Fact-esque

Ford Workers Buck Gettelfinger's Sweetheart Contract

Ron Gettelfinger, UAW's Pres, talked tough last year, banging his fist on the podium at the annual meeting and shouting "No More Concessions!" Almost as soon at that conference was over, Gettelfinger negotiated a series of sweeping concessions at Chrysler and GM which did not prevent the threat of bankruptcy mostly because the amount of workers' wages had nothing whatever to do with the long series of bad management decisions that killed sales along with the worsening economy.

Ford was the only car company that rejected govt help, and it did so in the expectation that it would be able to get major concessions from Gettelfinger. Which it did. That's not the problem. The problem is that Ford is bragging about its sales on the one hand while demanding Gettelfinger's major givebacks on the other, and the union members have had enough bullshit thrown at them from both "sides". They look like they might just turn down Gettelfinger's management-friendly contract.

Union Backtalk at Delphi

Well well well. It seems that after 30 years of abuse it's finally paying off to be the member of a union, and the "I spit on unions - pah! pah! - what have unions ever done except take dues money?" crowd ain't at'all happy about it. To quote chief NYT whiner Bruce Gump, "I’m being thrown out with yesterday’s trash." Mr Gump's complaint? Union members at his company are having their pensions fully paid out while Mr Gump and his fellow non-union members might have theirs cut. Too bad.

White Collar Unions

Writing a couple of years ago in The Democratic Strategist, ex-labor organizer and current union PR consultant Jim Grossfeld summarizes the results of a survey he and his partners conducted into modern attitudes about unions at the request of the Center for American Progress. The results aren’t so much surprising as they are cohesive. It’s not that, as David Kusnet points out in his reply in the same magazine, any of what Grossfeld says is all that new; but it’s knowledge that’s been scattered all over the place. Joining it all together helps bring the problems of labor organizing in the new millenium into sharper focus.

Norwood Nurses Join SEIU: Michelle Malkin Falls Down Backwards and Foams at the Mouth

Well, not yet. Maybe tomorrow when she finally hears about it.

Nearly 600 workers at Norwood Hospital, ranging from respiratory therapists to housekeepers, will join the Service Employees International Union as the result of an election yesterday.

***

Norwood became the third hospital in the Caritas Christi Health Care system, based in Boston, to unionize this year. More than 800 employees at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, the flagship of the six-hospital Catholic chain, in April affiliated with the same labor union, Local 1199 of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.

Malkin hates that. In fact, she hates unions, apparently because they promise better working conditions and pay to workers. Well, that's what she said. Calling SEIU's organization of home health care workers a "home invasion" - a term which used to be applied to criminals who broke into your house and robbed you with AK-47s or whatever but which Malkin now feels free to apply to people who ask you to let them help you live better - here's what she thought was so terrible:

Over the last month, home-based providers started have been receiving unexpected visits from out-of-state union lackeys trying to recruit them with the promise of health care benefits and more money.

(emphasis added)

Monstrous! Oh, and she doesn't like any of that voting business, either.

AFL-CIO's Trumka v Rahm on the Public Option

For once, Rahm Emanuel lost an arm-twisting session. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, browbeaten into agreeing to a meeting with President COS Emanuel, refused to climb down off his white horse. He flat-out told The Enforcer that the public option was the best and most viable of the current (sad) crop of healthcare reform measures. FDL's Jane Hamsher spoke directly with AFL-CIO spokesman Eddie Vale.

 I asked if Trumka considered "triggers" to be a public option. He responded:

Trumka is sticking to what he said on triggers all along - which is that we haven't seen any plans that would be as effective as the public option, and he told that to Rahm Emanuel today.

They discussed the Baucus/Pelosi plan to pay for reform by putting an unfair burden on the benefits of many AFL-CIO members.  (No doubt it's just a happy coincidence that the one big liberal institution which has pledged to withhold support from any Democrats who won't vote for a public plan is getting specifically hammered.)    Trumka reiterated that "working families shouldn't be taxed on their health care benefits, which often have been gotten by foregoing wage increases and other benefits." 

It's a good point and one that's often forgotten, even by raging progs like me. The management class used to offer benefit packages, particularly health care, in lieu of wage increases because such packages used to cost less than the pay increases being asked for. They thought it was a good deal for them, and it was until Reagan's deregulation cut the health insurance companies loose and premiums started to rise like Apollo rockets off a launching pad. Even then they could get cheaper coverage for a group (their employees) than any one of those employees could possibly get for him/herself and used the difference to wangle wage concessions and other benefit givebacks. (They used pensions and 401K payments in much the same way.)

Norma Rae Is Dead

You probably think I meant the title figuratively. I could have but I didn't.

This is one of the most famous scenes in movie history: Norma Rae (Sally Field, of course) standing on a table in the middle of the factory just before she gets thrown out for union organizing.

It's a scene that few who saw it could get out of their heads for days or weeks, a powerful moment when a lone figure stands against the rich and powerful and her co-workers shut down their machines in recognition that there are some things that are just plain wrong and no matter dangerous it may be, we have to stand against those things or lose our humanity.

Labor Day - Is That Anything Like Arbor Day?

Mark has a sizzling collection of Labor Day pieces and editorials that even on a day devoted to workers can't seem to remember what they are or what they do. Maybe that's because movement conservatives, as Salon's Michael Lind notes, have just about convinced everybody that workers, especially unionized workers, are the enemy.

According to many free-market conservatives, economic growth is almost exclusively the result of investment decisions by a small number of rich individuals – the "wealth creators." The wealth creators, according to the conservative press, are constantly being threatened from above by government, which seeks to destroy wealth by taxation, and from below by workers, particularly those organized into unions, who threaten to destroy wealth by insisting that capitalists share a decent amount of their profits with employees. The entire basis of conservative "trickle-down" economics is the idea that the economy will grow faster if the supposed wealth creators keep more of the profits of private enterprise, with less going to taxes and worker compensation.

If you believe this theory, then Labor Day should be a cause for national mourning. We should all pause to mourn the loss of capital that might have gone to a fifth or a sixth mansion or a private jet, but instead was conscripted against its will to pay for a public school or higher wages in a factory.

We should weep for the capital that might have given its life for high-end caterers but instead was forced by government to be spent on public hospital nurses. And we should grieve for the dollars that were wasted on public police protection, when they might have gone instead to private security guards in a gated community.

But there was one Labor Day editorial worth reading because it laid out, in print, finally, the awful secret of the Chicago Boys School of Economics, Milton Friedman, Founder.

You Get What You Pay For

Most of us have learned by now that going cheap doesn't usually pay. Oh sure, there's less out of pocket but otoh it won't last as long, do its job as well, or not have to be taken in every week for repairs. The problem is that even if we have a job our wages are so stagnant we often don't have much choice but to go cheap because we have to stretch every penny to the breaking point.

For years - decades - corporate managers have been using our poverty to justify a lean, mean approach to everything but executive salaries and bonuses (where they have been, as we know, exceedingly generous), cutting costs with a cleaver to squeeze out every possible 1/4-penny, and with wages being their absolute favorite element to slash. From hiring illegal immigrants and pretending they weren't to outsourcing work to Third World countries that have dirt cheap pay scales, US corpo's have routinely thrown millions of Americans out of work in order to buff their stock price (and pay themselves big fat bonuses for doing it).

So how's that strategy working out for them?

Townhall Rowdies Threaten Unions and Anyone Else Who Favors Public Health Care

Mark at Norwegianity has a post up with a passle of links about Dick's Army and the rest of the Kristalnicht Brownshirt terrorists astroturf town hall disrupters that you really ought to go click through. Big Pharma in particular is using these groups to kill any discussion about your healthcare and healthcare in America and this is how they're doing it:

Since the inevitable comparison is going to made by the Right to the Viet Nam protests of the '60's, I want to make a few comments to clarify the differences, what with the wingnuts saying it's all the same.

Recovery? What Recovery? For Whom? And Where the Hell Is Labor?

One of the best ways of killing unions is to make sure there aren't any employees to unionize. Without new employees or new industries, unions are left to fight amongst themselves for a shrinking membership. The Bush Economy was designed to make money for the rich at everybody else's expense, most especially the expense of workers, and it has been enormously successful. A few privileged financial institutions like Morgan Stanley and, of course, Goldman Sachs, have benefited from a stimulus package that was supposed to, originally, be aimed at creating jobs but somehow ended up creating bigger bonuses for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Funny how that happened.

All of which I take to mean that yet another jobless recovery was part of the plan, not some incidental by-product.