Labor

Shortly after the November election, Common Cause hosted a National Press Club forum that focused on the flood of corporate and other special interest investments into campaigns for Congress, governorships and state legislatures across the country.

The question we asked that morning – “What follows the money?” -- is now being answered in Wisconsin and other states, as well as here in Washington. Corporate interests that bankrolled last fall’s winning candidates, often through hidden donations, are busy collecting the first returns on their investments.


I should say here that I’m no expert on Wisconsin’s fiscal challenges, or those of any other state. But it’s clear to me that the course Badger State Gov. Scott Walker has chosen to answer those challenges, an attempt to break the collective bargaining power of some unfriendly public worker unions, reflects the wishes of one of his most generous corporate supporters.

Mr. Ross Eisenbrey’s recent blog post “Immigration rule fight pits Chamber of Commerce against U.S. workers” included several misconceptions about the H-2B program that may be responsible for his erroneous conclusions about the H-2B program and U.S. Chamber's position on immigration.

Everyone knows U.S. immigration law is broken, but most people don’t know why.  Powerful interests benefit from the system’s failures and lobby hard to prevent change.  Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries are businesses that don’t care where their workers come from as long as their wages are low and they have no bargaining power.  The fight over a regulatory change currently working its way through the courts and the U.S. Labor Department vividly illustrates why the broken system is so hard to fix. Read more...

As the political landscape in Washington shifts, there’s a lot of noise coming from Big Business and its allies about unions. That in itself comes as no surprise to anyone, on either side of the aisle. But as millions of out-of-work Americans lose their unemployment benefits just in time for the holidays, it’s clear that we can no longer afford to be misled by the same voices that drove our economy into the ground. The clock is ticking, and there’s simply too much at stake—for working families, our cash-strapped communities and our future.

So let’s set the record straight. Read more...

The American people clearly expressed their dissatisfaction Tuesday. They have demanded change on a number of hot button issues, among them immigration. Sadly, as far as immigration is concerned, change is still not on the horizon. Read more...

There was seemingly one loud message from last week’s election: Washington, get out of the way! But there were important footnotes in the voters’ pink slip for the last Congress, and incoming legislators would do well to heed the public’s desire for big government and big labor to step back and allow the free enterprise system and job creators to get our economy moving again.
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Manufacturing and manufacturing jobs proved to be powerful and prominent issues in this year’s campaigns.

Candidates from across the political spectrum campaigned on creating and preserving high-paying manufacturing jobs. Read more...

Last week, President Obama took time out of a hot campaign season to remind us all that, as National Work and Family Month wrapped up, “millions of Americans continue to struggle… to balance work and family life.”

As small business owners, we couldn’t agree more.  We are those Americans. And so are our employees.
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The warning signs are clear: without intervention and investment, the American manufacturing industry is in danger of extinction.

The United States used to be a country that made things: for over a hundred years, our economy was driven by the production of high-quality goods by American workers in American factories. And as Arianna Huffington has often commented, we are now a country that makes things up: speculation in collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities nearly led to the collapse of our economy in 2008.
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The Labor Department today reported that the unemployment rate continues to remain above 9.5 percent.  Last month, 159,000 government employees lost their jobs while only 64,000 private sector jobs were created.  Let me put that into perspective.  When Speaker Nancy Pelosi took over the House of Representatives in January 2007, America’s unemployment stood at 4.6 percent, or seven million individuals.  If we continue to only create 64,000 private sector jobs a month, it will take over 10 years to return to pre-Pelosi employment numbers.   Unfortunately, the Obama administration considers these abysmal numbers a recovery.
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