Tag: labor

Dear Seattle Teachers  and Seattle Education Advocates –

On Wed. 19 Oct the ballots go in the mail for the Seattle School Board election of Tues. 8 November.

WE each need to get 5 people WE know to vote for the FOUR challengers to the school board.

– Do YOU want to be on Strike in Sept. 2013 because the fellow travelers of Maria Goodloe-Johnson’s management by disruption, confusion and chaos have changed their tunes but NOT their behaviors?

NOTE:

–The more disruptions from downtown, the less we can help our kids.

–The more the school board is dancing to the tunes of education “reformers” who RARELY help us do our jobs better, the more disruptions from downtown.**

–The LESS we participate in elections, the more the school board dances and the more downtown disrupts.

— This really doesn’t require a mountain of degrees to figure out, because it is simple cause and effect.

Read the words of a Tacoma teacher who has taught at Lincoln High School for 21 years and who was on strike this year –

DO YOU WANT THESE EXPERIENCES?

http://postdefiance.com/reflec…

WE each need to get 5 people WE know to vote for the FOUR challengers to the school board.

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.

Controversial law prompts a spate of retirements

MADISON, Wis. – When students return today for the first day of school across Wisconsin, many familiar faces will be gone, as teachers chose retirement over coming back following the passage of a bill that would have forced them to pay more for benefits and taken away most of their collective bargaining rights.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press under the state’s open records law show that about twice as many public school teachers decided to retire in the first half of this year as in each of the past two full years, part of a mass exit of public employees.

Their departures came after the bill passed but before the new law took effect. The bill, which was pushed by Governor Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature, led to weeks of protests at the Capitol.

The ensuing exodus of teachers and other state employees has spurred fears that the jobs might not be filled and that classroom leadership by veteran teachers will be lost.

For the unwashed among you, Cee Lo Green has had a hit “Fuck You”, which is about a girl dumping him for his lack of funds. Taylor Swift has had a hit “Mean”, where she tells off some mean meanie for being a meanie – it is very high school song.  

I’ve listened to pop music for decades – it tells us what is going on out there among the mob of us nobodies, kind of like how the highly priced painting of a campbell’s soup can tells us how outta touch our ‘elites’ are.

These 2 songs have been popular for months – and some of the excuse making for 0bummer’s LATEST $ell out just hit me the other day – blaming fascist pigs for being pigs while your ‘champions’ sell you out is … great for the well paid ‘champions’!      

Ed Schultz rails against the latest attack on the middles class, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s bill ending collective bargaining on health care for state employees and reducing their benefits.

This is an outrageous attack on state employees and unions that will hurt them for years. The bill will increase the costs of contributions to pension funds and limit access to health care at the same time it could increase subscriber costs by several hundred percent.  It removes the right to choose where they go for treatment unless they purchase an even more expensive plan. Most public employees have no collective bargaining rights except for health care, this bill ends that right.

It also freezes retirees cost of living adjustments (COLA) for the next 30 years. These raises have fluctuated and for the last two years have been 0%. Without some raises the elderly in New Jersey may well find themselves impoverished.

While the bill was opposed by many Democrats, it was the Democratic leadership, including Senate President Stephen Sweeney, Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and Assemblyman Lou Greenwald, who sold out betrayed the fundamental Democratic values. Any Democrat that voted for this horrendous bill should be primaried by a real Democrat.

The stock market came tumbling this morning on the bad news that started yesterday with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s bleak economic outlook. With the news that there were higher than expected new unemployment claims, a drop in new housing sales and the announcement from the International Energy Agency that they would release 60 million barrels oil, sent stocks, oil and gold prices in to a downward spiral.

This isn’t necessarily all bad news. Lower the price of oil that has been driven wholly by speculators that have “no skin in the game” has been a major cause of the economic slow down. As the price of fuel drops, the price of transportation and goods fall, people have more money to spend or invest.

Global Oil Reserves Tapped in Effort to Cut Cost at Pump

The United States will lead an international effort to release 60 million barrels of petroleum reserves to world markets, replacing some of the oil production lost because of the conflict in Libya, the International Energy Agency announced in Paris on Thursday.

The action is aimed at reducing energy prices for businesses and consumers, and in early trading futures contracts for West Texas intermediate crude oil were down $4.50 a barrel to around $91.

The United States will release half of the total amount from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with the rest of the oil to be provided by other nations among the international agency’s 28 member states. Negotiations for the coordinated response have been going on in secret for weeks, according to a person involved in the talks. Similar unified action was taken in 1991 at the outbreak of the first Persian Gulf War.

Stocks and Oil Fall Sharply

The Dow Jones industrial average fell sharply and energy stocks declined more than 2 percent on Wall Street on Thursday after a report that the United States would release some oil from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Crude oil prices also fell.

The International Energy Agency announced in Paris on Thursday that the United States will release half of the 60 million barrels of petroleum reserves to world markets, with other nations releasing the rest, replacing some of the oil production lost due to the conflict in Libya.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke held a first ever news conference after the central bank’s meeting of Federal Open Market Committee which determines interest rates. His statement and the Q&A after were really boring as Bernanke droned in a monotone voice and filibustered questions. It took a bit, as David Dayen noted, to get to the meat, jobs, and what is the Fed doing to create them.

Bernanke answered that, while he has been engaged in extraordinary efforts to aid the economy, he had to be concerned about inflation as well. So basically, the Fed is failing at one of their mandates (maximizing employment) because they’re worried about their other mandate (price stability)… which they are ALSO FAILING AT! There’s also no awareness that, if inflation rises unacceptably, you can deal with it at that time. Refusing to stop the human suffering of mass unemployment because of the possibility of an inflation rise that can be dealt with if it happens is just a giveaway that the inflation mandate matters overwhelmingly more than the employment mandate.

Jobs? Never mind, too busy trying to control the inflation that hasn’t happened? Do these people shop or drive?

The first quarter growth rate report wasn’t encouraging either, coming in at a dismal 1.8% which was not unexpected due to “Higher commodity prices and winter blizzards that shuttered businesses and delayed construction were among the main causes of the slowdown, along with a large decrease in federal government spending and a sharp increase in imports, which are subtracted from output.” This will effect jobs no matter how optimist Bernanke is about the slow down being “transient”

(G)iven the ground lost during the Great Recession, the economy has a long way to go before its job market and output are back on track. And there are fears that the slow growth in the first quarter may weigh on job growth going forward, since employment trends tend to lag what happens in the rest of the economy.

“We may see employment growth weaken a little bit in the coming months, with more modest increases,” said Paul Dales, a senior United States economist for Capital Economics.

Dayen also reminds us that:

The first quarter saw a pretty modest decrease in spending – $10 billion from two continuing resolutions while negotiations on 2011 appropriations continued. If that was enough of a factor to contribute to sending growth down, then the impact will be the same in the next two quarters. And the fourth quarter, on the 2012 budget, is grand bargain time. So there’s no quarter that won’t be affected by contractionary fiscal policy. And don’t forget the debt limit, a failure to increase with will play havoc with the financial system and economic growth as well.

snip

Growth out of a recession is supposed to be sky-high. This homemade chart from Steve Benen is nice, but he knows that growth has sagged well below where a recovery should be for five straight quarters now. He even says it: “We can and must do much better than 1.8%, but we won’t if the nation pursues a conservative approach that focuses on one problem that doesn’t exist (inflation) rather than the problem that does exist (weak economic growth).”

How does this affect jobs? Job growth was actually above expectations for the quarter given this growth number. But realistically, you cannot expect to lower the unemployment rate without growth of 3% or higher. And as Paul Krugman noted yesterday, if you look at the employment-population ratio or other datum, you’ll see that job growth is totally stagnant. Which is in line with the stagnant growth in GDP.

Also a note about the Budget Battle in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) decided to take the bull by the horns and ride the wave of protests at townhall meetings over Wisconsin Republican Rep Paul Ryan’s disastrous budget that passed the House on a strict partisan vote. Reid announced that he will bring the budget up for a vote in the Senate:

“Republicans seem to be in love with the Ryan budget. And they are going to have an opportunity here in the Senate to vote on the Ryan budget and see (how many) Republican senators like the Ryan budget as much as their House colleagues did, he said.

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said that the timing of the vote has not yet been determined.

The idea behind Reid’s plan is to force Senate Republicans to vote on the measure, which could put incumbents facing tough reelections on the spot.

The Ryan budget is not expected to pass the Senate, which is controlled by the Democrats.

“I would hope they do”, Reid said when asked if he thinks the Senate will reject the plan. “It would be one of the worst things to happen to this country if that came into effect.”

Talk of a Republican split emerged alst week when centrist Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said she would not vote for Ryan’s plan.

cross-posted from Sum of Change

WASHINGTON, DC: Demonstrations were planned in over 60 U.S. cities today to show solidarity with workers in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and wherever workers’ rights are under attack. I stopped in at the Rally to Save the American Dream here in DC, at Dupont Circle, where we heard from a number of speakers, including Van Jones.