coordinator Victoria Espinel, and Acting Deputy Secretary of Commerce Rebecca M. Blank, who announced her agency’s forthcoming report on the economic impact of intellectual property theft. Denise O’Donnell, director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, emceed the event.

According to a fact sheet on the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) website:

The U.S. Department of Commerce puts the value of fake products—such as CDs, DVDs, software, electronic equipment, pharmaceuticals, and auto products—at five [percent] to seven percent of world trade.

As we reported in May, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, expressing support for the Protect IP Act, sees solving the problem of counterfeiting, piracy and intellectual property theft as critical to creating and sustaining the jobs needed to revive the economy:

The economic well-being of workers in the United States—jobs, income, and benefits—turns more and more on our protecting the creativity and innovation that yield world-class entertainment, cutting-edge and sustainable manufacturing and construction, and disease-ending pharmaceuticals.

More information on the campaign against counterfeit goods and intellectual property theft can be found here, at the NCPC website. NCPC is funded by the Justice Department.

Joaquin Luna, an 18-year-old Texas DREAM Act student, recently took his life, and his family told KGBT News in Harlingen, Texas, that the young man left behind letters saying he was worried about his immigration status and the failure of Congress to pass the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act is a common-sense immigration bill for students like Joaquin who were brought to the United States at a young age. It would give conditional legal status and eventual citizenship to undocumented students who meet a series of stringent criteria. The House passed the DREAM Act last December, but Republicans sidelined the bill in the Senate.

In a statement released today, Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller says Joaquin’s death “is a tragic reminder of the toll of inaction.”

Joaquin’s suicide is a grave tragedy for his family and community, Texas and the future of our nation. Joaquin was a young child when he came to the U.S. He dreamt of being an engineer and giving back to the only country he called home.  He experienced extraordinary challenges as an undocumented youth that no young person should have to face.

Click here for the full statement.

Time after time this year, congressional Republicans have voted against jobs-creating legislation, telling the fire fighters, teachers, construction workers and jobless Americans—“Don’t worry. We have our very own jobs plan.”

This week in the House, we get to see it in all its disingenuous glory. Here’s how congressional Republicans plan to create jobs—by attacking workers’ rights and gutting workplace and environmental safety and health laws. They really claim this is their jobs package.

The first bill (H.R. 3094) is scheduled to be voted on tomorrow. It would deny workers the right to fair union elections by blocking the modest changes proposed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) earlier this year in the way union elections are conducted.

It gives employers new tools to block workplace elections by establishing several new waiting periods before an election can go forward and giving employers more grounds to appeal pre-election decisions by the NLRB. It also allows employers—not workers and the union they wish to join—a larger role in determining who is part of a bargaining unit.

On Thursday and Friday, House Republicans will set their sights on crippling the government’s ability to enforce current rules and develop new health, safety and environmental laws. The two main bills are the so-called Regulatory Accountability Act (H.R. 3010) and the REINS Act (H.R. 10).

In a letter to House lawmakers, AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director William Samuel says the RAA would “upend more than 40 years of labor, health, safety and environmental laws and threaten new needed protections.”

In effect, the bill acts as “a super mandate” overriding requirements of current safety health and environmental laws by making costs to businesses, not protection of workers or the public, the primary concern. Click here for the full letter and here for more from the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards.

The REINS Act would basically take away the right of federal safety and health agencies to implement new rules by requiring Congress to approve all individual major rules, without Congressional approval the new rule would die.

Knowing just how well Congress currently works, imagine what would happen when it becomes the gatekeeper on the regulatory process. Politics, not scientific judgments or expertise of the agencies, would dictate action while corporate opposition and influence would swamp the public’s interest and block needed protections.

There are also Republicans bills that would put a moratorium on any new safety, health, environmental and other rules and even rollback current major safety laws that have been in place since 1991.

BTW, Republicans say all these attacks on workers’ rights and safety and health and environmental rules would free up businesses, especially small businesses from a supposed onerous burden and send them into a frenzy of hiring. Wrong.

As we noted last month, a survey of small business owners shows that only 13.9 percent say the reason they are not hiring workers is because of government regulations.  Why aren’t businesses hiring? To dust off an old chestnut— “It’s the Economy stupid!”

Members of Congress got an earful today about the dangerous and often life-threatening conditions workers face at oil refineries and in other oil processing facilities. At a briefing sponsored by the United Steelworkers (USW), Kim Nibarger, a USW health and safety specialist, laid out the issue in stark terms:

When things go bad in a refinery, they go really bad and people die.

Since the last round of talks in the National Oil Bargaining program, the industry has reported r25 fatalities and 175 fires in oil industry facilities, according to the USW. A new round of bargaining is expected to begin in January.

In recent years, the oil industry has focused its safety efforts on the individual worker—making sure people wear their goggles and hardhats, for instance —while ignoring the perils of aging and poorly maintained equipment and plants, according to the USW. As Nibarger explained:

BP had a low personal injury rate at its refineries, but the 2005 explosion and fire at its Texas City plant showed it failed miserably in terms of process safety. Fifteen people were killed and 170 were injured in the 2005 accident as a result of this failure.

USW Vice President Gary Beevers, who heads the National Oil Bargaining program, also addressed the briefing. In May, Beevers called on oil company investors to do their part to ensure workers’ safety.

The National Oil Bargaining pattern agreement, which governs the working conditions of oil workers, is set to expire Feb. 1.

The USW represents 30,000 workers at 168 production, refining, marketing, transportation, pipeline and petrochemical facilities nationwide.

When your job gets shipped overseas, you want help fast. You don’t want to decode reams of fine print to get that help.

The AFL-CIO Working America Institute (WAI) has cracked the code of the highly respected federal Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program and created a new website to help workers devastated by outsourcing get the help they need.

At TAAhelps.org, a simple, engaging animation, introduces TAA’s benefits, including training, health care and income support and job-hunt resources. It’s easy to quickly click through benefit details—and jump to a resource page that breaks down the process of TAA certification.

Short videos of workers who have benefited from TAA bring home the crucial role this program has played for more than 50 years in helping some 280,000 workers start a new chapter in their lives.

The AFL-CIO’s WAI is a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating good jobs and building strong communities. The TAAhelps site grew from a collaboration spearheaded by WAI with AFL-CIO state federations in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as the National Employment Law Project and the Workforce Development Institute.