Salon.com > Labor movement

Koch brothers, Tea Party cash drives Michigan right-to-work bill

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:37:00 +0000

Should we be surprised that Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who testified under oath that “right-to-work” wasn’t part of his agenda, is poised to sign just such a bill later today?

Snyder’s announcement last week that he’d support right-to-work has taken the sheen off his carefully cultivated image as a pragmatic alternative to hard-charging GOP counterparts in Ohio and Wisconsin. But it secures a dream of the anti-union Koch brothers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose associates are well-represented among Snyder’s donors, and whose economic agenda has been ascendant within the modern GOP.

“I think he was being a puppet for larger interests outside of the state,” United Auto Workers vice president Cindy Estrada told Salon Monday afternoon.

Right-to-work bill: Michigan just gives up

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:05:00 +0000

If you want to understand why Michigan is going to pass a right-to-work law this week, go to the Grand River Bar & Grill, a tavern on the north side of Chicago. It’s one of a half-dozen Chicago bars designed to appeal to graduates of Michigan State University. Green and white flags hang on the walls, the MSU fight song blares during Spartan basketball games, and there’s even a euchre league, for fans of the countrified form of bridge played in Michigan college dorms.

Fifty percent of Michigan State students now leave the state immediately after graduation. That ratio doubled in the 2000s, which is known in Michigan as “The Lost Decade.” In those 10 years, Michigan dropped from 30th to 35th in the percentage of college graduates, and from 18th to 37th in per capita income. (Michigan was also the only state to lose population in the last census.) The university system’s main function is giving Michigan’s brightest students a credential to get the hell off that jobless peninsula.

Their No. 1 destination is Chicago, the drain where most of the brains in the Midwest end up. (Every Big Ten school is represented by at least one bar there.)

Time to march on Washington again for jobs and freedom

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 22:46:00 +0000

Dear Brother Trumka:

Next year will mark the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Rallied by the great black union leader A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, with the assistance of civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin and UAW president Walter Reuther, 250,000 Americans of every color and creed turned out on the National Mall on August 28, 1963 to demonstrate their support for guaranteeing equal rights and affording “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to all Americans. And it is a day that generations will forever remember because of the words spoken on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: “I have a dream.”

No doubt plans are already underway to commemorate that event. But we who believe in America’s purpose and promise of extending and deepening freedom, equality, and democracy must do more than commemorate it. We must truly honor it. And to do that, we cannot wait until August, 2013.