Labor

Celebrate Labor Day. Really, celebrate. It’s important.

Wear a t-shirt announcing to the world the name of your union and march in a parade, chanting and whooping it up about how glad you are to belong to an organization whose members are devoted to looking out for each other. If you’re among those without a union, proclaim your profession and declare your pride in the hard work you do. Make some happy noise. Infect your fellow marchers with your zeal. 

Invite your most beleaguered neighbors, friends and co-workers over for a picnic. Raise a pint, braise some burgers and praise your companions for their skill, devotion and compassion. Recognize them for all they’ve persevered through since this relentless recession began in December of 2007.  Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers.

The 45,000 CWA and IBEW members are hopeful that Monday night’s return to work at Verizon after a two- week strike will bringmeaningful collective bargaining and a good result for all concerned.  For us, the strike was about real collective bargaining rights as much as about preserving the standard of living for our families.

The unity of our members and the widespread public support for workers really speak to the general state of working families in the US.  This includes stagnating  real wages in recent years, the collapse of employer based health care,  declining retirement security and the export of good jobs to low wage contractors and offshore.  The root cause of much of this decline is the collapse of bargaining rights in the US in both the public and private sectors.  

Last Thursday, President Obama suggested that voters give Congress an earful on the horrible state of the economy. He was right to do that. There is plenty that Congress can do to spur private sector job creation that would not swell our federal budget deficit.

Taken together, these steps would provide a significant boost to the productive sector of the American economy. Creating one manufacturing job will support four or five other jobs in the economy, which is why it makes sense to adopt a coordinated manufacturing policy which would include the following steps:

Last week, Representative Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) and Representative Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), together with their colleagues, came together to form the Congressional Small Business Information Technology Caucus, signaling their recognition of the role the IT sector plays in meeting a number of national priorities. We believe this development could not come soon enough.

While the nation has been riveted by the debate and drama in Washington, D.C. over the debt limit, let’s not overlook the other fundamental challenge -- job creation. Here, the IT industry continues to be a crucial pillar.

There is no greater engine of jobs than the 30-million strong small business sector, whose employees represent over 99 percent of all employer firms and employ over half of all private sector employees.

The majority of IT firms in America fall into this category. Of the roughly 385,000 IT firms in the US, 95 percent -- or about 360,000 firms -- have fewer than 50 employees.  

These IT firms are the traditional job creators and can help get the US economy back on a healthy trajectory.  However, these and other small firms are also not rebounding as quickly as experts had predicted -— a trend that is impacting the overall national economy.

House Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) delivered the following remarks today at a press conference with Senators Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

My name is Steny Hoyer, I’m the Democratic Whip. I’m speaking on behalf of Leader Pelosi and myself. As Leader Reid has pointed out today, almost 4,000 federal employees, and some 70,000 workers for contractors around this country are being held captive. They are out on the street because Republicans have refused to work with us to find common ground. The FAA shutdown will jeopardize $11 billion in construction projects. It will cost more than $200 million per week. It has already cost us $360 million. This is from the party that is worried about fiscal responsibility. Furloughs of thousands of critical aviation engineers, safety analysts, and key personnel—we owe it to these workers to come together and reach a compromise. We owe it to every American taxpayer to come together and reach a compromise. We need to get this done, and we should get it done today. Read more...

America is facing a catastrophic jobs crisis. Not since the Great Depression has official unemployment hovered above nine percent -- where it is today -- for more than 20 months. Millions of Americans have given up looking for a job altogether. Even worse, real unemployment is more than 18%. Yet Washington overall has obviously yet to embrace a large-scale job creation agenda. Even if we reach consensus around the deficit -- the only economic issue even getting any attention these days -- it will do little to help the 29 million Americans who are unemployed in real terms. If we do not seriously tackle jobs, our country may never regain its competitive global edge.

We recently co-chaired a task force on job creation, seeking real solutions to the jobs crisis plaguing our country. This group of policy makers, economists, business and labor leaders developed a series of 15 immediate recommendations for reversing the crisis, outlined in a new report, "Vision for Economic Renewal: An American Jobs Agenda." We found there are six vital policy areas that our government must address in order to create millions more jobs now: manufacturing, trade and globalization, U.S.-China trade, the infrastructure crisis, jobs in the green economy, and youth unemployment.

Last week the National Labor Relations Board held historic public hearings - the first in three decades -- on its proposed new rule on union certification elections. The rule, designed to streamline cumbersome administrative practices and eliminate excessive election delays, was roundly criticized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers, various anti-union organizations, and representatives from several of the nation's largest "union avoidance" law firms.

How do their arguments against the new rule and in favor of the status quo - under which anti-union employers can delay elections for several months -- stand up to scrutiny? Not well, as illustrated by ten examples below from the two-day hearings.

If a corporation is large enough, it should just be allowed to break the law.

That's the message of H.R. 2597, a bill voted out of the House Education and Workforce Committee last week. With the rest of Washington caught in tumultuous negotiations over public debt and deficits that are ballooning as a result of a recession caused by Wall Street recklessness and a lack of public oversight, you might imagine that making it even easier for corporations to escape accountability would be low on the agenda. Yet the legislation, sponsored by Representative Tim Scott of South Carolina, would do just that, blocking an agency that protects the rights of working people from taking action to enforce the law.

Largely eclipsed in the debt-limit rancor, an acrimonious debate has sprung up over the Obama administration's intention to include an extension of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) -- a half-century old program that provides training and other assistance to workers who lose their jobs due to foreign competition -- in the legislation implementing the U.S.-Korea free trade agreement (FTA). Using grossly outdated information, critics have questioned the value of TAA, and, using a highly selective reading of history, the appropriateness of attaching its reauthorization to the FTA.

Wild charges aside, TAA is simply not an out-of-control spending program. Based on a compromise crafted by Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), TAA is projected to cost only $1 billion next year -- three one-hundredths of a percent of total projected government spending. At that level, TAA's cost is tiny in both absolute and relative terms. Reforms over the last few decades have reduced the cost of TAA from peak of $4.6 billion in 1980 and the cost per participant has declined by 45 percent since 1993 (adjusted for inflation).

The Bush administration told taxpayers to hand over hundreds of billions of their hard-earned dollars to bail out Wall Street banks because the financial institutions were too big to fail. Now, Rupert Murdoch, owner of politically powerful publications and broadcast stations, claims his News Corp. is too big to know.

Murdoch, who's in the news industry, essentially a business based on knowing and knowing first, told an investigating committee of the British Parliament this week that he's a know-nothing. The CEO of News Corp., owner of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, said he was clueless about the phone hacking and other illegality endemic at his company. News Corp., he said, was just too big for him to keep track of its criminal activity. Others were to blame, he blathered. Others are responsible -- but not him, not the guy in charge. Here's what he said:

"I feel that people I trusted - I don't know who, on what level - have let me down, and I think they have behaved disgracefully, and it's for them to pay."