Labor Union Blog

He beat out some tough competition, but Rob Walton, chairman of Wal-Mart’s board of directors, is the top vote getter in the 11th annual Jobs with Justice (JWJ) Scrooge of the Year election.

Walton deemed a “billionaire bully” by Brave New Films, has an estimated net worth around $21 billion, JWJ reports. As a family, the Waltons control 49 percent of Wal-Mart and are, says JWJ, the richest family in the United States, with a combined net worth is $93 billion. The Walton Family has as much wealth as the bottom 30 percent of American families combined—more than 35 million families.

The family’s dividends from their Wal-Mart stock alone are more than $2 billion a year. Just using their dividends, they could ensure that a million Wal-Mart employees make at least $12 an hour instead of the current average of $8.81 an hour.

Just last month Wal-Mart, under Rob’s leadership, slashed health care coverage for hundreds of thousands of Wal-Mart employees and their families—right before the holidays. What a scrooge!

Click here to learn more about the runners up, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Publix supermarkets and Eddie Hull University of Massachusetts director of housing and residential life.

The new Wall Street reform law will make it difficult for big corporations involved in mining—like the former Massey Energy—to hide their safety records from shareholders and the public.

Yesterday, the Security and Exchange Commission adopted new rules that cover how companies must disclose the mine safety information. That information was required as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The new rules require that companies provide information for each mine they operate that includes the number of significant and substantial violations the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) has cited; any flagrant violations; failure to comply citations, imminent danger orders; the dollar of value of proposed fines and more.

Massey claimed to have an exemplary mine safety record. Yet following the April 2010 explosion at its Upper Big Branch (W.Va.) mine that killed 29 miners, MSHA’s record showed that both there and at its other Massey mines, health and safety violations were rampant.

Earlier this year, a report the West Virginia Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel (GIIP) found that the

responsibility for the Upper Big Branch Mine lies with the management of Massey Energy. The company broke faith with its workers by frequently and knowingly violating the law and blatantly disregarding known safety practices.…Massey exhibited a corporate mentality that placed the drive to produce coal above worker safety.

The 229 Republican House members who voted to kill unemployment insurance UI benefits for the long-term jobless and a payroll tax cut for working families are home for the holidays. But they will be getting some visitors who likely aren’t on their holiday parties guest lists.

Union members, jobless workers, faith and community activists are telling the lawmakers they should get back to work and pass the bipartisan Senate compromise that keeps the UI lifeline and payroll tax cut alive. If they don’t, 2 million unemployed workers will lose their benefits next month and another 4 million as the year goes on.

This afternoon, a group of protestors will be outside House Speaker John Boehner’s (R) in West Chester, Ohio. Dozens of other actions are also on tap.

Yesterday in Wisconsin, working families demonstrated outside the offices of Republican Reps. Paul Ryan, Sean Duffy and Reid Ribble.  At Duffy’s Wausau office, activists offered a new take on Deck the Halls that included this verse:

Do away with corporate stooges, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Feed the Cratchits not the Scrooges, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

We’ve been left with meager pickins, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Time to give the rich the Dickens, fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

You can make you voice heard back in Washington too. Call Boehner’s Capitol Hill office at 202-225-0600 and tell the person who picks up the phone:

Speaker Boehner should be ashamed of himself. He needs to get his House in order, stop the partisan games and extend unemployment aid immediately.

When House Republicans left town for the holidays Wednesday, they didn’t even leave behind a piece of coal in the stockings of some 2.8 million jobless workers whose unemployment benefits are about to expire over the course of the next two months. At least a piece of coal can be burned for heat.

An analysis by the National Employment Law Project (NELP) finds that come January, some 1.8 million will lose their unemployment insurance (UI), with another 1.1 million meeting the same fate in February.

NELP Executive Director Christine Owens explained in a statement:

Winter is upon us, a time when shelter, heat, and adequate nutrition are expensive and deeply important, and the most vulnerable among us are at even greater risk.

Further, Owens explained, the House failure to extend UI will be felt well beyond the ranks of the unemployed themselves:

The impact of a lapse of federal unemployment insurance will be devastating for the unemployed, their families, the communities in which they live and the local economies the benefits support.

As we reported, House GOP leaders scuttled a vote on a bill already passed by the Senate that would have extended federal unemployment benefits by an additional two months, and extended the payroll tax holiday for the same amount of time.

Owens concludes:

To rob the unemployed and their families of their essential lifeline just as the New Year begins, especially when a clear alternate path is available, is more than callous—it is unconscionable.

Download the full report, in a PFF file, here.

Along with holiday cheer, you can share some holiday justice with the AFL-CIO’s holiday e-card. Just click here. Choose the number of people you want to send the card to, enter their names and e-mail addresses and your name and e-mail.

Then you can add your message and tailor it to your activist friends or even send a message to a CEO or politician on your lump-of-coal list—just keep it clean, it’s the holiday season after all.

A new rule on the way union elections are conducted will take effect April 30, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced today. The rule will help alleviate the delays, inefficiencies, abuse of process and unnecessary litigation which plague the current system for workers who want to vote on whether to have a union. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says it’s “good news”that the NLRB has taken

this modest but important step to help ensure that workers who want to vote to form a union at their workplace get a fair opportunity to do so. Many more improvements are needed to protect workers’ rights. We hope the Board will quickly move to adopt the rest of its proposed reforms to modernize and streamline the election process.

The new rule, says NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston, gives workers who have petitioned for an election the

right to vote in a timely manner and without the impediment of needless litigation.

Although the new rule makes modest changes in the procedures for handling election cases, when it was proposed earlier this year, business groups and Republican lawmakers went apoplectic and mounted a massive campaign against the NLRB. In November, House Republicans approved a bill that gives employers new tools to combat and delay elections by workers who try to form unions. It was a direct response to the new NLRB election rule. The Senate didn’t take up the measure.

Congressional Republicans have made nearly 50 separate assaults on the NLRB since January by holding hearings, issuing subpoenas, and proposing bills to gut the agency’s funding and eliminate its ability to hold employers accountable for violating workers’ rights, according to American Rights at Work (ARAW). Click here for a detailed look.

It’s tough these days being a member of the top 1 percent, what with all the complaints about the widening income gap and tax breaks for billionaires, not to mention the demands of the 99 percent for a little accountability. “It feels lonely…,” said John A. Allison IV, former CEO of BB&T, one of the nation’s top 10 banks, to Bloomberg News.

Or, as billionaire Tom Golisano, founder of Paychex Inc., so delicately put it, according to Bloomberg:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Even Jamie Dimond, the J.P. Morgan Chase CEO who took home a cool $23 million last year, and John Paulson, the billionaire hedge fund manager, have publicly bemoaned their targeting by Occupy Wall Street and other detractors.

So what’s a lonely, nauseous billionaire to do? Organize!

Enter the so-called Job Creators Alliance (JCA), a sort of one-stop messaging operation, complete with a speakers bureau and media booking operation for those underappreciated fat cats. The group’s 17 featured business leaders say they aim to “shape the national agenda,” according to the JCA website.

Among the alliance’s founding members is Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, who still seems to need a little work on his messaging. Asked by Bloomberg reporter Max Abelson whether he he was concerned about becoming the target of protesters, Marcus replied:

Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?

One of the burning issues on that agenda is the 1 percent’s disdain for a section of the Dodd-Frank bill that requires publicly-traded corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO’s compensation and the median pay package given employees. BB&T’s Allison, who still sits on the bank’s board and is one of the 17 JCA-appointed spokes-billioniares for the 1 percent, complained to Bloomberg that the rule was “an attack on the very productive.”

This definition of productivity must include small business foreclosures and employee layoffs. BB&T, which took $3.1 billion in bailout funds (since repaid), announced this week that it was eliminating an unspecified number of positions, lending an Orwellian bent to his role in the purported Job Creators Alliance.

As we reported, excessive CEO pay is now seen as one of the key drivers of the housing bubble that led to the crashing of the economy in 2008. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka noted at a conference on the topic last week that the average CEO of the top 500 corporations listed by Standard & Poor’s now collects 343 times the amount in compensation as the median paycheck received by his or her workers.

Our scroll through the JCA website found several links to the billionaires Charles and David Koch, the anti-labor siblings who run Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the United States. Bernie Marcus’ business partner, Ken Langone, attended at least two of the brothers’ secret retreats for wealthy political donors, according to reporting by ThinkProgress. Art Pope, one of the JCA 17, is vice chair of the Americans For Prosperity Foundation, which is chaired by David Koch. Pope also sits on the board of Americans For Prosperity, the foundation’s sibling organization.

Two JCA staff have Koch connections, as well. JCA President Jeanette Goodman and message team member Lee Habeeb previously worked for the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-wing, climate-change-denying think tank funded by the Kochs.