Labor Union Blog

Jim Morin was a former Air Force air traffic controller when he joined the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in 1977 and was assigned to one of the busiest airports in the nation, New York’s LaGuardia, where he became secretary-treasurer of the PATCO local.

But even as air traffic was growing and the air traffic control system was working at near capacity, the FAA was cutting staffing numbers and forcing controllers to work longer hours, especially in the spring and summer when thunderstorms would back planes up across the country.

We’d get hammered. So many planes and so few places to put them. It just wore you down, especially if you worked swing shift [3-11 p.m.]. The fatigue factor was huge and a lot of suggestions we made just fell on deaf ears.

In 1981, Morin says controllers knew they were risking their jobs when 12,000 went on strike after negotiations broke down. But they stuck together in solidarity. President Ronald Reagan followed through on his threat and fired the controllers and busted PATCO. That’s still reverberating today, says Morin.

The major ramification for organized labor today is that employers are no longer hesitant to go ahead and hire or threaten to hire replacement workers and workers and unions are very hesitant to use it [strike] now. As far as conservatives are concerned, they point to the strike and the firings as a shining moment in labor history.

Morin was part of a forum at the AFL-CIO today Washington. D.C., where  Georgetown University associate history professor Joseph McCartin, author of the definitive book on the PATCO strike, Collision Course: Ronald Reagan, the Air Traffic Controllers, and the Strike That Changed America, explored the strike’s impact on the labor movement and its connection to the erosion of collective bargaining as a path for workers to get to and stay in the middle class.

“Never before,” says McCartin,

had the nation faced union busting on this scale…private-sector employers applauded his action and followed his example.  It broke the moral barriers and constraints against replacing workers who strike. It made union-busting not only respectable, but kind of a litmus test for politicians.

Earlier this year, McCartin said, just before Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was set to introduce his bill to eliminate the collective bargaining rights of public employees, Walker told a meeting of his advisors:

This is the last time we meet before we drop the bomb…Now it’s time to follow Reagan’s example.

New Jersey’s right-wing Gov. Chris Christie (R), says McCartin, calls Reagan’s firing of the controllers and busting of PATCO Reagan’s “most inspiring moment.”

Over the years, as more and more employers fired striking workers, the “power of collective action, the right to strike was undermined,” McCartin said.

By 2010, there were only 11 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, compared with 222 such strikes in 1960—a 95 percent drop in walkouts.  As the ability to successfully strike decreased, so did workers’ strength at the workplace and their numbers in unions.

That, he says, is a major factor in the growth of income inequality. “We used to look at collective bargaining as the bulwark of the middle class,” said McCartin. The inability to use collective bargaining’s most powerful tool—the strike— is a major factor in the growth of income inequality, he said.

Following the strike, Morin earned a law degree, served as Air Traffic Controllers (NATCA) general counsel and now worker at the FAA. Also on the panel today were former PATCO controller Elliot Simons and Kenneth Moffett, director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service at the time of the PATCO strike.

Pacific Rim Cayman LLC, the mining company determined to extract gold along the banks of El Salvador’s Lempa River, is seeking to use the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to force the Salvadoran government to allow it to have its environmentally disastrous, gold-digging way. Since 2009, four activists opposed to Pacific Rim’s mining plans have been killed.

Tomorrow, the AFL-CIO will join the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and activists from a range of labor and environmental groups to converge on the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a noon protest in opposition to a CAFTA case being brought against the Salvadoran government by Pacific Rim. The AFL-CIO has long called for ending CAFTA, whose absence of labor protections leads to the abuse of Central American workers.

As part of the action, participants will attempt to deliver an open letter to World Bank officials, calling on the bank and presiding officials to dimiss Pacific Rim’s CAFTA complaint, which seeks $77 million from the Salvadoran government for calling a halt to the company’s potentially devastating gold mining operation.

In El Savador, even the execution-style deaths of four anti-mining activists—including a pregnant woman who had a two-year-old in her arms when she was shot—hasn’t stopped the government from calling a halt to the Pacific Rim’s plans to mine gold, a process that threatens cyanide leakage into the river, which is the main water source for a majority of the nation’s population, according to authors Robin Broad and IPS Director John Cavanaugh, who published a comprehensive investigation last summer in The Nation.

In what environmental lawyer Marcos Orellana of the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) called “an abuse of process,” Pacific Rim, which is based in Canada, opened a U.S. office to use CAFTA as a means to force El Salvador to approve the company’s environmental impact study, which would allow the mining to proceed. (Canada is not party to CAFTA, but the United States is.) The case will be heard at a tribunal inside World Bank headquarters convened by International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Broad and Cavanaugh report:

Like other trade agreements, CAFTA allows foreign investors to file claims against governments over actions—including health, safety and environmental measures and regulations—that reduce the value of their investment. The affected farmers and communities are not part of the calculus.

El Salvador’s National Roundtable on Mining has filed an amicus brief, drafted with Orellana’s assistance, explaining how, according to Broad and Cavenaugh:

Canada-headquartered Pacific Rim first incorporated in the Cayman Islands to escape taxes, then brazenly lobbied Salvadoran officials to shape policies to benefit the firm, and only after that failed, in 2007 reincorporated one of its subsidiaries in the United States to use CAFTA to sue El Salvador.

Details on the protest:

Demonstration Against Trade Agreements at World Bank

Thursday, December 15, 2011

12 p.m. to 1 p.m.

Murrow Park, The World Bank headquarters
1818 H Street N.W.
Washington, D.C.

For more on how CAFTA harms workers in the United States and Central America, download the AFL-CIO report, “The Real Record on Workers’ Rights in Central America.”

In addition to the AFL-CIO, signers include representatives of the Mine Workers (UMWA); United Steelworkers (USW); AFT; International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM); the Teamsters; Sierra Club; and Friends of the Earth (FOE), among others.

Since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law last year, some 2.5 million more young people have health insurance than before the law took effect, according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Under the health reform law, children can remain on their parents’ health insurance plans until they turn 26, and families have flocked to sign up young adults. Says U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius:

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, 2.5 million more young adults don’t have to live with the fear and uncertainty of going without health insurance. Moms and dads around the country can breathe a little easier knowing their children are covered.

BTW, this is the same health care reform that every Republican presidential candidate and congressional leader says should be repealed.

This is a cross-post from the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO blog by Karen Hickey in AFL-CIO Field Communications.

A report released by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future entitled “The Price of Extremism” clearly and systematically outlines that Gov. Scott Walker’s policies are not working. In fact, the indirect, ripple affects of Gov. Walker’s actions are costing Wisconsin more than 18,000 full-time, private-sector jobs during the first year of Walker’s budget.

The report focuses on four ways Walker’s policies are hurting Wisconsin and attaches private-sector job loss estimates to each of the policies. The four areas and estimated job loss include:

1. Cuts to education and health care, which will cost Wisconsin 5,400 jobs.

2. Cuts in aid to low-income families, which will cost Wisconsin 1,200 jobs.

3. The economic impact of Act 10, which will cost Wisconsin 6,900 jobs.

4. The rejection of federal aid funds, which has cost 4,700 jobs.

The report, which can be viewed here, also provides county-by-county estimates of the impact of Act 10 and the impact of education cuts on local economies.

“In tough times, the worst thing a governor can do is further shrink the economy by stifling spending,” explained Jack Norman, research director for the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future. “Gov. Walker has taken huge amounts of money out of the economy through budget cuts, attacks on workers and increased taxes on low-income families. This leads businesses to have fewer customers, workers to have fewer jobs and local governments to have less revenue.”

“Along with stripping public employees of their basic collective bargaining rights, Act 10 decreased the spending power of public employees by an average of $3,668 a year for the typical public employee making $40,000 a year,” said Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “This has a huge affect on local economies that will result in $700 million leaving Wisconsin’s economy. This is money that was spent at the local corner store and small businesses in communities across the state. The end economic result for Wisconsin is the loss of 6,900 full-time private-sector jobs.”

“Under Walker, Wisconsin is 33,800 jobs short of matching the national pace of job creation,” said Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “Walker’s policies are not working. Our state needs jobs. It is crystal clear that we need to change direction so that Wisconsinites who work hard and play by the rules can have access to family-supporting jobs. This report is another reminder that Gov. Walker must be recalled for the sake of Wisconsin.”

The Institute for Wisconsin’s Future (IWF) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan statewide organization dedicated to tax policy research, community organizing and education policy. For more details, including copies of the various documents referred to in this press release, see the IWF website at: www.wisconsinsfuture.org.

The human costs of killing the extension to unemployment benefits

Click here for full size.

This is a cross-post by Heather Boushey from the Center for American Progress.

Unemployment insurance is the primary government mechanism providing financial assistance to workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own. These benefits are set to expire on December 31. If Congress does not address this problem by the end of December, 2.2 million unemployed workers will lose their benefits by February. In 22 states, more than 30,000 unemployed workers will lose benefits.

Extending unemployment benefits is critical because our economy remains mired in one of the worst labor markets since the Great Depression. There are currently 13.9 million Americans unemployed, with the unemployment rate at or above 9 percent for 28 of the past 30 months. In October, the last month for which complete data are available, nearly half of those unemployed (42.4 percent)—5.9 million workers—had been out of work and actively seeking a job for at least six months. (See map above.)

Currently, there are nearly five workers actively searching for work for every job available, compared to just one and a half job searchers per job opening before the Great Recession began. Allowing unemployment benefits to expire amid such a weak labor market would have serious implications for the unemployed, as well as every one of us who still has a job.

The reason: An end to the benefits would threaten our economic recovery. Economists across the board agree that unemployment benefits are one of the most important countercyclical economic policies we have, helping those who do not have jobs with assistance that is immediately spent in the broader economy. Over the past few years, according to a detailed study by Wayne Vroman for the Department of Labor, benefits for the long-term unemployed led to the creation of about 700,000 new jobs each quarter.

Congress needs to act. It’s that simple.

The growing gap between the rich and the rest of us is not just a problem in the United States. Over the past two decades income inequality has soared around the world. But a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OCED) says if nations make the right policy decisions, income inequality is not inevitable and can be reversed.

At a forum today at AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., John Martin, OECD Director of Employment, Labor and Social Affairs; AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, chairman of the Trade Union Advisory Council to the OECD; and Charles Heeter, chairman of the Business Advisory Council to the OECD, discussed the report and how to close the widening income gap.

The report looked at income inequality in all 34 OECD nations and found that the United States had the second largest increase between 1985 and 2008. Mexico led in the growth of income inequality. In addition, the United States led all nations in the growth of the share of a nation’s income that went to the top 1 percent.

While Trumka praised the OCED for focusing on income inequality, he said the report ignored an important aspect of the growing gap between the 99 percent and the 1 percent, “the dramatic shift in bargaining power between workers and their employers since the 1970s.”

I think the OECD’s work on inequality would be strengthened by a more explicit treatment of power and the policies that have diminished the bargaining power of workers.

According to the report:

Rising income inequality creates economic, social and political challenges. It can stifle upward social mobility, making it harder for talented and hard-working people to get the rewards they deserve… Inequality also raises political challenges because it breeds social resentment and generates political instability…The resulting inequality of opportunity will impact economic performance as a whole.

One of the “most direct and powerful” instruments to address income inequality is through tax and benefit policies. For low-income groups, the report calls for “well-targeted income support policies” to ensure that that “low-income households do not fall further back in the income distribution.”

Changes in tax policy are especially necessary

in the case where the share of overall tax burdens borne by high-income groups has declined in recent years (e.g. where tax schedules became flatter and/or where tax expenditures mainly benefitted high-income group.)

The report also calls for better investments in training, education and employment access aimed at young workers, women, older workers and migrants. Click here for the full report.

Today, starting at 11 a.m. ET, we’re joining with Working America, NELP, MomsRising, HERvotes, USAction and a slew of other organizations and bloggers to launch an #ExtendUI tweet-a-thon.

We’re sending a clear message: No Strings, No Cuts: #ExtendUI Now!

The first thing you can do to join the tweet-a-thon is visit our tweet-a-thon page and tell your friends what’s happening.

Once you’ve done that, browse our unemployment stories website and find and tweet individual stories you find compelling. Please also sign our act.ly Twitter petition to @RepDaveCamp.

Don’t use Twitter? You can still read compelling stories and share them on Facebook.

And, of course, send as many #ExtendUI tweets as you can today.

With your help, we’ll make a powerful case to #ExtendUI without cuts or preconditions that hurt the 99 percent.

House Republicans tonight voted (234-193) to cut more than in half the number of weeks jobless workers can collect unemployment insurance (UI) benefits next year. The bill also cuts pay for public employees, cuts preventive health services, reduces premium assistance for low- and middle-income individuals buying health insurance and raises premiums for many Medicare beneficiaries.

A new report from the National Employment Law Project (NELP) says the legislation:

abandons millions of U.S. workers and those communities hardest hit by the most severe jobs crisis since the Great Depression.

While the legislation extends the federal UI program that is set to expire Dec. 31, the huge reduction in weeks of benefits and other changes in the UI program are “reckless and irresponsible,” says NELP Executive Director Christine Owens.

To jobseekers and states hit hard by long-term unemployment, this proposal offers a cold cynical shrug. Anyone serious about helping workers and businesses get going again needs to know that is neither a serious nor acceptable way forward.

The bill also extends the payroll tax cut for workers and employers, but rather than financing it with a small surtax on multimillionaires as a Senate version does, it cuts federal workers’ pay and imposes higher health care premium costs for low- and middle-income families and seniors.

The Republican bill, says the Obama administration,

puts the burden of paying for the bill on working families, while giving a free pass to the wealthiest and to big corporations by protecting their loopholes and subsidies….Instead of working together to find a balanced approach that will actually pass both houses of the Congress, H.R. 3630 instead represents a choice to refight old political battles.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says:

House Republicans obviously have more sympathy for millionaires than for the jobless.

If the UI program is not renewed, 2 million workers will lose their benefits next month and 6 million in 2012. Last week, Shonda Sneed, an engineering worker from Yellow Springs, Ohio, who has been unemployed on and off for the past two years, traveled to Washington, D.C., to urge Congress to extend the UI program with no strings attached (see video).

My unemployment benefits have been my lifeline. They are what’s keeping me and my mother off the street.