Online Left

Employers hire more workers than expected

"Private employers hired more workers than expected in August, lifting hopes for the weak U.S. economy, but the nation’s unemployment rate rose for the first time in four months."

(Via MSNBC.com: Politics.)

Study Finds No Cases of Union Intimidation from Majority Sign Up

(Washington, May 4) Majority sign up does not cause union or employer intimidation, according to a new report released by University of Illinois Professor Robert Bruno. Bruno analyzed data from public sector workers in Illinois for six years and found that out of more than 21,000 people who joined unions through majority sign up, a process sometimes referred to as “card check,” there was not a single proven case of union or employer intimidation.

The report states:
In brief, from 2003-2009, 21,197 public sector workers employed in state, county, municipal and educational institutions voluntarily joined a union. Most importantly, contrary to business claims, in nearly eight hundred petition cases, there was not a single confirmed incidence of union coercion.

The report comes as Congress considers the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation that will give workers back the freedom to bargain with corporations for better wages and benefits. It includes a majority sign up provision which gives workers the choice of how to form a union rather than leaving that choice in employer’s hands, as it is under current law. Opponents claim this will lead to intimidation and coercion from unions, but according to today’s report, that simply isn’t true.

“Today’s report shows that corporations are throwing more lies to keep workers from forming unions,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “Workers form unions to bargain for a better life, not because of outside intimidation. Workers need the majority sign up provision because it gives workers the choice of how to form a union, not corporations.”

According to the findings, the lack of intimidation on either side also shows that when there is a clear path to forming a union, the workplace as a whole functions more smoothly with no friction.

The report concludes:
As is true in so many other policy areas, on the subject of union representation the states are incubators for new ideas and practices. Illinois has demonstrated that a majority authorization petition can genuinely determine the will of the employees to be unionized and provides a functional, largely non-adversarial and event-less process for insuring a fair work environment for everyone.

According to Bruno, the Illinois state law is very similar to the proposed Employee Free Choice Act majority sign up provision. The report, commissioned by the United Association for Labor Education is the first part of a nationwide report which analyzes similar state laws.

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Redstate Sucks: All The Proof I Need

I'm a fan of Sirius' station, POTUS Politics, channel 110. On several occasions, I heard a reporter on POTUS make reference to the blog, Redstate.Com, so I thought in the interest of adding more balance to my politics, I'd give it a try.

It was just as I expected -- more right-wing bullshit, convinced that if they tell enough lies, they'll regain favor.

Typical of what you'd expect to find on a conservative blog -- attacks on unions, and it's there in spades. For example:

Well, we can’t say no one saw this one coming, but Obama has turned back rules that had been put in place to force unions to be more transparent in their financial reporting. These rules were meant to stop union fraud, theft, and embezzlement but in an effort to pay back his supporters, Obama has turned these rules back so that unions can find it easier to hide illicit financial transactions.

I'd like to think that you fell for the Republican press release, but it's obvious from the blog that you have resources. These rules weren't put in place to cause unions to be more transparent. These rules were put in place by the Bush administration to force unions to spend more of their time and energy complying with needless regulations, rather than representing their members against attacks by contributors to Republican candidates.

The smear continues with an attack on Deborah Greenfield, a former attorney with the AFL-CIO, now a member of the Obama administration:

She was against forcing unions to account for all their illicit cash and secret accounts then. Now that she is in charge of implementing such rules she has been a major part of eliminating them so that unions could more easily hide their financial dealings from union members and the government.

Illicit cash? What illicit cash? The wing nuts at Redstate didn't offer any examples. Apparently, any money used to defend workers against Republicans is illicit.

The Washington Times reports this expected turning back of transparency rules.

Oh good, that should make union members feel better. The Washington Times is about as "fair and balanced" as that other fake news organization.

So, what we see here is the Obama administration making more efforts to payback his supporters from the campaign. What could be a better gift than eliminating rules that keeps union criminality at a minimum?

No, what we see is an administration that's trying to alleviate some of the mischief of the prior administration. What we see is an attempt to balance the playing field. What we see is this administration trying to help America's working people, who will not stand idly by while the rich get richer, and the poor have to pay for it. We're watching. You've been warned.

Union Busters Gear Up for Employee Free Choice Battle

Does this sound like businesses are prepared to deal fairly with their employees?

According to some reports, unions will start a media blitz aimed at Congress in DC starting tomorrow. At this point, it is all speculation, but the game is ON, no doubt. If you haven’t taken steps to prepare for EFCA, you should take action immediately.

In short, I recommend companies take the following action:

1. Conduct a Threat Assessment to determine where your company is vulnerable to union attacks.

2. Survey your employees, by an outside, unbiased professional to ascertain if there is currently union activity.

3. Train your managers, supervisors and executives in union avoidance.

4. Talk to your employees about union cards and what their rights are if they are asked to sign one.

These are the key building blocks to a labor relations strategy that will not only help keep your company union free, but will improve the morale of your workforce, improve productivity and improve profitability of your operations.

Article taken from Metreks, Inc. - http://metreks.com

URL to article: http://metreks.com/2009/03/09/efca-rumored-to-be-introduced-tomorrow/

Republicans Vote More Pay for Men than Women

The House of Representatives voted to pass a bill -- the Paycheck Fairness Act -- 256-163, on Friday which proposes to close a loophole preventing women suffering pay discrimination from filing complaints.

The Party breakdown of the votes in favor of ending the pay imbalance were 246 Democrats and 10 Republicans. 

Voting against equal pay for equal work was 3 Democrats and 160 Republicans. 

Within my lifetime, the ideal of ‘equal pay for equal work’ was a radical one. In the lifetime of many of those in this chamber, there was a time when it was perfectly acceptable to pay a woman less, simply because she was a woman. In 1963, when the landmark Equal Pay Act was passed, women made barely 60 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Today, we have closed that gap, thanks not only to generations of women’s advocates, but to millions of women who went to work every day and did their jobs as well as any man. At the same time, any gender gap in wages is a gap too large—and when women still make 77 cents on the male dollar, it is clear that we still have work to do. That wage gap is not simply a symbol of equality imperfectly achieved: It is the cause of serious economic damage for working families. The wage gap costs them a total of $200 billion every year, according to the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation. That’s $4,000 per family, each year.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer

The Democrats who opposed the bill -- all freshmen members, and hopefully one-termers -- are Bobby Bright and Parker Griffith of Alabama, and Walt Minnick of Idaho.

The 10 Republicans who supported H.R. 12 are Representatives Cao, Castle, Dent, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mario Diaz-Balart, Gerlach, Johnson, Reichert, Ros-Lehtinen, and Smith.

Further proof that the Republican party is devoid of ideas, and instead look for ways to discriminate against those not born white and male.  Okay, you're opposed to gay marriage.  You've made your position clear.  Even the gay Republicans oppose gays.  I guess since everyone else hates you, you're starting to hate yourselves.

I'm really having a difficult time with this decision, though.  If your wife or mother performs the same work, and performs it just as well as a man she should make less money?

Incredible!

I'm guessing Chris Hollen at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee toasted this vote with champagne.  You idiots just gave him the first issue of the 2010 congressional races.  I hope he hits you about the head with it.

Labor Pains

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Get Out of The Way of Fair Pay

Destroying What UAW Built

In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction. Titled "A Small Car Named Desire," the pamphlet suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently.

The pamphlet's author was the research department of the United Auto Workers.

By the standards of the postwar UAW, there was nothing exceptional about "A Small Car Named Desire." In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution -- not just the most farsighted union -- in America. "We are the architects of America's future," Reuther told the delegates at the union's 1947 convention, where his supporters won control of what was already the nation's leading union.

Even before he became UAW president, Reuther and a team of brilliant lieutenants would drive the Big Three's top executives crazy by producing a steady stream of proposals for management. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Reuther, then head of the union's General Motors division, came up with a detailed plan for converting auto plants to defense factories more quickly than the industry's leaders did. At the end of the war, he led a strike at GM with a set of demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM's board.

That proved to be a bridge too far. Instead, by the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations -- annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance -- that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez's fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early '60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther's death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care -- a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today -- which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that the Republican right hates the UAW so much that it would prefer to plunge the nation into a depression rather than craft a bridge loan that doesn't single out the auto industry's unionized workers for punishment. (As manufacturing consultant Michael Wessel pointed out, no Republican demanded that Big Three executives have their pay permanently reduced to the relatively spartan levels of Japanese auto executives' pay.) Today, setting the terms of that loan has become the final task of the Bush presidency, which puts the auto workers in the unenviable position of depending, if not on the kindness of strangers, then on the impartiality of the most partisan president of modern times.

Republicans complain that labor costs at the Big Three are out of line with those at the non-union transplant factories in the South, factories that Southern governors have subsidized with billions of taxpayer dollars. But the UAW has already agreed to concessions bringing its members' wages to near-Southern levels, and labor costs already comprise less than 10 percent of the cost of a new car. (On Wall Street, employee compensation at the seven largest financial firms in 2007 constituted 60 percent of the firms' expenses, yet reducing overall employee compensation wasn't an issue in the financial bailout.)

In a narrow sense, what the Republicans are proposing would gut the benefits of roughly a million retirees. In a broad sense, they want to destroy the institution that did more than any other to raise American living standards, and they want to do it by using the power of government to lower American living standards -- in the middle of the most severe recession since the 1930s. The auto workers deserve better, and so does the nation they did so much to build.

Harold Meyerson, in the Washington Post.

When Jobs End, Health Care Follows

Robert Pear writes a great article in the Sunday New York Times, When a Job Disappears, So Does Health Care outlining the direct correlation between jobs and health care in America.

Media Matters Challenges Autoworker Lies

During the November 24 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Republican strategist Todd Harris falsely asserted that union autoworkers earn "70, $75 an hour." Harris' claim -- which echoed the false assertion by host Chris Matthews on November 20 that members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) "negotiate for their salaries, and they're getting 70 bucks" -- was not challenged or rebutted by guest host Mike Barnicle.

According to GM, the figure Harris cited includes not only current workers' hourly wages and benefits, including health care and retirement, but also retirement and health-care benefits that U.S. automakers are providing for retirees, as Media Matters for America has noted.

Misinformation about autoworkers'hourly compensation resurfaces on Hardball