News for the Working Family From AFL-CIO
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Five Years After Katrina: Frustration and Determination This trumpet player is painted on a house still unrepaired five years after Hurricane Katrina. Unemployment in New Orleans is below the national average, but the poverty level is twice the national rate. The reasons behind that stark contrast tell the real story of what is going on five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City. There’s lots of work that needs to be done in New Orleans. The problem is that nobody’s making a living off the work but the “chiefs and the thieves,” says Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO. Even though the federal government just announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant to the city, Hammond says workers will be hard pressed to get good-paying jobs out of the grant. The money is coming to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and doesn’t include Davis-Bacon requirements that workers be paid the prevailing local wage. What’s happening, says Hammond, is that construction workers are being deliberately misclassified as independent contractors so employers can pay them less than if they had a union contract. He adds: It was hard enough to get a union job before Katrina. Now it’s even harder. New Orleans is not alone. With many of the shipping lanes in the Gulf of Mexico closed after the BP oil spill, longshore workers across the area are now working. And to add insult to this tragedy, just over a month after it announced the closure of its shipyard in Avondale, La., Northrop Grumman said this week it plans to l... AFL-CIO | | Monday, 30 August 2010 | Hits: 2 | Comments Read more |
Workers Who Win South Can Change The Nation MaryBe McMillan As we approach the massive One Nation Working Together march on Oct. 2, MaryBe McMillan, secretary-treasurer of the North Carolina State AFL-CIO, says the road to an economy that works for all must first come through the South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. realized the only way to win freedom for people of color everywhere was to win it first in the most difficult place—the segregated South. Union leaders must also direct their attention and resources to the South, where union membership is small and violent anti-union tactics are widespread. In her Point of View column on the AFL-CIO website, McMillan says: The southern United States is the center for exploitation of workers of all colors. Employees in the South have the lowest wages, the fewest worker protections and the least union representation. And nowhere are the harmful effects of globalization and flawed trade deals more evident than in the South. She cites her hometown of Hickory, N.C., as an example. Thousands of jobs in the textile and furniture industries have been lost there, mainly because of bad U.S. deals, but workers aren’t rushing to join unions. Because unions have not invested in organizing her neighbors, the only voices they hear are conservative talk-radio hosts and the local Chamber of Commerce. No wonder workers end up voting for anti-worker conservative lawmakers, which hurts every one. She points out that when unions do pay attention to the South, we can win, citing the election of Kay Hagan, a pro-worker senator from N.C. in 2008, followed by t... AFL-CIO | | Monday, 30 August 2010 | Hits: 2 | Comments Read more |
Trumka: Wins in November—Path to Jobs in Future Oregon gubernatorial candidate John Kitzhaber and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at Oregon “Jobs” town hall meeting. Elana Guiney, Communications and Research director for the Oregon AFL-CIO, sends this report on the start of the Labor 2010 campaign season in Oregon. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka kicked off the Labor 2010 campaign season in Oregon this week with two full days of events, including a town hall meeting on jobs, with more than 500 union members from across Oregon. The crowd filled the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) hall in Portland and spilled into overflow seating in the parking lot. Trumka was joined by Oregon gubernatorial candidate John Kitzhaber, who has spent his career working for Oregonians as an emergency room doctor, as an elected official and through programs to help expand health care to all Oregonians while bringing down costs. Both Trumka and Kitzhaber laid out their priorities—bringing back manufacturing jobs; stopping the demonization of our hardworking public employees, teachers and front-line workers; prioritizing policies that help us all get ahead; and electing working family candidates. Three Oregonians whose lives have been directly affected by the recession told their stories. Nick, a United Steelworkers (USW) member, was out of work for eight months before getting called back recently. The father of three said that finding a way to support his family for those months was daunting in a community that has lost more than 600 manufacturing jobs and no living wage jobs to replace them. He told the crowd that he was at the town hall meeting beca... AFL-CIO | | Monday, 30 August 2010 | Hits: 4 | Comments Read more |
Public Backs Ending Tax Cuts for Rich, and More Note to lawmakers: It’s the economy, stupid. Most Americans support ending Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. A new CBS News poll finds that a majority of Americans, 56 percent, say the tax cuts for the wealthy should expire for households earning more than $250,000 per year, as Democrats have proposed. Thirty-six percent of Americans say they should not be allowed to expire. Lower GDP offers more reason for Congress to act. Jeff Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) outlines the ramifications behind today’s revisions to estimates of gross domestic product (GDP). The new data revised the GDP downward for the second quarter to 1.6 percent from an initial estimate of 2.4 percent. Bivens says this downward revision shows without the stream of spending provided by the Recovery Act, the economy would have contracted outright. This is most troubling, as Recovery Act money is almost spent and will provide no boost to growth going forward. The case for more action from policymakers to support the recovery and return the job-market to health is now overwhelming. And a final word (or two): Income inequality. Raghuram Rajan, professor of finance at Chicago’s Booth School, pinpoints the underlying symptom of the nation’s sputtering economic recovery: Many causes have been suggested for both the economic collapse and mediocre recovery, but one that is hardly ever mentioned is income inequality. This is a mistake. Growing income inequality in the United States and the policy responses it has spawned have done tremendous damage to our economy. And because we continue to ignore this underlying problem, the risks of our poli... AFL-CIO | | Monday, 30 August 2010 | Hits: 2 | Comments Read more |
Trumka Takes It to Palin in Her Back Yard Laborers members rally with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Alaska State AFL-CIO President Vince Beltrami at two Anchorage hotels in violation of labor agreements. Last night, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said what many Americans believe but won’t say: Sarah Palin’s rhetoric is poisonous, dangerous and strikes of McCarthyism. In a much publicized speech to the Alaska State AFL-CIO, Trumka said: In this charged political environment, her kind of talk gets dangerous. “Don’t retreat…reload” may seem clever, the kind of bull you hear all the time, but put it in context. She’s using crosshairs to illustrate targeted legislators. She’s on the wrong side of the line there. She’s getting close to calling for violence. And some of her fans take that stuff seriously. We’ve got legislators in America who have been living with death threats since the health care votes. As usual, Palin tried to dodge the issues by writing on Facebook and Twitter—far easier than facing reporters—and calling on her “union brothers and sisters” to join “our commonsense movement.” Palin left working families in Alaska behind when she trade them for high-profile appearances on FOX News and star appearances at tea party rallies. Her actions, policies and the candidates she supports speak way louder than her tweets and Facebook comments, no matter how much she tries to keep up a faux populist image as caring about working people. Her true colors come through when she supports candidates like Kentucky’s Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul, who told miners across the state that “accidents happen,” and so the federal government shouldn’t be invo... AFL-CIO | | Monday, 30 August 2010 | Hits: 2 | Comments Read more |
