Labor Union Blog

Remember when Ohioans overwhelmingly voted to repeal Senate Bill 5—Gov. John Kasich’s attack on middle-class jobs that was designed to destroy collective bargaining rights in Ohio?  

According to Reuters, repudiating S.B. 5 was just the beginning of a big backlash against tea party overreach. In Ohio, many so-called “Reagan Democrats” are turned off by extreme attacks on working families waged by Tea Party politicians and are abandoning the party. Meanwhile, online fundraising for Ohio Democrats has quadrupled.

What we’re seeing in Ohio and other states that have faced attacks on collective bargaining rights is that attacks on working families are turning Reagan Democrats—and Republican union members like teachers, firefighters and police—against the tea party’s extremist agenda.

Brian Barnhart, a 33 year old lieutenant with the Columbus fire department, says it all: “I am socially conservative, I am a registered Republican voter and voted a strict Republican ticket in 2010 – but I am voting with Democrats in ’12.” 

The main reason is the attacks on workers that I have been seeing with the Republican Party.

“Mitt Romney said that he supported Senate Bill 5 and Issue 2, so he’ll have a lot of explaining to do to police officers and firefighters, nurses, teachers and working people in general as to why he was on the wrong side of where Ohioans were,” says Tim Burga, the president of the Ohio AFL-CIO.

You can read more about Ohio’s backlash against Republican overreach here.

Marco Trbovich, vice president at Tricomm Associates, sends us this.

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed led a presentation on his city’s initiative to retrofit a wide range of commercial, public and residential buildings in a 400-block area of downtown that proved the highlight of a gathering of investors, pension fund managers, business, labor and community leaders at Heartland Capital Strategies’ first Responsible Investment Forum.

The forum, sponsored in collaboration with the Blue Green Alliance, addressed the need for greater alternative investments to sustain the real economy, an investment arena largely abandoned by Wall Street.

In contrast, the responsible investment specialists attending the forum were characterized by Heartland Managing Director Thomas Croft as “a community interested in forging a new alternative path for responsible investment in manufacturing, community development and clean economy growth,” an approach that Heartland brands  as “doing well by doing good.”

Mayor Reed urged forum attendees to consider investing in the Better Buildings Challenge, the city’s retrofitting initiative to create a more sustainable economy, improved air and water quality and job growth.. 

“Capital goes where it is needed and stays where it is well cared for,” he told the gathering. Aided by staff of the Better Buildings Challenge and the Emerald Cities Collaborative, the Mayor provided a comprehensive presentation on how investments in the project would be managed to minimize risk.

Many of the participants in Heartland’s one-day forum committed to further conversations to discuss possible investments in the Atlanta project, which hopes to put many of city’s 57,000 unemployed union tradesmen to work in the massive undertaking.

Financing a Sustainable Economy 

The Atlanta forum was the first of four being sponsored by Heartland Capital Strategies in conjunction with the Blue Green Alliance’s Good Jobs, Green Jobs regional conferences. Inspired by the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Heartland promotes investments and projects essential for revitalizing America’s productive economy and community prosperity.

Heartland’s commitment to Responsible Investment is based on the United Nations ESG principles, which call for investors’ attention to Environmental concerns, Social well being, including respect for labor rights, and the character of corporate Governance, as well in addition to rates of return.

Throughout the day, forum presenters shared innovative ideas on how responsible pension investors and fund managers could maintain high rates of return while directing alternative investments toward domestic job creation in energy, manufacturing, housing and infrastructure, clear social benefits that derive from Responsible investment.

Craig Overmyer, Managing Director of Hopewell Ventures, cited the complex challenges facing efforts to fund innovative alternative investments that stimulate job growth. He characterized sustainability as creating “an eco system that keeps going,” which requires the considerable task of identifying gaps in the market and finding solutions for that gap. 

“You have to identify a problem and the constituents so that you cover all your bases before the decision on the investment arises.  You have to match returns of competitors and then you must lead by finding other constituent leaders” willing to advocate for ESG principles.

To overcome the fits and starts in regulatory and tax policy that hinder alternative investment, he added, “We need a national energy policy to establish continuity and consistency in policy and regulation.”

Jennifer Von Bismark, President of Towpath Renewables added that the current U.S. map of states with Renewable Portfolio Standards “looks like 29 different countries, which she said made it especially difficult for pension funds in particular to the long-term viability and return on potential investments.

Ups and Downs of Investing Responsibly

Landon Butler, who founded the $5 billion Multi-Employer Property Trust (MEPT) in 1982, offered a compelling overview of the explosive growth in construction investment trusts, financed by construction union pensions,  since passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

While working as President Carter’s deputy chief of staff, Butler said he gained a great respect for collective bargaining’s role in securing pension savings that represent a substantial source of investment capital for nourishing the nation’s job growth and retirement security.

“Somehow the social component has gotten lost in the process over the years,” he concluded, “at a time when there is a desperate need for jobs. We’re not sensing that [pension] trustees are looking at job creation, despite the substantial record of pension fund investments in creating them.” He allowed, however, that “trustees are shell shocked because of the downturn.”

Scott Woolsey, Managing Director of the Labor-Management Fund Advisors, added that trustees are not even recognizing the ancillary jobs that projects governed by ESG principles create. “it’s all ‘returns, returns, returns.’”

Innovative Leadership Crucial

Ted Chandler, Chief Operating Officer of the AFL-CIO’s Housing Investment Trust, noted that public funds have much less focus on targeted investment than in the 1990s, offering that “layers of gatekeepers” preempt focus on the ESG principles.  Gatekeepers, such as investment consultants, “identify with the management perspective,” he said.  “The real issue is leadership by trustees of pension funds in setting the agenda for investments.”

“Some consultants get it,” explained Mark Austin, Managing Director of North Sky Capital,  “though they’re in the minority.  Many consultants clearly don’t understand all the specific concerns of trustees.  They’re focused on return without an understanding of all the other issues trustees have in their laps.” 

Dan Givens, a pension administrator for the Miami Firefighters union, asserted that “trustee education is the whole deal, getting our people to get comfortable with their decisions, “ a daunting challenge, he averred, as the tenure of trustees in Florida is only three to five years, “so there’s little continuity.”

Trustee Training Crucial

The call for more substantial, ongoing training to strengthen trustees’ leadership role in advocating for ESG principles was voiced repeatedly throughout the forum.  “One of our missions [in the International Association of Firefighters] is to educate trustees,” Givens said. ”You have to have a platform for them to make the case for socially responsible investments.  Build it and they will come.”

Bob Eason, former Vice President of the Savannah, Georgia local of the International Longshoremen, added that “it all gets back to education, and trustee education is now entirely captured by Wall Street. “ e

Deborah Nisson, Vice President of ULLICO added that fund managers need to understand that “public-private partnerships is not a four-letter word.” For the long-term nature of funds, she concluded, we need to educate trustees on the value to their constituents and the real economyh of including ESG principles in their considerations. .  Unions need to make the investment in staff and training.”

This is a cross-post by Karen Hickey, communications director at the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO.

The Reclaim Wisconsin Tour has been criss-crossing the state giving citizens a chance to speak out on the local impact of Gov. Scott Walker’s disastrous agenda. Teachers, students, jobless workers, community members in La Crosse, Wausau and Eau Claire are coming together to discuss the local impact of Gov. Walker’s policies.

“Eliminating collective bargaining rights is wrong, and it’s not the way we do business here in Wisconsin,” said Jeff Huenink, who voted for Gov. Walker in 2010. “The more I learn about Scott Walker, the sorrier I am that I voted for him. If I had known about his extreme agenda and the direction in which he was going to take Wisconsin, I never would have voted for him in the first place.”

In Eau Claire, Sue Carey’s 18-year-old daughter, Katie, has Down syndrome and relies on FamilyCare. Carey is a lifelong Republican who voted for Gov. Walker and took to the Reclaim Wisconsin Podium.

“There is no way to overstate the impact on a family when a child with a disability is not able to receive long-term family care. For many of the families I know who have been wait-listed because of Scott Walker’s caps on FamilyCare, it will mean at least one of the parents will have to quit their job to stay home and care for their adult child—taking an economic, emotional and humanitarian toll on every single person in that family,” explained Carey. “That’s why I’m supporting the effort to recall Walker because the people who are getting hit hardest by his wrongheaded policies are the people who need help the most.”

In Wausau, Reclaim Wisconsin Tour participants heard from an employee of Wausau Paper who was laid off after 27 years of service with the company; a local public school teacher who explained that Gov. Walker’s education cuts are compromising quality public education in Wisconsin; and a personal story of how BadgerCare cuts are making Wisconsinites sick. 

“Scott Walker has given my family a one-two punch: not only did I lose my job, but my wife, a public employee, lost a big chunk of her income due to his wrong-headed policies,” explained Chuck Stine, a recently permanently laid-off employee of Wausau Paper. 

In La Crosse, community members heard from students, unemployed workers, teachers and firefighters about how Walker’s policies are hurting the community and the state at large. 

David Ruscher, a jobless worker from La Crosse, spoke about the struggle of living in the only state that has lost jobs for six months.

“Gov. Walker ran on a promise to create 250,000 new jobs for Wisconsin,” explained Ruscher. “I have to ask Gov. Walker one simple question, where are the jobs?”

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this.

At a time when the tea party-driven Republican agenda in New Hampshire’s state capitol is more unpopular than ever with voters on both sides of the aisle, Republican House Labor Committee Chairman Gary Daniels and his allies have ramped up their attacks on working people. In a work session yesterday, the House Labor Committee took another step towards dismantling New Hampshire’s collective bargaining rights law by voting no fewer than five anti-worker bills ‘ought to pass.’

The bills voted out of committee included:

• A new right-to-work for less bill similar to last year’s bill.
• A second right-to-work bill that is a backup in case HB 1677 fails.
• A bill that once repealed collective bargaining rights for teachers,  firefighters and other public workers; was stripped and amended in  committee to allow employers to lead decertifications of public unions.
• A bill that strips the requirement for a union to be the exclusive  representative of a bargaining unit out of the collective bargaining law.
• A  bill that gives the Legislature veto power over state and municipal employee contracts.
• A bill that prohibits automatic payroll deduction of union dues, but was  stripped and amended to split increases in health insurance 50-50 between  employers and employees if a contract expires.

Mark MacKenzie, president of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO, said Daniels has “admitted that his plan is to throw this handful of bills to the wall and see what sticks.”

Clearly, they have not listened to the thousands of working men and women in New Hampshire who have pleaded with them to stop attacking workers and move on to fixing the economy and creating jobs.

The House Committee’s vote comes at a time when the tea party-driven Republican agenda in Concord is increasingly unpopular with voters on both sides of the aisle. More than half of New Hampshire voters oppose bills to eliminate or alter the collective bargaining rights law, according to a poll from the Beneson Strategy Group.

Since November, Democrats or pro-labor Republicans have won five of five special House elections, indicating that voters will take their frustrations with the tea party-driven Republican leadership with them to the polls in November.

A year ago, thousands of Wisconsin workers filled the statehouse and streets of Madison protesting Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attack on their collective bargaining rights. The battle reverberated beyond the borders of Wisconsin, triggering a nationwide dialogue on collective bargaining.

On Wednesday, Feb. 15, the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, will hold a special discussion focusing on what the Wisconsin protests mean a year later; the history, law, and politics of collective bargaining in the public sector; and what these public sector labor struggles mean for the country more generally.

The discussion will run from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Georgetown Law Gewirz Center on the 12th floor.

Georgetown University professor and Kalmanowitz Initiative Executive Director Joseph McCartin will lead the panel.  Panelists include Craig Becker, a former National Labor Relations Board member, Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Fire Fighters of Wisconsin (IAFF), Joseph P. Rugola, executive director of the Ohio Association of Public School Employees (OAPSE/AFSCME) and Newsweek and Daily Beast contributor, Eleanor Clift.

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

As Arizona’s “Wisconsin on Steroids” anti-worker bills get streamlined through committee hearings, Arizona labor leaders are gearing up to push back. This afternoon, I spoke with Roman Ulman, executive director of AFSCME Arizona. Ulman told me union leaders are still meeting with legislators at this point, urging them to support working families over corporate interests. As he said:

Senators on both sides of the aisle are telling me they are uncomfortable with the bills and are pleased that we’re talking and not walking at this point. Some of the Republicans have privately expressed to me that they’re tired of being terrorized by the Goldwater Institute and the Tea Party into voting for bad legislation. They want to focus on the budget and solving Arizona’s problems.

(Click here to sign a petition to tell all Arizona lawmakers to stop the attacks on firefighters, teachers, police officers and other hard-working public service workers.)

Private conversations aside, even the more principled Republican lawmakers in Arizona have a history of caving under under corporate pressure so it is expected that the majority will vote for the bills in the end. Ulman says union members and allies are prepared for that.

If it moves out of the Senate, all bets are off and we will march and take our case to the public.

Labor and community groups plan to hold a press conference on the lawn of the State Capitol in Phoenix on Thursday afternoon and are expecting a good sized crowd to turn out.

The Goldwater Institute has been working diligently to pit private-sector workers against public-sector workers, so much so that they’ve taken to pretending to support private sector unions!

Which is odd because I had never known the folks at the Goldwater Institute, who support right to work laws with the same fervor that they oppose minimum wage laws, to be fans of any kind of union. So I asked Ulman about that and he agreed that it was preposterous. “They’re against all unions!”
He says the unions have noticed this new tack by the Goldwater Institute too, and they aren’t buying it.

Some of them trip up and admit they want to end all the unions but the smoother ones are sticking to the script. They’re running a stealth operation and they’ll say anything to move their agenda forward.

Ulman assured me that Arizona’s public-sector unions have the full support of private-sector unions.

People are so geeked up right now I’m having to tell them to calm down!

This is a crosspost by AFSCME President Lee Saunders from Huffington Post.

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, the Pravda of the 1 percent, is at it again, continuing its push to gut the retirement security of millions of middle class workers across the country while enriching the Wall Street moneymen who just three years ago took our economy over the cliff.

Virtually everyone agrees that our nation faces a retirement security crisis, but the Journal last week published a shameful op-ed calling for the elimination of pensions for nurses, firefighters, corrections officers and others who still have them. Having punched private-sector workers retirement in the gut, these folks won’t be happy until the whole concept of a secure retirement for working Americans is a thing of the past.

The typical AFSCME member — men and women who plow our streets, care for the sick, protect our children, clean our buildings and keep our communities safe — receives a pension of approximately $19,000 a year after a career of public service. The employees have earned and paid for these pensions. Employee contribution rates commonly amount to 3 percent to 10 percent of their paychecks. These contributions, combined with investment earnings, usually account for 75 percent or more of all pension benefit funding.

The economy’s collapse in 2008-2009 took its toll on everyone’s retirement savings. But our nation’s public pension systems, which were fully funded before the crash, continue their robust recovery earning their highest returns in decades in fiscal year 2011. Pensions continue to provide irreplaceable retirement security to millions of Americans who provide public services. Yet, the corporate-backed
opponents of pensions are creating a myth that the system is falling apart and that state and local governments are going bankrupt because of the $19,000 pensions sanitation workers are earning.

That is simply not true. According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the size of the projected state and local government pension funding shortfalls is manageable. In most states, the total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product during the next 30 years. Even in states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product during that period. And, because pension payments are made over generations of workers,
funding can remain stable over long periods, and funding challenges managed over decade long periods, despite short-term economic setbacks. These are facts that the opponents of public pensions simply ignore, as they seek to punish workers for Wall Street’s psychopathic behavior.

Read the full post here.

Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent. (Feel free to post a message to Daniels at his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mymanmitchfans .)

In his rebuttal, Daniels had the audacity to claim the mantle of people’s champion—this from the man who said he was against the “right to work” for less before he was pushing it armed with lies and ruthlessly anti-democratic tactics. This from the political party fighting Obama’s plan to address the deficit by raising taxes on retired financiers like Mitt Romney, who pay less in taxes than most firefighters, bricklayers, teachers and nurses.

Inconsistency and numbers not adding up is nothing new for Daniels, who failed miserably as George W. Bush’s budget director for the first 2.5 years of Bush’s presidency, which had massive tax cuts for the rich as its No. 1 domestic priority. And Daniels’ concern for working people is more than a little bit ironic in light of his record as governor of Indiana, which has included taking away the right in 2005 of  public employees to collectively bargain.

Today, Daniels has entered the national stage as an angry opponent of workers acting collectively. He may have seemed mild-mannered in a speech well-received by right-wing pundits, but that manner is belied by his efforts to shut down the basic institutions of democracy in Indiana.  Daniels, a lame-duck governor who seems to be spending a lot more time thinking about Washington than about getting Hoosiers back to work, ought to follow the lead of President Obama and listen to working people rather than CEOs.

Fire Fighters President Harold Schaitberger joins union members at a rally in New Hampshire.

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report.

Workers in New Hampshire took over the floor of the New Hampshire House chamber yesterday to testify against a spate of anti-collective bargaining bills debated in the House Labor Committee. The hearings were relocated to the people’s chamber after the hearing rooms were flooded past their capacity by more than 600 firefighters, state workers, truck drivers, teachers, and community members protesting the most recent anti-worker onslaughts in the Granite State.

Barely a month after right-to-work was definitely beaten down in the House, the House Labor Committee held a hearing on a slew of anti-worker bills ranging from dues deduction and other attempts to dismantle aspects of the labor relations law, to HB 1645, an outright repeal of collective bargaining for public employees.

State representative Andrew Manuse, sponsor of HB 1645, made it clear that he had no idea of what his bill would actually do after he compared a firefighters’ job to “changing a light bulb,” claimed he “respected” public workers—while trying to take away their rights—and said public employees “weren’t taxpayers.”

Diana Lacy, president of the State Employees Association, promptly asked Rep. Manuse to refund her $250,000 in back taxes.

But the most contentious bill, HB 1570,  would allow public-sector workers to opt out of a union in their workplace by surrendering any wages or benefits negotiated by the union, HB 1570 effectively creates two classes of employees in a workplace, opening employers to discrimination lawsuits. The sponsor of HB 1570 was so stumped by the good people of New Hampshire’s questions over how his bill would save the state money that he solicited advice on how to improve the bill on the floor of the House.

Jim Allmedinger of the New Hampshire Education Association put it most simply:

The consequences of HB 1570 are good for nobody but lawyers.

New Hampshire AFL-CIO president Mark MacKenzie cut through the brouhaha in his testimony and set the record straight about the true purpose of the hearings:

The real purpose of these hearings today is dismantling the collective bargaining law at the state level and at the local level. This law has been effective. We have negotiated thousands of collective bargaining agreements and attracted terrific employees to the public sector — this is not a broken system. Our legislators need to take their eyes off of this and focus on what really matters. They need to focus on creating jobs.

AFL-CIO communications staffer Nora Frederickson sends us this report.

You’d think that New Hampshire’s Republican leadership would have gotten the picture already.

When Gov. John Lynch vetoed their pet right to work bill, H.B. 474, after it passed the House and the Senate last year over the protests of thousands of Granite Staters, legislators in the House failed to get enough votes to override his veto.

But now, the Republican leadership in New Hampshire is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at working families in their newest attempt to dismantle unions in the Granite State.

It started with H.B. 383, a “right to work” for less bill that applies to state employees such as toll collectors, snowplow drivers and social workers. The bill is not a carbon copy of H.B. 474 but could easily be amended to apply to all workers. The House passed H.B. 383 on Jan. 5 by 212-128, falling short of the two-thirds threshold needed to override a veto from Gov. Lynch.

Protesters at the statehouse were undeterred to hear that H.B. 383 had passed.

Says Kelly Torosian, a Fairpoint technician and member of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 2320:

We’ll continue the fight until Speaker O’Brien stops playing games with our Legislature and starts making decisions that help New Hampshire workers and grow our economy.

And this definitely isn’t the end. A host of bills restricting collective bargaining for public employees—including the repeal of collective bargaining—are due to be heard in the Labor, Industrial, and Rehabilitative Service Committee on Jan. 19, and teachers, firefighters, state employees and community members are already gearing up to turn out and tell their lawmakers why these bills aren’t good for New Hampshire.

New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie explained that these bills are just the latest wave in a continuous assault on workers’ rights in New Hampshire.

As New Hampshire struggles out of this recession, Speaker [William] O’Brien has shown no wavering from the extreme Tea Party agenda that has cost us thousands of jobs in the Granite State. These laws are just another sign that the Speaker cannot admit defeat. He will push his agenda at any cost—regardless of how it impacts the people of New Hampshire.

For up-to-the-minute updates on the action during the hearings on Jan. 19, follow the New Hampshire AFL-CIO on Twitter at @NHAFLCIO.