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By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

There’s income inequality, and then there’s the United States. New research shows that within the developed world, no nation has seen the income share of the top 1 percent grow faster over the past three decades than the United States.

To qualify for the elite status of 1 percent in annual income, an individual makes somewhere in the mid-$300,000s per year (or way more, like Mitt!).

(H/t to the Institute for Policy Studies.)

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This has been reposted from AFL-CIO.

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

More than 1.6 million American jobs in the nation’s auto supply chain are at risk unless China’s illegal trade practices are curtailed, according to three new reports released today. In a conference call with reporters this afternoon, United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard said:

China is cheating unmercifully in this sector and we are saying to China—and asking our government to stand up to China and say—“enough is enough.” It is time to enforce our trade policies.

Two reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and one from Stewart and Stewart, a law firm that has won cases challenging China’s unfair trade practices, detail China’s persistent and growing violations of World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and outline plans by China’s government to use these same tactics to boost their auto parts exports even further.

In the past 10 years alone, China’s auto parts exports to the United States have increased by 850 percent, while jobs in the parts industry declined by more than 400,000. Says Scott Paul, executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM):

Taken together, these three reports show beyond a shadow of a doubt that China’s blatant use of illegal government subsidies and a web of predatory trade practices on a massive scale are undercutting companies in the U.S. auto supply chain. It’s essential that federal action be taken to challenge these abuses before they completely undermine the job recovery under way in the U.S. auto industry. (more…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Overall union membership increased by 49,000 from 2010 to 2011, including 15,000 new 16- to 24-year-old members, according to new U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data out this morning. An increase of 110,000 in the private sector was partially offset by a decline of  61,000 in the public sector, making the rate of union membership essentially unchanged at 11.8 percent, with some 14.8 million U.S. workers union members.

Public-sector density increased from 36.2 percent to 37 percent though November 2011. Private-sector union membership remains at 6.9 percent. The largest increases in union membership were in construction, health care services, retail trade, primary metals and fabricated metal products, hospitals, transportation and warehousing.

Bottom line, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka:

Despite an unprecedented volley of partisan political attacks on workers’ rights and the continuing insecurity of our economic crisis, union membership increased slightly last year. Working men and women want to come together and to improve their lives.

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This has been reposted from AFL-CIO.

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…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent.

In his rebuttal, Daniels had the audacity to claim the mantle of people’s champion–this from the man who said he was against right to work for less before he was pushing it armed with lies and ruthlessly anti-democratic tactics. This from the political party fighting Obama’s plan to address the deficit by raising taxes on retired financiers like Mitt Romney, who pay less in taxes than most firefighters, bricklayers, teachers, and nurses.

Inconsistency and numbers not adding up is nothing new for Daniels, who failed miserably as George W. Bush’s Budget Director for the first 2.5 years of Bush’s presidency, which had as its number one domestic priority massive tax cuts for the rich. And Daniels’ concern for working people is more than a little bit ironic in light of his record as governor of Indiana, which has included taking away the right in 2005 of  public employees to collective bargain rights. (more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, Too Much online magazine

Changes in state tax laws now encourage America’s awesomely affluent to create “perpetual” trusts for their heirs. The combination of these new laws and new technology, legal scholars are warning, now allows the “dead hand” of the past to rule over the living. In essence, immortality for the rich.

Money can buy many things. But money can’t buy immortality, right?

That may once have been true, legal scholars Lawrence Waggoner and Michael Vincent argue in two new and chilling scholarly papers, but not anymore.

Billionaires today — and mere mega millionaires, too — now have all the tools they need to impose their values on future generations essentially forever.

Lawrence Waggoner, an emeritus University of Michigan law school prof, traces the modern evolution of these tools back to the 1986 federal tax “reform” that created a monster loophole for the owners of the new grand fortunes then just beginning to pop up all across America’s economic landscape.

The details can get complicated. The simple story: The rich have always been able to create “trusts” for their heirs. In a common trust situation, people of means set aside nest-eggs of multiple millions, let their kids who survived them live off the income from those millions, then had the trust’s millions revert to the grandkids. At that point, the principal in the trust would face estate taxation.

The 1986 legislation created a tax on those trust millions every time a generation passed on, but also gave rich people and their heirs an exemption that shielded part of those original trust millions. Trusts now became even more attractive to the rich — and the longer a trust could last, the better. (more…)

By Donna M. Jablonski
AFL-CIO Deputy Director of Public Affairs for Publications

Republicans trying to ram through a “right to work” for less bill in Indiana cannot seize the pay of Democratic House members who are staying off the floor to filibuster the measure, a judge ruled last evening.

A Marion County judge issued a temporary restraining order barring the seizure after three of House Democrats challenged Republicans’ decision to fine filibusterers $1,000 a day by stealing their pay. The ruling allows the ines to be levied but blocks withholding paychecks.

The fines are the latest moves by Republican state legislators and Gov. Mitch Daniels to ram the “right to work” for less bill into law. Earlier tactics included temporarily shutting the protesting public out of the statehouse and reneging on an agreement to take up an amendment putting the issue to a statewide vote.

Hoosiers, 71 percent of whom support putting “right to work” on the ballot rather than
having it forced through the legislature, have been making their voices heard at the statehouse in Indianapolis. They’re turning up the heat with lobby days planned Monday and every day next week.

Follow the events on Twitter with the hashtag #InUnion.

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

There’s income inquality and then there’s total net worth inequality. Both are large, and growing, but a New York Times analysis of Federal Reserve data shows the gaping gulf in net worth between the 1 percent and the rest of us.

To qualify for the elite status of 1 percent in annual income, an individual makes somewhere in the mid-$300,000s per year (or way more like Mitt!). For net worth, the 1 percent threshold for net worth in the Fed data was nearly $8.4 million, or 69 times the median household’s net holdings of $121,000. (Because he’s worth roughly $250 million, Mitt Romney has no trouble fitting into the 1 percent in either category.)

Loads of cash, the study found, not only results in personal yachts, fourth and fifth homes and multiple cars with drivers, but in better health.

About 90 percent of the 1 percenters describe themselves as being in excellent or good health, compared with 75 percent of everybody else. About 85 percent expect to live into their 80s, compared with 68 percent of everybody else.

The rich are different from you and me–they live long, health lives because they can afford them.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Blog.

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Today is the second anniversary of Citizen’s United, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down restrictions on independent campaign spending by business corporations and their supporters.
Noting that the Citizen’s United ruling “further tilted the playing field in favor of the 1 percent and against the 99 percent whose voices are being drowned out by excessive corporate spending and influence,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says we must reform the system “to restore the corporation to its rightful place.”

In doing so, the greatest care must be taken to ensure that the Bill of Rights’ protections for real people, including protections for democratic organizations and movements, are not inadvertently weakened.  The AFL-CIO will work to support efforts to rein in corporate power that simultaneously protect our nation’s Bill of Rights, and to ensure those efforts are focused on the most effective means to address corporate dominance of our political system.

Read Trumka’s full statement here.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Blog.

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

The national Republican party has selected Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels to respond to President Obama’s State of the Union address next week–sending a clear signal the party is making attacks on working people a top priority in the 2012 elections. Daniels is a key backer of right to work for less (RTW) legislation which state Republican lawmakers, in a stunning display of arrogance, have repeatedly tried to ram through, while thumbing their noses at working Hoosiers–not to mention democracy.

Democratic state house lawmakers yesterday left the legislature to protest moves by the Republican majority, especially the refusal to allow Democrats to offer a vote making RTW a referendum, so that the people of Indiana would vote on it directly. From Huffington Post:

“We wanted the vote to be up or down,” said House Minority Leader Patrick Bauer (D). “The Republican Party wanted to skip the people completely, skip the election process and then skip the referendum process on whether or not you can have this bill, which many consider a ‘right to work for less’ — less pay, less safety less health care.”

Republican state House Speaker Brian Bosma is fining 33 House Democrats $1,000 each per day for every day they are not in the legislature.

Throughout the week, Hoosiers have packed (more…)