Salon.com > The Labor Movement

Salon.com > The Labor Movement http://www.salon.com Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 New video could damage Walker http://www.salon.com/2012/05/15/new_video_could_damage_walker/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/15/new_video_could_damage_walker/#comments Tue, 15 May 2012 18:59:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12920817 Does Scott Walker want to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state? He says no. But his allies are gunning for it.

In a new video, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly says his caucus wanted to pass a right-to-work bill last year. The video, shot on March 27 of this year by a Democratic Party tracker, who provided the footage to Salon, captures Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald talking at a bar with a reporter from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The reporter asks Fitzgerald whether he was surprised when Walker described his plans to attack public workers’ collective bargaining. “No, it wasn’t a shock to me …” responds Fitzgerald. “My caucus wanted to go further. I had people in my caucus that was, you know, were wondering if we were going to do Right to Work in this state. So to tell you the truth, the collective bargaining, to me, I thought was more of a middle ground if you can believe that.”

Fitzgerald says “a number of people thought” they would push right-to-work, just as Republicans were in Indiana (where it passed this winter) and Minnesota (where it stalled). “When I heard about the collective bargaining,” he says, “it didn’t surprise me at all.” (Fitzgerald did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/15/new_video_could_damage_walker/feed/ 19 “I’m not Scott Walker” http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/im_not_scott_walker/ http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/im_not_scott_walker/#comments Sat, 12 May 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12919101 Labor has taken a beating. While private companies squeeze and lock out workers, resurgent right-wingers have pushed anti-union bills in statehouses around the country. But after a seemingly relentless national assault provoked dramatic pushback in Wisconsin and elsewhere, some Republicans are … relenting.

Take Minnesota. 2010’s red wave flipped both the state House and Senate, putting Republicans in unified control of the Legislature for the first time in 38 years. In January 2011, just after they took office and just before an uprising erupted in neighboring Wisconsin, Minnesota Republicans introduced Right to Work – a bill to defund unions by banning contracts that require workers represented by them to pay for representation. To get around newly elected Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, Republicans proposed Right to Work as a constitutional amendment, requiring approval from the voters, but not the governor.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/05/12/im_not_scott_walker/feed/ 98 May Day’s radical history http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/may_days_radical_history/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/may_days_radical_history/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:32:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12912055 American general strikes—or rather, American calls for general strikes, like the one Occupy Los Angeles issued last December that has been endorsed by over 150 general assemblies—are tinged with nostalgia.

The last real general strike in this country, which is to say, the last general strike that shut down a city, was in Oakland, Calif. in 1946—though journalist John Nichols has suggested that what we saw in Madison, Wisconsin last year was a sort of general strike. When we call a general strike, or talk of one, we refer not to a current mode of organizing; we refer back, implicitly or explicitly, to some of the most militant moments in American working-class history. People posting on the Occupy strike blog How I Strike have suggested that next week’s May Day is highly symbolic. As we think about and develop new ways of “general striking,” we also reconnect with a past we've mostly forgotten.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/30/may_days_radical_history/feed/ 8 Minimum-wage misconceptions http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/minimum_wage_misconceptions/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/minimum_wage_misconceptions/#comments Fri, 27 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12910538 Sen. Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has introduced a bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 from its present level of $7.25. Polls are showing many voters in favor, though they are confused about what it would mean for the job market. The truth is that a move would be good for a slow economy and have a positive impact on the job crisis. Naturally, this has led to the usual cries of opposition, largely based on the notion that raising the minimum wage hurts the very people it is supposed to help. Typical of this view is a letter to the New York Times from Michael Saltsman, a fellow at the Employment Policies Institute, a business-backed nonprofit research group (surprise!).

Saltsman trots out the old canards against the minimum wage, claiming that research indicates that a minimum wage increase "simply doesn’t help the poor — in fact, it hurts them." He cites studies which showed that states with their minimum wages between 2003 and 2007 found no associated decline in state poverty rates. Saltsman gives three reasons for this:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/27/minimum_wage_misconceptions/feed/ 59 Taxes for union busting http://www.salon.com/2012/04/25/taxes_for_union_busting/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/25/taxes_for_union_busting/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:47:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12908820 On April 4, Barbara Harms’ boss forced her to attend a meeting about why she shouldn’t join a union. The two-hour, on-the-clock meeting was run by Michael Penn, a professional anti-union consultant. Harms says Penn told workers that “you’re going to sign your life away if you sign a union card … the union would tell you to go out on strike … the place could close down.” The meeting left Harms and other pro-union workers frustrated and angry. Especially because their taxes made it possible.

Harms works at the National Benefits Center (NBC) office in Lee’s Summit, Mo. She's not directly employed by the federal government but is, instead, a contractor. She is one of about 800 workers there employed by the British company Serco, or Serco's subcontractors, to process immigration paperwork under Serco's contract with the federal government ($190 million a year, as of 2009). Penn, meanwhile, is a partner at the anti-union firm Crossroads Group. According to the most recent contract he filed with the Department of Labor (for a different client), his services cost $350 an hour. Serco presumably paid for Penn's time out of its own pocket. But taxpayers paid for the facilities -- from office space to audiovisual equipment -- he used to campaign against the union.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/25/taxes_for_union_busting/feed/ 8 21st century chain gangs http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/21st_century_chain_gangs/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/21st_century_chain_gangs/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:06:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12888991 Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T and IBM.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/21st_century_chain_gangs/feed/ 61 Wisconsin unions bet on underdog http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/wis_unions_bet_on_underdog/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/wis_unions_bet_on_underdog/#comments Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:31:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12882711 After Wisconsinites submitted signatures to recall their union-busting governor, labor leaders pledged not to settle for just “Anybody But Walker.” Last week, the state AFL-CIO made good on that promise. As a string of current and former elected Democrats lined up behind Milwaukee Mayor and Democratic primary front-runner Tom Barrett, the labor federation followed many of its major unions in endorsing former Dane County executive Kathleen Falk. Many labor leaders say Falk is more likely to beat Walker in the recall and reverse his policies once in office. But to get the chance, she’ll have to overcome Barrett’s 14-point polling lead before the May 8 primary.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/19/wis_unions_bet_on_underdog/feed/ 10 An LGBT-labor alliance http://www.salon.com/2012/04/17/an_lgbt_labor_alliance/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/17/an_lgbt_labor_alliance/#comments Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12874861 As a straight, black labor organizer, Ezekiel Jackson is not the conventional face of gay rights. But as a visible defender of queer justice to the non-queer population, Jackson was the ideal choice for the presidency of Marylanders for Marriage Equality, a coalition of progressive groups. Last month, MFME made Maryland the eighth state to legalize same-sex marriage, just two weeks after Washington became No. 7.

“It wasn’t any struggle to get us on board,” Jackson says of his union, 1199, a local of the Service Employees International Union representing some 400,000 healthcare workers throughout the northeast. “We took a leadership role in putting together the coalition.”

Once the self-described guardian of “union power, soul power”—an ally of the Black Panthers and student New Leftists and an opponent of the Vietnam War—1199 is still a force for civil rights. This time, it joins a front of union confederates in the march for marriage equality. In fighting for “working families, not just certain families,” as Jackson put it in one campaign spot, labor is pushing the boundaries of queer politics while recharging its own power.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/17/an_lgbt_labor_alliance/feed/ 4 Sports activism’s welcome rebirth http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/sports_activisms_welcome_rebirth/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/sports_activisms_welcome_rebirth/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12858501 As high-profile events periodically prove, politics and athletics have long had a love-hate relationship, the affinity ebbing and flowing with the cultural tides. In the tumultuous 1960s, for instance, stars like Muhammed Ali, Arthur Ashe and John Carlos used their notoriety to embolden the major social movements of the time. Then came the 1980s and 1990s, which saw the sports world depoliticized in an age of “Just Do It” and “greed is good.” For every Charles Barkley using Nike commercials to forward social messages about role models, there were far more Michael Jordans who avoided any political statements whatsoever.

Skip forward to 2012 -- a superheated moment primed by seething protest campaigns and a divisive presidential election. Not surprisingly, the sports world has again shifted, becoming just as politically fraught as the society it entertains -- and whether or not you agree with a particular sports icon’s opinion, the larger change is a welcome development for participatory democracy.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/13/sports_activisms_welcome_rebirth/feed/ 16 The powerless American worker http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/the_powerless_american_worker/ http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/the_powerless_american_worker/#comments Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12796051 On March 16, at least 14 employees of the Elizabeth R. Wellborn law firm, located in Deerfield Beach, Fla., wore orange shirts to work. For this style choice, they were marched into a conference room and summarily fired. Wellborn’s husband declared that the shirts were a protest against working conditions at the 275-worker law firm, and that management would not stand for such behavior. (Early reporting claimed the workers’ dress merely signified a way to easily organize a happy hour outing, although it later came out that while that was true for some, others were dressed in the color of prison uniforms to protest draconian new work rules.)

Aren’t such tyrannical, arbitrary and callous acts illegal? Can management just throw you out on your ear, upending your life and endangering your ability to support yourself, for wearing the wrong shirt? Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, right?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/04/05/the_powerless_american_worker/feed/ 102 Life after collective bargaining http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/life_after_collective_bargaining/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/life_after_collective_bargaining/#comments Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12744281 Last year's labor protests across the Midwest rattled the country. They shook Republican politicians who thought they'd have an easy time erasing union workers' rights. They spurred thousands of rank-and-filers into action. They rejuvenated a beaten-down progressive movement and forced middle-class progressives to rediscover the language of class and workers’ rights. They inspired talk of tactics and ideologies that haven’t been tried since the 1930s. They laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new and vibrant protest movement that spread nationwide.

And they reminded Americans of the value of organized labor. People who'd never been part of a union stood and marched, rallied and voted, knocked on their neighbors' doors to gather signatures on petitions for recall elections and a ballot referendum.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/28/life_after_collective_bargaining/feed/ 12 Bring back the 40-hour work week http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12672741 If you’re lucky enough to have a job right now, you’re probably doing everything possible to hold onto it. If the boss asks you to work 50 hours, you work 55. If she asks for 60, you give up weeknights and Saturdays, and work 65.

Odds are that you’ve been doing this for months, if not years, probably at the expense of your family life, your exercise routine, your diet, your stress levels and your sanity. You’re burned out, tired, achy and utterly forgotten by your spouse, kids and dog. But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/feed/ 97 How Occupy helped labor win on the West Coast http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/occupy_helps_labor_win_on_the_west_coast/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/occupy_helps_labor_win_on_the_west_coast/#comments Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12413971 Earlier this month longshore workers in Washington state reached a contract with a boss that has spent the past year fighting to keep their union out. That company, the multinational EGT, sought to run its new grain terminal in the town of Longview, as the only facility on the West Coast without the famously militant International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). A victory by EGT would have emboldened employers up and down the coast to seek to free themselves of ILWU influence. And if the union -- with the help of the Occupy movement -- had not defied the law, EGT would have succeeded.

The Longview struggle began last March when, after initial discussions with ILWU Local 21, EGT announced its intention to run its new grain terminal without them. The ILWU held protest rallies, and joined the Port of Longview’s lawsuit charging that EGT was bound by the union’s contract with the publicly owned port. The union may have had a good legal case. But so did Washington’s Boeing workers when their boss blamed their strikes for its decision to take new work to South Carolina. Boeing mostly got away with it anyway.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/occupy_helps_labor_win_on_the_west_coast/feed/ 7 America’s last hope: A strong labor movement http://www.salon.com/2012/02/19/americas_last_hope_a_strong_labor_movement/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/19/americas_last_hope_a_strong_labor_movement/#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12370921 The fate of the labor movement is the fate of American democracy. Without a strong countervailing force like organized labor, corporations and wealthy elites advancing their own interests are able to exert undue influence over the political system, as we’ve seen in every major policy debate of recent years.

Yet the American labor movement is in crisis and is the weakest it’s been in 100 years. That truism has been a progressive mantra since the Clinton administration. However, union density has continued to decline from roughly 16 percent in 1995 to 11.8 percent of all workers and just 6.9 percent of workers in the private sector. Unionized workers in the public sector now make up the majority of the labor movement for the first time in history, which is precisely why — a la Wisconsin and 14 other states — they have been targeted by the right for all out destruction.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/19/americas_last_hope_a_strong_labor_movement/feed/ 166 Obama to unions: See you later http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/obama_to_unions_see_you_next_year/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/obama_to_unions_see_you_next_year/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12363821 On Tuesday President Obama signed a bill that will make it harder for workers to form a union. This bill, the FAA Reauthorization Act, passed Congress last week despite an outcry from major unions. Dozens of House Democrats voted for it, as did most Democratic senators.

To appreciate what that means, try to imagine a Republican president and Republican Senate majority leader signing off on a bill with pro-union language despite thundering objections from most big businesses. Your imagination may not be good enough to picture that, which tells you everything you need to know about the asymmetry between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to labor.

The signing of the FAA bill ends a long-running legislative fight. It began with something President Obama did right: He appointed members to the National Mediation Board who, in 2010, adopted a new rule governing elections for railroad and airline workers seeking to unionize. Such workers are covered by the 1935 Railway Labor Act, rather than the National Labor Relations Act that covers most American workers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/15/obama_to_unions_see_you_next_year/feed/ 88 Unions in a “death spiral”? Not on my job site http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/unions_in_a_death_spiral_not_on_my_job_site/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/unions_in_a_death_spiral_not_on_my_job_site/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2012 19:15:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12331431 With his assertions in Salon that "unions are in a death spiral" and "private sector unionism has all but vanished," Arun Gupta advances a shortsighted and incomplete narrative promoted too often by the mainstream media. His blanket assertion that organized labor has no response to today's challenges, other than to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at the Democratic Party, demonstrates an unfamiliarity with the nuances of today's union movement. As a close observer of the labor movement, I am confident in stating that, at least in the construction sector, Gupta's portrait bears little resemblance to what is actually occurring.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/10/unions_in_a_death_spiral_not_on_my_job_site/feed/ 30 What’s the matter with Indiana? http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/whats_the_matter_with_indiana/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/whats_the_matter_with_indiana/#comments Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:13:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12313571 I, for one, felt there was one thing missing from an otherwise exciting Super Bowl Sunday in my hometown of Indianapolis. There was nary a public peep from union workers about the twin hammer blows — the second delivered only days before the big game — brought upon their heads by the state’s conservative Republican lawmakers.

Just last week Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels led state legislators to pass a "right-to-work" law — the first in the Midwest — striking at the heart of union dues collection and further weakening a union movement that makes up only 11 percent of the labor force, a shade below the national average. Upon taking office in 2005, Daniels had also terminated collective bargaining with all public employee unions by executive order. Together, Indiana’s anti-union blows were decidedly tougher and more brazen than those delivered by Gov. Scott Walker in Wisconsin.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/07/whats_the_matter_with_indiana/feed/ 102 Arizona’s vicious war on workers http://www.salon.com/2012/02/06/arizonas_vicious_war_on_workers/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/06/arizonas_vicious_war_on_workers/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12306701 Not content to let Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich get all the fame (and recall elections, and ballot referenda) for their attempts to curtail union workers' rights, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators have jumped into the fray and proposed their own anti-union bills in recent weeks.

Along with South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Indiana's Mitch Daniels, Arizona's Jan Brewer, not content with making her state the least friendly to immigrants and people of color, has decided to get in on the union-busting action as well, introducing a bill that makes Walker's and Kasich's attacks on public workers look mild.

Brewer, the Republican left in charge of the state after President Obama tapped Janet Napolitano to be his secretary of Homeland Security, has been planning anti-union moves since last spring with the backing of the Goldwater Institute. (Named for Barry Goldwater, the think tank pushes for “freedom” and “prosperity” -- as long as it's not the freedom or prosperity of state workers.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/06/arizonas_vicious_war_on_workers/feed/ 70 How to fight Indiana’s “Right to Work” law http://www.salon.com/2012/02/03/how_to_fight_indianas_right_to_work_law/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/03/how_to_fight_indianas_right_to_work_law/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:24:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12294621 On Wednesday Gov. Mitch Daniels delivered a body blow to organized labor, signing a bill making Indiana the 23rd “Right to Work” state. Daniels’ law, which unions will protest during Sunday’s Super Bowl in Indianapolis, poses a major test for Indiana’s labor movement. To survive “Right to Work,” Indiana unions will have to disregard one of the most popular arguments made recently by their supporters: that a union is a business.

As a former union organizer, I’ve been squirming in recent weeks listening to the arguments made by Indiana Democrats against “Right to Work,” the brilliantly titled legislation that bars union contracts from requiring employees represented by a union to pay for that representation. Sen. Greg Taylor said the bill needed to be amended to restore the principle “that you have to pay costs of services.” Sen. Earline Rogers cited a Republican mayor’s comparison of “Right to Work” to welfare: providing benefits to people without making them pay for them. Other “Right to Work” opponents compared a union to a temp agency or a sports agent.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/02/03/how_to_fight_indianas_right_to_work_law/feed/ 77 What Occupy taught the unions http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/occupys_challenge_to_big_labor/ http://www.salon.com/2012/02/02/occupys_challenge_to_big_labor/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12265071 Unions are in a death spiral. Private sector unionism has all but vanished, accounting for a measly 6.9 percent of the workforce. Public sector workers are being hammered by government cutbacks and hostile media that blame teachers, nurses and firefighters for budget crises. To counter this trend organized labor banked on creating more hospitable organizing conditions by contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to the Democratic Party the last two election cycles. In return Obama abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have made union campaigns marginally easier, failed to push for an increase in the minimum wage, and installed an education secretary who attacks teachers and public education.

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