First it was not following up on card check, and now, he’s selling unions down the river in the latest FAA authorization, which served to gut decades of labor law.
The labor movement seriously needs to start going totally “Club for Growth” on the Democrats in the primaries.
William Black makes the convincing case that the widespread abuse of contractors’ employees in the manufacture of Apple products is the product of deliberate management decisions:
Apple has released a report on working conditions in its suppliers’ factories. It highlights a form of control fraud that criminology has identified but rarely discussed. I write overwhelmingly about accounting control fraud because it drives our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The primary intended victims of accounting control frauds are the shareholders and the creditors. Other private sector control frauds target customers (e.g., George Akerlof’s 1970 article on “lemons”), and the public (e.g., the unlawful disposal of toxic waste, illegal logging, and tax fraud).
Anti-employee control frauds most commonly fall in four broad, but not mutually exclusive, categories – illegal work conditions due to violation of safety rules, violation of child labor laws, failure to pay employees’ wages and benefits, and frauds based on goods and loans provided by the employer to the employee that lock the employee into quasi-slavery. Apple has just released a report on its suppliers that shows that anti-employee control fraud is the norm. Remember, fraud is hidden and is often not discovered and Apple did not have an incentive to make an exhaustive investigation. Apple calls its inquiries “audits” and it is apparent that most of its information comes from reviewing written and electronic records at its suppliers. That is exceptionally revealing. The suppliers know that they can defraud their employees with such impunity that they don’t even bother to get rid of records that prove their frauds. Apple has resisted making public its suppliers and the report refused to identify which suppliers committed which violations – often for years despite repeated, false promises to end their anti-employee control frauds. Two other facts are evident (but not reported). First, Apple rarely terminates suppliers for defrauding their employees – even when the frauds endanger the lives and health of the workers and the community – and even where Apple knows that the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about these fraudulent and lethal practices. Second, it appears unlikely in the extreme that Apple makes criminal referrals on its suppliers even when they commit anti-employee control frauds as a routine practice, even when the frauds endanger the worker’s and the public’s health, and even when the supplier repeatedly lies to Apple about the frauds. Apple’s report, therefore, understates substantially the actual incidence of fraud by the 156 suppliers (accounting for 97% of its payments to suppliers).
The ATCA has been used in cases like this, and what is clearly a policy of deliberate blindness to these abuse by Apple, seems to me to bean opening for a very well deserved lawsuit.
There is a lesson to be learned here.
The first priority* of Democrats is to implement decent policy, and the first priority* of Republicans is to change the rules in order to strengthen their allies and diminish their opponents.
In the long run, the latter strategy gives better results.
Case in point, the Republicans in Indiana passing union busting right to work legislation:
Indiana became the 23rd state to pass anti-union “right-to-work” legislation on Wednesday and the first in the nation’s manufacturing heartland, dealing a blow to organized labor by allowing workers to opt out of paying union dues.
Indiana’s Republican governor Mitch Daniels signed the legislation into law immediately after it was given final approval in the state Senate, making Indiana the first state to adopt such a measure since Oklahoma did so a decade ago.
This is why Obama should have attempted to re-institute the fairness doctrine, and pass the Employee Free Choice Act (card check) when he had overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate in 2009.
If Democrats ever again have such a large majority, how about repealing Taft-Hartley, and adding the right to organize the workplace to the Civil Rights Act?
*OK, truth be told, the truth be told, the real first priority of all politicians is reelection.
Stewart looks at Foxconn and what it does to its workers in order to make the iPhone.
He plays it for laughs, but he absolutely nails just how horrific the conditions are, and how little we actually save for the pain that we inflict.
He takes a complex issue, researches it, provides documentary evidence, and puts it all in context better than anyone in the news media today.
He is a national treasure.
It’s just that, at least until November 2, Barack Obama is more scared of the Occupy movement than he is of the Republicans, hence his recess appointments today:
President Obama kicked off the election year aggressively, picking a fight with congressional Republicans by sidestepping the Senate to fill the top job at the government’s newly created consumer protection bureau.
He also filled three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, which referees labor-management controversies — a priority of his allies in labor unions.
The appointments Wednesday, which had been stalled in the Senate, came as Obama moved to make confronting Congress a central part of his strategy for reelection. His job approval rating remains low, but Congress’ standing is even lower — “as unpopular as Ebola virus” — as one administration aide recently put it. In a confrontation between the two, the president will have the upper hand, White House aides say.
Actually, the NLRB appointments might be more significant, because the Republicans had shut down the board for lack of quorum.
I don’t expect the CFPB doing much, because Obama was dragged into the entire idea kicking and screaming, and his closest financial regulation adviser, Tim “Eddie Haskell” Geithner, hates it, and with Elizabeth Warren effectively neutered by virtue of her running for Senate, which pretty much requires her to be in lock step with the Obama administration, I expect to see a remarkably passive posture from Richard Cordray.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, Barack Obama will do the right thing, once he believes that he has no alternative.
Case in point, the official drive to recall Koch sucker Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has officially begun, and right now the polls show a majority supporting kicking his sorry ass out:
Gov. Scott Walker has lost support among his Republican base, according to a poll released Tuesday that shows a majority of respondents want to recall him from office.
The Wisconsin Public Radio/St. Norbert College Survey was released the same day that Democrats, labor unions and others, angry over his moves to curb union rights, began circulating petitions to get the 540,000 signatures needed to force a recall election next year.
The poll showed that 58 percent of respondents believe Walker should be recalled from office. That compares with 47 percent who said in April that he should be recalled.
The growth in support for a recall came, surprisingly, from Republicans. In the spring, only 7 percent of Republicans supported recalling Walker but that grew to 24 percent in the fall. Support among Democrats held mainly steady at 88 percent in the spring and 92 percent in the fall.
Let’s be clear: The recall effort is not a done deal.
They have to collect 540,000 signatures in just 60 days for Walker, and smaller numbers for the State Senators that they are targeting, and the Republicans are in full whine mode over this, complaining that this is an “abuse” of the law.
Case in point, Wasuau Senenator Pam Galloway, who bleated that, “I don’t know why I am being recalled. I haven’t broken any laws.”
Ma’am, you are being targeted for recall because you are a jerk who does not represent the interests of her constituents. That’s what the law is for, we have the criminal justice system to handle corruption.
If I were collecting signatures for this, I would be seeing how to get people who are part of the “Occupy” movement involved.
And the initial claims numbers are basically flat, which is still too high for a meaningful recovery, with the 4-weeking moving average and continuing claims numbers falling slightly, but extended and emergency claims rose.
When juxtaposed with the non-farm payroll numbers for September being over 100,000 less than is needed to accommodate natural growth in the labor force, this is not good news.
The House just passed a bill which would castrate the National Labor Relations Board:
The House voted on Thursday to approve a Republican-backed bill that would prohibit the National Labor Relations Board from trying to block Boeing from operating a new $750 million aircraft assembly line in South Carolina. The largely party-line vote was 238 to 186.
Republicans denounced the labor board’s case against Boeing, asserting that the board was overreaching its authority and should not be dictating where companies can locate their operations. But many Democrats and union leaders condemned the legislation, arguing that it undercut an independent federal agency and favored Boeing, a potent lobbying force and prominent political donor.
Under the bill, an unusual effort to curb a federal agency’s actions in a pending case, the labor board would be barred from seeking to have an employer shut, transfer or relocate employment or operations “under any circumstances.”
The bill, called the “Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act,” is expected to face a battle in the Democratic-controlled Senate. In the House vote, the partisan divide was clear: only eight Democrats voted for the bill and only seven Republicans voted against.
Republicans have repeatedly criticized the board’s acting general counsel for filing a complaint against Boeing last April, accusing the company of building an assembly plant in North Charleston, S.C., as a form of retaliation against unionized employees in Washington State who have engaged in five strikes since 1977, including a 58-day-walkout in 2008.
The National Labor Relations Act prohibits companies from taking any actions, whether firing employees or relocating a factory, against workers for exercising federally protected rights that include forming a union or going on strike.
“F%$# the law, we’re for rich pigs,” so say the Republicans.
The management at Boeing Publicly Stated that they were establishing a factory in South Carolina in retaliation for earlier (legal) strikes. If there is no sanction allowed for blatant and admitted law breaking, it will get worse.
Then again, the Republicans don’t think that rich people should be prosecuted for breaking the law.
‘Phant John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has decided that it’s too politically costly to shut down the FAA over his desire for union busting:
Unions were breathing a sigh of relief Friday morning after House Republicans punted a contentious anti-union issue preventing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration to the end of December, providing back pay to agency workers and giving opponents more time to organize and fight GOP-backed anti-labor provisions.
Rep. John Mica (R-FL), who chairs the the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, introduced a clean short-term extension of the FAA through December providing back pay to workers who were furloughed for nearly two weeks during a partial shutdown of the agency earlier this month. House GOP leaders plan to vote on the bill next week.
The extension, which cuts the agency’s overall budget by 5 percent, will be the 22nd for the agency since 2007, the last time Congress passed a full authorization bill. In the intervening years, Congress has failed to pass the measure over a dispute about modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system, but this year, the real sticking point for Democrats, was a GOP demand to change recently instituted federal labor regulation that made it easier for unions to organize at airline companies.
My guess is that some of his constituents at his town meetings gave him an earful over his union busting resulting in the layoffs of thousands of workers.
The next stage for the Dems should be to figure out why he folded, and rinse, lather, and repeat, but they won’t.
AFL-CIO president Richart Trumpka just said that Obama has aligned himself with the teabaggers:
The most powerful union official in the country offered reporters his harshest critique of President Obama to date Thursday, questioning Obama’s policy and strategic decisions, and claiming he aligned himself with the Tea Party in the debt limit fight.
“This is a moment that working people and quite frankly history will judge President Obama on his presidency; will he commit all his energy and focus on bold solutions on the job crisis or will he continue to work with the Tea Party to offer cuts to middle class programs like Social Security all the while pretending the deficit is where our economic problems really lie,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told reporters at a breakfast roundtable hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.Trumka dismissed Obama’s recent job creation proposals — an extended payroll tax cut, patent reform, free trade deals — as “nibbly things that aren’t going to make a difference,” and said the AFL-CIO might sit out the Democratic convention if he and the party don’t get serious.“If they don’t have a jobs program I think we’d better use our money doing other things,” Trumka said.
I do not think that Barack Obama has the slightest clue just how disappointed his “base” is with him, and if he did, I think that he would be dismissive of the fact.
Get ready for President Bachmann. (honest to God, how did the ‘Phants find someone scarier than Sarah Palin?)
New York Times Columnist Joe Nocera, who writes that by enforcing the law against illegal retaliation against unions, the Democrats are anti-job.
This is about the Boeing case, where Boeing executives publicly bragged about moving an assembly line to South Carolina specifically because of legal labor actions taken by the union.
Somehow or other, all the “Very Serious People” out there stem to feel that blatant law breaking by large corporations must be tolerated, because they count more than the rest of us.
With Democrats almost retaking the Senate in Wisconsin, and his union busting bill down significantly in the polls, Ohio wingnut Governor John Kasich is asking for Democratic Party and labor groups if he could negotiate to forestall the referendum:
Gov. John Kasich and fellow Republicans William Batchelder, Ohio House speaker from Medina, and Senate President Tom Niehaus of New Richmond, offered today to revise the controversial collective bargaining law, known as Senate Bill 5, if public unions will drop their campaign to repeal the bill on the November ballot.
We Are Ohio, the coalition of unions behind the repeal effort, has rejected earlier back-channel efforts by some Republicans to strike a deal, citing the GOP-controlled legislature’s unwillingness to compromise when the bill was written.
Following a press conference by Kasich, We Are Ohio issued the following statement rejecting a call for a compromise.
“We’re glad that Governor Kasich and the other politicians who passed SB 5 are finally admitting this is a flawed bill,” said Melissa Fazekas, spokeswoman for We Are Ohio. “Just like the bill was flawed, this approach to a compromise is flawed as well. Our message is clear. These same politicians who passed this law could repeal it and not thwart the will of the people. They should either repeal the entire bill or support our efforts and encourage a no vote on Issue 2.”
Good for them.
The only reason to call off the referendum that you are certain to win is if he backs down completely, which will not only weaken Kasich among the average voters, but will poison his relationships with Republicans in the state house, because he seriously twisted arms to get SB 5 passed in the first place.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
And by Bitch, I mean Ohio Governor John Kasich, who passed an even wider ranging assault on union rights, because the referendum to repeal the bill is on the ballot:
Ohio residents will be voting this fall on whether to allow a controversial collective bargaining law to go into effect, officials said Thursday.
Backers of the effort to repeal the law have successfully collected almost four times as many signatures needed to put the issue on the statewide ballot.
Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said opponents of the newly passed law collected 915,456 valid petition signatures. A total of 231,147 were needed.
“We Are Ohio has collected and validated more signatures than any other campaign in Ohio history,” said Melissa Fazekas, a spokeswoman for the group collecting the signatures. She expects voters will repeal the new law in November.
According to Maddow it’s gotten so bad that Kasich is polling behind Rick Scott of Florida. He’s down to 35% approval, which means that not only is he less popular than a case of hemorrhoids, he’s probably less popular than Dick Cheney pole dancing.
I expect that a lot of this vote will be about Kasich in addition to the union busting law.
I just hope that the Koch suckers and their corporate money don’t turn this around.
The Washington Post has a fascinating profile of respected school principal Bill Kerlina, who quit to bake cupcakes (really):
Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.He grew to love its students, teachers and — for the most part — its parents.“If I could lift that school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect,” he said.Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out.Principals in the District and other cities leave all the time, for a range of reasons. At least 20 of the District’s 123 public schools will have new leaders when classes begin in late August.The churn is especially heavy at low-performing schools. A 2010 study showed that nearly two-thirds of Chicago’s struggling schools had three or more principals in the past decade.But Kerlina, a baby-faced 39, is leaving Hearst, not a struggling school in a poor neighborhood. He’s also leaving education altogether after 17 years — to go into the gourmet cupcake business.Usually, resignations and firings unfold in silence, with officials citing privacy laws and educators reluctant to burn bridges. But a series of interviews with Kerlina offers a rare view of D.C. reform from an insider talking out of school.
He said he is quitting a system that evaluates teachers but doesn’t support their growth, that knuckles under to unreasonable demands from parents, and that focuses excessively on recruiting neighborhood families to a school where most students come from outside the attendance zone.
Generally, people on the way out doen’t talk, but in his case, he’s leaving the biz, so describes the dysfunction in detail:
Here is the money quote:
Kerlina signed on just as Rhee was rolling out the IMPACT evaluation system, which called for five classroom observations to assess criteria such as clarity of presentation, content knowledge and ability to teach children with varying skill levels. Some teachers would be held accountable for student growth on standardized tests. Those with poor evaluations were subject to dismissal.
It was a major change.Kerlina said he was surprised when he heard it would not be tried on a pilot basis, which was standard practice in Montgomery. He said he came to believe that the initiative offered virtually no provisions to help teachers improve.
“The reform, in my opinion, is getting rid of people,” he said.
It’s been very clear for a long time that Michelle Rhee was doing pump and dump on the DC Public Schools, she had no plan whatsoever on early childhood education, and her goal was to fire black administrators and teachers in the hope of bringing white students into the school, to create a bump in the test scores.
This is not education reform, this is private equity style asset stripping writ on the public schools.
You know, the guy who ran the Chicago schools, and was chosen to run the Department of Education, where he has gone full in on bashing teachers supporting the for-profit educational industrial complex.
Well. I’m not sure if he set the tone in the Chicago School district, or was just a product of it, but the fact that the Chicago Public Schools froze teacher salaries while jacking up pay for senior executives:
Though they voted last week to rescind four percent pay raises for teachers and union school workers, the Chicago Board of Education today is expected to approve salaries for the newly installed Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard and four other top executives that, by and large, mark substantial increases over their predecessors’ pay.
As the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday, Brizard’s base salary – $250,000 – tops former CPS head Ron Huberman’s salary by $20,000 – and is the highest pay rate for any city executive excluding the city’s new police chief, Garry McCarthy. It is also an annual salary nearly $40,000 higher than the head of New York City’s school system, though less than the public schools chiefs in Los Angeles and other cities.
Salaries for the other four executives are less dramatic, but still more than their Daley administration predecessors. New Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso, who is slated to rake in $195,000, is making $2,150 more than the former education officer. New Chief of Staff Andrea Saenz, who will be paid $165,000 annually, is making $49,000 more than those who came before. CPS chief administrative officer Tim Cawley and communications officer Becky Carroll are slated to take in $35,833 and $34,617 base salary increases over their Daley counterparts, earning $215,000 and $165,000 salaries respectively.
So their goal is to make American schools more like the banks.
They sh%$ on the workers, and extract as much money as possible out of the enterprise to overpay the incompetent rat-f%$#s in charge.
On a party line vote, the Wisconsin Supreme Court has reinstated Scott Walker’s union busting law:
The Wisconsin Supreme Court, just hours before a deadline imposed by state legislative Republicans, just reinstated the anti-union law which a district court judge had blocked because it violated state open meetings requirements. They made the novel interpretation that those requirements don’t apply to the legislature.
The court found a committee of lawmakers was not subject to the state’s open meetings law, and so did not violate that law when they hastily approved the measure and made it possible for the Senate to take it up. In doing so, the Supreme Court overruled a Dane County judge who had struck down the legislation, ending one challenge to the law even as new challenges are likely to emerge.
The majority opinion was by Justices Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Patience Roggensack and Annette Ziegler. The other three justices – Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson and Justices Ann Walsh Bradley and N. Patrick Crooks – concurred in part and dissented in part.
Not that I have to tell you this, but the four who signed the majority opinion were all nominated by Republicans, while the three who dissented were all nominated by Democrats.
I now expect the court to find a way to stop the recall elections.
At least three of the six Republican state senators targeted for recall in Wisconsin will happen:
State election officials ordered July 12 recall elections on Monday for three Republican state senators, setting the stage for what could be an unprecedented summer of recall elections.
The Government Accountability Board, which runs state elections, voted unanimously to schedule the recall elections against Sens. Dan Kapanke of LaCrosse, Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac and Luther Olsen of Ripon.
…………
On Monday, the Republicans successfully struck some of the signatures from the recall petitions against them as invalid, but not enough to prevent the elections. About 15,000 signatures for each senator were needed to hold recall elections, and in each case more than 21,000 valid signatures were gathered.
(emphasis mine)
So they got about 50% more signatures than were required, and unlike the Republican efforts, they did not have to bring in paid signature gatherers, nor did they have to lie about what was being signed or buy the signers drinks.
There are 3 Republican, and 3 Democratic state senators yet to be ruled on, but my guess is that all of them will go through, though I do not expect the Dems, unless the national Democratic Party does something mind-bogglingly stupid, like signal approval to some sort of Medicare cuts. (Yes, Steny Hoyer, have a nice glass of Shut the F%$# Up!)
After getting nothing but feeble lip service from national Democrats on labor issues, and even less on the Republican state-level jihad against unions from the national Dems, labor unions are pulling back on donations to national democrats:
Some of the nation’s largest labor unions are cutting back dramatically on their financial support to the Democratic Party, saying they are highly frustrated with the failure of Democrats to put up stronger resistance to Republican proposals opposed by labor.
The unions have cited what they see as Democrats’ tepid response to Republican efforts to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, cut Medicare funding and require voters to show identification at the polls.
“It doesn’t matter if candidates and parties are controlling the wrecking ball or simply standing aside,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, in a speech Friday. “The outcome is the same either way. If leaders aren’t blocking the wrecking ball and advancing working families’ interests, working people will not support them.”
…………
Labor’s threats to Democrats follow a major push in last year’s midterm election, when unions spent $8 million backing a liberal challenger to former senator Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.). The challenger, then-lieutenant governor Bill Halter, lost to Lincoln in a runoff, and a weakened Lincoln went on to lose the general election to Republican John Boozman.
Trumka trumpeted the outcome of that race in a question-and-answer period after his speech Friday. A moderator asked what was different about his latest rhetoric given that unions have threatened to withdraw support for Democrats in the past.
“Ask Blanche Lincoln,” he replied.
This is really the point that should be made, that there are a lot of Democrats who have little or no interest in protecting the average American worker, or of supporting organized labor, the distinguished gentlewoman from WalMart being one of the more prominent examples, and making an example of them is a good thing.™
I would also note that Lincoln was down by double digits to any Republican before the primary challenge.
Unions clamor, Obama cowers: His silence on state protests speaks volumes.
It raises a question that needs to be asked.
