Corporate Welfare

May 2, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Editorial in the NY Times today

… as labor standards have eroded, allowing profitable corporations to pay chronically low wages, taxpayers are not only supporting the working poor, as intended, but also providing a huge subsidy for employers by picking up the difference between what workers earn and what they need to meet basic living costs. The low-wage business model has essentially turned public aid into a form of corporate welfare.

I’m sure all sorts of investigations are going to pop-up to find out why this is happening….

Short of cracking down on such welfare frauds, California has an idea worth pursuing…

In 2016, California will start publishing the names of employers that have more than 100 employees on Medicaid and how much these companies cost the state in public aid.

Excellent!

Filed under Economy, Poverty Tagged with , ,

Unions Recognized in US Outsourcing Plants in Bangladesh

February 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment

In one of the principle countries of the world where low, low, low wages improve the bottom line for first world companies, finally a small counter-balance to autocratic corporate rule gets a foot hold.

VF, which makes North Face and Nautica, and PVH, the parent of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, as well as Gap, El Corte Ingles and other companies, had cut off or threatened to cut off orders from the company, the Azim Group, last year over the incidents at two of its factories in Chittagong.

But now, after weeks of negotiations, these companies have agreed to resume business with Azim because it has promised to recognize and bargain with the unions at the two factories where the violence occurred.

Azim, industry and labor officials said, has also agreed to stop efforts to oust a labor union, to pay the medical bills of a badly beaten union leader ]Mira Boashak] and to allow several union officials to return to work with full back pay.

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And speaking of unions, Lawrence Mishel argues that lowering taxes on the working poor is not the solution to the problem of working and being poor: raising wages is, and encouraging the organizations that can bring that about – unions.

“What has hurt workers’ paychecks is not what the government takes out, but what their employers no longer put in — a dynamic that tax cuts cannot eliminate.

Between 1979 and 2014, while the gross domestic product grew 150 percent and productivity grew 75 percent, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage of the median worker rose just 5.6 percent — less than 0.2 percent a year. And since 2002, the bottom 80 percent of wage earners, including both male and female college graduates, have actually seen their wages stagnate or fall.

Protecting and expanding workers’ right to unionize and bargain collectively is also essential; the erosion of collective bargaining is the single largest factor suppressing wage growth for middle-wage workers over the last few decades. And we need to modernize our New Deal-era labor standards to include earned sick leave and paid family leave so workers can balance work and family.

Finally, stronger laws and enforcement to deter and remedy wage theft and the illegal treatment of employees as independent contractors could put tens of billions of dollars into workers’ pockets.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, wage stagnation is not a result of forces beyond our control. It is a result of a policy regime that has undercut the individual and collective bargaining power of most workers. Because wage stagnation was caused by policy, it can be reversed by policy, too.

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The Supreme Court: Arming Goliath

July 3, 2014 by Leave a Comment

While the activist judges on the Supreme court give more and bigger weapons to the powers that rule the land (You’re a corporation AND a person so you get the most favorable treatment for each and are protected from the liabilities) it is also busy stealing David’s stones.

On Monday a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court fired its own salvo in the war on unions. Though its decision in Harris v. Quinn was narrow, saying that, in some cases, unions could not collect fees from one particular class of public employees who did not want to join, its language suggests that this may be the court’s first step toward nationalizing the “right to work” gospel by embedding it in constitutional law.

…[As it has been ] workers can’t be forced to join a union or contribute to its political and ideological activities, but they can be required to pay for the cost of the union’s collective bargaining and contract-administration activities.

The majority in Harris saw things differently. Making workers pay anything to a union they oppose is in tension with their First Amendment rights — “something of an anomaly,” in the words of the majority. But the real anomaly lies in according dissenters a right to refuse to pay for the union’s services — services that cost money to deliver, and that put money in the pockets of all employees.

Once selected by a majority of workers in a bargaining unit, a union becomes the exclusive representative, with a duty to fairly represent all of them. That is the bedrock of our public and private sector labor laws.

Unless everyone is required to pay for those services, individual workers can easily become “free riders,” taking the benefits of collective representation without paying their fair share of the costs.

NY Times: Estlund and Forbath

Filed under Economy, Labor / Unions Tagged with , ,

Union Busters Swarming in Tennessee

January 29, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Unlike most companies that confront unionization efforts, Volkswagen [in Chattanooga, Tennessee]  — facing a drive by the United Automobile Workers — has not mounted a vigorous campaign to beat back the union; instead VW officials have hinted they might even prefer having a union.

But then there are the outside anti union forces

A business-backed group put up a billboard declaring, “Auto Unions Ate Detroit. Next Meal: Chattanooga,” while a prominent anti-union group, the National Right to Work Committee, has brought legal challenges against the U.A.W.’s effort, asserting that VW officials improperly pressured workers to back a union.

In addition, Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, has set up a group, the Center for Worker Freedom, that has fought the U.A.W. on several fronts, partly to prevent the election of labor’s Democratic allies who might increase government spending.

… Chattanooga’s business community grew alarmed last September when the U.A.W. asked VW for union recognition, saying a majority of the plant’s 1,600 assembly workers had signed cards seeking union representation.

The business community reacted with further dismay when several Volkswagen officials from Germany visited the plant and hinted that it would be good to have a labor union because that would help establish a German-style works council. Such councils, comprising managers and representatives of white-collar and blue-collar workers, seek to foster collaboration within a factory as they forge policies on plant rules, work hours, vacations and other matters.

Michael Cantrell, 56, an assembly line worker, said it would be great to have a works council because it would give the workers more of a voice and help VW by fostering a smoother-running plant.

“It gives them a great competitive advantage if they do this,” said Mr. Cantrell, who has an M.B.A. and ran a tax preparation company before joining Volkswagen. “They have this standardized across the world. We feel we’re not as competitive if we don’t have this collaboration. This would be a paradigm shift.”

NY Times: Greenhouse

Filed under Labor / Unions Tagged with

Earning Enough to Eat By

July 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mark Bittman, a New York Times food columnist and author of a small 4 volume set [The Mini Minimalist] of easy recipes of which I am a big fan, does what more foodies should do — looks at the conditions of the many tens of thousands who work in food services around the country.  Good for you Mark!

 

…a rapidly increasing number of food industry and other retail workers are now fighting for basic rights: halfway decent pay, a real work schedule, the right to organize, health care, paid sick days, vacations and respect. Next week, organizers say, we’ll see a walkout of thousands of workers at hundreds of stores in at least seven cities, including New York and Chicago.

Something is happening here, though exactly what isn’t quite clear. Fast food was never a priority of organized labor — it’s difficult to imagine a traditional union of four million fast-food workers in something like 200,000 locations — but dozens of organizations are now involved, including, to its credit, the Service Employees International Union, which is providing financing and counsel. The upshot: Workers with nothing to lose are demanding a living wage of $15 an hour, and gaining strength and confidence.

Filed under Food, Labor / Unions, Organizing Tagged with , , ,

Strike! To Get Off Food Stamps

December 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From Eduardo Porter in the NY Times

Mr. Carrillo at a McDonald’s in Midtown Manhattan and Mr. Williams at a Wendy’s in Brooklyn. They both earn a little more than $7 an hour. And they both need food stamps to survive. Last Thursday, both did something they had never done before: they went on strike.

[Isn’t this a government subsidy to the fast food industry?]

More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty.

The bad news is:

Fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector are in a union. We have the largest share of low-paid jobs in the industrial world, amounting to almost one in four full-time workers, according to the International Labor Organization. And our rates of unionization continue to fall.

Union leaders know they are fighting long odds — hemmed in by legal decisions limiting how they can organize and protest, while trying to organize workers in industries of low skill and high turnover like fast food. But they hope to have come upon a winning strategy, applying some of the tactics that workers used before the Wagner Act created the federal legal right to unionize in 1935.

“We must go back to the strategies of nonviolent disruption of the 1930s,” suggests Stephen Lerner, a veteran organizer and strategist formerly at the Service Employees International Union, one of the unions behind the fast-food strike. “You can’t successfully organize without large-scale civil disobedience. The law will change when employers say there’s too much disruption. We need another system.”

Filed under Labor / Unions Tagged with , , ,

Fast Food Slow Raise

November 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Hidden away in the New York section of Thursday’s Times is an article about the poor standing up and beginning to fight their way out of poverty.

Unionizing

Fast-food workers at several restaurants in New York walked off the job on Thursday, firing the first salvo in what workplace experts say is the biggest effort to unionize fast-food workers ever undertaken in the United States. The effort — backed by community and civil rights groups, religious leaders and a labor union — has engaged 40 full-time organizers in recent months to enlist workers at McDonald’s,Wendy’s, Domino’s, Taco Bell and other fast-food restaurants across the city.

… Jonathan Westin, organizing director at New York Communities for Change, a community group that is playing a central role in the effort, said hundreds of workers had already voiced support for the campaign, called Fast Food Forward.

“The fast-food industry employs tens of thousands of workers in New York and pays them poverty wages,” Mr. Westin said. “A lot of them can’t afford to get by. A lot have to rely on public assistance, and taxpayers are often footing the bill because these companies are not paying a living wage.”

… Mr. Westin’s group, New York Communities for Change, has played a major role in the recent uptick in unionizing low-wage workers in New York, many of whom are immigrants. In the past year, his group, working closely with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and other organizations, has helped win unionization votes at four carwashes and six supermarkets in New York.

The sponsors of the fast-food campaign also include UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and the Service Employees International Union, a powerful union that is playing a quiet but important role behind the scenes.

Online update to print article

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Economic Justice and Economic Growth Aren’t Incompatible.

November 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Paul Krugman noticed as did many of us that Twinkies and Ho Hos may go the way of the buggy whip and the Cleavers.  He recommends that those who might be nostalgic for the good old 50s get a grip.

Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

…  There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.

Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.

Filed under Economy Tagged with , ,

Too Much Time Beating Up Unions

June 5, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Joe Nocera, NY Times columnist, comes from the business news side of that paper so it’s good to see this morning’s words: If liberals really want to reverse income inequality, they should think seriously about rejoining labor’s side. [my elision wbk]

Nocera

His is the third or fourth mention I’ve seen of Timothy Noah’s book “The Great Divergence.” Time to get a readin’.

Filed under Labor / Unions Tagged with , ,

Fixing the US Economy: Replacing the Engines of Inequality

May 28, 2012 by Leave a Comment

From the leadership from the greatly weakened U.S. labor movement, the same that once led the country to economic strength and a strong middle class, comes its analysis of what ails the U.S. Economy.

The crash of 2008 and the Great Recession were inevitable consequences of three decades of economic policies designed by and for Wall Street and the wealthiest Americans. At the heart of the problem was the hollowing out of American manufacturing, the growing dysfunction of our financial sector and a rapid increase in economic inequality, all of which crippled the growth engine of the U.S. economy.

Starting in the 1980s, corporate America decided to boost profits by shipping U.S. jobs overseas. NAFTA and the admission of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) accelerated the drive to relocate production to “export platforms” in foreign countries that would ship goods back to the U.S. market. Corporations that sent jobs overseas became forceful proponents of a “strong” (overvalued) dollar, which enhanced the profitability of their overseas operations but at the same time made much of the U.S. manufacturing sector uncompetitive and led to perennial U.S. trade deficits.

Fixing What’s Wrong….

 

The Republican presidential candidates not only failed to learn anything from Wall Street’s mistakes, they now want to double down on more of the same. They propose to deregulate the financial sector yet again, pass more trade agreements that encourage the offshoring of U.S. jobs, suppress wages by intensifying the assault on unions, prioritize inflation-fighting over full employment and perpetuate overvaluation of the dollar and the U.S. trade deficit. We already tried this approach, and it already failed spectacularly.

The Republican candidates pretend that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy are the answer to wage stagnation and the economic crisis, but the Bush years taught us that these obscenely wasteful tax cuts only make the problem worse. They are the equivalent of eating our seed corn, because they starve the kind of public investment in education, infrastructure and innovation that is indispensable for long-term economic growth.

Steven Greenhouse of the NY Times comments

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