Fact-esque

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.

Artists for Employee Free Choice Act

Call you Senators. Call your Congresspeople.

UAW Trades More Concessions for Probably Worthless Chrysler Promises

So it seems the automakers' strategy of using their financial difficulties, difficulties brought on entirely by executive incompetence, to weaken the unions to the point of anemia is working just fine, thanks. GM will be laying off 21,000 more union workers (and NO management, I bet) while apparently going right ahead with the construction of its new plant in Brazil, and at Chrysler the UAW basically just traded its contract's pension provision for govt money for the company.

Neither the United Automobile Workers union nor the company released details of the tentative agreement, which would modify the union’s 2007 contract and reduce the amount of money Chrysler must pay into a new health fund for retirees.

So Chrysler gets more bail-out money on top of the $4B they've already pissed away, most likely in executive bonuses so they can keep all that extraordinary "talent" - you know, the same "talent" that put them in this hole in the first place - and union workers get to keep their jobs at yet more reduced pay & benefits as if they were the ones who wrecked the company.

A couple more rounds like this and they'll be down to making minimum wage with a health plan as useless as Wal-mart's employee health plan and not enough of a pension plan to be worth worrying about. At that point, why join a union at all?

EFCA In Trouble as Feinstein Drops Support

I, likely the most verbose blogger in the western hemisphere, am speechless. I don't know what to say about this. Dianne Feinstein, a prior EFCA sponsor, says she's looking for something "less divisive".

The latest hurdle came Friday, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she would seek alternative legislation that was less divisive. Feinstein, a past sponsor of the act, cited the flailing economy as a reason; other critics of the bill have said it would drive up operating costs for businesses at a perilous time.

"This is an extraordinarily difficult economy, and feelings are very strong on both sides of the issue," Feinstein said in a statement. "I would hope there is some way to find common ground that would be agreeable to both business and labor."

She just fucked labor because business burped. The next thing they'll start screaming about is that their payroll costs are too high and American workers make too much money. Ms Diane "Fuck Labor" Feinstein will then obligingly submit a bill to lower the minimum wage to $2/hr because the "economy is failing" and Business told her the current minimum wage structure is "driving up their operating costs" and eliminating jobs.

Not that that's true, of course. But then neither is the absurd notion that unionizing will somehow scare all owners and corporate managers into selling off their cash engines or that a card-check union certification system will somehow end democracy as we know it even though decertifying a union by card-check has been legal for decades. No secret ballot necessary then, is there? No right-wing corporate fronts taking out ads about how the lack of a secret ballot during decertification is unConstitutional and the end of civilization as we know it? I didn't think so.

Specter is a Republican and extreme as he is, not extreme enough to keep the far-Right wackos happy who run the GOP these days. One expects him to run for cover almost as soon as he sticks his head out from behind the barricades. For Feinstein there is no possible excuse. She's scum. Bought-and-paid-for scum.

What else is there to say?

Rep. Patrick Murphy (PA-08) Co-sponsors the Employee Free Choice Act

He's my Congressman. How did your member of the House do? Send a thank you here. If you don't see his/her name, give'em a call and find out why not.

The UAW Takes Another Hit for Ford

While the other major players - GM and Chrysler - went to Congress bellowing for taxpayers to save their sorry butts, Ford rejected a government bail-out and went to its union for the money. And it got the givebacks it wanted.

Unionized workers at Ford Motor Co. have approved contract changes that include freezing wages and cutting benefits in a move aimed at helping the automaker remain competitive. The United Auto Workers said Monday a majority of hourly workers voted in favor of modifications to the 2007 contract with Ford, eliminating cost-of-living increases and cash bonuses.

The agreement is expected to be a model for Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp., which need to bring their labor costs in line with those of foreign auto companies' plants in the U.S. as a condition for the $17.4 billion they have received in federal loans so far. Under terms of their loan agreements, progress must be made by March 31. The companies are seeking an additional $21.6 billion in government aid.

Dearborn, Mich.-based Ford, which has not sought government funding as its rivals have, is the first U.S. automaker to come to an agreement with the union. The company said that it did not want to be at a disadvantage should its competitors negotiate lower labor costs with the UAW.

Precisely what Gettelfinger spent the last few years saying he wouldn't do. Once again an incompetent, hidebound auto company management that squandered its best years and overbet its worst has saved itself by talking its workers into taking another step back toward the 19th century. Wages are "frozen" at a low-income level after years of givebacks that have shrunk auto workers' paychecks while most of ours were already stagnant ("frozen", if you will), what's left of their benefits have been cut yet again, and even though prices continue to rise (quickly) despite the economic breakdown (when did that ever happen before?) there will be no cola's. Bonuses, of course, are only allowed for executives, particularly executives who have really screwed up.

Listen guys, if you really want to save your jobs, here's how you do it. You agree to work for NOTHING. Isn't that a great idea? Then you'll have jobs forever.

Union Feel-Good Story for the Day

Ray Abernathy has a happy take on Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis' recent appearance in Miami.

She was explicit about where she intends to steer the administrators, investigators and prosecutors of the DOL.”We’re going to put the enforcement back in the Department of Labor,” she told a cheering audience that interrupted her opening remarks 30 times with applause, several times standing. With a hint of Gary Cooper in High Noon, she intoned, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

...

An (sic) telecommunications customer service representative testified he’s a big backer of the Employee Free Choice Act because he’s a union member only because his employer agreed to allow employees to join through majority sign-up (sometimes called “card check”). Solis reiterated her support for the controversial legislation, which to the horror of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, will give all workers the right to join unions without being harassed, intimidated, threatened, or fired during union “elections,” which have come to resemble public Star Chamber proceedings.

Here's hoping.