Tag: unions

Recently AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka laid in on the line to the White House and the Democrats, you don’t support us, we won’t support you. “In the past we’ve spent a significant amount of resources on candidates and party structures, and the day after election, workers were no stronger then they were the day before,” Trumka said, during a sit down at his Washington D.C. office slightly more than a week ago.

The failure to pass Employee Free Choice Act and the public health insurance option and the renewal of the Bush tax cuts and the consistent push for free trade deals have made Mr. Trumka cranky. In light of the events in Wisconsin, he has taken a harder stand and in recent interviews has politely let his frustrations show.  This is some of what he said in an interview with Huffington Post where he also spoke out on Social Security and Medicare:

“What we are now focused on is doing a couple of things differently,” Trumka said. “In the past, we would build our structure six to eight months before the election,” he added. “Now we’re not going to do that. We’re going to focus our resources on building a structure that has total fidelity towards America’s working people, both union and non-union working people. We’ll do it 12 months a year, so they’ll be able to transition from electoral politics, to advocacy, to accountability with no effort. And it will continue to build greater strength for workers after the election and in between elections.”

snip

“How do you tell someone like my dad, who retired the day he was 62, that he has to work to 67? It would have been a death sentence for him,” said Trumka. “He couldn’t have worked to 67 — he was completely disabled of black lung. So what do you tell then? You tell them that they ought to be able to retire at a lower range.”

“I think the President made a strategic mistake when he abandoned talking about the jobs crisis and job creation and focused completely on the politically manufactured debt crisis,” he said when asked for a review of the administration’s economic record. “You have one very obvious way to make a dent in the deficit crisis, which is to get people back to work.”

“But you don’t have anyone actually talking about jobs,” Trumka said. “And when you bring it up to people at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, their almost universal response is we have a Congress that won’t do it. So what do you do? You do what leaders do, you lead.”

Another labor official spoke about plans to engage more on the local level:

“One of the most important aspects of the labor movement, which is different then for other entities, is that we have an enormous network of local community workers who are responsible for talking to people after their election,” one top union official said. “The experience of the last six years should teach progressives a great deal about the difference between elected people who say the right thing in their candidate questionnaires and the people who are there voting for workers, voting for jobs and advocating our positions.”

“There was a perception in the progressive community in January 2009 that things had gotten pretty good,” the official, who requested anonymity, added. “But we didn’t have an infrastructure in place to say we need a bigger stimulus, or we need to be concerned about jobs or we need to have a different national agenda.”

So what has President Obama done since he was elected? He has met with and capitulated to the demands of Republicans, banks, Wall St. and corporations. I sincerely doubt that Obama will have anything that will be any different to say on Thursday than this mediocre responses of the past.

This story begins in 1928 with bananas.  On the Caribbean coast of Colombia, campesinos who are employed by United Fruit are paid less than $1 per day for backbreaking work.  They live in filthy hovels.  And they die of malaria and tuberculosis.  Then they form a union.  Then they go on strike and paralyze the exportation of bananas.

General Carlos Cortez Vargas announces in Aracataca at a dinner put on by United Fruit that he will end the strike.  

The workers are told that a manager of United Fruit will arrive to accede to their demands, so they gather together to hear the announcement of their victory.  Instead of a United Fruit manager, General Cortez Vargas appears.  He doesn’t issue a concession.  Not at all.  He issues instead an ultimatum: get back to work, end the strike right now.  Or else.

Some of the most important changes that resulted from the tragic deaths at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire were the reforms to work place health and safety conditions. Modern buildings now must conform to fire safety and occupancy standards. The Asch building  loft were 500 women labored at overcrowded worktables did not have a sprinkler system, the exits were inadequate and locked, the passages were narrow and blocked and the fire escapes were unsafe. The fire compelled New York City to create the Bureau of Fire Prevention, which required stairwells, fire alarms, extinguishers and hoses be installed in all buildings and regularly conducts building inspection to insure compliance. The Bureau also determines maximum occupancy. The year after the fire the NY the legislature passed eight bills addressing workplace sanitation, injury on the job, rest periods and child labor. In 1913, the Factory Investigating Commission recommended that 25 new bills be passed mandating fireproof stairways and the safe construction of fire escapes, that doorways be a certain number of feet wide, and that older multi-storied buildings be inspected. In 1916, smoking was also outlawed in factories.

Frances Perkins, who would later become Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s Secretary of Labor, witnessed the women jumping from the windows that day. She would later comment that it was “the day the New Deal began.” In the ’30s, the New Deal included many of these provisions on the federal level. In 1933, Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act which also protected collective bargaining rights for unions.

These are just a few of the safety rules that resulted from that terrible day:

1. The law was instituted requiring employers to provide sprinklers for workplaces with more than 50 people.
2. Regulations require that enough exit stairways to accommodate all building occupants and direct passageways to those exits that are of minimum width. Additionally, all exit doors shall remain unlocked, requiring no special knowledge or tools to open.
3. Maximum occupancy regulations established occupant loads for building rooms under all probable conditions to prevent dangerous overcrowding.
4. Regulations for exits and openings created minimum 32in pathways and doors that open in the direction of travel, reducing the bottle neck effect that wasted precious minutes.
5. Fire drills for offices, apartment buildings, schools and health facilities train workers and occupants regularly for exit procedures, using audible alarms, visible exit signs, and off site gathering spots.
6. Organizers pushed for, and won, egress regulations for the workplace, creating continuous passageways, aisles and corridors for direct access to every available exit.

These reforms have resulted in a smaller risk of fires in the work place but the the fight for safer working conditions continues on other fronts

Because of these reforms deaths from fires in the work place were drastically reduced. Unions now are focusing on other factors that affect work place safety. Now in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, Republican dominated state legislatures are trying to end workers right to collective bargaining as an excuse to reduce state budgets while giving tax breaks to their corporate masters who financed their elections. Citizens are fighting back in court and at the ballot box with recalls and referendums. We must never forget what the 146 victims of Triangle represent. Ever.

Sources for this diary:

SEIU.org

WNYC News

Wikipedia.org

I’m enraged.  Wisconsin’s union workers this evening were temporarily outflanked by a legislative maneuver of questionable legality.  And of despicably sleazy intent. The Senate decided that, as everyone in opposition to it has been saying for months, the union busting bill really wasn’t a fiscal measure, the previous pronouncements that it was be damned.  No, it wasn’t a fiscal measure.  It was a union busting measure.  And therefore, the bill didn’t need a quorum in the Senate.  It could pass the Wisconsin Senate with no democrats voting.  Or even appearing.  So there. This wonderfully disingenuous piece of legislative legerdemain has– let’s call it what it is–  temporarily screwed Wisconsin’s public unions by withdrawing their right to bargain collectively.

And now.  And now, amigo@s, comes the real test.  Will the unions and their supporters and the demonstrators and you and I all throw up our hands in defeat and despair and slink home?  Will we say in words or actions, “Oh, we lost, it’s over, let’s just forget about it and move on?”  Or will we stand up now and fight on (nonviolently) with ever renewed dedication to overturn this evil, unpopular, antidemocratic, antiunion measure?

I hope that hundreds of thousands of people show up in Madison tomorrow to demonstrate against Governor Walker and the Koch funded Teapublicans.  I hope an equal number will show up in Lansing.  And in Union Square, New York.  And in San Francisco.  And Chicago.  And in every town and city in America that recognizes the dignity of workers and their right to bargain collectively.  I hope the recall efforts will be redoubled.  I hope that the demonstrators inspire a nationwide high school strike tomorrow at 2 pm.  And I hope the demonstrators will invite farmers to show their support, to come to Madison, to ride their tractors to and surround the capitol.  And I hope that across Wisconsin and across America teachers and nurses and garbage collectors and firemen and bureaucrats and policemen will all link arms with other workers, students, progressives, anyone who supports the unions and sees that the withdrawal of public unions’ collective bargaining rights is a step back, a regression into the darkness of the Nineteenth Century.

Yes, I’m enraged.  But I’m also hopeful.  I’m hopeful that we, you and I, amig@s, will not let Walker and the Koch funded Teapublicans get away with this.  I’m hopeful that this is the beginning not of a demonstration, but of an actual, popular movement.  I hope that the movement will continue with increased strength and focus to preserve the rights of workers to organize and to bargain collectively.

Yes, I’m idealistic.  And maybe pretty unrealistic.  And not particularly practical.  That doesn’t matter.  I believe that what we are about to see is a real change.  Coming from an organic movement.  And that we will now begin in earnest to link arms and stand in Solidarity in the struggle for what I believe is the survival of the middle class.  Here’s John Lennon:

cross posted from The Dream Antilles  

The AFL-CIO has called for another massive demonstration today in Madison, Wisconsin.

If you’re too far away from Madison to participate in person, please stand in Solidarity with the demonstrators by doing something to show your support.  Buying pizza is always good.  Posting on a blog is good. Organizing your own demonstration is great.  You get the idea.  Let’s do it.

h/t to Sam Pratt:

I invited you to please go to Wisconsin. You apparently declined.  Or didn’t get the invitation.  Ok.  I guess you forgot about this.

———

from The Dream Antilles

Thank you for attending the demonstration near you yesterday on Solidarity Saturday. It’s important to turn up in physical as opposed to digital form, to link arms, to carry signs, to speak out, to be counted on this important issue.  This is a terribly old fashioned way to petition the Government for redress of grievances, to take the First Amendment’s phrase, but alas, it’s all there is.

Well, here I go again, oversimplifying, being idealistic, possibly ranting.  To all of these I plead guilty.  In advance.

President Obama’s made a few statements about the demonstrations in Wisconsin.  The most widely disseminated one is this one, reported in TPM:

Well I’d say that I haven’t followed exactly what’s happening with the Wisconsin budget. I’ve got some budget problems here in Washington that I’ve had to focus on. I would say, as a general proposition, that everybody’s gotta make some adjustments to new fiscal realities. And I think if we want to avoid layoffs — which I want to avoid, I don’t want to see layoffs of hard-working federal workers.

We had to impose, for example, a freeze on pay increases for federal workers for the next two years, as part of my overall budget freeze. You know, I think those kinds of adjustments are the right thing to do.

On the other other hand, some of what I’ve heard coming out of Wisconsin — where you’re just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain, generally — seems like more of an assault on unions.



And I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers, and they’re firefighters, and they’re social workers, and they’re police officers. You know, they make a lot of sacrifices, and make a big contribution, and I think it’s important not to vilify them, or to suggest that somehow all these budget problems are due to public employees.

So, I think everybody’s gotta make some adjustments, but I think it’s also important to recognize that public employees make enormous contributions to the well being of our states and our cities.

Sounds, feels, smells and looks like a politician.  It’s balanced.  It’s cautious.  It looks over his shoulder to wonder which side might ultimately win the Battle of Madison.  It sounds like he’d like to be on the winning side for 2012.  What it doesn’t sound like by any means is leadership.

Leadership would be going to Madison and linking arms and standing in solidarity with the demonstrators and union members against the reactionaries and would-be union busters.  It would be standing up to the Koch funded “movement.”  It would be explaining clearly to all who would listen that these unions are important to sustained high pay in Wisconsin and the nation, and that the antedeluvian effort to kill these unions must be defeated.  The Wisconsin football stadium might be a good place to hold the rally.

The President, however, hasn’t shown any signs that he’s ready to lead a fight for labor, his largest supporter.  It looks like he might still want to invoke politesse and refer to these union busters as “the right to work” advocates with whom he has a small disagreement.

These people don’t deserve that kind of deference.  They have ginned up a plan to destroy public unions and are inflexible about it.  They will not modify it or back off from it.  They plan to destroy public unions.  Period.  They have begun by trying drive a wedge between public workers’ unions. The teachers and highway workers and bureaucrats are ok to beat up on and they won’t be able to bargain, but those the cops and firefighters, which are more traditionally Republican, will.  

Today’s mock phone call with “David Koch” proved beyond all cavil that Scott Walker is the lead dog running a national union busting movement.  He doesn’t care at all about the state’s budget.  This is another item entirely.  This for Walker is only about destroying public unions.  Yes, it’s happening through the state legislatures, but this is a manifestation of an organized, well funded, nationwide movement to emasculate public workers’ unions.

That’s why the unions can’t afford to lose this battle.  And it’s why President Obama needs to organize an appearance in Wisconsin.  The unions have already conceded on the economic issues in this confrontation by agreeing to pay more for their health insurance and to contribute more to their pensions.  Those issues are not what’s keeping 14 Wisconsin legislators under cover in Illinois (or elsewhere).  No.  They are outside the state solely to protect collective bargaining.  It bears repeating.  What makes the confrontation persist is only one thing: the governor’s adamant refusal to drop his plan for withdrawal of collective bargaining rights for certain Wiaconsin public workers.  Plain and simple: the Governor insists on destroying these unions.

That’s why the national democratic leadership in Washington needs to go to Wisconsin.  And they need to go now.  This is a confrontation that can and should be won.  Obama and the national leadership have to stop playing Bert Lahr.  They have to show up in numbers, and they have to roar.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles