Labor

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 Using grossly outdated information, critics have questioned the value of TAA, and, using a highly selective reading of history, the appropriateness of attaching its reauthorization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."

After taking power in January, the new Republican majority set out to make changes around Capitol Hill that reflect their ideology. They started by asking Congressional offices to share the burden felt by many across the nation and to take a 5 percent cut to office budgets. 

Many of us already adhered to the principle of giving back 5 percent or more toward deficit reduction every year, but their initial move to cut budgets had some legitimacy. But their sound decision-making ended there. 

Monday and Tuesday will see historic hearings at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on a proposed new rule for union certification elections. But the past few months has been a historic period for the NLRB for entirely different reasons – an extraordinary effort by the GOP leadership to “rule by intimidation” on labor policy.

First, Republicans threatened to defund the NLRB for daring to issue a complaint against Boeing in response to the alleged illegal transfer of jobs from Washington to South Carolina. They have also demanded access to confidential internal documents and threatened to subpoena board members.

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The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently filed a complaint against the Boeing Corporation based on evidence that Boeing moved work away from Washington State as punishment for the employees having exercised their legally protected right to strike. Politicians who either don’t know the law or don’t care about it have condemned the NLRB, including Mitt Romney and his fellow Republican candidates for President. They want to rile up the business community by painting the decision as the President’s, even though it was made by a career government employee on behalf of an independent agency outside the President’s control.

Various senators and congressmen are now trying to influence the Labor Board’s ultimate decision, which is not a policy decision but an adjudication. The law and policy were provided by Congress in 1935 when the National Labor Relations Act was passed by Congress and signed by Franklin Roosevelt. The NLRB’s only responsibility is to apply the law to the facts of this case, an undertaking that should be free from political influence or intimidation. And yet a growing number of legislators are threatening to slash the NLRB’s budget and punish its General Counsel if the case proceeds in the manner proscribed by statute.

Home health care occupations are projected to grow more than any others through 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but the workers who fill these jobs aren’t covered by our nation’s most basic labor laws. They should be.

The exclusion of an estimated 1.7 million home care workers from the federal minimum wage and overtime law has depressed wages in the industry and led to extremely long hours for those workers who provide round-the-clock care. These are the caregivers who get our grandmothers out of bed in the morning and facilitate the feeding tubes of our disabled neighbors. It’s time to close the loopholes that exempt them from federal wage and hour laws — laws most of us take for granted.

Let’s say you have city permission to host a farmer’s market on your property between two national grocery chains. How would you feel if those large competitors stopped you by wrongly claiming you don’t own the land?

Now let’s say you spend four years and vast sums in legal costs to persuade the city that in fact you do own the land. Should you be allowed to sue the grocery stores for damages if it turns out their claims were bogus and solely intended to delay competition from your business?

This is the situation facing my friend Larry Lockwood who owns a different kind of property – pioneering patents in electronic commerce granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

Last week, Senate and House finance leaders finally hashed out a deal on a long-delayed trade pact with South Korea that included an agreement to reauthorize Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), which provides job training and income support to U.S. workers laid off due to trade. It was a rare opportunity to act on legislation with bipartisan support and the broad backing of voters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and worker advocates.

The deal quickly dissolved, however, when Republican opponents balked at TAA’s inclusion, despite the fact that reauthorization would be paid for through other cost-cutting measures. On Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee held a mock markup of pending trade agreements with South Korea, Columbia and Panama that do not include reauthorization. This is a mistake for the economy and runs counter to the longstanding bipartisan support for helping U.S. workers displaced by trade.

In a recent editorial, The National Review states that while the government “take over” of healthcare stands out for most Americans as the Obama Administration’s most extreme act, “even more remarkable is its radicalization of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), part of its tireless campaign to aggrandize the cartels known as labor unions.” 

The editorial, which calls for retaliatory legislation, and Thursday’s House hearing on the NLRB, at which Republicans called the board a “political sycophant” of "Big Labor" and threatened punitive action, offer a perfect insight into the current tactic of conservative politicians and pundits to rule by intimidation when it comes to the enforcement of labor law.

Until a few months ago, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) enjoyed an existence similar to that of several other independent government agencies. Apart from labor and management specialists who scrutinize its every move, few people knew of the board’s existence, and after years of failing to update its practices, fewer still considered it relevant to their daily working lives.

Those days must now seem like an age away for the NLRB’s four members and Acting General Counsel (AGC), who have reluctantly been making headline news since April. Under constant and frequently ferocious attack from the GOP leadership and conservative pundits, they must now be longing for a return to dull normality and relative obscurity.