Labor Union Blog

First, multi-millionaire Mitt Romney told a group of jobless workers he’s also “unemployed.”

Next, Romney thought there was no problem in stating publicly that he likes to “fire people.”

Now, the Republican presidential wannabee proved yet again how out of touch he is with mainstream Americans by showing the extent to which he’s a member of the elite 1 percent. In South Carolina yesterday, Romney admitted he pays “around” a 15 percent tax rate, while earning $364,000 a year in speaker’s fees alone–an income he described as “Not very much.”

While estimates vary on what income or earnings qualifies someone to be part of the elite 1 percent, there’s agreement that the minimal annual income for that aristocratic group is $350,000 a year. Meaning Romney’s speaking fees alone put him in the 1 percent.

Meanwhile, Romney’s low tax rate–people making more than $35,000 a year pay a 25 percent tax rate, while personal tax rates go up from there to 35 percent–is based on investment income, rather than–his words–”ordinary income.” You know, the kind of “ordinary” hourly pay and annual salaries the vast majority of us “ordinary” wage workers depend upon for survival.

Working Americans, whose median annual income is $49,445, would have to work more than seven years to make what Romeny said he raked in via speaker’s fees alone in one year. But 1 percenter Romney sees that sum as chump change.

For someone like Romney, who’s worth an estimated $250 million, it sure is.

The 72-page report, issued yesterday by the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, makes many solid suggestions for how to address our nation’s jobs crisis, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. But Trumka says the fundamental focus is so flawed that, as a member of the council, he issued a dissent to the report. In sum, Trumka writes:

I believe the report downplays the need for a proactive role for the U.S. government in many of these areas; fails to address the significant additional revenues needed to address the challenges identified on an appropriate scale; and in many cases erroneously identifies the root causes of the underlying structural problems.

While agreeing with the report’s support for a vibrant and growing manufacturing sector, Trumka says the report does not address the fact that “our government’s own policies with respect to trade, taxes, and currency have created enormous competitive disadvantages for American-based producers.”

And while Trumka shares the report’s goal of attracting more investment and good jobs to the United States, he disagrees with its proposed reforms, which, he says, could instead result in providing tax subsidies for companies offshoring jobs while starving the government of the revenue it needs to create good jobs and upgrade infrastructure.

Trumka noted in his dissent that the 27-member council is ”simply too narrowly representative of our country to provide a balanced set of recommendations to the President in these critical areas.”

Primarily made up of corporate CEOs, the council supports reforming the U.S. regulatory system and reducing the statutory corporate tax as crucial to competitiveness. Trumka disagrees, saying empirical evidence does not “support the claim that significant net new job creation would result from such ‘reforms.’”

In short, says Trumka, the report fails to recognize that:

our country has become dominated by the interests of the wealthiest 1 percent at the expense of the remaining 99 percent. It turns out that a country run in the interests of the wealthiest 1 percent systematically underinvests in public goods; systematically silences, disempowers and underinvests in its workers; and in the end is less competitive and creates fewer jobs than a country that focuses on the interests of the 99 percent.

President Obama appointed the council in February 2011 to replace the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Its job is to offer “non-partisan advice” on how to strengthen the U.S. economy and ensure competitiveness while creating “jobs, opportunity and prosperity for the American people,” according to the executive order that created the panel.

Read Trumka’s full dissent here.

Stumping for president, Republican candidates have finally figured out that the public cares more about job creation than deficit reduction. But their solutions involve luring corporations back to this country from overseas by eliminating regulatory policies that could make working conditions here a lot more similar to those offshore. A recent Jon Stewart segment shows just what that would entail.

Pointing to recent news reports that describe the slave-like conditions at China’s Foxconn factory, where 800,000 workers make iPhones, iPads, Kindles and most other Apple products, Stewart notes that most Apple products are made in China,

the Communist country where corporations get the respect they deserve.

So, to compete with China, Stewart continues,

we’ve got to make our factories look more like this Foxconn.

At Foxconn,

• Employees live in dormatories eight to a room…often roommates, though, won’t know each other’s names.
• A worker described assembling a part 5,200 times a day.
• Employees can work 35 hours straight.
• Until recently, workers were paid 31 cents an hour.
• A growing number of workers are killing themselves, or trying to. The company installed nets around buildings to try and catch “jumpers.”

And, if a Foxconn workers try to improve their dire working and living conditions by seeking to join a union, they get 12-year prison sentence.

Or, as Stewart asks about Foxconn versus prison:

What’s the difference?

Viewers in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh are getting the first public look at a new AFL-CIO television spot, “Work Connects Us All: America’s Unions.”

The evocative ad features members of many unions, from virtually every industry, and is part of a broad campaign that aims to “fly above the tactics and controversies of the day” and connects with people around the values associated with work, according to AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler.

Rounding out the campaign’s features are social media and online ads, and a dynamic, interactive website, www.WorkConnectsUsAll.org.

The campaign emerges along with an expanding national awareness of the divide between the 99 percent and the economically privileged, and the recognition that the middle class is declining. Efforts in some states to take away rights of working people to come together in unions have given rise to a growing recognition of the bonds shared by working people.

Key lines from the TV spot, which is airing in English and Spanish, include:

And as work changes, we change with it. Work doesn’t separate; it’s what binds us together. I teach your kid, you fix my car, he builds my city, she keeps it safe…work connects us all.

Keep your eye on the Indiana statehouse today, where Republican House members are doubling down on their push to pass a “right to work” for less law. House Democrats offered a range of amendments to the bill, including a move to put the anti-worker legislation on the ballot for a public referendum—an idea 71 percent of Hoosiers support.

Despite an earlier agreement to allow the amendment to be introduced and debated, last night the Republicans declared it unconstitutional, adjourned and promised to slap a $1,000 fine on any Democrat who filibuster the bill in today’s session by staying away.

This exercise in cut-throat politics by Indiana Republicans isn’t their first. Expect more ugly today.

Follow the action on Twitter with the hashtags #INunion and #INlegis.

Hoosiers: Continue to write and call your state legislators and urge them to vote “NO” on this bill, or at least call for a public referendum.

Unemployment for African American workers has remained virtually unchanged, hovering between 15 percent to 16 percent throughout 2011, while unemployment for the rest of the workforce dropped below 9 percent, according to a new report by the University of California-Berkeley’s Labor Center.

Steven Pitts, a labor policy specialist at the center and author of the report, said:

[C]urrent unemployment rates for Black workers are still higher than in June 2009, when the recession officially ended, and well above December 2007, when the downturn began.

Read the full report here.

Graduate student worker Scott Thaller shows the card he signed to join the UAW.

As they proceed with a two-pronged approach to building their union, graduate assistants at the University of Minnesota say they are both hopeful and realistic.

Tuesday morning, one group of graduate assistants delivered a letter to the university president, asking that the university join with the majority of its 4,500 graduate assistants to file a petition for union recognition with the state mediation bureau.

Across the river, a second group of graduate teaching assistants asked the bureau to schedule a union election. Said research assistant and union spokesman Scott Thaller:

We know that a joint petition is a more democratic and inclusive way to form our union and we are hopeful that the University will agree to file joint petition. But we are preparing for other outcomes by also asking the BMS to call a union election.

The graduate assistants have formed Graduate Student Workers United and are seeking to join a union with help from the UAW.

The university blocked three organizing efforts by University of Minnesota graduates since 1991, but Thaller said,

this time, so many grad assistants are involved and support the way that a union will finally give us the right and power to advocate for ourselves, that we believe we will succeed.

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order opening the door for 2 million federal employees to join unions. His action set the stage for expanding these rights under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter—a bipartisan recognition that federal employees should have a voice on the job.

Executive Order 10988 “might be the least known of the string of significant events that made the 1960s such crucial years in American history,” writes Georgetown University history professor Joseph McCartin—but it contributed to a wave of public-sector unionization that grew tenfold between 1955 and 1975, topping 4 million by the early 1970s.

It’s fitting that on this key anniversary, when we acknowledge the decades-long efforts of public employees to work for passage of laws such as EO 10988, that public employees and workers across Wisconsin have today sent a strong signal that they will never give up the struggle for their rights to bargain collecitvely for a middle-class life.

Read McCartin’s full op-ed here.

Working people hit one right out of Miller Park: Moments ago, they submitted 1 million signatures supporting a recall election of Gov. Scott Walker (R), exceeding the total number of signatures required by 460,000. Walker last year pushed to abolish the rights of public employees to collectively bargain for a middle-class life. Overall, Walker’s policies are killing 18,000 jobs a year in Wisconsin, according to a recent report and more than 27,000 jobs have been lost since he signed the budget last year.

Interestingly, Walker received 1,128,159 votes in his 2010 election.

Working families also turned in 123 percent of the required signatures against Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, who was thought one of the more challenging leaders to recall.

There also are enough signatures to force recall elections for the state’s lieutenant governor and two other state senators. The Wisconsin elections board will need to verify all the signatures.

Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said Wisconsinites want to recall Gov. Walker to:

put an end to his disastrous agenda and stop his attacks on working families. Putting corporate allies above the people of Wisconsin has led to months of job loss and a compromised economy.

Walker is giving $2.3 billion in new tax breaks to corporations and his rich cronies.

Stephanie Bloomingdale, secretary-treasurer of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, applauded union and community members whom she said have been gathering signatures “at union halls, grocery stores and bowling allies.”

Last February, when Gov. Walker announced his plan to bust public sector unions and the middle class, a spark was lit and the people of Wisconsin began to take notice of Gov. Walker’s real agenda.  This is a governor who crippled the rights of workers, raised taxes on the poor, compromised our children’s education and made it harder for Wisconsinites to vote.  The signs are clear, his agenda is not working and the people of Wisconsin won’t stand for two more years of Gov. Walker.

AFL-CIO Field Communications staffer Cathy Sherwin sends us this report.

In their campaign to rush through so-called right to work (RTW) legislation, Indiana Republican leaders, including Gov. Mitch Daniels, have claimed they have public support. Wrong.

Polls show that the public overwhelmingly wants to see legislators slow down on “right to work” for less legislation, or let the people decide directly.

At worksites and around kitchen tables, at the Statehouse and door to door throughout Indiana, Hoosier workers have been speaking out and taking action against this anti-worker bill. Tens of thousands of workers have signed postcards now being hand-delivered to legislators urging a vote against RTW.

Today in Indianapolis, union members are at the Statehouse, putting 20,000
signed postcards and petitions in the hands of elected officials—Republicans
and Democrats. United Steelworkers (USW) member Kelly Hugunin, one of many working every day to raise awareness on the job and in the community, says public opinion is with working Hoosiers.

Everywhere we go, people are happy to sign. Union or not, working people want to stop this attack on middle-class jobs.

Members of unions have been helping out with collecting and delivering postcards  to Indiana state representatives. The state House is expected to vote on key amendments today, including one that would put the RTW bill in the hands of Indiana voters.

Unions involved include: AFSCME, AWIU, CWA, GMP, IAM, IBB, IBEW, IFT, Ironworkers, IUOE, IUPAT, LIUNA, OPEIU, SMWIA, UA, UAW, UBC, UFCW, UMWA, USW and Workers United.