Dayton Miami Valley AFL-CIO

After eight years in which “critical civil rights protections gathered dust,” the Obama administration has made enforcement of civil rights laws a major priority, the nation’s top civil rights official said over the weekend.

Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, told the AFL-CIO King Day celebration in Greensboro, N.C., which ended Jan. 18:

In 2010, we have an African American president. And yet discrimination persists—both blatant discrimination and the dangerously subtle kind—in so many of our institutions, showing up in our schools, in our workplaces, in our health care system, in our financial system. 

Saying the union and civil rights movements share the same goals, Perez, the son of Dominican immigrants, added:

Over the last century, those two movements have learned from each other, have helped each other and have changed our nation into one where more people have access to the promise of equal opportunity. 

Read excerpts from Perez’s speech in his Point of View column here.

	Union members in Little Rock, Ark., took part in that city’s King Day parade.

In addition to the celebration in Greensboro, working Americans across the country from Seattle to Chicago to Little Rock, Ark., to Atlanta held roundtables, marches and rallies to remind their lawmakers that King’s vision for the nation included not only civil rights but also an economy that served all Americans—a vision that is far from fulfilled.

In Joliet, Ill., clergy and other religious leaders announced a boycott to restore justice to a group of Bissell warehouse workers who were fired last year when they blew the whistle on violations at their workplace.

The workers were fired en masse after filing legal complaints over the many violations of state and  federal law in the warehouse and announcing to management that they were forming a union.

More than 400 union activists took part in the Greensboro celebration, which focused on economic justice. In workshops and speeches, the activists made the point that King’s dream of a better, more equal America must include good, meaningful jobs.

Participants honored the four trailblazing men whose sit-in 50 years ago at the Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker and AFGE President John Gage addressed the participants, along with Rebecca Blank, undersecretary for economic affairs at the U.S. Commerce Department.  

Community service is a major portion of each year’s King Day celebration, putting into action the union values of collective assistance for those in need. This year, participants sorted and distributed donated goods to local homeless shelters.

A town hall meeting on the jobs crisis highlighted the need for economic justice, and participants discussed the AFL-CIO’s five-point plan to save and create millions of jobs in the next year, especially in the nation’s most distressed communities where the population is primarily people of color.

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Today, Massachusetts working families are going to the polls to help put Martha Coakley in the U.S. Senate in a special election.

The election day get-out-the-vote drive follows a long Martin Luther King Jr.  weekend that saw thousands of union members working at phone banks in local union halls, knocking on doors of other union members and talking with their co-workers at jobs sites across the Bay State.

Massachusetts AFL-CIO President Robert Haynes says Coakley will continue the legacy of Ted Kennedy in fighting for working families.

This election is all about working families. That’s who the late Senator Kennedy spent his life fighting for.

As Massachusetts attorney general, Coakley has a long record of supporting working families. She vigilantly enforced prevailing wage, overtime, employee misclassification, independent contractor and workplace discrimination laws.

In the state legislature, Brown turned his back on working families when he voted to cut unemployment benefits for people who needed them the most.

Coakley promises that in the Senate she will be a strong advocate for job creation and the Employee Free Choice Act. Her opponent, Scott Brown, strongly opposes the Employee Free Choice Act and has vowed to be the 41st vote for the Republican agenda. With 41 votes, a minority of Senate Republicans will be able to block every piece of legislation vital to working families

In economic policy, Brown is a Bush-Cheney clone. Not only does he believe the answer to the economic crisis is more tax cuts for the wealthy; he opposes a proposed fee on Wall Street firms that received taxpayer bailouts and then gave extravagant bonuses to executives.

Says Coakley.

Scott Brown is standing with Wall Street CEOs. As attorney general, I’ve stood up to Wall Street and recovered millions of dollars back for taxpayers

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Paid for by the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Political Contributions Committee, www.aflcio.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.

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Workday Minnesota editor Barb Kucera reports on the latest victory for transportation security officers (TSOs) who are fighting to win a union voice and collective bargaining rights at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). For more information on their campaign, visit AFGE’s TSA website here.

Transportation security officers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have formed AFGE Local 899 while they await federal action enabling them to unionize.

Their organizing efforts got a boost from a solidarity event Monday with a national AFGE official, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) and leaders of unions representing other airport and airline workers.

“The union is coming!” AFGE chief of staff Brian DeWyngaert told security workers and supporters assembled on the mezzanine above the airport’s ticketing level. His comments were met with cheers and workers waving signs that read, “Give us freedom to bargain for the American dream.”

At Monday’s solidarity event, Ellison, a Democrat representing Minnesota’s 5th District, praised the efforts of TSA workers and condemned Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) statements that allowing TSOs to unionize threatens national security and encourages terrorism.

I fly through this airport twice a week. TSO agents are doing a good job every single day. Public safety depends upon workers who are feeling healthy, satisfied, protected, safe. Collective bargaining rights don’t hurt our safety, they help our safety because they make for a stronger workforce.

Click here to read Barb’s full article.

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Here’s a look at some of the latest news across the country on health care reform:

 Following his address to the National Press Club on the nation’s jobs and economic crisis, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and other union leaders met with President Obama at the White House to discus how the final health care reform legislation should be shaped, especially the tax on working families’ health benefits that is part of the Senate-passed bill.

The New York Times reports that during the hourlong meeting, Obama repeated his support for some form a health care benefits tax, but “used Monday’s session to search for a sort of compromise.” In a statement following the meeting, Trumka said it was “frank and productive meeting between friends on moving forward on health care reform.”

• Allan Sloan, senior editor at Fortune magazine (hardly a pro-union, left-leaning, tax-the-rich journal), writes in a Washington Post op-ed today that despite claims that the tax on “Cadillac” health care plans would finance health care reform, more than 80 percent of the money to finance the plan would come from individuals paying higher income, Social Security and Medicare taxes—and the biggest portion of that money would come from people who make less than $200,000. Sloan adds:

The impact on people in the $1 million-plus range—most of whom probably really are rich—is relatively trivial.

• Several studies show the tax on workers’ health benefits impacts regular folks with basic “Chevy” plans and likely won’t result in employers returning the tax to workers in the form of higher wages. Studies also show that no one really knows if the benefits tax would reduce overall health care costs.

• While pundits have been pontificating about the mostly cons of the tax on workers’ health care, everyday folks have more down-to-earth descriptions. Check out the comments’ section following Art Levine’s recent Truthout post about the possible political fallout if the tax lives. Real anger there.

• Who really spawned this awful idea to tax working families on their health benefits? PaulVA at Daily Kos reveals it was the gleam in the eye of the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and was given birth by Ronald Reagan when he proposed it in 1985. However Reagan, showing his political savvy,

dropped this tax like a hot potato once he found out it was so unpopular.

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The nation’s biggest health insurers have been funneling money quietly to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to air lie-filled, scare-mongering commercials about health care reform.

Like Capt. Renault, who discovered there was gambling going on at Rick’s Café Américain in Casablanca, we are: “Shocked, shocked….” Yeah, right.

Most observers of the health care reform fight suspected the major insurers that make up the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) were helping to foot the bill for the latest round of ads by two “business coalitions” subsidized by the Chamber. But it wasn’t until Peter Stone at the National Journal connected the dots that we had proof.

Dan Pfeiffer, White House communications director, says the report confirms

one of Washington’s worst-kept secrets—which is big insurance companies are fighting tooth and nail to kill health reform that will wrest power from their hands and give it to American families.

The big AHIP members have long tried to maintain a positive public posture of supporting some type of health care reform—just so long as reform proposals wouldn’t do anything to end their strangle hold on health care coverage and never ending, always soaring profits.

Writes Stone:

That money, between $10 million and $20 million, came from Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Kaiser Foundation Health Plans, UnitedHealth Group and WellPoint, according to two health care lobbyists familiar with the transactions. The companies are all members of the powerful trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans.

The ads sharply criticized the high costs of the separate bills, especially the House version. The commercials warned the legislation would raise taxes for Americans and hurt the economy as it tries to recover from the recession. And some chamber-financed commercials attacked setting up a government-run plan to compete with private insurers—a special sore point for the insurance industry—which is part of the House measure.

Click here to read Stone’s entire piece.

After the story broke yesterday, Kaiser said it provided funds to AHIP for advertising with the stipulation it not be used for negative ads and AHIP assured Kaiser none was sent to the Chamber for the current campaign. Read more from Ben Smith at Politico.

On her blog, The Gavel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi writes:

These big insurance companies appear to have gotten caught secretly bankrolling the effort to kill health insurance reform for millions of Americans, despite their disingenuous claims of support for the legislation. This duplicity is not surprising coming from an industry that has used every method to try to kill health insurance reform that would save lives, save money, save jobs, and save Medicare.

What about the commercials themselves that have been airing in dozens of media markets around the country? Media Matters takes apart the claims of the Chamber ad lie by stinking lie here.

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The death toll from yesterday’s devastating earthquake in Haiti reportedly is reaching into the hundreds of thousands, and union members continue to respond to the crisis as they did in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the recent tsunamis. 

Search and rescue teams from Fairfax County, Va., and Los Angeles County, Calif., made up of members of Fire Fighters (IAFF) locals 2068 and 1014, are preparing to head to Haiti to aid in the rescue efforts. Other teams are likely to follow.

You can help workers in distress by donating to the Solidarity Center’s Earthquake Relief for Haitian Workers’ Campaign. Click here to make a donation and here to learn more about how the center is working to help Haitian workers.   

The TransAfrica Forum, a longtime ally of the union movement, also suggests donations to two organizations already providing aid on the ground in Haiti: Partners in Health (click here to donate) and Doctors Without Borders (click here).

Last night, National Nurses United (NNU) issued an urgent call through its nationwide disaster relief network to recruit nurse volunteers to assist the earthquake survivors. Details are still being worked out, but nurses can sign up at the NNU website, www.nationalnursesunited.org. NNU also will provide follow-up information at www.twitter.com/nationalnurses for details and plans.

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Nurses in Connecticut and Dunkin’ Donuts bakery workers in Illinois recently voted for a voice at work and formed unions with AFT and the Office and Professional Employees (OPEIU).

Both groups of workers had to fight against the type of employer intimidation, harassment and other anti-worker tactics that the Employee Free Choice Act would eliminate.

Nurses at Rockville General Hospital overcame intimidation by hospital management in an unsuccessful May election and in December voted to join AFT Connecticut.

Sandy Lambert, a nurse at Rockville for 22 years, told the Hartford Courant that during the earlier campaign, she wore a pro-union button to work and was warned by a manager that the company was keeping a list of button-wearers among the 140 nurses.

The nurses filed an objection to the election with National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which ordered the second election.

Sharon Thompson, an RN in The Birthplace, the hospital maternity department, says it is not unusual to work a double shift (3 p.m. to 7 a.m.) because the maternity department frequently does not have staff to cover overnight.

Me for 16 hours is not as good as me for eight hours and someone else fresh for eight hours.

We want to partner with the hospital to help reduce cost, and as the front line we know places where we could save the hospital money, without cutting patient care staff or hours and putting patients at risk. Our union will give us the power to improve care for our patients and improve working conditions for our nurses.

In Elgin, Ill., 40 bakers, fryers, drivers and other workers at a Dunkin’ Donuts bakery that supplies about 35 stores in the Chicago suburbs voted to join OPEIU Local 2009. According to the local, the workers decided to form a union after having suffered

years of wage cuts…working for an employer who routinely refused to pay out workers compensation claims, and seeing a number of their co-workers fired for calling OSHA [Occupational a Safety and Health Administration] to report health hazards.

The employer mounted an anti-union campaign and tried to exploit the language and cultural differences among the workers, says Christian Hainds, Local 2009 council coordinator. But the workers stood together.

They knew that coming together with their co-workers to organize a union with Local 2009 was the only way that guaranteed any hope for change.

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National Nurses United (NNU) issued an urgent call last night through its nationwide disaster relief network to recruit nurse volunteers to assist residents of earthquake-devastated Haiti. Thousands are feared dead after the impoverished island nation was rocked by a 7.0 earthquake and severe aftershocks yesterday.

Details are still being worked out, but nurses can sign up at the NNU website, www.nationalnursesunited.org. NNU also will provide follow-up information at www.twitter.com/nationalnurses for details and plans.

Said NNU Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro:

We are calling on nurses throughout the U.S. to join us in this critical effort. Nurses will be fundamental to the disaster relief process, to provide immediate healing and therapeutic support to the patients and families facing the devastation from this tragic earthquake.

The Registered Nurse Response Network hopes to send nurses to provide emergency short-term and long-term medical support, as it has in previous major disasters. Following Hurricane Katrina, for example, hundreds of nurse volunteers worked with local health care and emergency agencies and officials in mobile clinics, area hospitals and other health care settings in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

The 150,000-member NNU was formed last month through the merger of California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, United American Nurses and Massachusetts Nurses Association.

This is the first of what will be many union responses to the earthquake. We will continue updates as information comes in.

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A screwy thing happened after the United Steelworkers (USW) and eight domestic steel producers won their trade case late in December against Chinese manufacturers of the steel pipe that’s used for oil and gas drilling.  

Instead of describing it as an important victory for U.S. industry and workers, one in which they proved to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) that China violated international trade rules, the corporate media characterized it as Americans unnecessarily picking a fight with China’s government.

That’s exactly what happened in September when the United Steelworkers won tariffs in a trade case regarding imported Chinese tires.

What’s particularly disturbing about this stance is that it occurs only when a trade case involves manufactured goods. The corporate media strongly supports protections for copyrighted material—movies, music, etc. The media have made clear they oppose Chinese piracy of intellectual property—you know, like the written and filmed products that media members produce.

But their reaction is completely different when China’s government violates international rules regarding manufactured goods. Then, the media blame the victims—the U.S. industries and workers—the same way defense attorneys accuse rape victims.

Here, for example, is the Washington Post contending that the ITC decision to impose duties of between 10.4 percent and 15.8 percent on Chinese pipe heightened trade hostilities between the United States and China:

The current tensions began in September, when the United States imposed a staggering 35 percent import fee on tires from China.

The Dow Jones Newswire, in a story by Henry Pulizzi, also charged the United States with provoking China’s government by imposing duties, beginning with a reference to the steel pipe decision:

The ruling adds more tension to the U.S.-China trade relationship. Ties between Washington and Beijing are already frayed by the Obama administration’s imposition of duties on Chinese tire imports and China’s criticism of U.S. moves as protectionist.

These reporters act like the decisions themselves initiated animosity between the United States and China over trade. That completely disregards how the process starts with China violating international trade rules it had agreed to obey in ways that cause U.S. businesses to collapse, factories to close, thousands of America’s paper workers, tire workers, steelworkers and others to lose their jobs and their communities to suffer.

We could sit back and just take it and allow U.S. industries to die, one after another, while China keeps its citizens employed by providing subsidies and supports forbidden under international law to its industries and then selling the goods in the United States at prices below production costs.

But that doesn’t sit well with most Americans. They believe their country should enforce trade rules. That is what U.S. industry and unions are demanding. That is what occurred in the tire and steel cases. That is what the United Steelworkers and paper manufacturers are seeking in a trade case to be heard later this year.

Demanding adherence to the rules isn’t protectionism. And the media need to stop saying it is. Here’s how Dan DiMicco, chief executive officer of Nucor Corp., the nation’s second largest steelmaker, explained it:

It is not protectionism when countries are held accountable for the agreements and obligations they freely entered into to have access to the USA and world’s markets.

In addition to falsely making this a protectionist fight, the media wrongly contend the tariffs were political. Dow Jones, for example, tried to make the unanimous ITC decision in the steel case political, writing:

The ITC is an independent federal agency tasked with investigating the impact of alleged “dumping” of foreign products on U.S. industries. While its six commissioners are split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, the decision fits with the Obama administration’s push to address U.S. manufacturers’ concerns about Chinese competition.

Dow Jones implies here that somehow Obama managed to strong-arm all three Republican ITC members to vote his way in this case. None of the stories suggesting politics were involved in the tariff decisions note that Republican Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama and nine Republican members of Congress joined dozens of Democrats in signing letters to the ITC supporting the duties.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has written that failure to enforce trade laws and compel China to stop manipulating its currency could cost the United States 1.4 million jobs over the next couple of years. He describes China’s behavior as mercantilist—supporting industry for export of goods to maintain high employment and trade surpluses.

He quoted economist Paul Samuelson:

With employment less than full…all the debunked mercantilist arguments—that is, claims that nations who subsidize their exports effectively steal jobs from other countries—turn out to be valid.

That is what China is doing to the United States—stealing jobs.

The United States doesn’t have to let it happen. America can enforce international trade laws. It works. Shortly after President Obama imposed the tire tariffs, Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. announced plans to add capacity to its Findlay, Ohio, plant and hire up to 100 workers. Other U.S. tire plants began recalling laid off workers.

American manufacturers, workers and communities are the victims of unfairly traded exports from China. They’re fed up with the media blaming them when all they’re asking for is justice.

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Nearly 150 workers at a Michigan auto parts manufacturer could be getting their jobs back—along with back pay—after a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative law judge (ALJ) ruled they were illegally fired.

In early 2008, the workers, members of UAW Local 822, were in negotiations for a new contract with Douglas Autotech Corp. in Bronson. In May, according to a press release from the NLRB, the union called a brief strike

but quickly realized that the strike was not lawful because certain timely notice was not given….The union made an unconditional offer to return to work on the third day of the strike.

But the employer then locked out the workers but resumed negotiations. In August, the company dismissed the entire unionized workforce, claiming the brief strike had cost them the protection of the National Labor Relations Act.

In his decision Administrative Law Judge Paul Buxbaum writes the employer lost its right to fire the workers for the illegal strike when managers responded to their return-to-work offer with mixed signals—a lockout and continued bargaining.

By belatedly choosing to terminate the entire bargaining unit, the employer chose what can only be described as the labor relations equivalent of a nuclear option—a flagrantly egregious and unlawful course of conduct.

According to the Sturgis Journal:

Mary Ellis, president of Local 822, said the company could do the right thing and stop fighting it but she doesn’t expect it. Douglas has probably spent more money keeping the workers out than they would have if they had settled it long ago, Ellis said.

Douglas Autotech has until Feb. 2 to appeal the ruling. Click here to read the full decision.

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