It's been more than a year since union workers at Verizon went back to work after a two-week strike. But it's only now, after continuing negotiations, that their unions, the Communications Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, have reached a tentative deal with Verizon. According to the CWA:
Highlights of the new agreement include:
Preservation of existing job security language, including a prohibition on layoffs of workers hired before 2003 and restrictions on the company’s right to relocate work out of the region.
Preservation of provisions of the contract which restrict the company’s right to reassign workers long distances from their homes.
Preservation of the existing defined benefit pension plan for all current employees.
The workers at Verizon Wireless negotiated a contract containing no concessions and substantial wage increases.
The first word from a union on a tentative deal will tend to emphasize wins and say little about concessions, but these points do hit Verizon's major concession demands. Even if there are in fact concessions elsewhere in the contract—for instance, what about a defined benefit pension plan for future employees?—the workers are clearly getting more than Verizon wanted to allow. The 43,000 workers affected by the contract will vote on it over the next month.
The past two years have been a time of many sports lockouts, and the most lockout prone of all, the National Hockey League, got into the game this week. The NHL locked out players in 1993 and in 2004-2005, when the league missed an entire season. This time, it's the same old story as in the recent National Football League and National Basketball Association lockouts—as in all lockouts, really. The owners think they can get more money by refusing to negotiate and not letting workers work:
Despite the N.H.L.’s record financial growth in recent years, which reached $3.3 billion in revenue last season, the dispute centers on the owners’ wish to reduce the amount they pay the players. Under the expiring contract, players received 57 percent of revenue. The owners’ latest offer would leave them with 47 percent at the end of a six-year agreement, the equivalent of a 17.5 percent pay cut. The players have offered to accept roughly 53 percent.
The players accepted a giant pay cut at the end of the 2004-2005 lockout, they're willing to take a significant pay cut this time, but it's not good enough for the owners. The owners have hugely valuable teams with huge revenues. But they want more. So screw the workers, screw the fans, they're going to take more, one way or another.
It's not just players and fans who are being hurt by this, either. At least one team has laid off staff, and the league is cutting its workers' hours and pay by 20 percent and isn't ruling out layoffs. Many players, meanwhile, are heading overseas to play in other leagues.
Let's step into the wayback machine with Mr. Peabody and take a look at Scott Walker's statements about Wisconsin's finances.
"I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker said. "We are broke in this state. We have been broke for years. People have ignored that for years, and it's about time somebody stood up and told the truth. The truth is: We don't have money to offer. We don't have finances to offer. This is what we have to offer."
Fact-checkers far and wide called BS on that little lie, calling it straight-up false.
Now, fast forward to today.
For the second time in three years, the state is giving the BMO Harris Bradley Center a $5 million grant for much-needed maintenance work.
So ... a basketball arena rates a $5 million dollar grant, but our schools ...
“There is no doubt Wisconsin has deprioritized K-12 spending,” says Sen. John Lehman, D-Racine, who chairs the state Senate’s Committee on Education and Corrections. “Education took the biggest cuts in the history of the state” over the 2011-13 biennium.
How drastic were these cuts? Wisconsin ranked 4th in the nation when it came to cutting education funding.
Mitt Romney must have really liked his campaign event using coal miners as a backdrop after their employer, Murray Energy, made attendance mandatory and unpaid, though they lost paid work time to attend. Romney liked it so much, in fact, that his new ad attacking President Barack Obama for supposedly being anti-coal uses images of Romney standing in front of those miners as they lose pay to be forced to listen to him.
The substance of the ad is ridiculous, of course. Obama has hardly been anti-coal—he just hasn't been as much of an enemy of renewable energy as the right would like to see—and the market is what's really hurting coal. But those images of coal miners forced by a mine owner with a dire safety record to give up pay to attend a Romney campaign event inadvertently reveal the true place workers would have in a Romney economy.
Mitt Romney’s campaign is airing two ads in eastern Ohio that include footage of the coal miners who lost pay because he campaigned at their mine. [...]
The Romney campaign confirmed the miners shown in the two ads were the miners from Romney’s campaign stop.
Mitt Romney has made President Barack Obama's supposed disrespect for business owners a cornerstone of his campaign over the past month, but it doesn't seem to be having much of an effect. According to a new poll, Obama holds a solid lead over Romney among small business owners:
Nearly half of small business owners (47 percent) plan to vote for a second term for the president, compared to 39 percent who plan to vote for Mitt Romney, according to a new poll conducted by the George Washington University School of Political Management and Thumbtack.com. Even more importantly, perhaps, the president is perceived as more supportive of small companies by the most coveted group of voters — independents.
That's in contrast to a poll done by Manta in August, which found Romney with a large lead. Both polls were conducted online among members of competing small business-focused websites—Thumbtack and Manta—so all the caveats that go with online polls and hard-to-poll groups of people apply here. That said, the new poll surveyed more than three times as many people and was done with George Washington University collaboration.
Respondents to the Thumbtack-GWU poll, more than 95 percent of whom had 10 or fewer employees, listed the economy, and especially unemployment and the job market, as their top concern, ahead of partisanship. Just 3 percent said taxes were their top issue.
The Chicago Teachers Union's House of Delegates met Tuesday afternoon and voted to suspend the strike that began last Monday, after having taken the past two days to discuss a tentative deal with the teachers they represent. Chicago Public Schools will reopen Wednesday, after:
Delegate Mike Bochner said “an overwhelming majority” voted to suspend the strike.
“I’m really excited, I’m really relieved,” said Bochner, a teacher at Cesar Chavez elementary.
It was standing room only inside Operating Engineers hall at Cermak and Grove for the 3 p.m. meeting.
Hoots, hollers, applause and what sounded like a cowbell erupted multiple times from inside.
Teachers had been fighting for, and have a tentative deal that makes significant gains on, classroom conditions and school staffing, as well as securing a teacher evaluation system less based on standardized test scores than Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his school board had been pushing for and defeating merit pay (an idea that's a proven failure yet continues rising, zombie-like).
The House of Delegates having suspended the strike, the tentative deal now goes to the union's membership for a vote.
When Mitt Romney was caught on video telling big donors about his trip to China to buy a factory where "we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10 rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room," he obviously wasn't talking in hypotheticals. He's moved jobs to China, to factories like that even if he didn't end up buying that specific one. And there's maybe no one in the country for whom Romney's description of that factory hits closer to home than the workers at Bain-owned Sensata Technologies, who are fighting to keep their own jobs from being sent to China.
The Sensata workers have repeatedly appealed to Romney to help them, with no answer beyond a campaign worker calling the police on them when they tried to deliver an open letter. And it's not just that Romney's former company controls Sensata—Romney personally has investments in Sensata.
A group of the Sensata workers have been camping out outside their factory for a week. These are workers who have, in some cases, worked at the plant for decades and now find themselves counting down the weeks until they're unemployed and their jobs are being done by Chinese workers they had to train to replace them. They have houses that they don't know how they'll make the payments on and children they're worried may not be able to finish college. They're facing "going from a well-paying job that got a lot of satisfaction to it, and going to a future that is nothing short of bleak."
In China, it looks like young women working for a pittance and living in overcrowded dorms. In the United States, it looks like unemployment and foreclosure. It's not Chinese workers versus American workers. It's people like Mitt Romney seeking a profit at the expense of workers in whichever country.
He's running for president, for Pete's sake, and he's still profiting from sending jobs to China. Quite the advertisement for all the jobs he'd create as president.
California Republicans haven't been faring too well in recent elections. But they have a shining hope for their future in Proposition 32, a ballot initiative pretending to be about getting money out of politics that leaves giant openings for corporate political spending while effectively defunding unions for political purposes.
The new ad, above, from opponents of Prop. 32, effectively spells out who's behind this; as a San Francisco Chronicleeditorial urging a no vote on the initiative puts it,
Proposition 32 purports to be an even-handed attempt to reduce the influence of special interests in California. It is anything but balanced. The most telling way to assess the motive and the effect of this initiative is to follow the money.
The bulk of the financial backing for Prop. 32 has come from conservative ideologues who have made no secret of their desire to tamp down the clout of labor unions. A group linked to the billionaire Koch brothers just poured $4 million into a committee just formed to help pass Prop. 32.
The fight against Prop. 32 is a fight for democracy in California.
How many beloved American brands have private equity firms completely trashed? Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers union members at Hostess have rejected the company's "last, best, and final" contract offer with a 92 percent vote. Union President Frank Hurt says:
“Our members have seen this company squander more than $50 million that it was contractually obligated to put towards our members’ pension. They have seen the company fail to invest in product development and new plant and equipment as was promised when the company emerged from its previous bankruptcy and for which our members made significant concessions.
“Our members have seen this company attempt to give millions of dollars in unseemly and unjustified bonuses to managers and supervisors in the midst of this bankruptcy. They have seen this company go through numerous CEO’s in the last seven years with not one of them having had any significant experience in the wholesale bread and cake baking business.
“Our members reviewed the analysis of this company’s business plan provided by a highly-respected financial analyst retained by the company which showed that the plan has little or no chance of succeeding in saving the business but would provide the investors with a windfall.
“Our members know that this is a company that is controlled by Wall Street private equity and hedge fund firms, whose sole objective is to maximize their own returns, not rebuild a company for the long haul.”
It's not just Hostess. Mitt Romney's now-infamous secret video was filmed at a fundraiser held by private equity manager Marc Leder, who trashed Friendly's.
A fair day's wage
Oh, Walmart. You suck so much in so many ways. Gawker's Hamilton Nolan has a farewell letter from a now-former Walmart employee and oh boy:
If you're ever in our store when the late night bi-weekly cleaning of the meat department cases takes place you'll learn first hand what a rotting corpse probably smells like..it should be done more often but no one wants to do it and the managers don't really give a shit to enforce it...this filthy cesspole catch basin of liquid blood scum is lurking about six inches below that package of hamburger meat you're about to buy, Mr and Mrs. Customer. Bon Appetit!!
Outsourcing in the fields is screwing farm workers the same ways it screws so many other workers: wage theft, lack of accountability, labor law abuses.
State and local legislation
Orange County, Florida, judges ruled Monday that a paid sick leave initiative should get a vote. But the judges also gave the county long enough to respond that the deadline for getting the initiative on the ballot could have passed. That deadline is today. If the county does not act and put the question on November's ballot, there's a chance the judges would order a special election. Predictably, businesses are insisting their very survival and ability to create jobs hinges on being able to make workers come to work to sneeze all over customers and their food.
Mitt Romney didn't just call 47 percent of Americans moochers while being secretly taped at a high-dollar fundraiser. He also described where he spent his career sending American jobs:
When I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people. And they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23. They were saving for potentially becoming married.
And they work in these huge factories, they made various uh, small appliances. And uh, as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with uh, with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 room, rooms. And the rooms they have 12 girls per room.
Three bunk beds on top of each other. You've seen, you've seen them? (Oh...yeah, yeah!) And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers. And, and, we said gosh! I can't believe that you, you know, keep these girls in! They said, no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in.
These are the labor conditions Romney and Bain were looking for to drive down costs. It's not clear if they actually followed through and bought this factory, but we know that moving jobs overseas was the business Romney and Bain were in. And Bain is still doing it, with the help of hefty investments from Romney. Right now, a group of workers in Illinois is pleading with Romney to keep their jobs at a company he's invested in from being sent to China.
I don't know how much American voters will care that Romney sees living 12 to a room, 120 to a bathroom, working for a "pittance" as a reasonable way for young Chinese women to live, or how much they'll care that he for one instant believed that guard towers and barbed wire are directed against people who want to get in to get jobs and not against the young women inside. But what every voter should remember is that creating those jobs and cutting good American manufacturing jobs is a big part of how Romney made (and continues to make) his hundreds of millions. And he's pointed to China as a model for the U.S. when it comes to job creation, saying that "They’re moving quickly, in part because the regulators see their job as encouraging private people." Encouraging the "private people" who own factories to make 120 of the meaningless people who work in the factories share a bathroom not just where they work but where they live.
And whether it happens by moving the jobs to China or moving Chinese practices to the United States, that's Mitt Romney's real vision for the American economy.
Appearing on the campaign trail in Ohio Monday, President Obama spoke about his administration's new trade enforcement action against China for illegal export subsidies on auto parts. Obama didn't hesitate to draw a strong contrast between his record on China and that of Mitt Romney:
"My opponent has been running around Ohio claiming he’s going to roll up his sleeves and he’s going take the fight to China," the president said to a crowd of 4,500 at a hillside park here. "Here’s the thing: his experience has been owning companies that were called pioneers in the business of outsourcing jobs to countries like China."
"Ohio," the president declared, "you can’t stand up to China when all you’ve done is send them our jobs."
Since the trade complaint was filed less than two months before the election, it's being reported in that light. Mitt Romney is calling it a "campaign-season trade case" that "may sound good on the stump," and the political press, always inclined to see any piece of news as election-related, is doing its share of "why now?" But it's not like this is the first American trade complaint against China under Obama. It's just the one you're hearing about, precisely because it is election season, and as White House deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said, "It’s not as if because we’re in the midst of an election that we should wait until next year to take these steps on behalf of American workers."
Workers do stand to benefit: According to the Alliance for American Manufacturing's Scott Paul, "We've seen imports of Chinese auto parts surge by 25 percent in each of the past two years. We've seen our trade deficit in auto parts with China grow nearly 900 percent in just 10 years," endangering more than 42,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.
This complaint isn't exactly a first, either. The U.S. had trade complaints against China on wind power subsidies and chicken tariffs in 2011. Earlier this year, the WTO ruled in favor of the U.S. on steel tariffs, and the U.S. filed a complaint against Chinese duties on American cars. Granted there's a whole lot more the administration could and should do to address trade issues with China, but an election season one-off this is not.
2:38 PM PT: In his complete remarks at that Ohio campaign event, President Obama made a strong case that this is not just an election season thing:
When other countries don’t play by the rules, we’ve done something about it. We’ve brought more trade cases against China in one term than the previous administration did in two. And every case we’ve brought that's been decided, we won.
When Governor Romney said that stopping unfair surges in Chinese tires would be bad for America, bad for our workers, we ignored his advice, and we got over 1,000 Americans back to work creating tires right here in the United States of America.
Chicago Public Schools management's attempt to get an injunction forcing the city's public school teachers to end a strike hit a roadblock Monday when the judge said he wanted to hold a hearing Wednesday rather than immediately on Monday. The Chicago Teachers Union had already said its House of Delegates would meet Tuesday, making Wednesday the earliest the strike would be called off by the union. Since the point of the injunction was to reopen schools earlier, a Wednesday hearing date may come after the fact.
The city claims the strike is focused on non-economic issues, which teachers are prohibited from striking over, and that the strike "a clear and present danger to public health and safety," with Mayor Rahm Emanuel accusing the teachers of using students as "pawns" because they have not ended the strike before seeing full details of their proposed contract.
Delegates just didn’t trust Chicago Public Schools not to try to slip one over on them if they called off the first CTU strike in 25 years without more study and discussion of the offer, [union President Karen] Lewis said.
“Please write ‘trust’ in big giant letters because that’s what the problem is,’’ Lewis said.
Considering teachers were stripped of a negotiated raise last year, their lack of trust is understandable. The idea of looking at details before making a decision may be foreign to Chicago School Board members, though; Joanne Barkan highlights a University of Illinois at Chicago Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education report (PDF) finding that not only do school board members typically not attend hearings on school closings, but don't even necessarily read transcripts of the hearings before voting on whether to close schools.
The union's 800 delegates are taking Monday and Tuesday to talk over the outlines of the deal with the members they represent; the details are expected to be finalized Tuesday, allowing them to vote on ending the strike based on more than just an outline. The union's entire membership will then vote on whether to accept the contract.
It's been more than a year since union workers at Verizon went back to work after a two-week strike. But it's only now, after continuing negotiations, that their unions, the Communications Workers ...
In September 2010, my home went into foreclosure.
In January 2011, I filed for bankruptcy.
In August 2011, the business I was working for (part-time--it never made it to full-time) shut down.
In ...
The past two years have been a time of many sports lockouts, and the most lockout prone of all, the National Hockey League, got into the game this week. The NHL locked out players in 1993 and in ...
President Obama has opened up a huge 14-point lead in Wisconsin, according to a new Marquette Laws School Poll.
Mitt Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan solidified the Badger ...
Cross-posted at Alevei .
I am a public-sector employee, a professor at a state university, a member of a labor union . The work I do has been described by a presidential candidate as
I ended up in this still active exchange. Will you help me bring #Leech out as the new hashtag to show who is ruining it for everyone else economically.
This is regarding the use of twitter by a ...
Life is great in the 47%.
Moochers of the World Unite!
Hallelujah! We're All Bums!
new verses by JayRaye
Oh, we were all working
And paying our tax,
And that's when Bain Capital
Gave us the ...
So I've written a lot about Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, Indiana, Connecticut, Wisconsin and Massachusetts because they are very important races. I will be writing my first diary on the Ohio ...
