Labor Union Blog

Last year’s Wall Street reform law, the Dodd-Frank Act, established significant changes in federal oversight of executive pay. On Monday, Dec. 13 at the AFL-CIO in Washington D.C., Americans for Financial Reform will host a conference on the new executive pay rules.

Those new provisions include a prohibition on excessive bank bonuses that encourage risk-taking by financial institutions. Other reforms include requiring companies to disclose a CEO-to-worker pay ratio and giving shareholders a greater say on top executive pay.

The conference, which runs from 1:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. (EST) will include two panel discussions, the first exploring the new “say on pay” and CEO-to-worker pay ratio and the second on executive compensation and risk at financial institutions.  Both panels will include corporate accountability, legal and academic experts. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will be the keynote speaker.

For more information and to RSVP—space is limited—click here. For more on executive pay visit the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch site here.

This is a cross-post from the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

The majority of workers around the world eke out a living in the informal economy, left vulnerable to exploitation and caught in a hand-to-mouth existence. They are largely unprotected by the laws of their country and excluded from the social benefits that formal workers consider their right.

Caught up in a daily struggle to make ends meet, workers in the informal economy—among them domestic workers, street and market vendors, agricultural and day laborers and workers who have been pushed from permanent jobs into short-term, temporary work—often cannot organize and fight for better working conditions, fair pay and a life with dignity.

The global reality is that the number of workers in the informal economy is growing. They are increasingly marginalized and poor. And their situation has serious human rights and economic development implications for workers everywhere.

The issues, needs and experiences of informal workers were the focus of a two-day conference held in Cape Town, South Africa, and organized by the Solidarity Center. With the support of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Dec. 2–3 meeting brought together informal workers, union leaders and researchers from around the world to explore ideas and strategies for helping precarious workers improve their lives and livelihoods.

Workers, union representatives and academics all agreed that the very nature of informal work—including its unpredictability, lack of legal protections, mobility of workers (e.g., street vendors) and the tendency to isolate them (e.g., domestic workers)—complicates efforts to bring them together under a traditional organizing model. Still, participants concurred, it is imperative that they organize so that they may fight for and defend their rights and be active participants in their societies.

“For the global working class, it is through organizing that working people can make their voices heard with employers and governments. And it is through organizing that once-isolated and exploited individuals can come together and challenge their conditions—and improve them,” said Shawna Bader-Blau, executive director of the Solidarity Center.

Some informal workers are finding their voice and coming together to address injustices. Many unions and worker organizations are stepping up to the challenge of reaching out, organizing and supporting these workers.

Despite the odds against them, workers and representatives of worker organizations described how they have overcome significant challenges and wrought key victories. For example:

• Domestic workers—integrating into a national trade union center in Hong Kong and winning a new convention on decent work at the International Labor Organization.
• Female beer promoters—mitigating stigma and integrating into the supply chain of a formal-sector beverage company.grant workers—creating the Migrant Workers’ Front under the national union center in Sri Lanka.
• Newspaper deliverers—organizing a nationwide network and winning improved wages and status for workers who deliver newspapers in Pakistan.
• Self-employed workers—implementing new marketing and production models to help small cooperatives sell their products in Brazil.
• Market venders—establishing the Zimbabwe Chamber of Informal Economy Associations and kinking the group to the national trade union center.
• Taxi drivers—organizing as a union of “independent contractors” with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance in the United States.
• Agricultural workers—organizing migrant farm workers worldwide through a global union federation.

Researchers from Solidarity Center partners Rutgers University and Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) also presented preliminary results from what will be multiyear studies on various aspects and sectors of the informal economy.

“The process of globalization has, in effect, put all of the labor market structures that we know at risk. No one is safe,” said Sue Schurman, acting dean of the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. “Globalization is driving workers from a high-wage economy into a more precarious, informal economy.”
 
Over the coming years, the Solidarity Center and its partners will work to better understand the issues and commonalities of informal workers and the economy they support around the world. It is an organizational priority, said Bader-Blau, to support their fight for social justice and to seek innovative solutions and linkages that will help them earn a more dignified life.

Newt Gingrich, who says child labor laws are “truly stupid” and wants to put low-income children in poor neighborhoods to work cleaning schools after he fires “all the unionized janitors,” has found an acolyte—Donald Trump.

Billionaire Trump—who most Republican presidential candidates are genuflecting before in hopes of a laying on of hands—endorsed Gingrich’s call to put poor kids to work. He told reporters, “I thought it was a good idea” and suggested they also work for him—as “apprenti.”

Gingrich apparently thinks all poor kids are lazy and says his plan will “get them into the habit of showing up and realizing that effort gets rewarded and that America is all about the work ethic.”

Last week he also inferred that low-income kids are crooks. He said, “They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.”

Amy Masciola, communications consultant with the Minnesota AFL-CIO, sends us this.

When a company locks out workers and won’t negotiate a contract, the entire community suffers a massive economic loss—as a new report on the economic effects of American Crystal Sugar Co.’s lockout of 1,300 workers in the upper Midwest details.

According to “A Region on the Ropes,” even as the company reported record profits during its annual meeting last week, families of locked-out workers are losing $1,000 to $2,300 per month, and the local economy of the Red River Valley has had direct losses of nearly $12 million during the four months of the lockout. The report, issued by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM), states:

Instead of continuing negotiations with its employees, Crystal Sugar has made increasing profits and compensation for its executives the priority. The Company has hired inexperienced, non-union contract workers and is turning a blind eye to the wider economic fallout, which to date totals an estimated $30.5 million.

More than 300 locked-out American Crystal Sugar workers and their supporters turned out for a public meeting with Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) in Moorhead, Minn., Saturday. Workers and members of the community spoke directly to the governor and other elected leaders about the impact the lockout is having on families and communities in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota.

Local BCTGM unions organized the meeting, along with area labor councils and the Minnesota  AFL-CIO and North Dakota AFL-CIO.

Roger Delage, president BCTGM Local 267G, says the report’s findings:

reveal the true cost of this lockout to our communities in dollars and cents. It’s time we ended it and got back to the bargaining table. Our members want to work.

Union members expressed frustration at the company’s priorities. Said Renae Fredrickson, a locked-out worker:

Their recent financials looked very good in part because of our hard work. Dave Berg told the shareholders that our contract was like a tumor and that his strategy is to cut that tumor out, and that strategy is coming at a high cost to all of us,” Fredrickson continued, referring to recordings of CEO Dave Berg’s remarks at a shareholders’ meeting on Nov. 7.

Melanie Holbeck, the wife of a locked out worker, said:

This lockout has taken a toll on my family. We lost our health insurance on Aug 1—with a month-old baby—we didn’t dare go without insurance. The outrageous COBRA coverage of $1,346 a month was out of the question. My employer picked us up right away. But, others haven’t been so lucky.

Holbeck also described the emotional toll.

The emotions I go through on a daily basis are overwhelming. I become so angry that the people I have known for years are not stopping this.

Paul Woinarowicz, who has worked for the company for 34 years, described how hard it’s been for him and his co-workers to ask for help. “My wife, my son, and my son-in-law all work for the company. We’re all locked out. You know, when you get to be my age, you expect that when your kids need something, mom and dad will be there to help. With all of us locked out, it’s been hard.”

He continued:

It’s hard for many of us to ask for the help we need, whether its help paying the rent or the heating bill or getting some groceries or medicine for the kids. But one thing I’ve learned in this struggle is that we’ve got to stick together and we’ve got to help each other and accept help from others. There is no shame in standing up for what you believe in, and that’s what we’re doing.  It’s our unity that will sustain us one day longer.

Amy Phillips, representing the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition (NDHRC), said, “At a time when the company has enjoyed record profits and management has received record compensation, these 1,300 workers are earning nothing.” According to Phillips, the NDHRC has found that “American Crystal Sugar is violating the human rights of its workers, [based] on the standards set in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States, along with 47 other countries, ratified on December 10, 1948.”

Supporters who attended the event suggested the high cost to the region would be measured in the tens of millions of dollars and in the loss of trust between Crystal Sugar workers and management that has existed for so long. North Dakota state Rep. Eliot Glassheim said, “This lockout has divided families, friends, neighbors, completely opposite the cooperative spirit that Crystal Sugar used to stand for. And it’s part of a national movement to bust unions. There is no other explanation. We must put an end to this crippling lockout.”

After hearing from the workers, Dayton said,

It’s very, very painful, and I feel that right in my own being and especially at this holiday season.

He urged the two sides to return to the bargaining table and commit to negotiating until a resolution is reached. He offered to host negotiations and to stay involved in the process until it’s resolved. BCTGM members have embraced the governor’s proposal and are willing to meet the company and the governor as early as Dec. 13 to resume negotiations.

The federal government and the owners of the former Massey Energy Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) coal mine where 29 miners died in an April 2010 blast that the United Mine Workers (UMWA) called “industrial homicide,” have reached the largest ever settlement in federal investigation of a coal mine disaster.

The $210 million agreement with Alpha Natural Resources which bought Massey Energy for $8.5 billion in February, does not bar any future criminal prosecutions of individuals connected to the deadly explosion.

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin told reporters today, “No individuals are off the hook.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the settlement is a “welcome beginning” step toward justice but:

The only way to make a real down payment on justice is to ensure the guilty serve appropriately stiff jail sentences.

UMWA President Cecil Roberts says, responsibility must be placed “where it belongs,”

on upper level management at Massey who created the safety-last culture at that company. We firmly believe the evidence is there for such criminal prosecution. Until someone goes to jail, there will be no justice done here.

The $210 million settlement includes $46.5 million in criminal restitution to the miners’ families, $128 million to fund cutting-edge mine safety upgrades, research and training, and $35 million in penalties for federal mine safety violations.

A report to be released later today by the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) will show the specific mines safety violations at the Massey mine that contributed to the blast.

MSHA’s final report on the blast will mirror the agency’s preliminary report and independent investigations by mine safety expert Davitt McAteer and the UMWA, writes Ken Ward in the Charleston Gazette.

All three investigations agree that the explosion involved an ignition of a small amount of methane gas that transitioned into a massive coal-dust explosion because of Massey’s poor safety practices. The ignition likely was sparked by worn-out longwall cutting teeth hitting sandstone. The spark grew out of control because water sprays meant to control it weren’t working, and the blast erupted into a huge explosion when it hit large amounts of coal dust Massey had not cleaned from underground tunnels.

Massey, McAteer wrote in his report, “exhibited a corporate mentality that placed the drive to produce Massey, coal above worker safety.”

Click here for more from the Gazette and here for more from the Associated Press.

In Joliet, Ill., Marvin says his unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are no substitute for a paycheck, but:

I’m grateful that I have it. I’m able to keep a roof over our heads….I’d like Congress to walk in my shoes for a day.

His story is one of hundreds on a new AFL-CIO website where jobless workers and families are sharing their experiences to spur Congress to extend long-term UI benefits. The program expires Dec. 31 and could cost as many as 6 million people their benefits.  Click here to read their stories or share yours.

You also can share the stories on Facebook and via Twitter with the hashtag #extendUI.

With the clock ticking and congressional Republicans delaying action, hundreds of unemployed workers, their allies, community and faith leaders will hold a prayer vigil Thursday, Dec. 8, at 11 a.m. near the U.S. Senate.

Particpants will wear and distribute white carnations to symbolize the millions of jobless workers who are threatened by congressional inaction. Two million will lose their benefits in January and 6 million in all of 2012 if an extension is not approved. Says Laura in Denver:

I am on my last tier of unemployment and my husband exhausted his benefits 17 months ago. Without my pittance of unemployment, we will go under.

Click here to see and share the stories and faces behind America’s joblessness crisis.

If this new Republican idea weren’t so scary, we would be laughing…hysterically.

Asreported by the Washington Post 2chambers blog yesterday, Rep. Jeffrey Landry (R-La.) is proposing that working Americans—already battered bloody by the recession—be forced to give up some of their Social Security benefits if they “opt in” to receive a payroll tax cut. (So much for the Republican mantra that tax cuts pay for themselves.)

Landry’s idea, introduced  as H.R. 3551, would cut the payroll tax rate from 6.2 percent to 4.2 percent—and allow workers to decide each year whether to receive the tax break.

The catch? Workers who chose to take advantage of the tax break in a given year would be forced to have their Social Security retirement age extended by one month, effectively cutting their own retirement benefits. Really?

It sure seems like a strange flip-side of oft-repeated GOP plans for a privatized Social Security system, where we would exchange our guaranteed retirement income for a chance to gamble in the stock market. Privatization would be a risky gamble for ordinary workers but one that may make sense for the wealthy 1 percent, whose Social Security is only a tiny slice of their retirement pie.

Landry’s plan flips this concept by cynically encouraging cash-starved workers to trade their own Social Security benefits for a quick and temporary cash infusion. Might this be a small but significant step toward ending Social Security—not by passing privatization legislation, but by enticing workers to give it up themselves?

By Monday night, Landry’s bill had a whopping two co-sponsors.