Jon Stewart, Aasif Mandvi and Jason Jones do a riff on the race to the bottom, in the context of their adoption of right-to-work legislation by Michigan and Indiana.
It ends with Mandvi proposing a bill where workers remuneration is thrown into a pit where they fight each other using the bones of the dead.
Unlike his hands off position in Wisconsin, Obama has actually come out against the Koch suckers’ right to work law in Michigan:
Union leaders warned that, if organized labor can be so battered in the union heartland of Michigan, it can—and may—be attacked anywhere. And the national significance of the move was highlighted by a statement from the Obama White House, which said:
President Obama has long opposed so-called “right-to-work” laws and he continues to oppose them now. The President believes our economy is stronger when workers get good wages and good benefits, and he opposes attempts to roll back their rights. Michigan—and its workers’ role in the revival of the US automobile industry—is a prime example of how unions have helped build a strong middle class and a strong American economy.
The problem is that following the 2010 debacle, Michigan is so f%$#ing Gerrymandered it’s not funny.
Another problem is that if there is a wave election that gives Democrats back control, the power brokers will ensure that too many of the Democrats will be faux Dems, and so repealing this will be put on the back burner.
There is a context to the Republican moves in Michigan to pass a right to work law.
When you see increasing levels of rejection by the electorate, along with an increasingly radical and delusional base pushing in the other direction, your only alternative is to direct your actions toward political advantage by things like Gerrymandering, and going after your opponents’ power base, and you dry to prevent them from voting.
That’s why you see Republicans going after labor unions, plaintiff’s lawyers, and actively suppressing voter turnout.
Well, there’s that, there’s the fact that they, as Lee Atwater said, scream N***er, N***er, N***er, albeit with increasingly sophisticated code words.
If this passes, and it almost certainly will, then when the Democrats get power back in Michigan, repealing this is the first order of business.
As you may, or may not be aware, the clerks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are on Strike.
The Los Angeles Times, in a reporting job that harkens back to their pre-Otis Chandler days, when they were the worst major daily in the nation, takes a claim by the management negotiator, and reports it as fact:
Stephen Berry, lead negotiator for the shipping lines and cargo terminals, said the clerical workers have been offered a deal that includes “absolute job security,” a raise that would take average annual pay to $195,000 from $165,000, 11 weeks’ paid vacation and a generous pension increase.
Of course, the idea that “clerks” get $165,000 a year, much less %195,000 a year.
Well, the slightly less credulous Long Beach Post, reports a slightly different number:
Employers however, feel most of these claims are highly questionable. They say that workers have rejected fair proposals in the last few years including the most recent one offered on Monday, the day before the walkout, which included: absolute guarantees that OCU workers will not be laid off; full-time pay for 52 weeks a year despite workload; permission to access computer database update histories and audit trails so as to allow clerical workers to research if anyone is using technology to divert their work; and most prominently, increase their compensation packages to over $190,000 in wages and benefits by 2016. Clerical workers currently make an average of $165,000 per year.
Well, if you assume about 10 hours of OT a week, normal in this environment, and that 30% of all remuneration is of the non wage form (healthcare, vacation, sick time, pensions), you get a base hourly rate of about $46/hour, which is nice, but not spectacular.
Also note that the union is demanding access to the job routing database, which indicates that there is a real suspicion that management is transferring jobs elsewhere.
Also, look how another source, from the same Stephen Berry, drops the pay number even further:
Stephen Berry, a negotiator for the employers, said under the old contracts, workers earn either $40 or $41 per hour, receive a full pension after as little as 10 years of work, and receive 11 weeks of paid time off annually.
Berry said the employers have offered slight raises. But both sides agree the dispute is not about money.
Union officials say the companies have been quietly moving some jobs to Taipei, Taiwan; Costa Rica; Charlotte, N.C.; and Texas, a charge employer representatives vehemently deny.
So,we are down to $40/hour.
But we are still relying on Stephen Berry, who is paid to lie for employers.
What if we found an independent source, something like an official government job posting, which lists the salary for a “Cargo Audit Clerk III- Provisional” as $16.69 – $22.80 Hourly.
Kevin Drum took the LA Times article as gospel, but his readers provided links (which I am using here) which show that both the Times, as well as Mr. Berry, to be full of crap.
It appears that someone in the labor union movement has realized that with modern lean inventories, labor unions have another lever to use against recalcitrant management:
The recent Walmart strikes — beginning first among warehouse workers in California, then spreading to others in Elwood, Illinois, and finally to Walmart retail stores across the United States — raise the possibility that workers may be able to crack the anti-union wall at the country’s largest employer. The new momentum seems likely to spread among many more workplaces to come. But these wildcat strikes are a reminder that, if American workers are to have a better-organized future, they will have to better understand where their corporate opponents are vulnerable.
The Walmart strikes are part of a significant reevaluation of organizing strategy by labor unions and activists in the context of the continuing decline of unionism in the United States — where fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector belong to a union. As Nadine Bloch pointed out two weeks ago, such wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain at Walmart are unprecedented, and groups like OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers for Justice are planning to escalate the campaign in the coming weeks.
………
Workers at key points in the supply chain can create massive disruptions in the process. A report conducted in 2002 found that a West Coast longshoremen lockout cost the U.S. economy $2 billion daily. And, in the recent strike of just two dozen subcontracted Walmart warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois, the strikers heard reports from allies at Walmart retail stores in the region that there were already shortages of goods. This occurred less than 10 days into the strike, Elwood warehouse worker Mike Compton told me.
By focusing on key links in the supply chain, and by using a strike at the beginning of an organizing campaign instead of at the end, Walmart workers are not only taking advantage of the company’s 21st-century weaknesses. They’re also harkening back to an earlier form of union organization, which was far more common prior to the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935.
I’m not sure if I’m heartened, or alarmed that the union movement has to go back to the tactics of the early 1930s.
Attempts by mainstream Democrats to turn education into another private sector profit center from which they can extract campaign donations is starting to piss off teachers:
The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers’ unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Over the past few years, even as Republicans have led efforts to thwart unions, lawmakers previously considered solid supporters of teachers’ unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.
As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers’ unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.
In Illinois, the top two recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association through June 30 were Republicans, including a State House candidate who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.
………
“The notion that just because you’re a Democrat” you can take the teachers’ unions for granted has changed, said Jim Reed, director of government relations for the Illinois Education Association.
As teachers grapple with a reform agenda backed by hedge funds and large philanthropic donors and championed by the Obama administration as well as some conservative Republicans, the unions are navigating a delicate political landscape where they increasingly pursue friends in unlikely places.
There are way too many Democrats, including Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who think that handing our schools off to hedge funds is a good thing.
It’s not.
The creation of the educational-industrial complex, much like the creation of the prison-industrial complex, and their granddaddy, the military-industrial complex, are a disaster for our society.
Technically, the strike is just suspended, but I can’t see the teachers hitting the line again:
The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates decided this afternoon to end the city’s first teacher strike in 25 years and return more than 350,000 students to the classroom Wednesday.
The voice vote was taken after some 800 delegates convened at a union meeting hall near Chinatown to discuss and debate a tentative contract. Union leaders had already signed off on the agreement with Chicago Public Schools.
“We said we couldn’t solve all the problems. . .and it was time to suspend the strike,” CTU President Karen Lewis said at a news conference after the vote.
One hopes that Rahm gets taken down at the next election.
To the degree than anyone lost, it was Emanuel, and here’s hoping that he gets taken down at the next election.
He’s a f%$#ing bully who never seems to muster the guts to use it on the other side, and he’s yet another case of an incompetence failing up.
He’s Dick Cheney minus one finger tip.
The AFL-CIO is going to fight voter suppression laws being enacted by Republicans:
The nation’s largest labor federation plans to mount an aggressive campaign against voter identification laws in a half-dozen battleground states that will be key in the presidential election.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters on Tuesday that the labor federation will have boots on the ground registering and helping voters in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in coordination with the group’s political program.
Labor is pushing back against voter ID laws, which they say suppress voting by minorities, the elderly, the poor and students. Supporters of the measures say showing identification to vote is needed to crack down on fraud and protect the integrity of elections.
They should have started this a year ago.
Because our so-called leaders are cowardly incompetents:
The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said Friday that if Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) doesn’t prevail over Gov. Scott Walker (R) in next month’s Wisconsin recall election, there won’t be any ramifications for Democrats nationally.
“I think, honestly, there aren’t going to be any repercussions,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said in a broad-ranging interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.”
“It’s an election that’s based in Wisconsin. It’s an election that I think is important nationally because Scott Walker is an example of how extreme the tea party has been when it comes to the policies that they have pushed the Republicans to adopt,” Wasserman Schultz said. “But I think it’ll be, at the end of the day, a Wisconsin-based election, and like I said, across the rest of the country and including in Wisconsin, President Obama is ahead.”
Timidity to the point of paralysis.
You have a major election, near on a make or break issue, for organized labor, and the DNC is afraid to expend any resources, because it’s not a slam dunk.
It is no wonder that George “If you not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time” McClellan was a Democratic presidential nominee.
Yes, the folks that they are disappointing won’t vote for Mitt, but I think that they won’t canvass or stuff envelopes for you either.
It looks like the slaves student athletes are looking to unionize again:
With college basketball’s March Madness approaching, commentators will soon regale us with tales of underdogs, upsets and last second heroics. But few will mention the moment, 17 years ago, when a group of players planned to stop the games.
Rigo Núñez, a reserve on the 1995 University of Massachusetts basketball team, says more than 20 players from several teams attempted to organize an action to halt March Madness. The plan was that the players would show up on the court, in full uniform, and refuse to play ball. The goal, says Núñez, was to “paralyze the whole NCAA.” William Friday, who co-chaired the Knight Commission on College Athletics at the time, recalled to the Atlantic the time he was warned about a planned March Madness strike.
Those plans fell apart. Friday says the plan he was warned about centered on a certain team, and that team lost prior to reaching the Final Four. Núñez says the culprit was fear of retaliation. “The fear of being blackballed overcame the ‘rah rah’ emotion … No one went on to actually pull the trigger.”
But in the 17 years since that strike plan fizzled, there’s been little change in the conditions that fueled players’ unrest. And, with the backing of a major union, there are still players organizing to do something about it.
It’s about time.
At the top tier schools, in the big money sports, the fiction of student athletes is a disservice to the athletes, and the schools as institutes of higher learning.
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.
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.
So, we had a prosecutor in Indiana suggesting that Scott Walker stage a false attempt on his life in order to gain political advantage.
He’s admitted it, and has now resigned as deputy prosecutor..
Josh Marshall of TPM asks whether this is is normal Republican procedure.
The answer is Yes.
Whether it’s Nixon’s Dirty Trixters, where his operative Roger Stone coined the term “Rat F%$#ing”, or Karl Rove planting bugs in his own office to create a mock scandal, or James O’Keefe’s deliberately dishonest videos, or this instance, this sort of behavior is a part of Republican DNA.
I used to hang out with Tony Rudy, now best known as a Jack Abramhoff associate, as an SGA Senate member at UMass, I was technically a “right wing” member of the Senate as a Mondale Democrat.* and this was the sort of stuff that the College Republicans did all the time, and when they got together in regional and national meetings, they talked about it.
With me, a Democrat, people like Greg Rothman, Rudy’s partner in crime in the student senate, bragged about such things. They reveled in and bragged about their willingness to ratf%$# their opponents.
*The left wing was the “US out of North America” crowd.
They were reporting that the Wisconsin State Democratic Senators were returning to the capitol shortly, which was emphatically denied by the state Senators in question.
This was clearly planted because as time goes on the Republicans are losing ground. For example, one of the more prominent teabagger PACs is begging for money because they are losing this fight, and a counter protest, complete with Koch brothers free bus service, could only muster 700 attendees.
The lesson to be learned here is that when you make nice, no one notices who was on what side, but when you fight back people do notice, and if you are on the sane side of the argument, you win.
In an effort to remove demonstrator from the Wisconsin capitol, Scott Walker had the windows welded shut to prevent people passing food in.
In related news, a district judge has issued an injunction against Scott Walker’s order to shut the capitol until a full hearing can be held.
Is it just me, or does dealing with Republicans remind one of the O. Henry story, The Ransom of Red Chief?
Jon Stewart on how f%$#ing absurd the assault on teachers is:
So, we are seeing huge, and growing, protests, with a teacher sickout to attend the protests growing, it has now shuttered both the Madison and Milwaukee school systems, and the Democrats in the state Senate have left the state, to prevent quorum for voting on the bill, while, in a bit of traditional religious silliness, religious leaders are offering sanctuary for them if they return to the state:
Religious leaders in Illinois and Wisconsin are offering sanctuary to Wisconsin Democrats as they boycott a vote on a Republican bill that would strip public workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights.
Actually though the most surprising development is that Barack Obama has actually felt the need to make a declarative statement on all this, as opposed to trying to make nice, and split the difference, calling it an, “assault on unions.”
What, Obama isn’t trying to split the difference and being hopey-changey? That’s like a f%$#ing sign of the f%$#ing apocalypse.
It would be nice if we would see some more of this, because the Republicans aren’t getting any more reasonable in response to his standard modus operandi.
You know, I’m not entirely sure how they are alike, but recently elected wingnut governor Scott Walker looks like he might be joining Hosni Mubarak is some form of internal exile soon.
You see, in his new budget, he proposed completely gutting the right of public sector employees to unionize, forbidding unions from requiring that dues be paid, forbidding them from negotiating about pensions, healthcare, or even asking for a pay hike above that of inflation, and requiring an annual recertification vote.
He then followed this up with a threat to use the national guard against strikers, and there were somewhere between 10 and 30 thousand protesters in the capital, Madison.
We are already hearing calls for Walker to be recalled, but state law requires that a year follow his swearing in before petitions can be turned in, so that’s off the table for about 10½ more months.
He riffs on Rahm Emanuel’s “F%$# the UAW” comment, which was reported by former Car Czar, and corporate criminal Steve Rattner.
Damn good, if somewhat profane, writing.
I will be so f^%$ing glad when that f^%$ingchicken sh$# pissant coward Rahm is gone from public service.
It’s Not “Free Trade” When Union Members are Murdered
Call your Congressman, and ask them to vote against a free trade deal with Columbia, where more union activists are murdered than in the rest of the world combined.
Without the right to organize, and government enforcement against management thugs, Columbia is subsidizing the labor costs of business.