Showing posts with label unionization. Show all posts

14 February 2014

BREAKING: Workers threatened; Chattanooga Times Free Press: “'Outrageous' GOP threats on VW union vote” & As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk & Why Unions Matter: The Numbers 14&13FEB14&5AUG11

VW has made it clear they are not opposed to workers at their Tennessee factory unionizing. They have said they are used to working with unions in Germany and do not expect a problem if their Tennessee workers vote to join the UAW. But Tennessee's repiglican and tea-bagger politicians have a problem with it, because if these workers unionize then maybe more will, and these additional workers will demand from their employers, many of them wealthy multi-national corporations with executive pay packages that are grossly obscene, a living wage and other benefits. The article from Mother Jones shows how unions even increase the pay scale of nearby business that aren't unionized. This terrifies the corporate America. These politicians are showing who they actually represent, the rich and powerful, the 1%. They are waging class warfare on the workers of Tennessee, and the voters should remember that on election day this November. Sign the petition calling on Tennessee's gop & tea-bagger politicians to stop their threats against the workers of their state and to support their right to unionize if they so choose....

Sign the Petition: Tell Tennessee Republicans to stop their threats!

How angry would you be if a company wanted to add jobs in your community, but your own elected officials told them to go to Mexico instead?

That's exactly the situation playing out this week in Tennessee, where Volkswagen factory employees are voting RIGHT NOW on whether to unionize. On the eve of that vote, GOP legislators threatened to scuttle future factory expansions if workers choose to unionize.

These Republican threats are outrageous and unprecedented - please add your name to demand that Tennessee Republicans end their intimidation campaign.

Keep in mind, Volkswagen itself wants to give its workers a voice at this plant. They also want to expand their Tennessee operations to build a new product line.

Tennessee's Republican legislators are the ones trying to force Volkswagen to move the new work to their other plant in Mexico.

Stop the Intimidation: Sign our petition telling Tennessee Republicans to stop threatening workers!

Thank you for helping to stop this outrageous abuse of power at the expense of working families.

Sincerely,

Michael Sargeant
Executive Director
Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee

P.S. Tennessee Republicans' threats against Volkswagen could be illegal under federal labor law - demand an end to the threats today.

As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk

By Richard Cowan and Bernie Woodall

WASHINGTON/CHATTANOOGA, Tennessee Thu Feb 13, 2014 4:49pm EST

U.S. Senator Bob Corker speaks to the media in Chattanooga, Tennessee February 11, 2014. REUTERS-Bernie Woodall

The Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga ,Tennessee, is shown December 1, 2011. REUTERS-Billy Weeks

1 of 2. U.S. Senator Bob Corker speaks to the media in Chattanooga, Tennessee February 11, 2014.

Credit: Reuters/Bernie Woodall

Why Unions Matter: The Numbers

—By Kevin Drum

| Fri Aug. 5, 2011 1:55 AM GMT

Chris Devers/Flickr

A few months ago I wrote a piece for the magazine arguing that the decline in unionization over the past three decades has been a key factor in the decline of the American left over the same period. But it's a hard case to prove because there are so many moving parts to it. So I was intrigued earlier this week when my colleague Josh Harkinson linked to a new study that attempts to quantify the effects of unionization on income inequality using a rigorous regression analysis of census data.
The study comes from Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld and was published this month in the American Sociological Review. The authors use a model that accounts for both individual membership in unions as well as overall unionization rates in specific industries and regions. It also controls for education, age, race, ethnicity, and gender, which allows them to estimate the effect of unionization both between groups (e.g., the evolution of income inequality between high school dropouts and high school grads) and within groups (e.g., the evolution of income inequality within the entire subset of high school grads).
Once their model was in place, Western and Rosenfeld could manipulate their variables to estimate what income inequality would look like if union density had remained at its 1973 level. So what did they find? Answer: Among men, if you account only for the effect of individual membership in unions, it would be about a fifth lower, which agrees pretty well with previous estimates. But if you also account for the effect of unions on surrounding nonunion employers (who often raised wages to compete with union employers and to avert the threat of unionization in their own workplace), the effect is larger: Unionization at 1973 levels would decrease income inequality by a full third. You can see this in the chart below. For intragroup differences (which account for nearly the entire effect of unionization) the top line shows the actual rise of income inequality since 1973, while the red line is a prediction of what it would look like if union density were still at 1973 levels:

The effect of unionization on women is less dramatic because women were never unionized at the same rate as men. For them, increasing returns to education are a bigger factor in rising income inequality than deunionization. For men, however, deunionization has had a huge impact: "The decline of the US labor movement has added as much to men's wage inequality as has the relative increase in pay for college graduates," the authors say.
Western and Rosenfeld's explanation for this is similar to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's in Winner-Take-All Politics, last year's best book on modern political economy. Roughly speaking, there's a direct economic effect of unionization on wages, but there's also an effect of unions on the political system that indirectly affects wages. Western and Rosenfeld put it like this:

[Our] analysis suggests that unions helped shape the allocation of wages not just for their members, but across the labor market. The decline of US labor and the associated increase in wage inequality signaled the deterioration of the labor market as a political institution.…The de-politicization of the US labor market appears self-reinforcing: as organized labor’s political power dissipates, economic interests in the labor market are dispersed and policymakers have fewer incentives to strengthen unions or otherwise equalize economic rewards.
…[Prior to 1973,] unions offered an alternative to an unbridled market logic, and this institutional alternative employed over a third of all male private sector workers. The social experience of organized labor bled into nonunion sectors, contributing to greater equality overall. As unions declined, not only did the logic of the market encroach on what had been the union sector, but the logic of the market deepened in the nonunion sector, too, contributing to the rise in wage inequality.

In other words, deunionization has allowed income inequality to rise partly because unions are negotiating wages for fewer people than they used to, and partly because unions no longer have the power to force the political system to pay attention to the needs of the middle class. But if income inequality has to be reduced in order for middle class wages to grow—and it does—and if robust middle class wages are a key driver of the liberal project—and they are—then we're all in big trouble. Mass unionization is gone, and it's not coming back. This means we still need something to take its place, and we still don't have it. Until we do, the progressive movement will continue to tread water.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/08/unions-and-wages

05 March 2011

Public Employee Unions Don't Get One Penny from Taxpayers and Can't Require Membership, But the Big Lie That They Do Is Everywhere 5MAR11

With corporations and right wing politicians (mostly gop and tea-baggers) waging a propaganda war on unions (and all workers) in America here is another offering of the truth on unions, union membership, union political activity and the economy, budgets and deficits....

Nobody has to belong to a union or support its political activities, but you'd never know that from reading the news. |

Photo Credit: vaxomatic

Let us begin with this simple, indisputable truth: public employees' unions don't get a single red cent from taxpayers. And they aren't a mechanism to “force” working people to support Democrats – that's completely illegal.
Public sector workers are employed by the government, but they are private citizens. Once a private citizen earns a dollar from the sweat of his or her brow, it no longer belongs to his or her employer. In the case of public workers, it is no longer a “taxpayer dollar”; it is a dollar held privately by an American citizen. Public sector unions are financed through the dues paid by these private citizens, who elected to be part of a union – not a single taxpayer dollar is involved, and no worker is forced to join a union against his or her wishes. No worker in the United States is required to give one red cent to support a political cause he or she doesn't agree with.
There is no distinction between the role public- and private-sector unions play: both represent their members in negotiations with their employers. At the federal level, both are prohibited from using their members' dues for political purposes. They donate to political campaigns – to elect lawmakers who will stand up for the interests of working people – but only out of voluntary contributions their members choose to make to their PACs.
“Unions cannot, from their general funds, contribute a dime to any federal candidate or national political party,” says Laurence Gold, an attorney with the AFL-CIO. “They can only do it through their separate political PAC and only according to strict limits.”
The states have a patchwork of different laws, and many do allow unions to donate to campaigns. But membership is entirely voluntary – when a group of workers elect to form a union, it doesn't mean that everyone must sign up. The union negotiates on behalf of all the workers in the group – and all of the workers get the job security and other benefits that come with collective bargaining -- but by law it can't compel them to pay union dues. “It is a right-wing canard that anyone needs to join a union,” Gold told AlterNet. “If a union member doesn't like what his or her union is doing, he or she is ultimately free to walk, without any diminution in their employment rights. They still get all the benefits and the union still has to represent them – just like it did the day before.”
In states that haven't passed so-called Right-To-Work laws, the union can charge all workers in a “negotiating unit” for the direct cost of representing them, but cannot, by law, force them to pay for the union's political activities. “They can only be required to pay for their share of bargaining costs and representation costs – not politics, not legislative stuff, not anything else,” Gold said. “Compulsory union dues are a canard, everywhere, and without exception. Anybody who says, oh you can compel somebody to support the union's electoral activities – well, that's simply false.”
Now that we have established a baseline of factual reality, let's take a look at what much of the media – even the ostensibly “liberal” media – are telling the American people.
In a widely cited opinion piece in the Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson claimed that "public employee unions have the unique power to help pick pliant negotiating partners -- by using compulsory dues to elect friendly politicians." Again, a blatant falsehood, and one that prompted economist Dean Baker to point out that “if Mr. Gerson knows of any violations of the law, I'm sure that there are many ambitious prosecutors who would be happy to hear his evidence.”
The irony here is that while unions can't compel workers to fork over a penny for political campaigns, corporations can donate unlimited amounts of their shareholders' equity to do so – they are, in fact, in the “unique position” to elect pliant lawmakers. “What the right-wing and the business community always try to portray is that you have these union bosses that are forcing helpless employees to give them money,” says Gold, “when the reality is that these are their members who chose to be in a union and then elected their officers democratically, in sharp contrast to corporations, none of whose officers are elected democratically unless you count shareholders voting at an annual meeting as a real democratic system.”
And conservatives have long held that voluntary donations to political campaigns are a high form of free speech. The double standard is clear-- “money equals speech” unless it's money freely donated by working people to advance their own economic interests.
The corporate-backed Heritage Foundation – which has waged a longstanding propaganda war against the American labor movement -- notes that “state and local employees in 28 states are required to pay full union dues” – patently untrue -- and, “using this government coercion, government unions have amassed tremendous financial resources that they use to campaign for higher taxes and higher pay for government workers.”
There are no “government unions,” just unions of private workers. And they have no interest in campaigning for higher taxes – they are unions of taxpaying citizens. They do push for better pay, benefits and working conditions, like private sector unions, but officials elected by American voters determine the number and size of public programs and therefore the ultimate cost of government.
Heritage also makes much of the fact that public unions lobby for various policies that conservatives don't like, and claims, yet again, that they do so with “taxpayer dollars.” That's false, as we know, but it is true of another group: private contractors. They routinely include a line-item billing the government for part of the money they spend on lobbying – they, rather than the unions, actually use taxpayer dollars to lobby for, as Heritage puts it, “legislation and ballot measures that raise taxes and spending.”
Writing for Newsweek, Mark McKinnon writes that “it is the abuse by public unions and their bosses that pushes centrists like me to the GOP.” (McKinnon was a political adviser to both George W. Bush and John McCain.) His enthusiasm to spin public unions as something to be feared is so great, he ends up making this confused – and confusing – argument:

Unlike private-sector jobs, which are more than fully funded through revenues created in a voluntary exchange of money for goods or services, public-sector jobs are funded by taxpayer dollars, forcibly collected by the government (union dues are often deducted from public employees’ paychecks).

I don't pretend to know what he means when he says private sector jobs are more than fully funded – we do have an underemployment rate of about 17 percent – but the rest is an incomprehensible mish-mash of “public sector jobs,” which are obviously paid for out of tax revenues, and public sector unions, which, as he notes, are funded out of the paychecks of private citizens working for the government – workers who choose to belong to a union.
He then advances the Big Lie, essentially turning reality on its head:

Big money from public unions, collected through mandatory dues, and funded entirely by the taxpayer, is then redistributed as campaign cash to help elect the politicians who are then supposed to represent taxpayers in negotiations with those same unions.

This falsehood pitting public employees against taxpayers is ubiquitous. The Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Ohio, Wisconsin shine spotlight on new union battle: Government workers vs. taxpayers”; Rush Limbaugh called public sector unions, "money launderers" for "Democrat politicians"; Mark Steyn called them, "rapacious, public sector-shakedown kleptocrats," and self-proclaimed liberal Joe Klein wondered if they “are organized against the might and greed...of the public?”
All of this is meant to serve another, Bigger Lie – even more ubiquitous -- that the cost of public workers is killing state budgets. As Bill O'Reilly put it with typical understatement, state "governments can't afford to operate" because of "union wages and benefits."
Here's another factual baseline: those “cadillac” pensions we always hear about public workers getting actually average $22,000 per year and amount to just 6 percent of state budgets. Some states' pension funds have problems because they've been raided to pay for tax cuts, but in aggregate, pensions aren't eating up state budgets. Andrew Leonard, writing in Salon about what he calls “the imaginary public sector pension fund crisis,” notes that because the stock market has recovered to a great degree, “those horrible 'shortfalls' everyone has been making such a big deal of are already in retreat.”
As economist Dean Baker notes, it was Wall Street, not a bunch of teachers and firefighters, which is to blame for the gaps that do exist. “Most of the pension shortfall,” he wrote, “is attributable to the plunge in the stock market in the years 2007-2009. If pension funds had earned returns just equal to the interest rate on 30-year Treasury bonds in the three years since 2007, their assets would be more than $850 billion greater than they are today.”
Public workers' salaries are another 28 percent of state budgets. They get paid less than comparable workers in the private sector, even including benefits. The problem, as far as an honest debate goes, comes from the word “comparable.” Last week, USA Today (mis)informed its readers that workers in the public sector make more than in the private, a claim it backed up with misleading averages. The article only quoted in passing an economist who pointed out that their “analysis is misleading because it doesn't reflect factors such as education that result in higher pay for public employees.” It's actually meaningless, as public workers are twice as likely to have a college degree and have, on average, more years on the job than workers in the private sector.
State and local employees' wages and salaries have virtually nothing to do with the budget gaps which many states are grappling with – that too is a result of the recession caused by Wall Street, not Main Street. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, “State tax collections, adjusted for inflation, are now 12 percent below pre-recession levels, while the need for state-funded services has not declined. As a result, even after making very deep spending cuts over the last several years, states continue to face large budget gaps.” According to Census data, states' social welfare payments to struggling individuals and families increased by around 25 percent between the first quarter of 2007 and the last quarter of 2010.
Most of the media lazily accepts that collective bargaining by state workers is a fiscal matter – a typical headline on AOL news asked, “Can collective bargaining bills stem state deficits?” as if there is some correlation between those two things. But the evidence doesn't suggest as much: There are already 13 states that restrict public workers' bargaining rights and it hasn't helped their bottom lines. As Ed Kilgore noted, "eight non-collective-bargaining states face larger budget shortfalls than either Wisconsin or Ohio," and " three of the 13 non-collective bargaining states are among the eleven states facing budget shortfalls at or above 20%."
Tragically, the corporate media, rather than shedding light on these facts –which are necessary for a healthy debate -- is helping to obscure them under a cloud of anti-union spin.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America). Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

03 March 2011

Labor Fighting Quiet Anti-Unionization Measure In Congress While Eyes Remain On Wisconsin 3MAR11

AMERICANS seem to have forgotten how unions have improved the working conditions, wages and benefits for all of us. Weekends, vacations, minimum wage, worker safety, health benefits, pensions, all are because of the negotiating power of unions. Too many believe the the propaganda of the gop, tea-baggers and corporate America that unions are responsible for the economic decline of America, but you only need to look across our southern border, to Mexico, to see what our working conditions and pay and lives would be like if it weren't for unions in this country. Most of the gop and the tea-baggers wouldn't mind turning America into a Third World country for the benefit of their corporate masters. This proposed law brings us just a step closer to meeting that goal. From HuffPost....
WASHINGTON -- While labor activists continue to stage a high-stakes campaign against the budget bill from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) that would strip collective bargaining rights from that state's public employees, union backers are feverishly working to derail what they describe as an equally troubling federal proposal with a clear route to passage.
In recent days, union officials have ramped up lobbying efforts to block or remove language in the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that would make it drastically harder for rail or aviation workers to unionize.
Sponsored by House Transportation Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) -- a major recipient of campaign contributions from the airline industry, totaling more than $620,000 in his career -- the controversial provision states if an eligible voter fails to vote for union representation, he or she will be tallied as an active vote against representation.
Such a policy, which puts an extra burden on union organizers to round up all voters, rather than a simple majority, existed up until last July, when the federal National Mediation Board, which adjudicates labor-management disputes, ruled that absent votes ought not be counted against unionization. Labor officials hailed that decision as one of their signature victories last year, and the proposal to strip it away has sparked an equally emotional reaction.
"This was the one advancement that you had seen in organizing rights and here they have launched an all-out effort in the House to go after unions again," said Shane Larson, the legislative director for the Communications Workers of America. "Currently, this is the biggest issue federally right now in terms of organizing rights. There is nothing else that is on the table."
Critics of expanded union rights appreciate the decision's significance, too. The NMB's July ruling was quickly followed by attempts to undo it, including a Congressional Review Act proposed by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) that would have called for a formal evaluation of the decision.
Isakson's review effort fell short, but Mica's provision, introduced through normal legislative order, seems much harder to disrupt.

The provision was passed by voice vote during markup at the House Transportation Committee on Feb. 16. Rep. Jerry Costello (D-Ill.) offered an amendment shortly thereafter to strip it from the final language, later telling The Huffington Post that he saw it as a clear effort "on the part of Republican leadership in the House to bust unions," but his amendment fell one vote shy of passage. The Transportation portion of the FAA reauthorization bill, with Mica's language included, ultimately passed out of committee, 34 to 25.
Two additional House committees -- Science and Ways and Means -- have input in the final legislative language, but according to House officials, neither has jurisdictional authority to revise Mica's provision.
"Once this comes to the floor," said one of those officials, "it will pass."
With that in mind, union operatives have turned their sights to the Senate, where a different version of the FAA reauthorization bill passed in mid-February. Sens. Jay Rockeller (D-W.V.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are being petitioned especially heavily to strip Mica's provision when the two congressional chambers meet to merge their respective bills.
An aide to Rockefeller, who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said he supports the new NMB rule, and that position "has not and will not change." Harkin, who chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, told labor leaders to "rest assured" that he would "vigorously oppose any effort to include these dangerous provisions in the FAA Reauthorization Act conference report."
Costello, the Illinois congressman, predicted that the measure would not pass the Senate. "And if it does," he added, "I would doubt the White House would sign the bill with the provision in it. I think it's a showstopper."
Such public resolve, however, is somewhat at odds with blunt political calculations. While Harkin and others may be insisting that Mica's provision be exorcised from the bill, in private, aides question whether the appetite is there to hold the line.
"Now that it is in the bill and it is going to conference, the dynamics have changed," acknowledged one top Democratic Senate aide. "Senator Harkin would of course vehemently say it shouldn't be in there. But the question is, will people vote down the entire bill over it?"
While last year's rule change was a cherished breakthrough for the labor community, the practical impact has not been as widely felt as anticipated, Democratic aides noted. One aide opposed to Mica's provision said unions have actually had a lower success rate since the NMB's ruling, winning only nine of 17 elections. "The new rule, in and of itself, will not cause an avalanche of unionism," the aide added, in an effort to downplay conservative critiques.
The numbers can cut both ways. When pressed about Democratic criticism of the congressman's provision, Mica spokesman Justin Harclerode said that reverting back to the old ways wouldn't be all that drastic. "The aviation industry was already heavily unionized before the rule change," he said.
Yet it's hard not to see the broader symbolism in this under-the-radar legislative fight. Republicans are fully invested in rolling back both the incremental gains and the longstanding rights that unions enjoy. And while the primary theater has recently been at the state level, labor officials and allied lawmakers are bracing themselves for similar high-stakes showdowns in Washington.
"I expect this is only the beginning," Harkin said. "I think we'll see a lot of amendments this year -- probably on every bill we consider -- that will chip away at the basic rights and protections that help middle class working families get by. Like Governor Walker, advocates will describe these amendments as budget savers or pro-growth, but make no mistake, those are not their real goals. The real goal is to weaken the voice of American workers, and continue to push the same, trickle-down economic theory that has led us to unprecedented levels of inequality and instability."

NORTON META TAG

14 February 2014

BREAKING: Workers threatened; Chattanooga Times Free Press: “'Outrageous' GOP threats on VW union vote” & As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk & Why Unions Matter: The Numbers 14&13FEB14&5AUG11

As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk

Related News

Related Topics

Why Unions Matter: The Numbers

Kevin Drum

05 March 2011

Public Employee Unions Don't Get One Penny from Taxpayers and Can't Require Membership, But the Big Lie That They Do Is Everywhere 5MAR11

With corporations and right wing politicians (mostly gop and tea-baggers) waging a propaganda war on unions (and all workers) in America here is another offering of the truth on unions, union membership, union political activity and the economy, budgets and deficits....

03 March 2011

Labor Fighting Quiet Anti-Unionization Measure In Congress While Eyes Remain On Wisconsin 3MAR11

NORTON META TAG

14 February 2014

As Volkswagen workers vote, Tennessee senator ramps up anti-union talk

Related News

Related Topics

Why Unions Matter: The Numbers

Kevin Drum

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With corporations and right wing politicians (mostly gop and tea-baggers) waging a propaganda war on unions (and all workers) in America here is another offering of the truth on unions, union membership, union political activity and the economy, budgets and deficits....

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