Labor Union Blog

This is a crosspost from the Charleston Gazette’s Coal Tattoo Blog by Ken Ward.

We’ve heard House Republicans talk quite a bit about how much they care about coal miners’ jobs … but what about those coal miners’ lives?

You have to wonder, when you see the GOP leadership sticking riders into appropriations bills like this one, described in a summary of a funding bill for the Department of Labor:

A prohibition on the implementation or enforcement of DOL’s “coal dust” rule until an independent assessment of the integrity of the data and methodology behind the rule is conducted.

That’s right, the majority party’s proposal for funding MSHA (see pages 35-36) would keep the agency from implementing the key provision of its campaign to End Black Lung, a deadly disease that claimed the lives of 10,000 coal miners in the last decade.

The GOP legislation would block MSHA from instituting a tougher coal-dust standard until the U.S. Government Accountability Office “evaluates the completeness of MSHA’s data collection and sampling, to include an analysis of whether such data supports current trends of the incidence of lung disease arising from occupational exposure to respirable coal mine dust across working underground coal miners.”

Never mind the peer-reviewed studies that show a resurgence of black lung in parts of the nation’s coalfields.  Never mind the data showing that miners working under what are currently legal levels of coal dust are developing black lung. And forget about the fact that public health and worker health experts have for years been urging MSHA to do exactly what agency chief Joe Main is trying to do — tighten the legal limit for coal dust.

I don’t know if there’s a war on coal, but you have to wonder if there’s really  a war on coal miners.

Tags, black lung, MSHA, Mine safety and Health Administration, mine safety, Coal Tatto, union, unions, union blogs, labor

This summer, Alabama passed one of the harshest anti-immigrant bills (HB 56) in the nation and the parallels between that law and the old South’s Jim Crow laws are “all too real,” says William Lucy, president of the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU).

Lucy was part of an AFL-CIO-sponsored delegation of prominent African American labor leaders who traveled to Alabama last month to see firsthand the law’s devastating impacts on immigrant workers and their families. Today, the delegation released its report on its findings. The leaders, who have for years been deeply engaged in the struggle for human and civil rights—some for decades—write that they were shocked by what they found.

None of us expected to witness the humanitarian crisis we experienced—a crisis that hearkens Alabama back to the bleakest days of the state’s racial history. The parallels to Jim Crow were all too real, and the prejudice we heard about felt all too familiar.

The report sheds new light on the crisis Alabama immigrant families are facing as a result of HB 56. Many of those who went to Alabama will present the report to lawmakers on Capitol Hill tomorrow.

The law requires school officials to question students about their immigration status and that of their parents. Mothers told the delegation they fear they will be separated from their children and some undocumented parents are making arrangements with church members, friends and even strangers to care for their U.S.-born children in case the parents are deported.

I drop my children off for school, but I’m not sure if I will be around to pick them up.

The law allows police to stop and check the immigration status of people they suspect may be in the country illegally and restricts the rights of undocumented immigrants to the point where they are nearly ”non-persons” subject to a form of legal exile. HB 56 has generated—because of politicians’ outlandish and false claims about immigration—a near hysterical anti-immigrant atmosphere in the state.

For example, the report notes, Birmingham deli owner  Steve Dubrinski, told the Birmingham News he was worried for his business because his workers—all Latinos and fully documented—were thinking of leaving the state.

“They are scared and I can’t blame them,” he told the paper, making clear he was speaking about his documented employees. That interview set off a firestorm. A local radio talk show called for a boycott of the deli, and Dubrinski received vitriolic hate e-mails.

Alabama teachers also told the delegation about the law’s impact in the classrooms where students are staying away put of fear of the new law. . Said Richard Franklin, president of the Birmingham AFT

This is a bad law…We need to invest in all our young people who seek an education, not find ways to prevent them from learning.

The delegation also heard from DREAM students, young people who were brought to this country at an early age, whom the report says “are American in every sense except on official paperwork.”

[Many] have become politically engaged in Alabama after the passage of HB 56 and have risked deportation, detention and family separation to organize their communities to advocate against the law. Their testimony was some of the most compelling and energizing we heard during our visit. They are a bold and brave group who we are certain will help change the law and get real reform at the national level.

Click here for the full report, “Crisis in Alabama: Investigating the Devastating Effects on HB 56.”

The misery of U.S. joblessness has everyone’s attention, but in the African American community, high unemployment has been the norm for 50 years, in good times and bad.

A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is calling for federal intervention to break the cycle that has kept the jobless rate among African Americans at twice the rate among whites.

The three-part plan includes the creation of public-sector jobs, job training with job placement programs and wage subsidies for employers.

EPI urges federal implementation of the program in counties and metropolitan areas of 25,000 people or more that have suffered unemployment of 6 percent or more for the the past 10 years.

Says Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program and the report’s author:

Our economy should be one in which everyone who wants to work can find a job.

Read more here.

According to an analysis released by the Department of Labor, 3.3 million Americans would lose unemployment insurance under H.R. 3630—the House Republicans’ so-called “compromise” bill that cuts coverage for jobless workers, 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.

You can find out how many people would lose benefits in your state under this terrible bill by clicking here.

Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released data yesterday showing claims that unemployment insurance benefits dissuade the jobless from looking for for work are untrue. Unemployed workers who receive unemployment insurance (UI) are more likely to search for jobs online, look at newspaper classified ads and to send e-mail inquiries and applications to prospective employers than those who never receive benefits.

The same lawmakers who obstructed an extension of unemployment insurance are now are suddenly claiming they are willing to extend unemployment coverage. But when you look at the details, all they have to offer is massive cuts that would throw over three million people off of unemployment. Some “compromise?”

The AFL-CIO believes it’s time for Congress to stop picking on the 99 percent and make the 1 percent pay its fair share. And we will keep pushing for a clean, full extension of jobless aid, because it’s the right thing to do.

As Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project (NELP)  says,

Long-term unemployed workers are not lazy slackers who choose an unemployment check over a paycheck. They are millions of men and women—family, friends and neighbors, many of whom have worked for years—whose lives and livelihoods have been chewed up and spit out by the nation’s worst economy in 80 years. With the number of officially unemployed job seekers still outnumbering job openings by more than four-to-one, it’s no wonder so many long-term unemployed workers cannot find work: there simply are not enough jobs.

You can get involved by reading and sharing unemployment stories and signing our petition.

United Wisconsin, the coalition spearheading the movement to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R), announced today that volunteers have collected more than 500,000 signatures on petitions to put the recall on the ballot.

Working families need 540,000 signatures by Jan, 17, but are aiming to gather another 250,000 to offset expected dirty tricks and challenges from Walker’s supporters. This Saturday, volunteers across the state are holding a massive petition drive to collect recall signatures.

Wisconsinites began mobilizing against Walker after he rammed through legislation that eliminated collective bargaining rights for public employees and made huge budget cuts to education, health care and other vital working family services. He’s also attacked voting rights and cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. A new study this week showed his policies have cost the state 18,000 jobs.

Time magazine’s selection of the “Protestor” as its person of the year reflects not only the individuals who took part in demonstrations around the world. In this country, the “Protestor” is essentially the vast majority of the American public that believes the 1 percent are out of control.

Some 61 percent of Americans now say the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy and just 36 percent say the system is generally fair to most Americans, according to a new Pew poll out today. Most (77 percent) agree that there is too much power in the hands of a few rich people and corporations. More from Pew:

The public also views Wall Street negatively, little changed from opinions in March. Currently, just 36 percent say Wall Street helps the American economy more than it hurts — 51 percent say it hurts more than helps. Majorities of both Democrats (60 percent) and independents (54 percent) say Wall Street hurts more than helps, while nearly half of Republicans say Wall Street helps the economy (49 percent).

Hats off to you, the U.S. public, Protestor and Time Person of the Year.

Evidence continues to mount that a so-called tax holiday for corporations’ overseas profits is bad idea.

A new study of the tax holiday passed by Congress in 2004 that allowed multinationals to bring back to the United States offshore profits at a reduced tax rate finds it did little to spark the economic and jobs revival that proponents claimed the scheme would. Republican lawmakers are recycling the economic boom theory to boost support for a new corporate tax holiday. According to the study:

In essence, the corporate rich got richer.

The study appears in the latest edition of “The Journal of the American Taxation Association,” published by the American Accounting Association—hardly a group of wild-eyed radicals.

The study’s main author University of Texas Professor Lillian Mills says that the result of the 2004 holiday where American multinational corporations brought back about $312 billion at a tax rate that dropped from standard 35 percent to 5.5 percent was

None of the many studies of [tax holiday] has been able to document the major increase in investments and jobs that was the main selling point for the legislation. What they found, instead, was an upsurge in corporate stock repurchases, an activity associated with lack of investment opportunities and of primary benefit to company shareholders rather than to the economy as a whole.

Click here for more.

Earlier this week the AFL-CIO and hundreds of member organizations of the FACT Coalition signed an open letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, urging them to reject calls for a “repatriation tax holiday.”

In October, the Institute for Policy Studies (ISP) reported that the first two years after the 2004 repatriation windfall that 12 of the top recipients laid off more than 67,000 American workers after saving $32 billion in taxes.

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 in 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.