Labor Union Blog

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones spent $1 billion to build the gilded palace his legendary National Football League team plays in eight Sundays a year. But in the gift shops inside Cowboys Stadium and in sports apparel stores around the nation, Cowboys fans are buying fancy jackets, jerseys and other gear made by Cambodian workers earning just 29 cents an hour for 10-hour days, six days a week.

And now the Cowboys merchandising arm—Silver Star Merchandising—is pursuing deals with major U.S. universities for exclusive rights to produce the schools’ logo apparel, reports ESPN’s  Outside the Lines. A recent episode spotlighted the Cambodian supplier’s factory where workers:

fear the wrath of their supervisors if they talk to a co-worker sitting next to them or take too long at the bathroom. They say they are essentially forced to work overtime daily and describe a hostile work environment in which supervisors yell and insult them. They work while sick because either they can’t afford to go to the doctor or fear they will be fired if they miss work.

One of the schools Silver Star has its sights set on is Ohio State and student activists there are outraged, says Rob Battista of the Ohio State chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS).  In letter urging students to fight the proposed 10-year deal he writes:

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, our group revealed disturbing collusion between the Cowboys and our university to completely restructure our licensing program and to give the Cowboys exclusive rights to make Buckeye gear, cutting off ties with dozens of local Ohio businesses. For months, we have been pleading with our university administration to restart this unethical process, yet they refuse to. How can OSU continue to entertain a rigged deal with a company that abuses workers’ rights and conspires to obtain backdoor deals?

Click here for the Outside the Lines Report and here for more from Ohio State USAS.

Donna Gatehouse, who blogs at DemocraticDiva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Arizona, as the pithy Jon Stewart put it a while back, is the “meth lab of
democracy.”  The Grand Canyon State has achieved international notoriety for legalizing guns in bars, SB1070 [anti-immgrant legislation], a Birther Bill, and of course, the antics of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, among other things.

We are so proud!  But our reputation for zany characters and appalling social legislation notwithstanding, Arizona has been no slouch at pushing an economic agenda very favorable to the upper crust and very unfriendly to working families.  We are one of the top go-to states of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as a fertile ground for its horrendous ideas.

This year, ALEC and its BFFs at the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry are pushing hard for capital gains tax cuts.  Capital gains, put simply, are the profits earned from the sale of a property or investment. Long-term capital gains are capped at 15 percent at the federal level, thanks to the Bush tax cuts.  States collect capital gains tax too, usually at ordinary income rates. ALEC wants to eliminate state capital gains taxes entirely.  The AZ Chamber has a slightly less ambitious goal for Arizona.

Reduce capital gains taxes to stimulate investment by using the same proportion of capital gains tax to ordinary income tax as the federal system.

They proposed that in their “2011 Legislative Priorities” They didn’t succeed last year but advisers are back again this year to persuade an eagerly receptive Governor and state legislature that capital gains tax cuts are a super duper awesome economic
stimulus.

[Gov. Jan] Brewer also wants to alter how capital gains are taxed under Arizona law.

Federal laws tax capital gains kept for a longer period of time at a lower rate than regular income. The governor is proposing a similar dual tax rate here, though the proposal made Wednesday does not say how much difference she wants.

Here, too, the Ways and Means Committee has a more far-reaching plan: Total elimination of the state’s capital gains tax.”

Shockingly, they’re wrong about that, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, as other states have already learned.

Capital gains tax preferences are costly, inequitable and ineffective, depriving states of millions of dollars in needed funds, benefitting almost exclusively the very wealthiest members of society, and failing to promote economic growth in the manner their proponents claim.  States cannot afford to maintain these tax breaks  any longer, and lawmakers considering introducing these regressive loopholes should understand the  fairness and revenue implications before allowing this seriously flawed policy into their tax code.  Lawmakers considering introducing these regressive loopholes should understand the fairness and revenue implications before allowing this seriously flawed policy into their taxcode.

But hey, when have right-wing Arizona politicians let a little thing like being wrong stop them?

Alliance for Retired Americans Communications Director Michael Buckley sends us this report.

While presidential candidate Mitt Romney noshed at a recent Palm Beach fundraiser co-hosted by a sugar baron and a pro sports owner, Florida Alliance for Retired Americans members gathered nearby for a more simple meal: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

The idea for the “Regular Man’s Picnic,” according to event organizer Tony Fransetta, a UAW retiree and Florida Alliance president, was to contrast Mitt Romney and his financial backers with the daily struggles of seniors in Florida and across the nation.  Speaking near the Romney event, Fransetta said:

Those inside are advancing the interests of the 1%, while we are outside today to speak up for the 99% who are too often silenced in this country.

The Alliance for Retired Americans is gearing up for its largest-ever grassroots mobilization, seeking to educate current and future retirees on the issues and where the candidates stand.  According to Alliance president Barbara J. Easterling:

Mitt Romney’s America would have seniors buying their Medicare from the big insurance companies and anxiously watching Wall Street gamble away their retirement savings through a privatized Social Security.

Billionaire Warren Buffett is a thorn in the side of Republicans. This pillar of the capitalist community and CEO of the corporate conglomerate Berkshire Hathway, continues to press Congress to raise taxes wealthy people like him. When congressional Republicans answered him by proposing a voluntary check-off box on tax-filing forms for people who want to pay more taxes, Buffet threw down a gauntlet. He’d happily match the voluntary tax contributions made by GOP lawmakers, he said — and he’d even triple-match those made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Speaking with Time magazine’s Rana Foroohar, Buffett said (with a chuckle, according to the reporter):

It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions.

Buffet made waves in August when, in a New York Times op-ed piece, he repeated his complaint that his secretary paid a much higher tax rate than he did. Buffett is worth $45 billion. (For the record, the senate majority leader is worth a mere $10 million.)

McConnell spokesperson Don Stewart responded to Time with a call for President Barack Obama, congressional Democrats and members of the Democratic National Committee to voluntarily pay extra taxes.

In a 2010 article in Fortune, Buffet wrote:

I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.

That’s one billionaire who thinks he should pay more than 17 percent of his adjusted net income — the rate he currently pays — to the U.S. Treasury. He’s convinced a few others already, but not, apparently, the Republicans in Congress.

Newt Gingrich has said some pretty outlandish things over the years—the most recent was his proposal to put poor kids to work cleaning inner-city schools. But as a friend of mine was fond of saying—“sometimes even a blind squirrel can find an acorn.”  Newt has an acorn.

During the New Hampshire primary when Gingrich was talking to voters about Mitt Romney’s days as a vulture capitalist—shortly after Romney said he “likes being able to fire people”—Gingrich said  Romney “looted” companies and left behind “broken families and broken neighborhoods.” Then he added something that could have been uttered by any progressive or Occupier.

You have to ask the question: Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and walk off with the money, or is that in fact a little bit of a flawed system?

That got AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka’s attention who says:

Here are words you won’t hear from me very often: I agree with Newt Gingrich.

In an e-mail to working family activists Trumka says that Romney’s brand of capitalism “is not the kind of capitalism that built America.” He said it’s time to elect leaders who like to hire people, not fire people.

You can send that message to lawmakers across the nation by clicking here to sign an AFL-CIO petition  telling politicians that it is time to put America back to work and urging  leaders to work together on an agenda that actually creates jobs to stop following the lead of corporate raiders like Mitt Romney.

While Trumka says he agrees with Gingrich about flawed capitalism that works for the 1 percent but not working people, “It’s unfortunate that both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney are on the wrong side of most issues that matter to working people.”

For example, they are both on record in support of so-called “right to work” legislation, like the bill that’s being considered in Indiana. If “right to work” passes, Indiana’s unions no longer will stand between corporate raiders like Mitt Romney and many of the workers they like to fire to boost short-term profits.

In state legislatures around the AFL-CIO and our allies will be focusing job-creating, hire-people-not-fire-people agenda that includes

• Making sure state tax dollars are used to keep jobs in that state and in America.
• Buying state-made and American-made goods—so we create jobs in our communities and in America.
• Stopping corporate tax loopholes and tax breaks for millionaires—so our states no longer are starved of the revenue they need for critical services.

Be sure to click here and sign “I like leaders who hire people” petition and we will deliver the petitions to local, state and federal politicians in this crucial legislative season and election year.