Fact-esque

The Rosselli-Stein War: Labor Shoots Itself in the Foot

My very first post for Fact-esque (a year ago last month on March 28, an anniversary I failed entirely to remember to acknowledge so I will now - Thanks, Rob. It's been real) reported on a fight that was developing between Andy Stein's SEIU and an affiliated West Coast Union run by Sal Rosselli called United Health Care Workers West.

SEIU's Andy Stern was reported by the SF Chronicle yesterday to be threatening to oust the leaders of the Oakland-based United Healthcare Workers West, charging its president, Sal Rosselli with "breaches of fiduciary duty, interference with collective bargaining rights, financial irregularities and unethical conduct".

Three months later in a follow-up, I wrote that Stern was indeed looking like a bit of an old-style union dictator, making contracts in which he agreed to shut his membership up. I called him "powercentric".

What matters is that Stern seems to be willing to weaken his membership's rights and bargaining position for reasons of his own. He also appears to be willing to undercut one of a union's core duties when he asks it to keep its mouth shut about the way management is running the company. It's as if Stern wants his members to sign the union cards and then melt quietly away into the darkness. Dissent will not be tolerated either in the SEIU (Roselli) or in unionized companies, is that it?

Rosselli was far from blameless in all this and the two of them were making a spectacular for anti-unionists to salivate over. I wasn't happy.

At the time, they were in a battle over who was going to control Rosselli's union. It appears that after slightly more than a year of position-jockeying, Stern has won.

The Service Employees’ internal battle broke wide open late Tuesday when International President Andy Stern put the dissident United Healthcare Workers-West into emergency trusteeship.

Financial assets for the 150,000-member local were immediately seized, the executive board was dissolved, and full-time officers were removed from payroll. Reports circulated among workplace leaders that SEIU also dismissed UHW stewards, and that employers are holding captive-audience meetings to introduce new SEIU-appointed staff representatives.

Stern named Executive Vice Presidents Eliseo Medina and Dave Regan as trustees of UHW. Regan said rank-and-file worksite leaders remain in place.

As word of the trusteeship spread, hundreds of members and supporters rallied at the union’s Oakland headquarters, vowing to resist SEIU’s hostile takeover.

Labor Notes comcludes the article with an acknowledgment that tghis fight wasn't good for anybody and might be harmful to the effort to pass EFCA.

Without Comment (because we all know what that comment would be)

You're Welcome!

I don't know how Leonard Cohen still sounds this good. 

You Got a Problem With That?

Did the SCOTUS just Turn the Constitution Into a Popularity Contest?

At OS' More Liberal Than Liberal, Justin Schmidt picks up on a SCOTUS decision that is, to say the least, disturbing. To begin with, though a complicated Constitutional question, the decision was unanimous.

Dear Sheilagh: Suggestions for Improving the Washington Post

Balloon Juice's John Cole got in on one of those WaPo chat things with Sheilagh Murray, the WaPo's National Political Reporter, the other day and asked her if she thought maybe George Will's stupidity maybe just possibly "lessened the prestige" of the paper?

Shailagh Murray: I will post this without comment…but rest assured, all of us in the ailing newspaper business are highly receptive to ideas from readers about how we might improve.

Notwithstanding that there have been a LOT of such suggestions over the years, I thought that as long as she was, you know, inviting it, I might take a shot. Hereinafter:

Mick's Suggestions to Shielagh Murray for Improving the Washington Post

1. Retire George Will

It's usually best when making big changes (and it's going to take BIG changes to improve the horrendous record of the Post in recent years) to go for the obvious stuff first, the easy stuff, the stuff everybody, you know, agrees on. That makes putting Old George out to pasture a natural opening move. He's an embarrassment. He gets everything wrong and has for years. The only reason you got away with it before was no one was paying any attention to him. Now they are and you just can't afford to let him go off half-cocked, mumbling into his bow tie about non-existant marsh mice, spewing out the first thing that comes into his disordered, paranoid mind, and quoting ceackpot right-wing think tanks as if they did serious work. (Food v sex? He doesn't understand either one.) 

George needs to be in a home where people can take care of him and feed him a steady diet of Good News so he won't spit up on his bib. Be kind. Send him.

The Employee Free Choice Act

Mark Thoma saw this ad in the pro-war WaPo today and I'm going to run it again because it should be seen everywhere: (emph mine)

Statement

Although its collapse has dominated recent media coverage, the financial sector is not the only segment of the U.S. economy running into serious trouble. The institutions that govern the labor market have also failed, producing the unusual and unhealthy situation in which hourly compensation for American workers has stagnated even as their productivity soared.

Indeed, from 2000 to 2007, the income of the median working-age household fell by $2,000- an unprecedented decline. In that time, virtually all of the nation’s economic growth went to a small number of wealthy Americans. An important reason for the shift from broadly-shared prosperity to growing inequality is the erosion of workers’ ability to form unions and bargain collectively.

A natural response of workers unable to improve their economic situation is to form unions to negotiate a fair share of the economy, and that desire is borne out by recent surveys. Millions of American workers – more than half of non-managers – have said they want a union at their work place. Yet only 7.5% of private sector workers are now represented by a union. And in all of 2007, fewer than 60,000 workers won union status through government-sanctioned elections. What explains this disconnect?

The problem is that the election process overseen by the National Labor Relations Board has become drawn out and acrimonious, with management campaigning fiercely to deter unionization, sometimes to the extent of violating the labor law. Union sympathizers are routinely threatened or even fired, and they have little effective recourse under the law. Even when workers overcome this pressure and vote for a union, they are unable to obtain contracts one-third of the time due to management resistance.

To remedy this situation, the Congress is considering the Employee Free Choice Act. This act would accomplish three things: It would give workers the choice of using majority sign-up-- a simple, established procedure in which workers sign cards to indicate their support for a union – or staging an NLRB election; it triples damages for employers who fire union supporters or break other labor laws; and it creates a process to ensure that newly unionized employees have a fair shot at obtaining a first contract by calling for arbitration after 120 days of unsuccessful bargaining.

The Employee Free Choice Act will better reflect worker desires than the current “war over representation.” The Act will also lower the level of acrimony and distrust that often accompanies union elections in our current system.

A rising tide lifts all boats only when labor and management bargain on relatively equal terms. In recent decades, most bargaining power has resided with management. The current recession will further weaken the ability of workers to bargain individually. More than ever, workers will need to act together.

The Employee Free Choice Act is not a panacea, but it would restore some balance to our labor markets.  As economists, we believe this is a critically important step in rebuilding our economy and strengthening our democracy by enhancing the voice of working people in the workplace.

Statement Endorsers

Henry J. Aaron, Brookings Institution
Katharine Abraham, University of Maryland
Philippe Aghion, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Eileen Appelbaum, Rutgers University
Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University
Dean Baker, Center for Economic Policy and Research
Jagdish Bhagwati, Columbia University
Rebecca Blank, Brookings Institution
Joseph Blasi, Rutgers University
Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University
William A. Darity, Duke University
Brad DeLong, University of California/Berkeley
John DiNardo, University of Michigan
Henry Farber, Princeton University
Robert H. Frank, Cornell University
Richard Freeman, Harvard University
James K. Galbraith, University of Texas
Robert J. Gordon, Northwestern University
Heidi Hartmann, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Lawrence Katz, Harvard University
Robert Lawrence, Harvard University
David Lee, Princeton University
Frank Levy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lisa Lynch, Brandeis University
Ray Marshall, University of Texas
Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute
Robert Pollin, University of Massachusetts
William Rodgers, Rutgers University
Dani Rodrik, Harvard University
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Columbia University
Robert M. Solow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
William Spriggs, Howard University
Peter Temin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Mark Thoma, University of Oregon
Lester C. Thurow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Laura Tyson, University of California/Berkeley
Paula B. Voos, Rutgers University
David Weil, Boston University
Edward Wolff, New York University

Our Stupid Congress

Just now on CNBC Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) told me that the banks aren't to blame for everything we face and that I should look in the mirror because Americans have "over-consumed" for decades.

"Not Them! Us! Us!"

No sooner had Obama started taking about raising taxes on the wealthy to cut back the deficit than guess who showed up to demand more $$$?

The government faced mounting pressure on Monday to put billions more in some of the nation’s biggest banks, two of the biggest automakers and the biggest insurance company, despite the billions it has already committed to rescuing them.

The government’s boldest rescue to date, its $150 billion commitment for the insurance giant American International Group, is foundering. A.I.G. indicated on Monday it was now negotiating for tens of billions of dollars in additional assistance as losses have mounted.

Separately, the Obama administration confirmed it was in discussions to aid Citigroup, the recipient of $45 billion so far, that could raise the government’s stake in the banking company to as much as 40 percent.

The Treasury Department named a special adviser to work with General Motors and Chrysler, two of Detroit’s biggest automakers, which are seeking $22 billion on top of the $17 billion already granted to them.

That even as unreliable and blatantly greedy a thief as AIG would dare to show its face in public arguing for more vacation bucks is a testament to what a mistake Giethner is as Treas Sec. He should have thrown those bastards out on their collective ears. Instead, he's going to give them another immense chunk of our money even as he and the rest of the Obama Admin insists on talking about cutting SocSec.

Robert Gibbs was just asked whether the administration had previously had plans for a social security "reform" commission and had just recently shelved it. He didn't answer it. Chuck Todd followed up and he still wouldn't answer it saying he had to look at the article.

Helen Thomas asked why we are dealing with Social Security right now, considering the huge problems we face immediately, when it's solvent until 2040. Gibbs pretty much gave the Republican line about how we have to deal with it now in order to be "responsible."

The message here is as clear as glass. The bankers get bailed and we get the shaft. Again. Obama seems to be out there all by himself saying that the corpo's and the rich who have been stealing this country blind for a decade are going to have to start paying something back on the party they've been having that we have paid for, but the rest of his people are working hard to follow conservative fiscal policy: Take from the poor and give to the rich.

Who's on the President's page? Anybody?

There You Go Again: The GOP Blames Us for Their Crisis

The stimulus package may be as weak as 1% water but, as Krugman says, it's better than nothing.

To be sure, the Obama administration is taking action to help the economy, but it’s trying to mitigate the slump, not end it. The stimulus bill, on the administration’s own estimates, will limit the rise in unemployment but fall far short of restoring full employment. The housing plan announced this week looks good in the sense that it will help many homeowners, but it won’t spur a new housing boom.

What, then, will actually end the slump?

It's a good question and it's the question we, as well as President Obama's Administration, should be trying to answer. But it isn't a question the corporate conservative media is interested in discussing, most likely because the answers aren't likely to be much good for their corporate bosses as far as continuous lining of their pockets even more than they already have is concerned. No, the conservative attack seems to be centered around fixing blame but not, this time, on the Democrats.

On us.