Highlights of the new agreement include: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.
- 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.
![Washington Capitals player Alex Ovechkin](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6572/small/Alex_Ovechkin-.jpg?1348083679)
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.
![](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/5943/small/spalding_nbaball_hires.jpg?1347411604)
"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.
But, the Bradley Center, oh, wait, I am sorry the BMO Harris Bank Bradley Center (can't forget the company that just paid $1 million to slap its name on the building), can get $5 million to add the kind of amenities, such as more premium seating and retail space, that most modern arenas have.
Premium seating and retail space ... more important than education in Walker's Wisconsin.
About the only upside out of this is that some jobs will be created out of this (but wait, I didn't think government spending could create jobs).
![In a screenshot from a Mitt Romney ad, Romney stands in front of coal miners whose boss had made attendance at Romney's speech mandatory and unpaid.](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6556/large/Romney_with_unpaid_coal_miners.jpg?1348074282)
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.
10:31 AM PT: And the Ohio media is taking notice. The Columbus Dispatch writes:
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.
![U.S. President Barack Obama holds on as he is hugged and picked up by Scott Van Duzer at Big Apple Pizza and Pasta Italian Restaurant in Fort Pierce, Florida, while campaigning across the state by bus, September 9, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/5778/large/RTR37QIM.jpg?1347237169)
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.
![Smiling woman at a rally holding two signs, one saying "my public school teacher helped me succeed. Now I want the same for my students." The other saying "I work an average of 12-13 hours a day...all for my students."](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6059/large/CTU_rally_day_1_peoplesworld_2.jpg?1347548343)
Delegate Mike Bochner said “an overwhelming majority” voted to suspend the strike.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).“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.
The House of Delegates having suspended the strike, the tentative deal now goes to the union's membership for a vote.
![A sign outside the](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6400/large/Bainport_sign_cropped.jpg?1348001992)
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.
The new ad, above, from opponents of Prop. 32, effectively spells out who's behind this; as a San Francisco Chronicle editorial 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 fight against Prop. 32 is a fight for democracy in California.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.
![Hostess Twinkies](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6380/large/Hostess-Twinkies.jpg?1347982467)
“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.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.“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.”
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!!
- Warehouse workers in Illinois have joined the workers in California striking against Walmart-contracted warehouses.
- 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.
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.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.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.
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.
![President Barack Obama speaks at a campaign event in Golden, Colorado, September 13, 2012.](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/6336/large/Obama_Golden_CO_OFA.jpg?1347906848)
"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."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.""Ohio," the president declared, "you can’t stand up to China when all you’ve done is send them our jobs."
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 teachers and supporters on the picket line.](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://s3.amazonaws.com/dk-production/images/5812/large/CTU_picket_day_one.jpg?1347297800)
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.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.“Please write ‘trust’ in big giant letters because that’s what the problem is,’’ Lewis said.
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.
![RSS](http://web.archive.org./web/20120919211731im_/http://images2.dailykos.com/i/rss_icon.png)
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