Daily Kos

For workers in two lockouts I've written about in recent months, it's two different stories. The lockout at Connecticut's West River Health Care Center ended this week. The lockout had gone on for nearly four months, and the National Labor Relations Board had issued a complaint against the nursing home chain, HealthBridge, for bargaining in bad faith. That was scheduled to go to trial in May. The workers return under their previous contract while bargaining continues. It's a victory to have the lockout over and workers back in the nursing home; hopefully it will be followed by management actually bargaining in good faith and not just advancing more ridiculous demands.

It was a happy scene as workers returned:

Elizabeth Geneus, who has been working at West River for 11 years, said she was happy to return after four months even as the negotiations drag on.

"The residents were happy to see us again," she said. "And this is our family -- this is our home. Some of them were crying when they saw us today."

One of the residents, Stella Chizenko, who has been at West River for almost two years, agreed.

"I was thrilled to death today," she said. "Thrilled to death. You know, when you're used to a certain group of people, and then they take them away all of a sudden, you feel lost."

SEIU 1199, the workers' union, has proposed a cooling off period, in which the old contract would stay in place and workers could neither be locked out nor go on strike.

It's a different story for workers at American Crystal Sugar, who have been locked out for nine months and counting. That means falling behind on home payments, retirement savings and more:

Some Drayton and Hillsboro workers have been forced to sign up for fuel assistance and food stamps, many for the first time in their lives. Renae Fredrickson said she became physically ill at the thought of asking for help to feed her family.

“I went to the food pantry the first time and it was just ... oh,” she said. “I’ve always donated. I’ve never had to go there.”

All so the highly profitable company can get rid of the tumor that its CEO considers a union contract to be.

(Continue reading below the fold.)

The Obama campaign is not cooperating with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's evident hope that little notice would be taken of his repeal of his state's Equal Pay Enforcement Act—or letting Mitt Romney walk away from his Walker fandom just because the Wisconsin presidential primary is over. The president's campaign provided Greg Sargent with a statement asking where Romney stands:

“As he campaigned across Wisconsin, Mitt Romney repeatedly praised Governor Scott Walker’s leadership, calling him a ‘hero’ and ‘a man of courage’. But with his signing yesterday of a bill make it harder for women to enforce in court their right to equal pay, Walker showed how far Republicans are willing to go to undermine not only women’s health care, but also their economic security. Does Romney think women should have ability to take their bosses to court to get the same pay as their male coworkers? Or does he stand with Governor Walker against this?”

It's a question that, doubtless, Romney will try to answer both ways, given his continuing need to shore up the Republican base and his problems with women (no matter how his campaign tries to deny it). But tell us, Mitt. What's your first answer?

Way back in February, the Wisconsin state Assembly followed the state Senate in voting to repeal the enforcement part of the state's equal pay law. The legislature then waited more than a month to send the bill to Gov. Scott Walker for his signature.

He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.

Walker's office did not return repeated requests for comment.

Gee, do you think they're hoping this won't draw much attention?

Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have been lining up to say they think the Augusta National Golf Club should admit women. Just days ago, in the run-up to the Wisconsin presidential primary, Scott Walker was pretty much Romney's hero. Has the Etch-A-Sketch already shaken and wiped that one clean, or would the dividing line between discrimination against women that Romney supports and discrimination against women that he doesn't support fall somewhere between membership rules in Augusta and paychecks in Kenosha? Walker didn't make discrimination against women legal, after all. He just took away the legal recourse women who have been discriminated against previously had.

Walker's leading Democratic challengers, Kathleen Falk and Tom Barrett, condemned the move:

Falk said Walker has "turned back the clock for women across Wisconsin."

"As a woman and as a mother who worked full-time while raising my son, I know first-hand how important pay equity and health care are to women across Wisconsin," she said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

A spokesman for Barrett's campaign said that Walker's "ideological civil war includes a war on women, and repeal today of this protection against pay discrimination is a major step backwards for Wisconsin values and basic fairness."

Scott Walker wants his rollback of women's rights in Wisconsin to go unnoticed. But, especially with the recall election coming up, people need to know this. Make sure the word gets out by sharing this story over Facebook and Twitter or with your friends and family in Wisconsin. And make a $5 donation to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin to take the bill-signing pen out of his hand.

Unions really want to beat Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker in the upcoming recall election. But first there's the question of the Democratic nominee. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk are the leading candidates, and AFSCME, for one, is coming down in favor of Falk. Barrett opposed the elimination of collective bargaining last year, but supported cuts to public worker benefits and has not promised to veto any budget that doesn't restore collective bargaining. And:

Barrett earned the ire of Milwaukee unions last year, when he used Walker’s budget reforms (known as Act 10) to propose a budget that cut city employees’ health and pension benefits rather than making a deal with unions before the law took effect. He also clashed with unions in an attempt to take over the public school system.

The Teaching Assistants Association is undecided about what to do. Its Political Education Committee recommended a Falk endorsement, but the union still has not endorsed, not because it is considering a Barrett endorsement but because Falk has not said she would restore wages and benefits that were cut under Walker, and in fact likes to talk about $10 million in concessions she got from unions during her time as Dane County executive.

Polling has Barrett leading in the primary and performing slightly stronger in the general election. Whatever happens in the primary, the important thing is beating Scott Walker. Please, contribute $5 to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin.

In its closely watched monthly report, the Bureau of Labor Affairs announced Friday that the private sector generated a seasonally adjusted 121,000 jobs in March. The disastrous public sector job losses of the past two years have tapered off significantly, and the 1,000 government workers laid off in March only brought the total jobs created for the month down to 120,000. A weak showing.

The figure was 83,000 less than a consensus of experts had forecast and less than half the three-month average, the weakest March showing in three years and the slowest job growth in five months. The official unemployment rate fell to 8.2 percent.

The civilian labor force participation rate fell slightly to 63.7 percent and the employment-population ratio fell to 58.5 percent.

Data showed that those with jobs worked fewer hours.

The report was another reminder of the fragility of the economic upturn that has left millions out of work for longer than at any time since the 1930s. The question now is whether this is a one-month anomaly or the beginning of a fresh trend after several months of comparatively solid job growth.

“We see a lack of sustainability in terms of strong job growth,” Tony Crescenzi, a strategist at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in a radio interview on ‘Bloomberg Surveillance” with Tom Keene and Ken Prewitt. “This is still not strong enough to create escape velocity, which is to say an economy strong enough to make it on its own without additional monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve.”

The number of officially unemployed is now 12.7 million with 5.3 million of those having been out of work for six months or longer. An alternative measure of unemployment called U6 includes part-time workers who want full-time work and some but not all of the millions of people who have become too discouraged to look for work. That number fell from 14.9 percent to 14.5 percent.

Revisions changed growth in payroll employment for January from 284,000 to 275,000 and in February from 227,000 to 240,000.

Here's what the job numbers have looked like for March in the most recent five years:

March 2008:  -80,000
March 2009:  -652,000
March 2010: +208,000
March 2011: +194,000
March 2012: +120,000

While the survey of business establishments showed the 120,000 increase, the BLS's monthly household survey (Current Population Survey) showed the number of jobs fell by 31,000. The CPS number is less focused upon because it is highly volatile. But when the economy is changing gears—falling into recession or beginning to build steam after a downturn—some analysts believe it provides a better view of where things may be headed in the next several months.

The BLS jobs report is the product of a pair of surveys, one of business establishments and the Current Population Survey of households. The establishment survey determines how many new jobs were added. The CPS provides data that determine the official "headline" unemployment rate, also known as U3. That's the number that is now at 8.2 percent.

Among other changes detailed in today's job report:

• Retail: -34,000
• Financial: +15,000
• Constructon: -7,000
• Transportation & warehousing:  
• Leisure and hospitality: +37,000
• Professional & business services: +31,000
• Health care: +26,000
• Manufacturing: +37,000

• The average workweek (for production and non-supervisory workers) fell to 34.5 hours.
• Average manufacturing hours fell to 40.7
• The average hourly earnings for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls rose by 5 cents to $23.39. Over the past year such earnings have risen 2.1 percent, compared with an inflation rate of 2.9 percent.

Compared to the kind of abuses that Walmart contractor warehouses have been accused of, fined for, and sued over, Amazon has a relatively clean record. But that this is a business where a company can have a relatively clean record despite having been reported to have warehouses so hot that it needed to keep paramedics stationed outside to deal with heat stress is somewhat telling. In fact, the Seattle Times' Hal Bernton and Susan Kelleher report that in 10 years, Amazon has been fined only $6,500 for safety violations all around the country. That's an amazingly clean record for such a big company—except that Bernton and Kelleher also detail how it's maintained in part by pressuring workers and doctors not to report workplace injuries.

Three former workers at Amazon's warehouse in Campbellsville told The Seattle Times there was pressure to manage injuries so they would not have to be reported to OSHA, such as attributing workplace injuries to pre-existing conditions or treating wounds in a way that did not trigger federal reports. [...]

A former warehouse safety official said in-house medical staff were asked to treat wounds, when possible, with bandages rather than refer workers to a doctor for stitches that could trigger federal reports. And warehouse officials tried to advise doctors on how to treat injured workers.

Avoiding stitches and other treatments that might trigger an injury report "when possible"? Doesn't that just make you wonder what Amazon managers consider "possible." But it's actually very common for companies to keep their injury statistics down by pressuring workers not to report injuries, including offering bonuses—as Amazon does—for clean injury reports. That's why, for instance, unionized coal mines have more injuries reported but fewer traumatic injuries and deaths—having a union means minor injuries are more likely to be reported despite an overall safer work environment. And Amazon, of course, is fiercely anti-union.

The Seattle Times interviewed former managers and safety officials who described being intimidated away from reporting problems or pushing for change, including one who was told to either resign or be fired for a rule violation he supposedly committed, coincidentally (it's always coincidental), just a week after expressing his concerns about overheating and other working conditions.

If you had to choose between working in an Amazon warehouse and a Walmart one, Amazon seems like the better bet—pay and benefits are better, at a minimum. But, as Mother Jones' Mac McClelland detailed in her account of working in such a warehouse, the price of free shipping these days is in workers forced to keep up a brutal pace, walking or running more than 10 miles a day across concrete floors, squatting and reaching and carrying, and fired when they can't keep up, even if the reason they can't keep up is that their bodies have been broken by the work.

Under Gov. Chris Christie, New Jersey supposedly can't afford to pay its public workers the pensions they worked for and contributed to while the state failed to contribute its share. But meanwhile Christie has doled out $1.57 billion in tax cuts to businesses, supposedly to create or preserve jobs, the New York Times' Charles Bagli reports.

About those jobs: One program has provided $900 million in tax credits to 15 companies. The result?

The companies have promised to add 2,364 jobs, or $387,537 in tax credits per job, over the next decade.

With savvy, thrifty fiscal policy like that, no wonder:

New Jersey has recovered only 20 percent, or 51,500, of the 261,000 jobs lost during the recession, compared with 80 percent in New York City.

Chris Christie isn't spending $1.57 billion on a jobs program. In line with his priorities, it's a corporate tax break program thinly disguised as a jobs program.

If you went to a site called "Protecting Our Workers" and the first thing you saw was a huge picture of Robert F. Kennedy, quoting him that "The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society," what would you assume about that site? Unless you've seen the site, your answer was probably not "it's an anti-union website put up by Republican House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa."

Yes, Issa has put together a spectacularly disingenuous site completely aimed at attacking unions that leads off with Bobby Kennedy and uses the word "union" only once on its front page (in claiming a desire to work with union leaders), speaking instead in sweeping terms of freedom and liberty and decrying partisanship. But really it's an attack on union political spending—part of the larger Republican campaign to bankrupt unions or at least to prevent them from spending money to elect candidates who will every so often cast votes that help working people ... Democrats, in other words.

This is the Darrell Issa who last fall demonstrated his concern for workers by calling for massive teacher layoffs, who has a former Goldman Sachs VP working for him as a staffer getting in the way of regulators overseeing big banks like Goldman Sachs, who will only hold investigations if they fit the narrative and announced an intention to investigate President Obama because "it'll be good theater." This is someone who's the richest member of Congress and has repeatedly used his position to seek earmarks that benefit himself financially. And he, like fellow super-rich guy Mitt Romney, wants to eliminate one of the few ways working people get a voice in politics. Of course he does.

Michelle Rhee calls her organization StudentsFirst, a common affectation among corporate-style education reformers, who often like to claim that the tens of millions of dollars they pour into remaking education policy are spent on behalf of students and parents. But in fact, the policies they push—promoting testing, making it easier to fire teachers, opening charter schools, and bringing profit motives into education in a dozen more ways—are not only empirically flawed and anti-teacher, but are often opposed by actual students and parents, who are increasingly pushing back.

In Florida, a so-called "parent trigger" bill failed last month. Though it was sold as parent empowerment, "Not a single major Florida parent organization supported the bill, including the PTA," with many opposing it, believing that it "would lead to the takeover of public schools by for-profit charter management companies and other corporate interests."

In Seattle, a growing group of parents have opted their kids out of standardized tests:

"We're not against testing," Purcell said. "But in the context of all the budget-cutting, we're saying: Can we at least spend the money on a more useful test?"

And in New York, students at several schools slated for "turnaround" have protested in a variety of ways.

Kids and parents don't have the money to put into their protests that the corporate reformers have to put into the agenda being protested. But at least they're speaking in their own voices, not trying to claim to speak for someone else to cover up a profit motive.

Reposted from TomP by Laura Clawson

I believe in unions. I don't claim each one is perfect or unions will create some sort of utopia, but they are an institution that fights for working people and makes their lives better in ways that matter. Yes, more food, a better house, a few extra bucks for a working man or woman means a lot. Without unions, life would be much worse for millions.  

I saw this on the AFL-CIO blog and thought it was fitting here.

If your kids are going to get a sugar buzz from their Easter basket treasures, you can at least make sure it’s a union-made sugar buzz. Our friends at Union Plus have a handy candy guide to union-made treats.The list ([see below]) includes candy products made by members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM); snack foods by members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW); and fruit and nuts from members of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW).The candy ranges from the ubiquitous and beloved Peeps to upscale Ghirardelli Chocolates and dozens and dozens of other sweet treats.  Come on—you know you're going to enjoy some of them, too.

The great thing about being a Republican governor is that when you go after public workers, you can exempt yourself from the pain. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is proposing just that—he's pushing legislation that would make public workers pay more toward their pensions, but the governor, statewide officials, judges, and some legislators would be exempted from it. Jindal's argument is that he and the other officials who wouldn't face higher pension costs already pay a slightly higher percentage of their salaries toward their pensions than do public employees. The thing is:

While elected officials pay a higher contribution rate today, state law also give them a higher 3.5 percent accrual — the rate at which they earn benefits — compared with employees’ 2.5 percent and they also can retire earlier.

But under Jindal's proposal, he and a few other officials would keep their current contribution rate, their current accrual rate, and their current retirement age, while the contribution rate for teachers and custodians and secretaries would go up.

The increased pension contributions from your average state worker are, Jindal claims, necessary because Lousiana has $6.45 billion in unfunded liability. But:

Most of the $6.45 billion is attributable to promises made decades ago by past governors and Legislatures that went unfunded.

We've seen this story in several other states. Public workers take lower pay during their working years in exchange for promised stability and retirement security. Year in, year out, they pay their share of their income into their pension fund while the state neglects to put in its share. Then, years later, all those missed payments by the state add up and the answer the governor comes up with is to make the workers pay what the state's past obligations. And he exempts himself.

Mitt Romney may have won the Wisconsin Republican presidential primary, but he wasn't ready to move on from his anti-union message. In his victory speech, Romney said:

"Workers should have the right to form unions, but unions should not be forced upon them. And unions should not have the power to take money out of their members’ paychecks to buy the support of politicians favored by the union bosses."

It is so tiresome having to answer the same Republican lies again and again. Nobody has to join a union. They just don't. It's a federal law. Yet Republican politicians like Mitt Romney and Scott Walker have the stamina to go on saying this stuff day after day, month after month. At what point does lying and misleading as their mission in life completely eliminate even what little moral compass they had when they started out?

And "buy the support of politicians"? Mitt Romney's Super PAC got $5 million from just 25 donors. It got $22.4 million from donors giving $500,000 or more. And he wants to accuse unions, pooling money from people who might, if they're lucky, earn $500,000 over 10 years, of buying the support of politicians?

Some days the barefaced shamelessness and utter mendacity of these assholes is just a little too much to take.