Cheers for Social Security’s Cost-of-Living Adjustment

Cheers for Social Security’s Cost-of-Living Adjustment: It will compensate seniors for the bout of inflation. Workers deserve as much.

CEO Pay Has Risen 1,322 %

  

Since 1978, CEO Pay Has Risen 1,322%. Typical Worker Pay? Just 18% Jake Johnson  August 10, 2021 Common Dreams   https://portside.org/2021-08-10/1978-ceo-pay-has-risen-1322-typical-worker-pay-just-18

The Economy We Enter

 

Workers Lives Put at Risk

OSHA PRESSURED TO STEP UP ENFORCEMENT: Congressional Democrats, labor unions and other worker advocates are increasingly agitated that the Occupational Safety and Health Administrationhasn't set harsher requirements for masks, gloves and social distancing in essential workplaces like grocery stores and pharmacies, POLITICO's Ian Kullgren reports.

Critics say the agency's inaction could worsening a pandemic that has already claimed more than 16,000 lives in the U.S., Ian writes. During the 2009 H1N1 outbreak, OSHA published a lengthy documentenforcing CDC guidelines for the health care industry. It required health care employers to follow certain hygiene procedures, to postpone elective surgeries on patients who might be infected, and to perform high-risk procedures in airborne infection isolation rooms, among other measures.

"The Trump administration has published no comparable document for the coronavirus — meaning that the CDC guidelines are strictly optional, according to former safety officials," Ian writes. 

GROCERY UNION DEMANDS PROTECTIONS AS WORKERS DIE: The 1.3 million-member United Food and Commercial Workers union demanded Wednesday that the CDC direct grocery employees and customers to wear protective masks, Ian reports.

Retail workers and cashiers, including those in grocery stores and pharmacies, are among those most at risk of contracting the virus, data shows. At least 1,500 UFCW workers were infected as of Tuesday, and 30 had died, the union said, though it was still making tallies.

MEANWHILE... CDC SAYS ESSENTIAL WORKERS DON'T NEED TO QUARANTINE: The Trump administration Wednesday said that health workers and other essential employees who have been exposed to the coronavirus should go back to work instead of quarantining for 14 days, POLITICO's Brianna Ehley reported.

First responders and health care workers across the country had previously been isolating for two weeks — the estimated period in which an individual can develop symptoms — after coming within 6 feet of a coronavirus patient. The new guidance is an effort to address frontline workforce shortages.

But unions and worker safety groups are calling on the CDC to revoke the policy, arguing the administration has "abandoned its responsibility to protect workers."

"It is well established that there is significant risk of transmission from asymptomatic and presymptomatic individuals," said Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the worker advocacy group the National Employment Law Project. "Thus these guidelines risk endangering workers, their families, their communities, and the public."

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka argued that the move was an effort to ensure businesses will continue to profit. "These dangerous new guidelines tell employers to keep potentially infected workers at work," Trumka said, adding that the change "does not protect essential workers on the front lines and ignores firmly established science."

BARRED FROM STRIKING, AIRLINE FOOD WORKERS SIT DOW...

The Reality Check: BARRED FROM STRIKING, AIRLINE FOOD WORKERS SIT DOW...: BARRED FROM STRIKING, AIRLINE FOOD WORKERS SIT DOWN IN TRAFFIC Photos and Story By David Bacon, Truthout  March 3, 2020 https://truthout....
Workers, union, and health care.  Great photos.

California Victory for Workers

A victory for working people,  Gig Workers

https://www.vox.com/2019/9/11/20851034/california-ab-5-workers-labor-unions

Green New Deal

WEDNESDAY, DEC 12, 2018, 6:20 PM

12 Reasons Labor Should Demand a Green New Deal

BY JEREMY BRECHER AND JOE UEHLEIN

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Labor shouldn't just back the Green New Deal, it should help lead the way. (Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)   

Workers have gotten a raw deal. Employers and their Republican allies are trying to eliminate workers’ rights both in the workplace and at the ballot box. But even when Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, they did little to protect, let alone expand, the rights of working people. Workers need a new deal.

Read the entire piece.  http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21634/labor_green_new_deal_ocasio_cortez_sunrise_movement_unions

Bernie Sanders on Amazon and Jeff Bezos

I want to ask you to clear your mind for a moment and count to 10.

1…

2…

3…

4…

5…

6…

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8…

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10…

In those 10 seconds, Jeff Bezos, the owner and founder of Amazon, made more money than the median employee of Amazon makes in an entire year. An entire year.

Think about that.

Think about how hard that family member has to work for an entire year, the days she or he goes into work sick, or has a sick child, or struggles to buy school supplies or Christmas presents, to make what one man makes in 10 seconds.

According to Time magazine, from January 1 through May 1 of this year, Jeff Bezos saw his wealth increase by $275 million every single day for a total increase in wealth of $33 billion in a four-month period.

Meanwhile, thousands of Amazon employees are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing because their wages are too low. And guess who pays for that? You do. Frankly, I don't believe that ordinary Americans should be subsidizing the wealthiest person in the world because he pays his employees inadequate wages.

But it gets remarkably more ridiculous: Jeff Bezos has so much money that he says the only way he could possibly spend it all is on space travel.

Space travel. Have you ever heard of such a thing? It is absolutely absurd.

Well here is a radical idea: Instead of attempting to explore Mars or go to the moon, how about Jeff Bezos pays his workers a living wage? How about he improves the working conditions at Amazon warehouses across the country so people stop dying on the job? He can no doubt do that and have billions of dollars left over to spend on anything he wants.

A Transition Economy- for Workers

A Superfund for Workers

http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2015/1115brecher.html

Author: 

Jeremy Brecher

Date of Source: 

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Dollars and Sense

When the Dominion Corporation proposed, On April 1, 2013, to build a liquefied natural gas export facility at Cove Point, Md., right on the Chesapeake Bay, seven hundred people demonstrated against it and many were arrested in a series of civil disobedience actions. But an open letter endorsing the project maintained it would “create more than 3,000 construction jobs” most of which would go “to local union members.” The letter—on Dominion letterhead—was signed not only by business leaders, but also by twenty local and national trade union leaders.

Similarly, in the struggle over the Keystone XL pipeline, pipeline proponents were quick to seize on the “jobs issue” and tout support from building trades unions and eventually the AFL-CIO. In a press release titled “U.S. Chamber Calls Politically-Charged Decision to Deny Keystone a Job Killer,” the Chamber said President Obama’s denial of the Keystone permit was “sacrificing tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs in the short term, and many more than that in the long term.”

The media repeat the jobs vs. environment frame again and again: an NPR headline on Keystone was typical of many: “Pipeline Decision Pits Jobs Against Environment.” A similar dynamic has marked the “beyond coal” campaign, the fracking battle, and the struggle for EPA regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

Is there a persuasive answer to the charge that climate protection policies are job-killers? A common environmentalist response has been that environmental protection produces far more jobs than it eliminates. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson explained, “environmental protection creates jobs—1.7 million of them as of 2008.” It is true that, on balance, environmental policies usually create jobs (see box, “Jobs: Clean Energy vs. Fossil Fuels”); unfortunately, this is of little comfort to the small number of workers in fossil-fuel producing and using industries who are likely to lose their jobs as a result of climate protection policies, including coal miners, power-plant workers, and oil refinery workers. And such workers can rapidly become Fox News poster children for the threat posed to workers by climate protection.

Fortunately, a strategy has been emerging to protect workers and communities whose livelihoods may be threatened by climate protection policies. Protecting those who lose their jobs due to necessary environmental policies has often been referred to as a “just transition,” a phrase popularized by labor and environmental leader Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers union (now merged with the Steelworkers) in the 1990s. (More recently, the term “just transition” is often being used in a broader way to include not only justice for workers and communities adversely affected by environmental policies, but the inclusion of broader social justice objectives within environmental policies.)

How Hedge Fund Billionaires Take Over a State

Excellent piece on Illinois politics in Today's New York Times.

MUST READ: WEALTHY SHIFT BALANCE OF POWER IN ILLINOIS: We've chronicled for months the daily battles between Republican Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner and the state's public employee unions. But the New York Times' Nicholas Confessore offers a brilliant macro-level view of the group of millionaires and billionaires that mobilized to elect Rauner. "To bring about a revolution in the Illinois Capitol, in Springfield, Mr. Rauner and his allies have created what amounts to a new campaign economy, in which union money has long been the financial lifeblood of both parties," Confessore writes. "All told, the Griffin family's contributions to Mr. Rauner through the end of 2014 came to $13.6 million - more than the combined sum donated to [former Democratic Gov. Pat] Quinn by 244 labor unions in the state." 

What's more, that group of wealthy donors is staying in the game after Rauner's election, with an ongoing spending binge designed to draw union-friendly Democrats to its corner, Confessore writes. Most of the wealthy donors "lean Republican; some are Democrats. But to a remarkable degree, their philosophies are becoming part of a widely adopted blueprint for public officials around the country: Critical of the power of unions, many are also determined to reduce spending and taxation, and are skeptical of government-led efforts to mitigate the growing gap between the rich and everyone else." 

"They come with a very political and philosophical bent," said the Chicago hedge fund executive William Daley, a former chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a member of Rauner's transition team. "I think they believe philosophically in that business mentality and that strong public unions are a root of all evil in governing places like Illinois or Chicago and New York and California." http://nyti.ms/1XqaNnh

A similar effort is at work in California.  The primary target is labor unions.

And on the worker side:

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez 

The American Prospect

Managers and supervisors can now legally require their workers to participate in politics as a condition of employment. For instance, in most states, managers have the legal right to mandate worker attendance at a political rally for a favored candidate—and fire or punish workers who decline to participate.

Aside from Citizens United and the overall political climate, several other changes in the American workplace have facilitated greater political recruitment of workers by managers. Most important, American workers have lost much of the voice and bargaining power that they possessed a generation ago. One clear manifestation of this imbalance in workplace power is the stagnation of the typical worker’s wages relative to the productivity of the overall economy, especially since the 1970s. Other signs of reduced worker bargaining power include record levels of wage theft by managers and the rise of on-call positions where employees are not notified of their schedules until just before they are required to report for work...

The collapse of the labor movement, competition with lower-wage economies overseas, the failure to update labor-law protections, and greater pressures on firms to generate high returns have all contributed to workers’ loss of power and left them in a far weaker position to resist employer demands for political support. In the past, when workers were more secure in their employment, they might have been comfortable refusing to participate in employer-led political activities. Today, not so much: Employees are reluctant to defy management for fear of being replaced.

Talking Political Economy for Thanksgiving

With Thanksgiving just a day away, I wanted to send along some guidance on how to deal with the inevitable political debate that breaks out over Thanksgiving dinner. When your conservative cousin insists that raising the minimum wage is a bad idea, I want you to know how to push back. When your cantankerous uncle vilifies unions, I want you to be prepared with the facts. Let’s start with the erroneous attacks on unions. MYTH: "Unions haven’t done anything for us."   Wrong. Unions do not damage productivity or employment growth. Instead, unions help distribute income gains more equitably toward workers from corporate owners and their executive managers. Evidence shows that when unions are empowered, the higher pay and standards they set—such as overtime pay and the 40-hour workweek—spill over and benefit all workers.