Sent to me by friend of blog Tom: The Caterpillar Strike as Metaphor

If Labor Unions Can’t Put the Brakes on This Thing, Who Can?

The Caterpillar Strike as Metaphor

by DAVID MACARAY

Not that anyone—least of all American factory workers over the last three decades—needs to be reminded that corporations have very little respect for working people, the International Association of Machinists (IAM) strike against the Caterpillar plant in Joliet, Illinois, removed any lingering doubts.

Judging by their actions, Caterpillar saw this negotiation as a unique opportunity to stick it to their workers. Indeed, its truculent, take-it-or-leave-it posture is emblematic of every offensive aspect of post-Reagan corporate arrogance. Labor relations have gone from hard-nosed collective bargaining to gladiatorial blood sport, with labor now shedding most of the blood. What used to be viewed as an undignified and unnecessary show of muscle by management, is now regarded as standard procedure.

What Caterpillar has said to the IAM is this: No matter how healthy we are as a company, no matter how profitable we become, and no matter how much cold, hard cash we manage to rake in, we will never, ever, under any conditions, share one more nickel with the hourly workforce than is absolutely, positively necessary. Which raises the question: Why is this company taking such a hard line with their long-time, loyal workers? Simple answer: Because they can.

While it was announced Wednesday that IAM district leadership (as opposed to local leadership, directly answerable to the rank-and-file) had reached a tentative agreement with Caterpillar management to end the 15-week strike (approximately 780 workers went out on May 1), there’s a good chance the local will reject the offer when they vote on Friday. No one can predict how these votes will go, especially after a lengthy strike, but given how disillusioned and resentful the membership it, a rejection is definitely a possibility.

According to reports, the company’s LBF (last, best and final offer) was very close to the concession-laden LBF that precipitated the strike in the first place and resulted in the membership spending 15 long, agonizing weeks on the bricks, drawing a paltry $150 a week in strike benefits. It’s going to be interesting to see how successful IAM’s apparatchiks are in persuading the membership to accept what is, by all accounts, a profoundly inferior contract.

Among other things, it calls for a staggering 6-year freeze on wages and benefits. A company making billions of dollars in profits off the backs of its workers insists on a 6-year wage freeze? How cold is that? And not only is this freeze being offered with a straight face, it’s being presented as one of those “If you don’t like it, pal, you can rot in Hell” propositions. It’s true. The company has indicated that if the union remains coy, they’re prepared to fire everybody and take their chances with a brand new workforce.

Last winter, Caterpillar showed how aggressive they were willing to be. Appealing to that wildly misleading wage statistic known as “fair market,” Caterpillar insisted that the 450 workers at its London, Ontario, plant take a whopping 55-percent wage cut. When the workers balked (and who wouldn’t?), the company locked them out. And when it became clear that the union viewed these tactics as a form of economic extortion and were unwilling to roll over, Caterpillar shut down the entire factory and moved away. Period. No more jobs.

As far as pure commerce goes, Caterpillar is doing spectacularly well. Profits are at a record high and forecasts for the future are even rosier. Moreover, management is so confident and comfortable being in the driver’s seat, they’re not even trying to cosmetically cook the books for negotiating purposes. Caterpillar executives are more than willing to admit that business is booming. In fact, they’re bragging about it.
Last year the company earned a record $4.9 billion in profits, and expects to come in even higher this year. But, alas, they’ve also vowed that none of that increase—none of that marvelous windfall—is going to end up in the pockets of the people who actually do the work. Why would they give these people raises when, technically, they’re not obliged to? Only a fool would pay more than necessary.

To make matters worse, Caterpillar executives are playing dumb. Management is clinging to the fiction that it has no choice but to freeze wages because their pay scale is already higher than the “fair market.” Of course, the insanely bitter irony here is that today’s “fair market” wage is a grossly misleading statistic, the tragic result of a concerted, two-decades long assault on American earnings.

Which is why the middle-class is shrinking so alarmingly. It’s not unemployment that is killing the middle-class; it’s the depletion of decent-wage jobs. While bottom-line fundamentalists like Caterpillar proudly see themselves as benefactors to their stockholders, what they are, in fact, is destroyers of the middle-class and subverters of the American Dream. And if labor unions can’t put the brakes on this thing, who can?

DAVID MACARAY, an LA playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

Original Post here:  http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/17/the-caterpillar-strike-as-metaphor/

The rest of the taxi episode is just as interesting on labor issues.

What's wrong with unions part two. I think Andy Stern learned it from Tony Danza

thanks to Alan: unemployment rate

There is also good statistical analysis country by country.

originally posted: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/unemployment-rates-list-by-country

Scott Brown Features Foreign Businesses In 'Let America Be America Again' Ad

Scott Brown Features Foreign Businesses In 'Let America Be America Again' Ad:

'via Blog this'

LP - The Democratic Presidents at the beginning are a nice touch for the Wall Street. What will Wall Street money buy you click on it and enjoy it.

According to Daily Kos

US Senator Scott Brown, who played a critical role in the battle over the 2010 financial regulatory overhaul, has used a joint fund-raising committee to collect$2.9 million in political donations over the last year, nearly half of which came from the nation’s financial sector.

The mechanism is a joint committee, the Scott Brown Victory Committee, between Brown and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Campaign finance laws allow this kind of committee much higher donation limits than traditional campaign committees, $30,800 per donor per election cycle versus the $5,000 limit for regular committees.

So he has this Victory fund, along with his regular campaign committee, allowing for seven times the donation power for donors, an effective limit of $35,800. Among those donors, theGlobe reports, are "deep-pocketed venture capitalists, bankers, and leaders of some of the country’s largest investment firms."

Full Story here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/02/1088180/-Scott-Brown-double-dips-on-massive-Wall-Street-campaign-donations

WASHINGTON -- Letting "America Be America Again" may be a tall order, if the filming locations of some clips in Sen. Scott Brown's latest reelection ad are any indication.

The two-and-a-half-minute spot, which the Massachusetts Republican's reelection team has hailed as an "online sensation,"features three instances of stock footage filmed overseas, undercutting the ad's running theme of growing American business.

In one scene, a beaming chef is shown before he flips ingredients in a frying pan over an open flame, while President Gerald Ford praises American capitalism. According to Getty Images, the kitchen is located in Barcelona, Spain, a country currently stuck in its second recession in three years.

"Through our system of democracy and free enterprise, the United States has achieved remarkable, unbelievable progress," Ford booms as the chef flicks the frying pan.

In two other scenes, video portraits depict a butcher standing in the doorway of his shop and another worker posing in front of a delivery truck full of boxes. Both clips were filmed in Dublin, according to Getty Images.

Shortly before the camera hovers on the Irish butcher shop, President Ronald Reagan pays tribute to "the forgotten heroes of America, those who create most of our new jobs, like the owners of stores down the street."

The three clips are tagged with "Non US Location" on the Getty Images website, which also lists filming locations in each respective caption.

A Getty Images representative confirmed Monday that the cities and countries listed in the stock footage captions indicate filming locations.

A Brown spokeswoman did not respond to several requests for comment Monday.

In a statement, Massachusetts Democratic Party spokesman Matt House called Brown's rhetoric "as phony as his stock footage."

Full Story:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/30/scott-brown-ad_n_1720199.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

This is a petition for raising the minimum wage in US

Take some time get involved. This is a petition for raising the minimum wage in US as promoted by Ralph Nader. It would be a good first step for putting the politicians who are legally redistributing their money to their corporate constituency who buy them and it would go a long way to healing up the division between our public and private unions that has allowed their corporate backers to alternately whack both. It is time for working people to stand up for the good of workers as a whole.

http://www.timeforaraise.org/2012/06/07/petition-to-raise-the-minimum-wage/

This says it all. Is the glass half empty or half full

special thanks to Margot

Excellent article on how the mainstream media plays an active role in the discussion of unions

Daily Kos: Union basics the media often gets wrong—and ways right-wing messaging sneaks into labor coverage:

'via Blog this'

A typical way the media likes to portray the unions. For some reason they don't talk about all the labor violations that happen when a work force tries to unionize.

Two regular features of reporting about unions are sometimes hard to tell apart: A lot of reporters don't know basic facts about labor, and anti-union forces have a powerful PR machine tirelessly working to insert anti-union language into the media as "neutral" language. Some mistakes are just that. They're wrong but not necessarily harmful. Others may have become naturalized, repeated so often that even people who don't intend any harm to unions have picked them up. But it's important to try to get things right, and it's particularly important to combat the spread of right-wing messaging, maybe especially when it's been so successfully inserted into the discourse that people don't recognize it for what it is.

This list isn't anywhere close to exhaustive, but it features a few of the big problems I see repeated the most often.

Big labor—Ooh, scary, right? Not just labor, not just unions, not just millions of working people joined together, fighting together rather than one by one, having hired some lawyers and organizers to represent their interests, but big labor. It must be a fair fight between corporate money and Koch brothers money and U.S. Chamber of Commerce money and big labor money, right? No, of course it's not. But those are the assumptions embedded in the term, which is exactly why it's important to push back on it.

Union boss—Try this: "union leader." Though union officers are elected through different processes, some at conventions at which delegates from around the country vote, some by a vote of the union's entire membership, union officers are elected leaders. The term "union boss" is used to create a false equivalence between the boss in the workplace put there from above who holds the power to hire and fire workers, to promote or discipline them, and the elected union leader.

Merit shop—Any time you see this one, you know that the person using it is straight-up anti-union. "Merit shop" refers to non-union companies, usually construction companies, implying that workers are hired and paid according to their individual merit, not union rules. Of course, it turns out that the individual merit of "merit shop" workers leads to lower pay, fewer benefits and a whole lot of misclassification. One of the particularly Orwellian things about this term is that construction unions and union contractors typically invest heavily in apprenticeship and training, while non-union construction firms are less likely to do so.

Closed shop—This term describes something that doesn't exist under law—a workplace in which only existing union members may be hired. Not only are collective bargaining agreements prohibited from limiting hiring to existing union members, they are prohibited from forcing workers to join the union once hired. Any worker can decline to join a union and pay a fee covering their fair share of the work the union does directly representing them. Yet anti-union organizations like the Associated Builders & Contractors and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will still use this term, just to see if they can get reporters to quote them doing so without challenging it.

Right to work—We've been over and over the substance of these laws, but the challenge imposed by the name deserves a word. "Right to work" is akin to "death tax" as a right-wing frame. Unfortunately, the right created this law and with it the name, so there's no formal name to call it by that isn't by design an anti-union term. "Right to work" laws don't put anyone to work and they don't give them any right except that to receive benefits that they do not pay for—which is why you'll see such laws referred to as free rider laws or right to work for less laws or no rights at work laws—but the official name they are given says otherwise, and until we have the kind of PR engine and access to powerful people using a pro-union message that has gone into creating anti-union messages, we are stuck grappling with it.

Project Labor Agreements are not union-only—But anti-union groups generally claim they are. Project Labor Agreements govern large construction projects, setting uniform terms across different contractors and different types of work being done on a project. Each PLA is specific to a project, and they can greatly increase efficiency and reduce the risk of interruptions or labor conflict. While PLAs set the same standards for union and non-union contractors on a project, they do not require that all workers or contractors be union. Additionally, they can be used for things like requiring that a percentage of the work on a project be done by local workers or by economically disadvantaged workers.

Union/labor leader—There's nothing wrong with this term if it's correctly applied. But when it's incorrectly applied, take a second to think about why. The key thing here is that only the elected leaders of a union should be called union (or labor) leaders. That's presidents and secretary-treasurers, not political directors and communications staffers. Unions are organizations of workers, and officers are their elected representatives. Staffers are critical to the function of a union, but their role is to execute the interests and the will of the workers who are members of the union, under the direction of the leaders elected by those members. So if you read an article in which someone other than a union president or secretary-treasurer or maybe vice president is described as a union leader, ask yourself: Did the author of this article not know enough about unions to know the difference between an elected leader and a staffer, or is there a political agenda involved in the error? If so, what might it be?

Top union/labor leader—A term to be applied very judiciously. If the full description is "top union leader" and the context is national politics, there's room for legitimate debate about who should be characterized as a "top" labor leader, but it begins with a core of the president and secretary treasurer of the AFL-CIO and the presidents of maybe a dozen of the largest or otherwise most significant unions, and it doesn't extend a whole lot further—certainly not beyond the presidents and secretary-treasurers of national or international unions, and likely not that far. Of course, if "top union leader" is modified somehow—top Los Angeles union leader, top construction union leader—the pool changes.

The AFL-CIO is not a union—The AFL-CIO is often referred to as a union, but in fact, it's a federation of unions. It's in the name! American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations. The AFL-CIO consists of 56 unions, ranging from the very large to the tiny, familiar names like AFSCME and unions you may not have heard of like, say, the Glass, Molders, Pottery, Plastics and Allied Workers International Union. Each of those unions has its own organizational structure, and a voice within the AFL-CIO. This is why, when unions are divided between different candidates in an election, the AFL-CIO may not endorse until late, perhaps after a primary.

original post is here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/10/1086581/-Union-basics-the-media-often-gets-wrong-and-ways-right-wing-messaging-sneaks-into-labor-coverage

The serfs just don't understand their role in this

Broken Promises: Romney's Massachusetts Record

Having lived in Massachusetts I'd say this was pretty accurate. I can say taxes didn't go up, fees went through the roof and they weren't called taxes. He was there for about two years and used it as a platform to run for president. We got a part-time governor but we got a full time campaigner. During those year Massachusetts had a campaigner in chief.

Jim Cramer: Bain Capital "fired a lot of people and that's how they got ...

Scott touts his job loss numbers

Scott Walker was out with his "miracle math" jobs numbers yesterday in public and with a campaign ad talking about how Wisconsin gained jobs in 2011 (Big, Fat, Smelly Lie) to get ahead of another really official report on how Wisconsin lost jobs again.

Wisconsin lost an estimated 6,200 private-sector jobs in April, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the state Department of Workforce Development. April showed the second consecutive month of job losses in the state.

After losing more jobs than any state in the nation in 2011, we had slight job gains in January and February of 2012, but March again showed major losses and that has repeated.

Earlier in the week, Gov. Scott Walker released fourth-quarter employment data - not due for formal release until June 28 - showing Wisconsin added over 23,000 public and private sector jobs last year. It was an unusual step for Walker because the numbers had not been fully vetted by federal authorities at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The new figures from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages - which is collected from 95% of the state's private and public sector employers and deemed reliable by most economists - contrast sharply with more than a year's worth of monthly employment surveys, which suggested that Wisconsin lost 33,900 jobs last year, ranking it last among the 50 states.
While the accuracy of the monthly data has been called into question in the past, they were never shown to be off by a magnitude of 57,200 in a single year.

Full story here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/05/17/1092507/-BREAKING-Walkers-Miracle-Math-Fails-Wis-Loses-6-500-Jobs-in-April

Walker stands by promise of 250,000 jobs | TPM2012

Walker stands by promise of 250,000 jobs | TPM2012:

'via Blog this'

As he campaigns in the Wisconsin recall, Gov. Scott Walker has been answering questions about a promise he made in 2010 to create 250,000 private-sector jobs during his first term — the state lost 9,700 private-sector jobs in 2011, and even after a partial recovery this year is only at plus-5,900 jobs since Walker took office.

LP - I can feel those jobs coming now.

Synchronicity II by The Police HD with lyrics

Another suburban family morning
Grandmother screaming at the wall
We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can't hear anything at all
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration
But we know all her suicides are fake
Daddy only stares into the distance
There's only so.much heartache he can take
Many miles away
Something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today
He doesn't think to wonder why
The secretaries pout and preen like
cheap tarts in a red light street
But all he ever thinks to do is watch
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch
Many miles away
Something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish loch

Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance
He knows that something somewhere has to break
He sees the family home now looming in his headlights
The pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache
Many miles away
There's a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake
Many miles away, many miles away

Child labor advocate Paul LePage, Maine Governor, Tells Unemployed Americans To 'Get Off The Couch' And Get A Job

Paul LePage, Maine Governor, Tells Unemployed Americans To 'Get Off The Couch' And Get A Job:

'via Blog this'

WASHINGTON -- At the Maine GOP convention on Sunday, Gov. Paul LePage (R) received an enthusiastic standing ovation from his fellow Republicans for saying that all able-bodied out-of-work Americans need to "get off the couch" and go find employment.

LePage called on the state legislature to pass structural changes to welfare, saying, "Maine's welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. To all you able-bodied people out there: Get off the couch and get yourself a job."

"I understand welfare because I lived it," he added. "I understand the difference between a want and a need. The Republican Party promised to bring welfare change. We must deliver on this promise."

Through the looking glass: dinner with the tea party

For some reason the government should have let Detroit go bankrupt because all they are doing is bailing out the CEOs. I wonder how if they put all those people out of work how that would possibly have helped the economy? I also wonder how rolling back one hundred years of labor law that went along with those jobs would help either. My friend appears indifferent as to the ripple effect that this would have on the Michigan economy. These laid off people would no longer be unable to buy things at stores and restaurants. This is a position that shows very little concern on empathy to the people lives while totally valuing the cerebral thought of economic austerity.

The most important right that the federal government provides is the second amendment: the right to bear arms and defend yourself. All's I know is I heard how tough it was to buy a gun in certain states - why don't you want me to have a gun - no, I really don't care if you have one. Thanks NRA for the talking points. Machine gun like weapons, that spray more bullets than water from a water hose, can't be regulated because of the "slippery slope" from banning one M-16 to leaving the citizenry defenseless with sling shots. They live in an area where they can't leave their first floor windows open and they're arming themselves against the hoards,  hoards which are usually off-white, that are coming. If the area is that bad then I don't think I'd be saving up for a gun but more likely for a U-haul.

They vote for politicians who are totally in the tank for Wall Street banks in order to teach Wall Street  banks a lesson.

They think George Soros is the scariest man in the world, and I don't know why. They don't say it but you know they are one step removed from declaring Obama to be a Kenyon Nationalist Socialist Muslim though you really think the Republican national committee would have Obama to serve one term before they tortured him..

They might not like being labelled as the pull yourself up by the bootstraps crowd though everything about them promotes pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. That's what happened in the seventies when their parents separated. When you ask them how much worse it is today than it was in the seventies they have no idea. The answer is that the seventies is when  the factories began to pack up and leave for places like China in the "original rust belt" states (PA, OH, MI, NY). Or the free market regulators who allowed the country to bleed jobs into Mexico. Just between 2001-2009 the US lost six million manufacturing jobs (CNN). Those jobs often have higher wages and benefits than the ones who replaced it. In real spending money the Americans are going backwards.

Everyone on welfare is automatically a moocher who wants nothing but to stay on welfare. My friend doesn't believe in the working poor who work two or three jobs and still can't get by. They offer no stats or data to back up this point and all's they offer is anecdotal evidence, namely theirs. For some reason they appear to be a lot more upset over a person stealing an extra bag of cheese doodles, with their food stamps, than they are with a guy who parks his millions in a Cayman bank.

Hilary Rosen  was dead wrong about Ann Romney. How dear she attack a woman, Ann Romney, who has survived both MS and breast cancer. The way she says it you know she believes that Rosen is actually working directly for Obama rather than just being someone who actually draws a check from CNN. You forget to tell your friend that Ann Romney is lucky to be married to former governor of Massachusetts. Under her husbands plan, she would have pre-existing condition and wouldn't qualify for health care if she wasn't. The ones who would qualify if they got as sick would be people, like my friend, a poorly paid Romney supporter.

Bruce Springsteen - Death To My Hometown

LP - Was in Littleton New Hampshire Friday. A woman was setting up a play date for her child with girl friend's child. She had been picking up more hours at Dunkin' Donuts and talking to a friend who was in there and had a week off. She seemed depressed that she was now working full time at a dead end job and said "What do you expect from a mother who is a single parent."

The town appeared run down. There was big box stores on the outskirts of town selling each other things and people who worked for the tourist industry. When you broke it down what did the town now produce: it didn't appear much. It was just people selling each other shit that had originally been made in China. What did America produce now? Not much. There was no more gold rushes and what was left was charlatan feasting off the bones of public education and privatized jails, that's where the real opportunities currently are. It's in these small towns where you see the ache of the American recession.

It reminded me of being in Lubbock Maine a few years back when the sardine industry went out there and people were left with out work. My wife and I were trading money to go into Canada on vacation, and they were desperate to get whatever they could out of the bank so it wouldn't foreclose on their houses. Go to these small towns. Take their temperature and you'll see the overall health of this country. It's something that the Washington politicians can't be bothered to do.

Walker Responds : "Certainly not aware of that"

It look like the rats are leaving the ship, leaving only the king rat on the ship.

Missouri Senate Candidates Don't Know Minimum Wage

For those on the minimum wage this is who represents them. I wonder how many of them are actually living on minimum wage. Of course if you brought back slavery you'd have complete employment.

Scott Walker: Out of Touch