Emblematic of 1 Percenters, Cooper Tire Punk’d Workers
Four years ago, Cooper Tire told its workers they’d have to sacrifice to save the company. With a straight face, Cooper executives said it was essential for the corporation’s survival that workers take tens of millions in pay and benefit cuts.
The workers understood the link between their livelihoods long term and Cooper’s success. Dedicated and loyal, they accepted the cutbacks. Soon afterward, city and state officials granted Cooper millions in subsidies.
Management didn’t share in the workers’ and taxpayers’ pain, though. The top dogs rewarded themselves with millions in pay increases and a shiny new corporate jet.
Cooper punk’d the workers and taxpayers.
This isn’t an aberration. It’s a pattern. Corporate executives, the 1 percenters, slash workers’ wages, then give themselves big bonuses. CEOs tell mayors and governors their businesses are in such dire shape that they may close or move offshore. Government officials dutifully shovel truckloads of taxpayer cash into CEO hands, then the CEOs grant themselves more perks. The television show Punk’d, in which actor Ashton Kutcher humiliates famous people, took a five-year hiatus. The 1 percenters gave workers and taxpayers no such break. Punking the 99 percent for profit has only escalated.
At Cooper, 1,050 members of the United Steelworkers union in Findlay, Ohio agreed in 2008 to give the company $30 million in concessions when executives cried destitute at the negotiation table. The next year, after witnessing the same sad song and dance, Ohio officials began transferring $2.5 million from taxpayer pockets to corporate coffers.
Between 2008 and 2011, though, Cooper awarded its executives two pay hikes and double bonuses. The year after Cooper told workers they had to suffer for the company, Cooper CEO Roy Armes got a 50 percent pay increase. The next year, in the middle of the recession, his bump was 19 percent, giving him a package worth $4.7 million in 2010.
Cooper 1 percenters also bought themselves a corporate jet and, for $17 million, a Serbian tire company. Since January of 2009, Cooper posted $360 million in income before taxes.
The workers who took the cutbacks and taxpayers who subsidized the company got punk’d. More »
Posted January 24, 2012 at 8:00 am, in From the USW International President
China’s ‘Competitive Advantage’: Serfdom
By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor
A much-discussed report in the Sunday New York Times on why iPhones are made in China highlights the transition of Apple guru Steve Jobs who, a few years after Apple began building the Macintosh in 1983, bragged it was “a machine that is made in America.” Today, millions of Apple products like iPhones, iPads and Kindles are made in China sweatshops like Foxconn.
So what happened?
In a nutshell, this:
Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul [at a Chinese factory]. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.
A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”
China’s use of near-slave labor conditions creates its “competitve edge.” But its advantage is not so much due to lower wages as to speed and turnover—an on-demand supply of workers who are housed little better than assembly parts, stacked in multiple dorm beds per room with no chance to escape. More »
Posted January 27, 2012 at 12:00 pm, in Allied Approaches, From AFL-CIO
Anti-Union “Right-To-Work” Laws Really A Tax On Unions
Dave Johnson
Fellow, Campaign for America's Future
Indiana is about to pass what is called a “right-to-work” law. These laws prohibit union contracts from requiring workers to be in the union and paying dues to the union, while forcing the unions to provide full benefits to the non-unions members for free. The idea is to weaken and defund the union’s (99%) ability to push back against the big corporations (1%).
CSM: With Indiana ‘right to work’ vote, a GOP thumb in the eye to unions,
Indiana is poised to become the first state in the upper Midwest to follow the lead of Southern “right to work” states, taking a big step Tuesday to bar unions from requiring nonunion workers to pay membership dues for representation in bargaining.
… Democrats framed the bill’s passage as a political maneuver by Republicans to weaken union strength in the state.
“The only places where today’s events will be cheered is in the boardrooms of big businesses and corporations across this state,” said the top House Democrat, Patrick Bauer, in a statement Tuesday. “The House Republicans just helped increase the profit margins for these companies at the expense of their workers.”
Union dues have long been a target of Republican lawmakers, who say those dues are often used to further a Democratic agenda and to elect Democrats to office. The right-to-work legislation hits unions right in their pocketbooks, reducing their ability to wield clout in elections and during negotiations over labor contracts. More »
Posted January 27, 2012 at 8:00 am, in Allied Approaches, From Campaign for America's Future
Obama Didn’t Steal “All Of The Above.” The Republicans Never Had It.
Bill Scher
Online Editor, Campaign for America's Future
Yesterday, one of Politico’s headlines from the State of the Union was: “He steals GOP’s ‘all of the above’ energy slogan.”
But something can only be stolen from you if you actually had it in the first place.
Yes, the Republicans like to say they are for an “all of the above” energy strategy, but every time they are presented with one from the Democrats that would mean oil would have to compete with “all” the other available sources of energy, they always vote “no.”
When, in the last Congress, Democrats proposed a comprehensive energy strategy that would cap carbon emissions, make both renewable energy and nuclear energy more affordable, while providing support for continued production of American oi and, coal, Republicans said “no.”
When the President last year shelved the idea in face of conservative obstruction, and instead proposed a “clean energy standard” with a broad definition including nuclear power and relatively cleaner coal, Republicans said “no.”
When, in 2008, House Democrats offered a bill that would expand coastal oil drilling while also eliminating oil subsidies and mandating more renewable energy production, Republicans said, “no.”
And as far back as 1977, when President Jimmy Carter proposed an ambitious energy policy to end dependence on foreign oil, but would increase domestic production of coal, wind, solar power, geothermal and methane and even “encourage production of oil and gas here in our own country”, Republicans still said “no.” More »
Posted January 26, 2012 at 3:19 pm, in Allied Approaches, From Campaign for America's Future
