Unions

Invisible Americans: The Overlooked Millions Inside Those Job Numbers

Richard Eskow — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 14:08:45 -0500

Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.

Mos of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.

This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.

The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.

Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line.

The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.

And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.

In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.

Invisible: The jobless generation.

There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates - along with historically high student debt.

Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.

Invisible: The under-employed.

There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part time work. in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.

And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money the'll earn from one week to the next.

Invisible: The vanishing public servant.

While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment - at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.

Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers - you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, How many more of them can we make unemployed?

Invisible: The drowning middle class.

Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percen over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.

Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

Political Blindness

This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.

Republicans have no solution at all - just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.

Our neighbors deserve better than this. We deserve better than this. Change starts with a simple statement we can make to those around us, and they can make to us: You're not invisible. I see you.

People in Washington over-complicate the debate by tinkering at the margins: tax-break this, incentive that. Those things will have some effect, but there's a simpler and better way to fix the joblessness problem: Put people to work. At a time when this country needs trillions of dollar in infrastructure repair, government should hire people and get on with it.

George W. Bush had no problem doing that a few years ago. He signed a bill spending more than a quarter of a trillion dollars on infrastructure spending while the Republican Speaker of the House bragged about creating. But Republicans would apparently rather prolong the suffering so they can defeat Obama and the Democrats in 2012.

As for the Obama Democrats, either they don't understand the problem or they don't think it's politically smart to propose fixing it. I suspect it's the latter - and they're dead wrong. The President's jobs bill had some useful ideas. But the President went small on the fixes and, in his typical fashion, couldn't resist pushing useless conservative "job creation" ideas along with the good ones.

Far-Sighted

We need a massive jobs program now to fix our crumbling bridges, highways, railroads, dams, and public buildings. We need to fix wage stagnation by going back to the policies that built the middle class, beginning with stronger collective bargaining rights for working people. Unions were one of the engines of post-World War II prosperity, and the war on unions needs to stop.

We also need higher taxes for the wealthy, tax advantages for companies that hire, and higher taxes for those who make money by gambling, trading other people's debts, or hedging against the success of the American economy. We need to downsize the financial sector, which is capturing too much corporate profit and squeezing out job-creating businesses.

And we need to rebuild the firewall between banking and speculating, so we can end too-big-to-fail and the boom-and-bust cycle that keeps crashing the economy.

Vision Test

Some political party, maybe one that has had a reputation for defending the middle class, ought to say something this: We know what's going on out there. We understand the problem. Here's how we would fix it. We're going to introduce these measures in the House and Senate wherever and whenever we can, so you can see who's fighting for the Invisible Americans, and who's fighting against them.

But no party appears willing to do that, at least not without the presence of a non-partisan movement that forces it to act.

Someday historians will review this country's history to find those times when our people and our leaders responded to a crisis with vision and courage. They'll see the millions of Americans who rose to the occasion during the War of Independence, the Civil War, World War II, and the Great Depression.

But will they see us, or will we have become ... invisible?

Our political leaders need to be pressured - a lot - which is why the Occupy events in Washington are so important. We need to build and maintain a movement for real change, a movement that sees the invisible ones among us, a movement that sees each of us and makes us visible, a movement that fights unrelentingly for a better society.

Hope to "see" you soon - on the barricades.

Britain's Massive Anti-Austerity Strike: Could It Happen Here?

Richard Eskow — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:38:20 -0500

Millions of employees mounted Great Britain's first General Strike in many years today after the government threatened to impose more cuts in retirement benefits and pay for public workers.

It was a smash success. As many as two million strikers proved that the public's patience with the unjust fiscal regime known as 'austerity economics' has its limits. It highlighted the important role unions can and must play in the fight for a more just and stable economy.

And it raised an important question for the United States: Could it happen here?

We Have Ignition

The Cameron government struggled to find the right messaging. It claimed that the strike was an inconsequential event involving a mere 960,000 strikers (as if that were a small number), instead of the two million reported in the press.

The Prime Minister even described the strike as a "damp squib." If you're like me you don't know what that means. But a quick Google search revealed that the phrase refers to a firecracker that has failed to ignite, perhaps because it was left out in the rain.

So the strike fizzled, says Mr. Cameron. But his government also accused unions of sabotaging something it described without any apparent irony as an "economic recovery." So which was it: A dud, or sabotage? Apparently consistency is not this government's strong suit.

What was the strike's real impact? As the Globe and Mail reported today:

"58 per cent of public primary and secondary schools are closed completely and only 13 per cent are fully staffed. Hospitals are only taking emergency cases, as most nurses are on strike. In fact, the school where Mr. Cameron and one of his top cabinet ministers send their children ... was largely shut down, with only two classes open ... At Manchester Airport, only 26 of 176 scheduled international flights arrived today ... Garbage collectors, social workers, street cleaners, and some workers at museums and children’s centres also closed ."

Fizzled? As some New York workers of my youthful acquaintance might have said: I got yer "damp squib" right here, pal.

Nailed

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defines "austerity" as "enforced or extreme economy," or as an "ascetic practice" - you know, like those wandering monks who starved themselves or slept on a bed of nails. "Austerity economics" is the practice of forcing others to sleep on a proverbial bed of nails, to pay for the financial disasters caused by those who sleep on silk and satin.

Soundlike class-warfare hyperbole ? Consider this: Even as the Cameron government was cutting benefits for teachers, nurses, airport workers, and other public employees, new efforts were underway to rescue British and European banks yet again for their unwise lending practices, this time to European governments.

Hypocrisy? Well, yeah.

As Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, observed: “This is a government that scrapped the tax on bankers’ bonuses.” While bankers revel in their government-subsidized riches, the poorest 10% of Great Britain's population saw their real income fall over the last decade, according to a recent report, while the "richest tenth of the population have seen much bigger proportional rises in their incomes than any other group."

Gold-Plated

You can't ask people to sacrifice their financial security without giving them an enemy to hate, so conservatives in the United States fingered public-sector union employees as the source of our economic misery. Millions of people actually believe that the country's financial problems were caused by bus drivers making $45,000 a year.

They're using the same playbook in the UK. While bailed-out bankers enjoying their usual round of bonuses and raises,public employees face a two-year pay freeze and a 3% increase in pension contributions. The end result could be net pay cuts of as much as 15% by 2014.

How does a government justify that? By using the well-oiled phrases of the parsimonious elite, honed by consultants and then echoed endlessly by politicians and journalists. In this case the phrase they've chosen is "gold-plated pensions." A Google search on that phrase comes up with nearly half a million results.

The Daily Mail, house organ of Britain's morally degraded wealthy, routinely runs stories like the one it ran today, which begins "Taxpayers cannot afford to fund the latest gold-plated pensions, business leaders say." Three days ago a Daily Mail headline screamed,"Union barons behind the strike that will cripple Britain enjoy gold-plated pensions."

The phrase "gold-plated pension" appears 9,500 times on the Daily Mail website.

The Daily Mail is owned by a gentleman named "Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere," whose net worth exceeds one billion US dollars. By contrast, the average public employee's retirement income in the United Kingdom is $4,650 per year.

The only thing 'gold-plated' about British pensions is the gold-plated BS that's being spread about them by self-serving (but hardly self-made) billionaire heirs like ... well, like "Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere."

This Economy Will Self-Destruct in 10 Seconds

These austerity measures are brutal and unfair, and they punish innocent people for the mistakes of others. But at least they're working, right?

Wrong. Austerity is devastating the British economy. There are 3.8 million 'workless households' in Great Britain, and 1.8 million children live in them. As of last August, retail sales had fallen 2.5% and household income was projected to fall another 2% under Cameron's austerity plan. As Paul Krugman explains, the British government is even defying the advice of the typically austerity-minded International Monetary Fund, which really, really thinks they ought to fix the economy before doing more of the budget-cutting that's making things so much worse.

There's more: An OECD analysis released this week concluded that Britain is slipping back into a full-blown recession. the British public's confidence in the economy is the lowest it's been since the height of the financial crisis. And just yesterday the Cameron government was forced to downgrade its own economic forecast. They're not even convincing lenders they're fiscally responsible, which is supposed to be conservatism's strength. Great Britain's credit rating has been downgraded at least five times under their austerity regime.

The austerity types have turned the British economy into a disaster of epic proportions, and now they're proposing more of the same. But then, if they did anything else they would risk incurring the displeasure of Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere.

So?

Somebody in this country is probably muttering, so what does this have to do with us? Here's what: Austerity economics is dominating our politics, too. We're being subjected to the same warped economic strategies that decimated Britain's economy, and our austerity crowd isn't any more deterred by reality than theirs is.

Why has the Occupy movement touched such a chord? Because misguided, premature debates about austerity - like the ones we've seen in the "Super Committee" and the Deficit Commission - are the ultimate expression of a broken political system that has stopped addressed the concerns of the 99% and is operating in a bubble of unreality.

Just today, as Washington looks for other ways to impose austerity after the Super Committee's collapse, the Federal Reserve announced new actions to save the world's banks one more time - this time from their bad investments in Europe.

People are fed up. They're searching for ways to change things, and they're willing to support a movement for real change. That's why so many governments trying so hard to shut Occupy down.

Different Drums

The New York City's Transport Workers Union was among the first, if not the first, to ally itself with Occupy Wall Street. If you've met many New York City Transport Workers, you know they're not usually the drum circle type. But the US labor movement sees a kindred spirit in Occupy, and vice versa. The two groups need each other. And they can work together brilliantly, as the Port of Oakland strike showed.

The 99% need independent thinkers like Occupy to reignite its imagination and frame new messages. And when unions stand to shoulder to shoulder with students and the other groups that make up Occupy, there's more of everything: more energy, more ideas, more human beings on the front lines.

Can a general strike happen here? Sure it can. The Oakland action must have been particularly disturbing in some quarters, because it nearly became a general strike - one that would have had broad public support.

Any movement should begin its efforts with persuasion and negotiation. But it's hard to negotiate without leverage. Strikes are the best tool working people have for restoring economic balance and fairness. And who organizes strikes? Unions.

The Occupy movement found a message that resonates. Unions can help them make sure the message gets delivered.

The People's Strike

Conservative rhetoric about "union barons" fell flat in Great Britain today. This general strike was the People's Strike. Despite all the 'gold-plated' propaganda, the public overwhelmingly backed the unions. Pollsters asked British citizens if they "support" the strikes and they said yes in striking numbers. 90 percent said "yes" to the Daily Mail's pollsters - which much have galled His Lordship, the Viscount - and 79 percent said "yes" to the Guardian's.

It was the biggest strike in Great Britain since 1926, possibly the biggest in a century. And union leaders warned that there would be more after the New Year if the government doesn't listen.

A "damp squib"? The Cameron government doesn't even know when it's raining. And those clouds could pass this way too, if things don't change. And they need to really change. Rhetorical flourishes from professional politicians won't be enough.

In Britain today, even those TV personalities they call "weathermen" went on strike. But as Bob Dylan once observed, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

Coordinated Attack On Unions From Republicans And Corporate/Conservative Machine

Dave Johnson — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 14:14:04 -0500

There is a big, behind-the-scenes fight going on in Washington over whether our country will continue to have a middle class or not. The forces of the 1% are trying to change rules that protect the right of working people to band together, organizing themselves so they are better able to get concessions from big, wealthy corporations. There is a key vote in Congress today, and the corporate/conservative/lobbyist machine is going all-out to lay down a smokescreen and provide cover for those who vote on the side of the big corporations.

The NLRB

The mission of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), by law, is "to protect the rights of employees and employers, to encourage collective bargaining, and to curtail certain private sector labor and management practices, which can harm the general welfare of workers, businesses and the U.S. economy."

The Law

That's right, it is the policy of the U.S. government, and the law, to "encourage" unionization because higher wages and benefits helps Americans and our economy overall. By law. But paying good wages and providing benefits means that the 1% and their corporations might have to wait a bit longer to stash away a few billion, so they are furious at such government "interference." Yes, it is better for everyone in the long run when working people do better, but it isn't better for the 1% right now, this quarter, so they fight every effort to help the middle class.

The Bill In Congress

This time, Republicans in Congress have introduced the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act to block the NLRB from guaranteeing that union elections are timely. This means that the big corporations can't spend week after week forcing workers to sit through endless propaganda sessions about how terrible unions are, etc. They will still be able to do this, but not for week after week after month, and not delay elections, and delay them, and delay them.

The conservative outlet The Washington Times lays it out in, GOP seeks to head off NLRB rules,

House Republicans are waging a pre-emptive strike against the National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday to keep the group from speeding up the process for organizing unions and to prevent multiple unions at a single company.

The NLRB wants to quicken the pace to make it easier for employees and to prevent employers from discouraging them. The NLRB also supports allowing multiple unions, known as “micro-unions,” that represent different divisions within each company.

The Corporate/Conservative Machine

Here are just a few examples of the corporate/conservative machine in action. It is always fun to watch the lobbyists and conservative organizations swarm like this:

The Heritage Foundation today, Stop Obama's Big Union Onslaught,

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives will vote on the Workplace Democracy and Fairness Act, introduced by Committee on Education and the Workforce Chairman John Kline (R-MN). The bill protects the right of workers to decide whether or not to unionize. That’s a right that the NLRB would like to drastically weaken.

... All of this is occurring despite the fact that only one in 10 non-union workers say they want to unionize. What’s more, unionized companies invest less, are less competitive, and create fewer jobs than non-union companies. Given these facts, it’s no surprise that union membership has shrunk to just 7 percent in the private sector. Likewise, though, it’s not surprising that the Obama NLRB is digging in and trying to foist unionization on all companies while it still can.

Heritage Foundation: Big Labor Drags American Airlines into Bankruptcy,

American is at a disadvantage because of high labor costs, proving that in a competitive economy, unions can’t do much for their members without sending companies into bankruptcy.

US News: Out of Control NLRB Strikes Again,

The National Labor Relations Board is out of control, and it's time to slam the brakes on.

[. . .] it's a serious and well-thought out effort involving the NLRB, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the rest of the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies that have the power to cripple the U.S. economy—and which are trying to give the labor unions, radical environmentalists, trial lawyers, liberal activists, and the rest of the Obama electoral coalition what they want.

Wall Street Journal: The NLRB Putsch,

The descent of the National Labor Relations Board from independent referee to a wholly owned AFL-CIO subsidiary is speeding up. Now its two Democratic appointees are attempting to ram through a new rule requiring quickie organizing elections, with barely any notice and little consultation with its sole GOP member.

The Examiner: NLRB is out of control

Americans For Tax Reform: NLRB Suppresses Dissent to Ram Through Controversial Rule

The Tennessean: Bill would stop pro-union crusade; 'Big Labor' pulls strings with NLRB,

When it comes to our workforce, Tennessee has a history of making the right decisions. But now, as the country is mired in a deep recession and Tennessee hovers dangerously close to 10 percent unemployment, a bureaucratic agency in Washington with strong ties to labor bosses is subverting our state’s ability to decide what is right for our workforce.

LaborUnionReport.com: ‘It’s Time To Close The NLRB For Renovations’ Also at RedState: ‘It’s Time To Close The NLRB For Renovations’

Big Government: Action Alert: Rein In The Rogue NLRB

"Ambush Elections"

Corporate lobbyist focus groups came up with the term "ambush elections" to fight the NLRB. Google now showes more than 33,000 website references to "ambush elections".

American Spectator: Ambush Election Prevention.

Competitive Enterprise Institute: Congress, NLRB to Vote on "Ambush Elections",

To prevent the NLRB from passing these “ambush election” rules, U.S. Rep. John Kline (R-MN) drafted the Workforce Democracy and Fairness Act. This bill would ensure that the union election process guarantees fair periods of preparation and deliberation for employers and unions. Both the House vote on Rep. Kline’s bill and the NLRB vote on its proposed rules are scheduled for tomorrow.

The right-wing Washington Examiner: Big Labor pushes ambush elections

Etc. etc. etc. They have all the money in the world, and it buys a lot of noise.

Delta's Greed Helps Shut Down The FAA

Dave Johnson — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:32:13 -0400

You probably don’t know that another act of hostage-taking by Republicans is underway. They have shut down the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to help Delta Airlines in its battle to keep its workers from voting in a union. This is costing the government $200 million a week, more than 4,000 FAA employees have been furloughed, and as many as 87,000 construction workers and other contractors around the country are being laid off. The agency has been shut down for more than a week and so far the Republicans have refused to let it open before Congress leaves town for the summer. All this apparently so one company can keep employees who want a union from winning an election.

The FAA is the agency that regulates and overseas civil aviation. That is airports, airlines, pilots, employees, air traffic control, and other components of our aviation system. But the agency has been shut down. FAA inspectors and others are working without pay and paying for their own job-related travel. The shutdown is keeping the FAA from collecting federal taxes on airline tickets at a cost of $200 million in revenues each week even as the country struggles with deficits. Republicans said they don’t like deficits, but they clearly hate working people more – this shutdown adds $30 million a day, over $200 million a week to deficits.

A Shutdown Engineered For A Company

This shutdown of the FAA has occurred because of a form of “government shutdown” by Republicans, at the behest of Delta Airlines, over rules about unionization elections. Delta is in the middle of a fight to keep workers from being able to form a union. Delta wants the rules changes so a nonvoting worker, including one who might be sick, on vacation or otherwise absent from the workplace on election day, is counted as a “no” vote for unionization. Republicans inserted this anti-union language into the FAA funding reauthorization and are refusing to fund the agency unless Democrats agree to change these union election rules to help Delta.

Delta is apparently calling in favors to get this. According to Campaign Money Watch, in Is Delta Using Its Campaign Cash to Influence the FAA Debate?,

Delta's been spending money wisely to try to overturn the decision to let workers organize more easily. They spent $1.6 million on lobbying during the first half of 2011, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (Over the past ten years they spent at least $32 million to influence Washington.) Their PAC has given $826,243 to members of Congress since 2000. Adding additional incentive for Republicans in Congress to stand with them, Richard Anderson, Delta's CEO, made a $5,000 contribution to the Senate Republican's campaign committee earlier this year — apparently his first one ever.

Not Delta's First Anti-Labor Problems

This is hardly the beginning of anti-labor activities by Delta’s management. There has been a string of actions against its workers to the point that the government has had to step in. WSJ: Delta Probed on Union Drive,

The National Mediation Board said Wednesday it will conduct a full-blown investigation into allegations by a flight attendants union that Delta Air Lines Inc. interfered in last year's fractious organizing drive at the world's second-largest airline by traffic.

Joan McCarter elaborates in Daily Kos in June, Delta Air's anti-union practices earns federal probe,

Delta isn't just a crappy airline for passengers, it's a crappy employer, too. At least it is if you can judge by the lengths it has gone to to prevent fairness in the workplace. Around the World Blog has some of the gory details of Delta's extreme anti-union activities:

Open advocacy against fair American elections: Delta issued a press release commending the news that Darrell Issa's deranged Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will investigate the NMB’s 2010 decision to conduct union elections for air/rail workers the same as all other types of American elections. … Unfortunately for Delta, the facts aren’t on their side -- there’s no reason to conduct NMB elections differently from every other form of election, union or non-union, in the nation. ….
Bumping paying customers…so Delta employees can lobby: Delta is so committed to its anti-union ideology that it offered its employees the chance to travel to Washington to lobby against fair union elections under a provision that may bump paying customers. …

It goes beyond, however, a general fight against the rights of airline and railroad employees to organize, to a very specific fiht among Delta employees to organize. The airline's fight against that union drive has made the airline a target for federal investigators.

"Delta is like the Scott Walker of airlines." Joe Sudbay sums up Delta management's attitude at AmericaBlog:

"Delta is like the Scott Walker of airlines. It wants to be known as anti-worker. And, of course, the GOPers in Congress are great allies in that quest. They'll join together to fight this investigation and undermine NMB."

Two Senators Weigh In On Delta And FAA Shutdown

In an NPR report, Reid Says FAA Shutdown Will Continue; Blames House, Delta Airlines, Senate Majority Leader Reid explains,

"It's not a battle over essential air service. It's a battle over Delta Airlines, who refuses to allow votes under the new rules that have been passed by the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board]." The issue, Reid says, is Delta's "non-union" stance. The bill to fund the FAA, as crafted by House Republicans, includes language that sets new rules for aviation workers' votes on labor representation.

Senator Rockeffeller, in a USA Today op-ed, Rural America needs Essential Air Service, talks about Delta's attack on workers rights,

Unfortunately, the Republican House is holding the FAAhostage and using the EAS program to distract from its acknowledged goal: overturning a workers' rights rule that makes sense and has been upheld in court.

This ugly backroom deal is the work of Delta Air Lines' anti-worker allies in the House. They want to overturn a decision of the National Mediation Board that allows airline and railroad workers to organize with their votes counted the regular way — yes and no — rather than by counting people who don't participate at all in the election.

Delta lost in court, and so it lobbied the Republican House leadership for help. That now involves blocking critical FAA legislation and attacking the EAS program, which creates jobs and economic opportunity in small communities by giving business access to travel.

Delta Greed Also Not Good For Customers

Delta's management provides us an example of what happens to a company that prioritizes greed over all else. We see a company that is not just bad for its workers, it is also bad for its customers. Here are examples.

Greed: When the FAA shutdown meant that taxes would not be collected some airlines let their customers keep the money. But not Delta's management -- they decided to keep that extra cash for themselves. Memphis Business Journal, Delta raises ticket prices amid FAA shutdown,

Air travelers are getting a break from federal taxes as the Federal Aviation Administration has partially shut down, but some airlines, including Delta Air Lines Inc. , have raised fares and nullified the tax break. ... While some airlines will allow customers to take advantage of the tax break, others, like Delta, have increased fares following the shutdown...

Greed: Amanda Terkel at Huffington Post: Delta Charges U.S. Troops Returning From Afghanistan $2,800 In Baggage Fees,

Delta Air Lines is facing intense criticism after charging 34 U.S. soldiers returning from Afghanistan $2,800 in baggage fees.

The incident came to light on Tuesday after a couple of the new-media savvy soldiers recorded a video about their ordeal and posted it on YouTube.

Greed: According to Delta Nightmares, a website devoted to describing Delta's bad customer service,

I’m apparently not the only one who thinks so. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, Delta is having serious issues…ranking LAST among major carriers in customer service last year.

…among major airlines Delta finished with the highest rate of customer complaints filed with the Department of Transportation in the first nine months of last year, and was second-to-last in on-time arrivals and baggage handling through November. Delta also had the highest rate of canceled flights among major carriers in 2010, according to FlightStats.com.

Greed: Delta has earned the #65 place in BNet's Business Blunders of the Year for offering a $200 flight credit after losing a customer's dog.

"Delta told Josiah Paco had "escaped" and the best they could do is refund his $200.00 pet transportation fee, but only as a "credit" for future Delta travel. That doesn't do Josiah any good, as he's vowed to never fly Delta again"

Greed: just Google Delta Airlines bad customer service and see the thousands and thousands of results that pop up...

Part Of Larger Anti-Worker Campaign

This effort by Republicans in Congress is really just a part of a larger fight against workers' rights. As we have seen in several states, most notably Wisconsin, this is a coordinate, all-out attack by the larger corporations and their allies in the Republican Party. New Jersey, as just one more example, just passed, and Governor Christie signed an anti-union bill. In Ohio there is a campaign to repeal a law restricting collective bargaining rights. In Florida it is revealed that ALEC was behind the state's anti-union legislation efforts. In Missouri large protest turnouts beat back anti-union legislation.

FAA Still Shut Down

So the FAA is still shut down, possibly until September when the Congress returns. This is the Tea Party dream, government destroyed, financed and pushed by private companies, this time Delta Airlines. Delta is showing itself as a model of bad corporate behavior. Delta couldn't keep their workers from joining a union, so they try to get the laws rigged. Meanwhile the Republicans are showing themselves willing to contract out their legislative power to the highest bidders.

Delta Airlines is certainly not the only example of bad, greed-inspired behavior by corporate management these days -- far from it. But with the FAA shutdown over Delta's request for a rule to keep its workers from being able to unionize Delta is putting itself forward as a top example of bad corporate behavior.

Public Employees Offer Solutions. Examples.

Eric Lotke — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:41:37 -0400

Enough with blaming public employees for all of America’s problems. Last week public employees in Oregon marched on the state Capitol with a billion dollars worth of recommendations for government efficiencies and revenue enhancements. On Monday in Lansing, Michigan, public employees presented their own report, New Solutions for Michigan, with concrete suggestions on how state leaders can to reduce Michigan’s budget deficit and improve services at the same time.

Like any other job, the people doing the work know how it’s done and how to do it better. Members of SEIU Local 517 in Michigan started by sharing their own ideas for increasing efficiency, cutting costs and improving the quality of services. Soon they were joined by state employees united in UAW, AFSCME and MSEA, along with A Better Michigan Future, a coalition of 48 nonprofit organizations. Together they represented a broad range of agencies and interests, and over 30,000 state employees.

First, the workers called attention to excessive management. New Solutions for Michigan reveals that the state workforce averages fewer than six non-supervisory staff for every manager and/or supervisor (5.9:1) – well above other states’ norms.

The Michigan workforce is twice as top heavy as Texas, which won bipartisan support for legislation that set a minimum ratio of 11:1. Last year Iowa enacted legislation to increase the number of staff per manager from 14:1 in 2010 to 20:1 in 2016. Oregon, which is not as top-heavy as Michigan, is considering action on SEIU’s recommended target of 11:1.

Increasing the ratio in Michigan by just one staff per manager would yield a savings of $75 million annually in wages alone. Moving Michigan toward an 11:1 target in the long term could save hundreds of millions in annual spending without jeopardizing essential services.

Second, New Solutions for Michigan proposes that contract costs be examined along with state employee salaries and benefits. Using data newly available on the Michigan Transparency website, the report demonstrates that contract payments amount to 26 cents for every $1 of state spending, compared to 10 cents for state worker compensation. Michigan spends two-and-a-half times more on contractors than its own workforce, and has committed billions of dollars in long-term contracts with out-of-state firms.

State agencies routinely spend millions for contract services – on everything from computer programming to motor vehicle maintenance – to the tune of $1.1 billion annually (without counting community health or colleges). Workers estimate that a 10 percent cut in contract costs –by seeking savings from vendors or paring down contracted services – would save Michigan $110 million annually.

The report highlights two types of contracts, transportation and information technology, where contract vendors provide services that state employees can often provide at lower cost. Lead technicians in the Michigan Department of Transportation work side by side with contractors doing the same work – but the fully loaded cost of the state worker, with salary and benefits, is $54 per hour, whereas contractors range from $86 to $122 per hour.

David Baker, a member of AFSCME who works in a secure residential treatment facility for youth, is especially outraged at the contracting. He says contractors charge higher fees every year, and now they’re getting tax breaks too. When we’re cutting schools, police and other services, he asks “why are contractors not being asked to share in the sacrifice?”

The final recommendation pulls it all together – inviting collaboration with agency personnel at every level to search for new ideas. Gina Nelson, a caseworker with 34 years of experience with the Michigan Department of Human Services and a member of UAW, summed it up nicely. “For every idea like these,” she said, report in hand, “workers across our state have hundreds more.”

Governor Snyder said he wants to work together to fix Michigan’s problems. The workers are ready, willing and able. The new report is a strong step in the right direction. Let’s hope they can continue together.

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This article originally appeared at SEIU.

Does Government Know Who The Boss Is?

Dave Johnson — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:53:52 -0400

In Washington state workers are allowed to organize and form unions so they can win good wages and benefits. In "right-to-work" states like South Carolina, though, the government sides with big companies against their workers. (They used to have even harsher anti-worker laws there but the North stopped rounding up the escapees…)

Boeing workers in Washington go on strike, so Boeing sets up an assembly line in anti-union South Carolina and tells the Washington workers to take what they offer and like it. This is a standard move from companies these days, telling workers, “Take the cuts or we’ll close the plant and move your jobs somewhere where workers can’t do anything about it.”

Illegal, But So What?

You probably didn’t know this but retaliating against workers like that is against the law. It is even illegal to threaten workers in order to avoid a strike. It is illegal to fire or intimidate employees for organizing.

But companies go ahead and do these things anyway, and other illegal things, because no one does anything about it. And it has been so long since anyone did anything about it – just like with banking fraud or age discrimination – that it is now standard operating procedure. No one even remembers that it is illegal. No one cares.

Like age discrimination. Look at the faces of the employees behind President Obama when he visited Facebook and tell me if Facebook is the least bit worried about age discrimination enforcement.

Or this picture of the President visiting Google:

Workers' Rights A Thing Of The Past

With labor-law enforcement -- or even a sense that workers should have rights -- seemingly a thing of the past, these anti-worker sentiments are spreading. Recently, for example Arizona and South Dakota passed anti-worker laws, forbidding the formation of a union after a majority workers sign cards asking for one. Wisconsin and other states have passed laws restricting the labor rights of public-employees and restricting the ability to collect union-membership dues.

But THIS Time!

But THIS time something unusual happened. The government has actually threatened to enforce the law! The National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing and is suing Arizona and South Dakota for violating labor laws!

Boardrooms across the land are rising up in indignation. How dare the government threaten giant corporations that they might enforce the law? Don’t they know who's the boss? The Wall Street Journal explains, "Boeing management did what it judged to be best for its shareholders and customers and looked elsewhere. ... As Boeing chief Jim McNerney noted on a conference call at the time, the company couldn't have "strikes happening every three to four years." and calls Boeing's threats against unions a "reasonable business decision."

Conservative columnists and bloggers are earning their pay, writing indignant column after column about "union bosses," some even praising Ayn Rand. Conservative astroturfers (also) and politicians are not far behind them.

How dare We, the People (government) tell a business that it has to respect its workers and our laws!!!

Who Is Boss?

Do We, the People have the ability to enforce our laws? Do we have the power to tax corporations and the wealthy?

Do we have the power to protect the protections of democracy?

Democracy provides workers with safety protections and fair wages. We fought so hard to build and maintain this democratic society so that We, the People could share the benefits. We passed laws allowing union organizing, as a balance to the immense power of corporations and wealth. We passed laws prohibiting companies from telling workers, "Work for what we give you or don't eat."

And for a time this built our prosperity. But we let the protections slip, and allowed companies to cross borders to escape the protections democracy offers -- to non-democratic countries like China where workers have few rights, where pay is low, environmental protections practically non-existent. Companies locating manufacturing in places like have huge cost advantages over companies located in democracies that respect and protect the rights of citizens.

The Threat Against Us

Won't companies just move out of the state/country if we try to enforce labor laws or tax them? Won't China just stop selling to us if we apply a tariff to protect democracy, or try to enforce trade laws? Won't the rich just pack up and move or stop working if we don't just give them everything they want? Won't they move even more factories out of the city/state/country if We, the People try to demand our rights?

We Still Have The Power

Here's the thing. We, the People still have some power left in our hands. For one thing we still have a huge market. We still have the power to make demands on those who would like to sell into that market. And we can still choose to enforce tax laws, and wage laws, and tariffs, and labor laws, and trade laws to protect and strengthen what remains of our democracy.

But we can only do this if we decide to stand up for ourselves and do something about what is happening. We have to put our foot down, and demand that our politicians listen to We, the People and do what we say. It is time to get organized, to talk to neighbors and relatives, to show up at town hall meetings and protests. We can demand that news media begin to cover more than just the corporate/conservative viewpoint. We can go out and register others to vote, and get them to the polls, and demand that votes be counted accurately. We can take back our democracy and put We, the People back in charge.

Colombia FTA: Rewarding Promises Instead of Performance

Leo Gerard — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:22:56 -0400

Tragically, the government of Colombia exhibits the behavior of an addict. And, just as regrettably, the United States is co-dependent, so addicted to so called free trade that it plans to award Colombia an agreement based solely on promises.

Addicts always promise. They’ll stop, they pledge. Their co-dependents desperately want to believe, so they cooperate with the addicts’ demands.

Colombia, the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, has pledged to try to stop the murders to persuade Congress to approve a Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Promises, promises.

And the United States has agreed to accept those promises rather than demand performance before signing an FTA. American’s Wall Street banks and multi-national corporations crave another FTA so badly they will believe anything.

When the Colombia FTA was first proposed, Congress refused to approve it because so many trade unionists are assassinated each year by the Colombian military and paramilitary forces that the murders exceed the number of unionists killed in all other countries of the world combined. In 2007, the year that former President George W. Bush completed the agreement, 39 Colombian unionists were slain.

The Colombian government knew why Congress denied approval. It could have responded four years ago by protecting trade unionists and preserving their lives. It did not.

Instead, the murders increased. In 2008, 52 Colombian trade unionists were assassinated, one a week. In 2009, the number declined by 5 to 47, but it was back up to 52 last year. Six have been slain so far this year, including Hector Orozco and Gilardo Garcia, members of the agricultural union known as Association of Peasant Workers of Tolima, who were threatened by the Colombian military just before they were assassinated. Promises, promises.

In response to the concerns expressed by Congress about the murders, the newly-proposed FTA requires Bogota to improve safeguards for workers by April 22, and to develop a plan by May 20 to enhance the capacity of regional judicial offices because the murders of trade unionists go unpunished by the Colombian government – giving the killers an impunity rate of approximately 95 percent. And by mid-June, the Colombian government promises to increase penalties for threatening workers.

The government of Colombia could have completed all of those steps four years ago. It didn’t bother.

To this point, Congress has taken the moral high ground by refusing to approve the trade deal. It said, basically, as long as Colombia continued to countenance the slaughter of its community and labor leaders, Afro-Colombians and indigenous people, America would not give it special treatment for trade purposes.

In addition, Congress recognized the FTA’s potential to devastate Colombian farmers. The FTA would speed forced displacement of Afro-Colombians and indigenous people by encouraging increased exploitation of their land by business interests, such as palm oil companies, half of which are owned by paramilitary groups. Expelling these farmers from their land would further swell Colombia’s internally-displaced population – the largest in the world at 4.3 million.

Making matters worse for Colombian farmers, the main U.S. beneficiaries of the FTA would be big agricultural companies which would be permitted to dump cheap, subsidized food stuffs into Colombia duty-free. This would result in farmers’ impoverishment and land loss because small growers would not be able to compete with the low-cost American produce. In Haiti and Mexico, domestic food production was wiped out by similar free trade agreements. It’s likely that Colombia would follow the path of Mexico, where, as the ability to grow legitimate crops became economically impossible, farmers turned more and more to producing illicit drugs. Colombia already produces as much as 80 percent of the world’s cocaine.

Business groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, protested the refusal by Congress to approve the FTA, contending that increasing American exports and jobs was more important than protecting Colombian lives and human rights.

The Chamber’s position is not only depraved, it’s based on flawed calculations of exports and jobs. Just like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and granting China entrance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Colombia FTA will cost America jobs and exacerbate the U.S. trade deficit.

Previous projections by the Chamber and the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that NAFTA and China’s WTO membership would improve the U.S. economy proved catastrophically off base.

When the U.S. signed NAFTA in 1993, it had a $1.7 billion trade surplus with Mexico. After the agreement, that surplus quickly morphed into a deficit, which ballooned to $64.7 billion in 2008. These annual deficits cost the U.S. 560,000 jobs between 1993 and 2004.

Similarly, the ITC predicted that the tariff reductions China offered when it entered the WTO would result in a trade deficit of $1 billion a year. Instead, between the years of 2001 and 2008, the actual result was deficits of $185 billion, and the loss or displacement of 2.3 million American jobs.

The U.S. already runs a trade deficit with Colombia. It was $1.86 billion in 2009. The Economic Policy Institute calculates that the proposed FTA with Colombia would nearly double that trade deficit by 2015, which would cost the United States another 55,000 jobs.

Frankly, the EPI calculation, which factors in effects on trade like currency manipulation, is far more credible than the ITC and Chamber reports, which ignore these issues.

Bogota wants the FTA because it believes the deal will be good for Colombian business interests. One immediate bonus, for example, is that the FTA would eliminate tariffs on 80 percent of Colombia’s exports to the U.S.

To get what it wants, the Colombian government is willing to say anything. Just like an addict. Promises, promises. The Colombian government’s past performance shows its pledges to protect workers from assassination are empty.

America must reject the role of co-dependent. It must demand the proof of performance before rewarding the government of Colombia with an FTA.

Without proof of performance, the government of Colombia will get away with murder. It will export more of its goods – crude oil, coffee, fruit and flowers -- to the U.S. And unwitting Americans will buy more blood red Colombian roses.

17 Rooms and What do You Get? Apparently, a Workforce in Rebellion

Dmitri Iglitzin — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 21:38:55 -0400

Statistics are one thing; people are another.

According to a 2009 report in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine, hotel employees, and especially housekeepers, have relatively higher rates of occupational injury, and sustain more severe injuries, than most other service workers. This was not a surprising conclusion. A 2005 survey of 941 hotel room cleaners found that during a twelve-month period, 75 percent experienced work-related pain, 83 percent report taking pain medication for discomfort due to work, and 62 percent reported work-related pain that forced them to visit a doctor.
There is a reason for this, of course. The work of hotel employees and housekeepers is not only tedious and badly compensated, it can be extremely physically demanding. Cleaning 15 rooms in eight hours, which is the standard in quality hotels, is hard, hard work. Doing it under pressure makes it worse.

And when a hotel decides to up its profits by increasing the number of rooms that need to be cleaned by each housekeeper each shift from 15 to 17, as both the Sheraton Anchorage and the Anchorage Hilton hotels did in 2009, the problem gets exponentially worse. As a housekeeping employee at the Sheraton explained in March of 2010:

When they increase the job, we have to do more work with our hours. We are not able to take our breaks, because we are just running, running, to try to finish our work, and that leads you to injure yourself. You bump your elbows and you bump your knees. When you are stripping the linen off the bed, you can easily hurt yourself badly. It happened to me three weeks ago. I was running, I smashed my fingers trying to close the closet. I smashed three fingers because of that.

A former housekeeper at the Hilton hotel, Blanca Garcia, explained:

I worked for 15 years at the hotel and never had an accident. Only last year [2009], with the workload now being 17 rooms -- I needed to hurry up, hurry up, and I slipped on the floor and my knee got broken.

Nationally, hotel employees have fought back against this type of speed-up through organizing, protests, and appeals for public support. They have often done so with the support of the hotel workers’ union, UNITE HERE! Employees of both the Sheraton and the Hilton hotels in Alaska have played active roles in this effort.

Like so many companies faced with requests and demands from their workers for better treatment, however, the Sheraton, in particular, refused to tolerate that dissent. According to the enforcement arm of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency which oversees private sector labor relations, the Sheraton has, since approximately October of 2009, committed a whole host of unfair labor practices, including:

• unilaterally eliminating the workers’ health benefits plan;
• improperly installing and operating surveillance cameras;
• outsourcing workers’ jobs and duties;
• interrogating workers regarding their support for their union;
• threatening workers for supporting the union; and finally
• declaring that the Sheraton was now a “non-union” hotel and refusing to bargain further with their union.

The Sheraton also fired four hotel employees outright for handing out pro-union flyers in front of the hotel -- something the workers were clearly within their legal rights to do.

Not surprisingly, the NLRB found that these terminations were unlawful. And the hotel’s original decision to increase the number of rooms hotel employees are expected to clean each shift from 15 to 17? The NLRB says that that was unlawful, too.

But the wheels of justice in the world of employee rights grind exceedingly slowly, when they grind at all. The first legal charges were brought against the Sheraton by the NLRB on May 28, 2010, and nearly a year later, that prosecution has still not been concluded. While pressure from the NLRB forced the Sheraton to bring the four fired workers back to work in July of 2010, five months after the date of their termination, the Sheraton has not stopped, much less remedied, any of its other unlawful behavior.

Instead, the Sheraton has ramped up its attack on both its workers and their union. The Sheraton first sued the workers’ union for “defamation,” and for engaging in a boycott of the hotel, a boycott it claims has cost it in excess of $630,000. Then it sued the NLRB itself, asserting that the federal government, by finding merit in the workers’ many claims, had itself violated the law. That last lawsuit was dismissed outright by a federal judge in Anchorage, just five weeks after it was filed.

The slogan of the Alaska Cabaret, Hotel, Restaurant and Retailer's Association, the hotels’ trade group, is "Strength Through Unity.” So far, however, it is the housekeeping employees of the Sheraton, not the hotel itself or its corporate partners and allies, who have showed remarkable resilience in the face of almost insurmountable odds. As Ana Rodriguez, a union committee member and recently fired Sheraton housekeeping supervisor, stated:

We’re not asking for anything we don't deserve. We’re not asking for extra stuff, just to keep what we have.

It seems that when you are being required by your employer to clean 17 rooms in eight hours, day after day, standing up to your employer and asserting that you are a person deserving of a decent wage, benefits, and working conditions, and not merely a statistic in the annals of journals of occupational health, is a necessity, not a choice.

Dmitri Iglitzin is a partner with the firm of Schwerin Campbell Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt, LLP, in Seattle, Washington, a frequent commentator on labor matters, and legal counsel to UNITE HERE Local 878, which represents workers at the Sheraton Anchorage and Anchorage Hilton hotels.

False Fear: Cyborgs Instead of CEOs

Leo Gerard — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:43:09 -0400

The nightmare for far too many is Cyborgs. The public fears HAL, the 2001 Space Odyssey computer that killed astronauts rather than forfeit its objective.

So terrified of the sentient machine, citizens overlook the allegory. The soft-spoken, reasonable-sounding HAL behaves exactly like a greed-driven, multi-national corporation. The corporate mission is profit. With 29 workers massacred in a Massey mine explosion and 11 slain in the BP oil rig explosion in just one month last year, greedy corporations have shown they’re willing to kill rather than forfeit their profit objective.

In America, the UK and Europe, the entities that should be feared -- greedy corporations -- are pulling politicians’ strings. Reckless speculation by multi-national financial corporations took down the world economy, creating the worst recession since the Great Depression. Governments – in the UK, Europe and America – used worker tax dollars to bail out the banks. Now those big banks are granting outsized bonuses and pay packages to their executives while demanding that governments balance recession-ruined budgets with cuts to social services, education, pay and pensions for government workers and worker’s rights to collectively bargaining for better lives.

Workers, students and pensioners in the UK and Europe have protested these measures for a year, from general strikes in Greece to national strikes in France. In the U.K. students, in the largest numbers since the 1960s, protested education fee increases. Last weekend, the U.K.’s Trades Union Congress (TUC) organized the March for the Alternative in which a quarter million demonstrators walked for five hours in London to protest austerity imposed on workers while corporations get breaks.

The diamond-crusted rich on both sides of the Atlantic have determined that workers and the vulnerable will pay the consequences of the bankster-caused recession. And they’re exploiting the financial crisis to strip workers of collective bargaining rights, preventing them from ever regaining what they’ve lost.

That is what’s going on in Wisconsin -- and in a half dozen other American states where right-wing legislatures and governors are passing or pressing for legislation decimating workers’ rights to collectively bargain, even after workers accepted pay cuts to help balance budgets.

The disingenuousness of these right-wing governors in blaming public employees is clear. First of all, many of the state leaders granted huge tax breaks to corporations, lowering the states’ anticipated revenues, then demanded state workers bear the brunt of filling budget deficits.

Second, many of these governors didn’t stop at demanding public workers accept pay cuts. They also insisted on terminating workers’ rights to bargain for better pay, benefits and working conditions in the future. In addition, these right-wingers are meddling in the relationship between private sector unions and corporations. They want to forbid private employers from subtracting union dues from paychecks and remitting the money to the union. And they want to pass legislation intended to bankrupt unions and to prevent them from supporting progressive candidates who would treat workers fairly and protect their rights.

This is how it played out in Wisconsin: The governor, right-winger Scott Walker, gave corporations more than $100 million in tax cuts then decreed that public workers, such as teachers, nurses and librarians, take wage and benefit concessions. And Walker threatened to send out the National Guard, a state-run militia despite the name, to quell protests. This raised the specter of the May 4, 1970 massacre at Kent State when Ohio National Guardsmen called out by the governor gunned down unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War.

Contrary to Walker’s expectations, his threat energized opposition. Repeatedly, tens of thousands of workers, students, retirees, environmentalists, religious leaders and children poured into the streets and occupied the state capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin to protest the right-wingers’ plan.

Walker’s proposal passed in the state Assembly and needed a vote in the state Senate before it could get to his desk for final signature. To prevent a quorum needed to vote on the measure, all 14 Democratic senators left the state. They became known as the “Fab 14” as they remained holed up in hotels in Illinois for weeks, trying to negotiate a less draconian measure with the governor.

Although public opinion polls showed 60 percent of Wisconsin citizens opposed cutting collective bargaining rights, although workers already had accepted the pay reductions Gov. Walker had contended were vital to balance the budget, although protestors occupied the capitol building with a sit-in and sleep-in for weeks, the right wingers devised a scheme, in a secret meeting behind doors locked to the public, to vote without a quorum to deny government workers their collective bargaining rights.

In the midst of the dispute, Gov. Walker revealed his puppet masters – the Koch brothers, owners of the Georgia-Pacific paper company, with plants in the United States and the U.K. While contending he had no time to talk to progressive leaders or union officials about his union-busting legislation, Gov. Walker jumped on the phone for 20 minutes when told the caller was billionaire David Koch. The billionaire was Walker’s second largest campaign contributor; he provided $1 million to a fund to attack Walker’s opponent, and he bankrolls the right-wing’s right-wing, the Tea Party.

Events in some other countries show it doesn’t have to be this way. Brazil just passed a law giving unions a director’s seat on each board of a state-owned company. And in Australia, progressive labor legislation has enabled unions to increase membership by 20 percent in the past two years.
There are some signs of success in U.S. workers’ struggle to stop the corporate-backed right-wing campaigns. A Wisconsin judge has halted implementation of the union-busting measure because the way conservatives passed it appears illegal. And progressives are working to recall – or remove from office – eight right-wing Wisconsin senators who voted against worker rights. They’ve pledged to mount a recall campaign against Gov. Walker as soon as it’s legally possible.

In addition, labor activists and their supports have derailed proposed anti-union legislation in Indiana and Missouri.

That’s an indication of what coordinated coalitions of citizen protesters can do. That’s an indication that organized workers with their allies can take on global capital and win.

The difference between HAL and corporations is that HAL is fictional while greedy multi-national corporations are real threats. In the end, a human defeated HAL. In democracies, workers united with their allies can take on corporations and win as well.

Where the $ Is: Modern Maryland's Ancient Revenue

William Neil — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:31:13 -0400

WHERE THE $ IS: MODERN MARYLAND’S ANCIENT REVENUE

March 21, 2011

Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:

We are writing this post in the wake of the monumental union rally held in Annapolis on Monday evening, March 14, which drew some 15,000 people. Given the tremors the turnout set off, perhaps now it’s clearer why there is no legislative push to restore train service to the state capital.

Once again, as we reported in an earlier posting about the more tepid February 26th rally, there were no legislators who spoke, and, according to the Maryland State Education Association, none were invited. Governor O’Malley did manage to get in a brief speech near the end of the rally, following AFL-CIO President Trumka’s. Our translation of the Governor’s message is this: unlike Wisconsin, he’s not going to put public workers on the rack, or strip them of their bargaining rights, just give them a regrettable but necessary financial squeeze, because we all have to sacrifice and where else can we find the money?

Yes indeed, that seems to be the question of the day, nationally, and at the state budget tables: where, oh where, could the money have gone, other than to the pockets of public workers and their too generous pensions? Of course, as many on the left have said, we are not broke; we are a very wealthy nation, and Maryland is one of the very wealthiest states of that nation, standing 4th in median income, with Gov. Chris Christie’s New Jersey ranking second. In other words, we know perfectly well where the money has gone. Over the past 30 years, money and wealth has defied the old notion of gravity and flowed uphill to those who were already well situated near the crest of the slope.

Governor O’Malley likes to use the theme of One Maryland, the implication being, as he said Monday evening, that no one group is going to bear the brunt of the sacrifices, although the crowd at Lawyers Mall didn’t sound entirely convinced, chanting “Tax the Rich!” and “Keep the Promise.” They have a right to be skeptical, even as it’s true that Maryland is not Wisconsin and O’Malley is no Governor Walker. That’s because he, like the President, is not operating with a fully developed public philosophy and consequently their version of the political economy still overlaps in too many critical places with that of the fundamentalist Right. After all, the Center (think back to President Clinton) and the Right (Republicans and all the business lobbies except those for manufacturing) pushed neo-liberalism (another term for economic fundamentalism) down the throats of protesting labor, as Thomas Palley has reminded us all in his fine little essay America’s Exhausted Economic Paradigm (June, 2009). As if to rub salt into the wound of our very immediate troubles, Palley wrote that workers were trapped inside a four sided “policy box,” the four sides being “globalization, small government, labor market flexibility, and retreat from full employment.” Although they would probably protest, there is no doubt in our minds that Governor O’Malley and President Obama are still pushing in on workers from all four of the sides Palley has noted. Here’s the link to Palley’s work at http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/america_s_exhausted_paradi...

Because the Republican Right is always reading from a fundamentalist text (Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, 1944) they had no problem pivoting on the wreckage of the financial crisis to launch right into an attack on Keynesian economics, the role of the state and anything that looked like generosity towards public workers, the only unionized workers left standing after their decades of assaults on private workforce unions. As attentive readers also might have noticed, the Right is nothing if not comprehensive: they’ve gone after every possible leverage point the left might have used to turn the public discussion in a more progressive direction: gone after Van Jones and the Green Jobs response to Global Warming; gone after “Cap and Trade” even as it tried to please Goldman Sachs and the Wall Street banks’ derivative trading platforms; gone after ACORN and its inner city help to and voter registration of the poor; gone after Planned Parenthood and reproductive rights, again, especially those for the young and poor; gone after Public Broadcasting, the already greatly intimidated, meek voice trying to balance out Right Wing Talk Radio…there’s not much left standing, therefore, besides public unions…

But the Right still has a list of public functions they would like to privatize, and we’ve seen press accounts over the past year of a Maryland company that even specializes in privatizing public libraries. Topping the list of targets though, is public education, which plays out on so many planes to assist the Right: hedge fund honchos get to push private charter schools, break unions, reduce public pensions and therefore taxes, and attack job security and tenure, all at the same time. It all pushes in a conservative direction, aided and abetted by defensive liberals: who can be against excellence, defend incompetence hiding behind tenure, and merit pay? Who could deny that our schools and teachers could do better, especially in the inner cities? But wait a minute. Behind this whole line of reasoning is the assumption that failing teachers are the prime cause of failing schools, even under ghetto conditions, and we do mean ghetto, the Newark’s and the West Baltimore’s… Why aren’t schools seen as a reflection of society’s failings with race and poverty and the old crises of the inner cities, and as a mirror of America’s broader economic decline? Oh come now, the Right answers….these problems must reflect the failures of the liberalism, line item by line item, even if it was Albert Shanker, the AFT president from 1974 to 1997, who started the idea of charter schools, according to Diane Ravitch’s fine answer to the Right, The Myth of Charter Schools, (New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010.).

Ravitch’s article was a response to the documentary film Waiting for Superman, but her defense of public education and the role of teachers mirrors the chasms of the broader left-right fault lines in our society, now made so apparent by “Wisconsin.” She reminds us that “about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income…teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.” Yet that is precisely what we heard one of the national founders of “Teach for America” maintaining on the Charlie Rose show a month or so ago: that inspired teachers and administrators can overcome it all…all the destructive forces so ably laid out for us by David Simon and Edward burns in their tale of West Baltimore’s streets in The Corner…

Here’s how Ravitch maps it out for us: “There is a clash of ideas occurring in education right now between those who believe that public education is not only a fundamental right but a vital public service, akin to the public provision of police, fire protection, parks, and public libraries, and those who believe that the private sector is always superior to the pubic sector. Waiting for Superman is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the ‘free market’ and privatization.”

We ask our readers to, again, stop for a moment, pause as each of these individual state funding crises builds towards the grand one looming in Washington this April; stop and consider that every accountability thrust now directed at public school teachers could, just as well, and indeed, even more justly, be directed at America’s national business leaders, who, along with 99% of the economics profession, have presided over our nation’s economic decline, outlined above so succinctly by Thomas Palley. Accountability for failures? Which failures and whose accountabilities are the most significant? Teachers and their unions or Bill Clinton’s and Robert Rubin’s – to go along with Reagan’s, the Bushes’, Angelo Mozilo’s and Alan Greenspan’s?

Needless to say, we think the failures in the national schools (and Maryland should be the last state to take it out on their teachers and their schools) are reflections, rather, of the national economic failures over 30 years, and those failures can also be tracked by the transformations in the Democratic Party: from the party of the New Deal to its current manifestation as America’s second, and self-contradictory business party, one that puts the needs of upper middle class professionals and their view of the political economy far ahead of labor’s rank and file and the average, unorganized citizen, especially the 35.8 percent of the adult population who are no longer participants in the work force. That’s why this party’s President immediately placed a debt and deficit balancing commission on the nation’s agenda, even before he had adequately addressed the nation’s number one problem: tens of millions of missing jobs. He failed to realize, like most Democratic local and state elected officials who are required to balance budgets, that, given the very conservative bias in local fiscal proceedings, there had to be a deep and profound Washington Keynesian offset to what was inevitably to take place locally. There would be no other way to correct the deflationary downdraft unless citizens were to go to leaders like Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch in January of 2008, as we did, and ask him about the possibility of waiving balanced budget requirements under the duress of an economic emergency. Barring that, it was bound to be budget cuts versus revenue increases, where the Right has a 30 years “head start” and standing…and bound to be a wave of austerity instead of a wave of job creation, especially public job creation. This is political terrain that the Right has been licking their chops over for decades now. If you doubt that, please visit Bruce Bartlett’s ‘Starve the Beast’ essay from 2007, which covers the ground all the way back to Reagan, and opens its concluding paragraph this way: “Perhaps a future fiscal crisis will provide political cover for massive cuts in entitlement programs that would be politically impossible except in such dire circumstances.” (Here at http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=641).

But it gets worse, given Maryland’s democrats’ participation in these trends, and intensified by their proximity to the “Beltway” Insiders’ influence, as Christopher Hayes fine piece in The Nation, “Why Washington Doesn’t Care About Jobs,” shows. Hayes tells us that college graduates have a much lower unemployment rate than the rest of the nation, and that the DC metropolitan area, in turn, being a vast gathering of professionals and college graduates, has the lowest in the nation. He goes on to make another crucial linkage, crucial for that evolution of the Democratic Party away from its New Deal days: “…our system is responsive only to voices at the top of the social pyramid – the bankers and businessmen who are raking in record bonuses and the professional upper middle class, which is recovering much faster than the nation as a whole…” Going further, he cites a political scientist’s finding that “‘when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans.’” Following some of the same reasoning, and going after the same indifference, Paul Krugman reminded us of the consequences in his column from March 18th, “The Forgotten Millions” Here they are at http://www.thenation.com/article/158992/why-washington-doesnt-care-about... and

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/18krugman.html?partner=rss&emc...

And that is the background, and the Introduction, to the subject line of our posting, why it is that Maryland can’t raise the revenue to balance its budget and meet its pension obligations, obligations which George Lakoff has reminded us are “deferred payments for work done,” by bringing its ancient (1947) sales tax up into the modern era. That year of the sales tax’s origin, the year of “reigning in” labor with the Taft-Hartley Act, after the greatest strike wave in American history in 1946, was a signature year for the old industrial economy that was based on making things, and not the rise of the service economy that would famously follow its fall, dating, arguably, from the mid-1970’s.

How out of touch is Maryland’s ancient sales tax? So out of touch that out of 168 categories of services which might be included in a sales tax – Maryland taxes only 39 of them – less than a quarter. And which services does Maryland leave out, according to the Puddester Commission findings from 2002? Why it leaves out precisely those professional, modern services that stand in such close proximity to the upper middle class profile of the New Democrats and New Democratic Party made by Bill Clinton & Company: Business Services, Information Services, Professional Services, Transportation, Financial Services…trailing off into the more mundane “Personal” and Repair Services….add them together and the Puddester Commission found missing annual tax revenues to be $1.6 billion to $2.2 billion. And let’s not be coy here; hiding amidst the Commission’s more generic categories are the hints as to why the legislature has so much trouble expanding its reach: these are accounting, engineering, legal, advertising and political “consulting” services, aren’t they?

Yet these would also be the very tax categories that would help make what is a currently a regressive tax much more progressive, because, even though they would be used occasionally by citizens from the lower and middle portions of society, they are used on a much more frequent basis by the participants in the upper middle stretches of our economy.

Indeed, we had a very high ranking legislative leader tell us, after we posed the question in a meeting in January of 2008, that these categories would never even be brought up, never put on the table – the implied, but unstated reason being the professional and business composition of the legislature itself. And there you have it: a very succinct, yet very instructive lesson in the basics of political economy, circa early 21st century.

And is that perhaps why Governor O’Malley’s signature legislation for 2011 is not a bill to bring the Maryland sales tax into the 21st century, but one rather to create yet another Maryland “venture capital fund,” one he hopes, yes, fairly, to create jobs, and replenish the already existing but depleted ones, but one that is quite convoluted and pitched towards the same upper middle class professionals that now tilt the Democratic Party towards the Republicans, and not their own traditional base. Once again, it’s Biotech! and IT!, not WPA and CCC.

So below, please find our little report, submitted to a Progressive Neighbors working committee back in July of 2008, but never really put on the table by progressive groups in Maryland. We urge our readers to share it with you own representatives in Annapolis. And please don’t misunderstand us. We fully support the push for Combined Reporting, but note that even at its most optimistic projections, that’s not a game changer in scope, although it is a good lesson in political economy and how wealth and income is hidden. And we also fully support the efforts of the Fund our Communities groups, with the caveat that abandoning futile Empire maintenance efforts is only the beginning; money not spent on military-industrial Keynesianism doesn’t mean that the Republican Right nor Democratic Center will necessarily agree to spend it on better alternatives…as the current “austerity” debates in Washington amply demonstrate.

That’s hard to believe, given the unemployment situation, but there it is. Progressives have a new political economy to build, and need to construct a philosophy to stand behind it. Even when some of them come together over the right direction, such as at The Campaign for America’s Future’s “Summit on Jobs,” (March 10, 2011, at the National Press Club), it’s pretty clear that they don’t have a common text or even texts (please understand that this is very different from elevating something to be “The Text.”); they’re all about organizing a movement, all urgency and alarm and energized by the Wisconsin moment, but it’s not matched by clarity in philosophy or political economy – not yet, anyhow. The best of the conference, we thought, were: the speech by Leo Hindery, Jr., a Democratic private equity fund investor who called for, among other things, a new WPA for jobs and putting America’s workers first (reminding us that for every person “officially” listed as unemployed, there is another ignored by the statistics, bringing the total to 30 million, and the rate to 20%, not the official 8.9% or so…); the Rev. Paul H. Sherry’s reference to FDR’s “Second Bill of Rights,” from 1944 and last, but not least, Van Jones’ call for a combination of individual hard work, of the “bootstrapping” he learned from his father – but – and a very crucial Social Democratic “but” it is – bootstrapping that’s met with a social “ladder,” the means of ascent to meet the will to ascend – the only way to get out of the very deep economic hole our nation’s economic leaders (not the teachers or other public employees) have dug for us. Right now, without a massive commitment to jobs, including public jobs, there is no meaningful ladder. We also like the way he addressed the Tea Party and their values, their definition of “Liberty” which leaves out “…and justice for all.” Here’s the pathway to the speeches we heard, at
http://ourfuturedotorg.blip.tv/?sort=date;date=;view=archive;user=ourfut...

And, as a proper lead-in to what we wrote almost three years ago, here is the New York Times’ front page article from just a few weeks ago, “Majority in Poll Back Employees in Public Unions.” Aside from that headline finding, the Times/CBS poll also found that “those polled preferred tax increases over benefit cuts for state workers by nearly two to one.” Here at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01poll.html

MAKING MD’S SALES TAX MORE PROGRESSIVE
Bill Neil
July 2008

In the complex budget maneuvering of 2007-2008, the Maryland Legislature chose to raise the sales tax from 5% to 6% with the expected revenue increase to be $687 million in FY 2009. Based on 2007 numbers, the MD sales tax raised 3.62 billion dollars, 27% of the state’s general revenue, second compared to the 7.04 billion and 52.4% raised by the personal income tax (and just $598 million and 4.5% raised by corporate income taxes) Although Governor O’Malley extended the services taxed to four new categories, it was not a very bold effort and ended up targeting a “weak lobbying link” – computer services – which then rallied to repeal its inclusion. The significant thing here was the potential revenue raised by just this one category of service: $207 million. It is suggestive of Maryland’s deeper failure, to extend the sales tax base from its 1947 starting point of taxing only tangible goods, to capture the vast changes since then in an economy which has become more and more service oriented.

National tax studies indicate about 168 categories of services which might be included in a sales tax – and Maryland taxes only 39 of them. In the fall of 2007, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities proposed taxing services such as cable and satellite TV, auto repairs, interior decorating, pet grooming, and country club memberships, which they say would have raised an additional $163 million. The list again hints at the unwillingness to take on the tough lobbies and therefore the big numbers: accounting, engineering, legal services, advertising. As a matter of fact, I have been unable to find even studies which would tell us what each of these services would generate if included in the sales tax. The closest we have, using broader categories which don’t highlight these services, comes from the Puddester Commission from November of 2002: Its list of revenue to be raised by “Taxation of Services” reads as follows:

“Business Services” - 600-700 million
“Information Services” – 325-385 million
“Professional Services” – 200-260
“Transportation” - 200-250
“Financial Services” - 150-230
“Personal” - 75-115
“Repair Services” - 50-80
_______________
Total Revenue from taxing “these” services: $1.6-2.2 Billion

House Bill 448 from 2007 started to head down this path. It proposed 30 new services to be included under MD’s existing 5% sales tax, and the revenue generated would have been an additional $657 million – without raising the rate to 6%. A sampling of the new services in the bill: auto repair and services, parking, barber and beauty salons, docking and boat services, engineering, storage, (shoe repair!), tax preparation and locker and storage facilities…..personnel and temp. Agencies….the numbers raised on certain services are impressive: engineering: $82.8 million; personnel and temp. $65.7 million.

This leads me to the conclusion that Progressives should keep the impressive categories from House Bill 448, drop the silly ones like shoe repair, and add advertising, accounting, legal, management and p.r

The obstacle is political: to get a legislature full of lawyers and accountants and sensitive to the lobbying power of the other big services named above (real estate-advertising), to even consider producing a study showing what the excluded services would raise in revenue. (Personal note: I’ve heard a high ranking state leader say these categories would never even be brought up, never put on the table, in answer to me directly raising the question in January of 2008).

Who has pushed in the Past: Progressive Maryland listed the same list as I have above from the Puddester Commission in their “Fiscal Crisis Briefing Book” from 2008, but it was near the end of a long document and did not seem to be a high priority.

Another Approach: There has been some discussion in Annapolis of enacting a Gross Receipts Tax, which 7 states have some variation of: Del., Kent., Mich., New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and Wash. – which functions almost like a sales tax on the purchasers of services as well as goods. Economists don’t like the pyramiding effect: many of our “hollowed out” business entities purchase accounting, advertising, etc. services from outside firms and each time they bought them, they would be hit by this tax…so this is a big obstacle…and progressives don’t seem too high on this approach, nor many economists. In a phone conversation I had with Neil Bergsman of the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute (July 10) he favors, if we want to head down this route of taxing services, that the legislature bring all services under its sales tax – a kind of grand House Bill 448, and then enumerate which categories and exemptions it feels would be necessary to make it function well. I might add that part of the political trade-off in Annapolis might well be to reduce other corporate taxes if either this grand inclusion of services or the Gross Receipts Tax is enacted. Illinois considered the GRT approach – 1-2% would raise 6-8 billion…but it was not enacted.

Until the next post, all the best to our readers…

Bill Neil
Rockville, MD

PS Although it’s very late in the current (March, 2011) budget negotiations in Maryland, another pathway which leads directly from the answer to the question “Where did the money go?” is that the maldistributions of the past 30 years can’t be reached by just taxing income, you have to look at the different forms and places where wealth is stored (and hidden). That leads to the consideration of a surcharge on wealth, broadly defined, not income. An obscure “redistributionist” named Donald Trump suggested that a few years ago, at the national level. His is not the greatest recommendation we can think of, but The Donald just might have some idea of where “it is stored.”