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Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
USW International Vice President for Human Affairs

Government workers are the latest victims of a GOP smear campaign. Right-wing strategists have revived the tactic of false accusation in a vain attempt to keep voters from noticing that the policies of the current batch of Republican candidates mirror those of the batch who laid waste to our economy.  

From Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass, to Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Republicans are lying about government workers’ wages and work habits in an attempt to convince voters that the source of the country’s economic woes is public sectors workers – the very people who investigate child abuse, monitor nursing homes, enforce workplace health and safety, repair roads, protect our water and air, teach our kids, maintain our parks, clean our schools, and mail Grandma’s social security check.

The United Steelworkers union represents 26,000 public sector workers, ranging from  lawyers who serve as public defenders to workers who ensure sewerage treatment plants don’t pollute. The union will not tolerate the GOP’s baseless attacks on our members. USW members who work in service to the public will discuss additional responses during the USW Public Sector Conference Oct. 21 through 23 at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel.  

Republican policies of deregulation left our jobs, our pensions and the economy at the mercy of avaricious and incompetent Wall Street CEOs and put our environment and worker safety in the hands of cowboy capitalists like BP. Theirs were the policies that enriched corporations while gutting worker safety rules and enforcement, increasing the likelihood of worker deaths on oil platforms, in refineries and in coal mines. 

For Republicans, public sector workers are doubly repulsive. A significant percentage are unionized, and Republicans hate unions. And all of public sector workers are the face of government, which, of course, Republicans want to drown in a bathtub.

For the past several months, the GOP has declared open season on the public service workers they so despise, portraying them as over paid and underworked.

Amy Traub, Research Director for the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, wrote about the Republican assertions. “It would be an alarming story,” she said, “if it were true.”

Research has shown it is not.

As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and Harvard professor, observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” 

The National Institute for Retirement Security (NIRS) and the Council on State and Local Government Excellence (COS & LGE) released a jointly-funded study on this topic just as the Republican sound machine revved up this spring. On the facts, they found that every one of the Republican assertions is false.

Analyzing data from the U.S. Government’s National Compensation Survey, their economists found that when factors such as education and work experience are taken into account, state and local employees earn less than their counterparts in the private sector. To be exact, state employees earn 11 percent less than comparable private sector workers.  Employees of city and county governments earn 12 percent less than their private sector counterparts.

Pensions and health insurance coverage make up a slightly greater share of public employees’ overall compensation than those benefits do for private sector employees, but when those costs  are included, state and local employees still wind up with less total compensation – 6.8 and 7.4 per cent less, respectively.

In addition, while Republicans are blasting public sector workers, they voted against reforming Wall Street, where compensation and bonuses remain immorally high even after taxpayers footed a bailout. Far too many of Wall Street’s investment bankers take home tens of millions annually. The last CEO of Merrill Lynch, John Thain, spent more than $1 million redecorating his office while Merrill’s value plummeted. Like investment bankers, too many CEOs at health insurance, pharmaceutical and other corporations are paid millions in annual compensation.

Meanwhile, many public employees can’t afford to buy homes in most major U.S. housing markets. A study by the Center for Housing Policy found that police officers and elementary school teachers don’t earn enough to buy a typical house in two out of five metro areas.  Firefighters and librarians can’t afford the median home in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago metropolitan areas.  A school-bus driver can’t afford the rent on a standard two-bedroom apartment anywhere.

Voter anger is more appropriately directed at Republicans and their corporate cronies – the real privileged class that has managed to make the rest of us pay for the economically-devastating consequences of their greedy risk-taking. Republicans’ American dream consists of slashing the family-supporting wages of workers in manufacturing, public service and health care to minimum wage. Their intent is to drag down the workers’ earnings and the American economy, as they did while Bush held office.

Ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote that the surest way to defeat an opposing army is to cause them to fight amongst themselves. The greatest danger for labor is Republicans succeeding in their quest to pit private sector workers against their public sector brothers and sisters. 

If they can divide us; if they can sow suspicion and jealousy among us, misery will be our lot.  If, on the other hand, we can see the greed and gross irresponsibility at the very top of our economy and among those who carry their cause in Congress, then we have a chance to re-write the rules and bring back middle-class prosperity for ourselves and this nation.

***

Fred Redmond coordinates bargaining for the USW healthcare, pharmaceuticals and public employees sectors.

Tom Conway

 By Tom Conway
United Steelworkers Vice President

Lehigh Valley has proposed using tax dollars to enshrine the defunct Bethlehem Steel Corp.’s dilapidated, 38-year-old headquarters building in Eastern Pennsylvania as a national monument to mismanagement.

There’s no question about the mismanagement. I know from firsthand experience. I worked as a millwright in Bethlehem’s coke ovens and later became chairman of the United Steelworker’s bargaining committee for Bethlehem. I saw some corporate foolishness.

There is a question, however, about the logic of using taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to create a memorial to a corporation that went bankrupt, slamming both its investors who lost money and its workers who lost jobs and pensions.

Lehigh County has asked the National Register to anoint the building, called Martin Tower, as historic, even though it’s a dozen years short of meeting the minimum qualifying standard of existing for half a century. The 21-story hulk hasn’t sold in the decade since the bankruptcy – mainly because it needs $16.5 million in asbestos removal and sprinkler installation. I’ve got a much better idea for the future of the Martin Tower than forcing taxpayers to foot the bill to renovate and preserve it.

The Pennsylvania Preservation Board doesn’t agree with me, though. It accepted Lehigh County’s application for preservation that says:
“Martin Tower is the symbol of one of America’s mightiest industrial concerns as it plunged from the zenith of its power into a steady decline, ultimately leading to failure that resulted in the loss of over 100,000 jobs and regional economic hardship.”

The state recommended that the U.S. Department of the Interior agree to dole out untold tens of millions in tax dollars to commemorate corporate failure. Future generations could make the pilgrimage to Bethlehem, Pa., to gawk at the splendor of sleek Martin Tower and ponder “what did those corporate managers do wrong?”  Was it too many corporate executives to fill the offices in the cruciform tower specially-designed to add extra corners for offices? Maybe if the architects had stuffed a few more corners into the skyscraper, tension among competing executives would have dissipated, and somehow Bethlehem would have been saved.

Perhaps the problem was Bethlehem Steel’s private executive “airline.” Lots of airlines have merged or gone bankrupt since the 1970s. Maybe the cost of running that sizeable fleet of corporate jets was too much for a steel corporation.

Maybe the problem was an arrogant, privileged corporate mentality. Bethlehem executives traveled to the United Steelworkers’ union headquarters in Pittsburgh to discuss their “plan” to reorganize the company. I can still see the string of white stretch limousines pull up in front of the USW building. The suits piled out onto the street after the luxurious ride from the airport. They told the drivers to keep the cars waiting in front of the building for them. After all, it’s hard to find your limousine sometimes, and you don’t want it wandering off when you need it to make a quick get away after telling union leaders that workers needed to give up everything corporate executives had contracted to provide.

Bethlehem’s reorganization plan was simple, really. Retired and active workers would lose pensions and health care. And Bethlehem Steel would use contract workers at its whim, enabling managers to pick up the phone and double the workforce as well as the cost for every job. But Bethlehem Steel would do its very best to preserve bondholders’ investments because, as those executives said, it would be so embarrassing to management to fail to deliver to the people who had invested in them. It was not embarrassing to them, however, to break promises to workers that Bethlehem Steel executives had made in the labor contract. They also had an application pending for one of their top executives at the Burning Tree Country Club, and they were rightly concerned that the stigma of bankruptcy might damage chances for its approval.

 In the final days of Bethlehem Steel, Leo W. Gerard, who is now USW international president, and I went to Martin Tower to talk to the executives. I remember walking down the hall to the board room, past oak doors that stood 12-feet tall, past private dining rooms and past walls covered in oil-painted portraits of all the corporations’ past executives. They were stern looking guys, a whole bunch of them, a real art gallery full of them. I got a phone call during those days from an artist who had been commissioned by Bethlehem to paint the then-chairman’s portrait. Bethlehem owed him $10,000, but they’d told him to get in line with all the other bankruptcy creditors. That was a very long line. I told him to send me the portrait; I was certain the USW could find some use for it, although probably quite different than its original purpose. I told him I’d urge Bethlehem to square up with him. He never sent me the picture, but I heard later that the chairman paid him out of his own pocket.

During those meetings at Martin Tower, the goal of the union was helping Bethlehem figure out a way to survive.  Could we find a merger partner? Could Bethlehem Steel downsize? Were so many bosses necessary? The USW offered an asset restructuring and workforce plan. Bethlehem refused to consider it. Later, however, when ISG took over the Bethlehem assets, it used the USW plan.

While the U.S. Interior Department considers Lehigh Valley’s application to use federal money to memorialize Bethlehem’s blunders, I want to urge the government to do something entirely different with Martin Tower.  Better to memorialize good deeds and criticize executive errors:  

Tear that building down.

Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
USW International Vice President for Human Affairs

A Washington, D.C. area hotel last week closed its doors to a racist convention that had booked rooms under the benign-sounding name “American Renaissance” conference. Now all American hotels and conference centers should follow that lead because in the U.S., renaissance means overcoming bigotry.

“American Renaissance” conducts a biannual conference that promotes racial and religious hatred. This year one of its guest speakers at the February conference is to be Nick Griffin, a convicted criminal who heads the British National Party, a white separatist group that contends immigrants are causing the “genocide” of “indigenous” white Britons.

The hotel cancelled the booking after several groups asked it not to serve as host to a hate hoedown. Those groups will monitor the organization’s attempts to secure another meeting place. They include the United Steelworkers; One People’s Project, which describes itself as a resource for those fighting fascism; and the Mormon Worker, a newspaper based in Provo, Utah.

As a union that promotes diversity and inclusion, the United Steelworkers finds the doctrine and language of Griffin and “American Renaissance” reprehensible.

The “American Renaissance” website contends, for example:

“Virtually no whites anywhere are willing to break taboos about racial differences in IQ, the costs of ‘diversity,’ or the challenges of non-white immigration.”

It specifies:

“Gentlemen will wear jackets and ties to all conference events.”

Apparently women are not invited.

 It also tacitly acknowledges the offensiveness of its message by offering attendees tags bearing false names, which it describes as “war names:”

 “We will prepare name tags in advance; please call us if you would like to use a nom de guerre.”

That link to violence is not accidental. By inviting Nick Griffin, the group embraced a criminal whose organization is connected to numerous violent – even deadly – acts.

In 1998, Griffin was convicted of inciting racial hatred for articles that denied the Holocaust. He received a suspended nine-month prison term. At the trial he said, “I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat.”

Griffin has cited neo-fascist Robert Fiore as a major BNP influence. Fiore is a convicted criminal and member of the Italian terrorist organization implicated in the 1980 Bologna bombing that killed 85 people.

Among the criminals associated with the BNP are David Copeland, a former member sentenced to 50 yeas for setting off explosives that killed three people and injured 139; former BNP candidate Coventry Roderick Rowley who was sentenced to prison on 14 charges of making and distributing obscene images of children, and BNP election agent Kevin Hughes who was sentenced to two years in prison for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker.

Griffin and the BNP were admired by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter James W. von Brunn, who killed a security guard when he opened fire in the Washington, D.C. museum lobby last year. Brunn, a white supremacist who was convicted and imprisoned earlier for an armed attempt to kidnap Federal Reserve Board members, went to see Griffin speak when the BNP leader lectured in the U.S. previously. Brunn wrote on his blog that although he had misgivings about Griffin allowing Jews to join the BNP:

“My hat is off to this fighting white man, Nick Griffin, for the incredible victories for White Britain which his hard work, rhino-thick skin against Jewsmedia criticism, and inspired leadership have made possible. . .Hail the white leader, Nick Griffin!”

Brunn died in prison in January awaiting his murder trial.

Griffin himself is again facing the potential of imprisonment, this time over the BNP’s racist constitution. A British court ordered him to change the document so that it no longer bars admission of Asians, blacks and members of other ethnic minorities.  The BNP constitution also says:

“The British National Party stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make-up of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948.”

Griffin suggests non-whites be paid to leave Britain and return to their countries of origin. It’s not clear how that would work for minorities who’ve lived in Britain for generations.

The court initially set the end of January as a deadline for the constitutional change, but has given Griffin two more weeks to comply. This convict connected to so many other criminals apparently received a visa to enter the U.S.  How likely is it that he would he have gotten one if he were a Muslim endorsing the “cleansing” of Christians?

Hotels and conference centers have every right to shun the likes of Griffin and “American Renaissance.” Refusing to provide a forum for hate is not a denial of First Amendment free speech rights. Griffin and the American Renaissance are free to spew their race and religion-based venom in any public park or on any private property owned by a like-minded bigot.

Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
USW International Vice President for Human Affairs

Today I issued a call to arms to the civil rights activists of the United Steelworkers union.

This was no summons to warfare, though.

To the contrary, I challenged USW civil rights committee members to shield the downtrodden in society, to aid those felled by the current economic crisis, to serve as their brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, not just for labor union companions, but for all fellow community members.

This is a call to arms because it will involve heavy lifting, I warned the USW committees at their 15^th International Civil and Human Rights Conference in Pittsburgh.

We’ll get a feel for it this week as 85 of us lug books and movies to be donated to Pittsburgh’s Children’s Hospital, unpack boxes of food and stock shelves at the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank in Duquesne, and distribute recyclable bags containing fruit to residents of Pittsburgh Housing Authority’s 10 senior citizen communities.

This economic downturn mangled the budgets of our food pantries, churches, schools, charities, even our local governments. The Great Recession has left them under-resourced and under-staffed. And that is hurting our children, our elderly parents, our fragile relatives and our communities’ health.

We hear their plea. It is our communities calling us to arms. And we will reach out in response to them.

That does not diminish our civil rights committees’ traditional duties. These are crucial and will continue. They will investigate civil rights complaints and explain the value of diversity.

These functions simply can’t be set aside. That is what happened in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department during the long, dark Bush years. A Government Accountability Office audit of the division’s activity showed a significant drop in litigation in several major anti-discrimination and voting rights areas during the Bush years. The Bush department pursued fewer cases when compared to enforcement during the Clinton years, according to the report released early in December.

This, of course, was deliberate by the Bush administration, which did not believe in enforcing civil rights law. We will not allow our new duties in the community to distract us from vigilantly pursuing civil rights complaints filed with our committees. Instead, we will assume this new function as an additional role.

It is a role that is basic to unions, which have always struggled to improve conditions for their members and their families.

At this moment, it’s vital that labor union civil rights activists everywhere – not just at the USW — take inspiration from the Dr. Martin Luther King Day of Service and intercede for the sake of their communities so hobbled by the effects of Wall Street recklessness.

Families are suffering under the highest unemployment in a quarter century. For every single job opening available, 6.3 unemployed job seekers are desperate to take it. Those who lose out are forfeiting their homes. Every month, banks file another 330,000 new foreclosure notices and seize another 75,000 homes.

Those lucky enough to have jobs have been pinched by pay and benefit cuts, furloughs and shortened hours. The average work week is 33.2, nearly 7 hours short of 40, costing many workers nearly a whole day’s wages. The Center for Economic and Policy Research calculates that workers haven’t endured the worst of it yet. In its report,

Families that can’t make mortgage payments also can’t meet tax obligations. Then local governments and school districts are caught short. Low tax revenues meant

So I propose that union civil rights activists volunteer to do whatever they can to fill those gaps in community service. Like workers across this country, our civil rights activists have suffered layoffs and furloughs and work week reductions. So stepping forward as cash cows is unrealistic. But we can step up as volunteers, in our church groups, community organizations and schools. Our hands can help hold it together during these trying times.

We can link arms to help our communities. That is my call to arms.

Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
Vice President for Human Affairs

A. Philip Randolph spoke up for civil rights at an AFL-CIO convention during a different era. It was a time when women who got pregnant were fired the moment they showed; one in which America practiced apartheid at water fountains, on buses, and in schools; one that hid people with physical and mental disabilities away in institutions; one where no openly gay people lived.

It was 1959 when Randolph spoke at the AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco. As founder and leader of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph served on the AFL-CIO executive council. 

Normally dignified and composed, Randolph let loose a fiery speech seeking from the gathering a commitment to greater inclusion. Collective bargaining had given the members of his union – railroad porters, maids and cooks – the power they needed to secure middle class wages from the Pullman Company. Randolph wanted the AFL-CIO to help end racial injustice and provide that access to more minorities.

“The labor movement traditionally has been the only haven for the dispossessed, the despised, the neglected, the downtrodden and the poor,” he said. 

The delegates – a room of white men — booed him. George Meany, AFL-CIO president at that time, asked, “Who the hell appointed you as guardian of all the Negroes in America?”

A half century later, much has changed. At the AFL-CIO convention being held in Pittsburgh this week, the delegates elected a diverse set of top officers — a white man for president, Richard L. Trumka; a black woman for executive vice president, Arlene Holt Baker; and for the first time ever, a woman, for secretary-treasurer, Liz Shuler. And, by AFL-CIO standards, she’s young, at 39.

Arlene Holt Baker, Richard Trumka, Liz Shuler

In addition, 43 percent of the convention delegates who elected those officers are women or minorities. That resulted from a resolution the labor federation adopted four years ago requiring the AFL-CIO and its affiliate unions take steps so that leaders and representatives begin looking like membership. They named it, “A Diverse Movement Calls for Diverse Leadership.”

That stuff doesn’t always go down well, as Randolph experienced. But when this resolution passed, outgoing AFL-CIO president John J. Sweeney took it to heart. He provided the resources to make it happen and made it clear he expected change. He also gave moral support, something Randolph clearly didn’t receive.

“The moral imperatives move us,” Sweeney said at the “Power in Diversity” summit held before the AFL-CIO convention this week. “But there is also the practical,” he explained. Unions cannot expect women, minority, gay, physically challenged and young members to step up and participate in union activities if union leadership opportunities are closed to them. “We do not have a two-tier dues rate and we cannot afford to have a two-tier leadership culture,” Sweeney said.

It just took 50 years for the AFL-CIO to get a leader who understood that.

The man elected as the next AFL-CIO president, Richard Trumka, made it clear at the diversity summit that he apprenticed under Sweeney well. He pledged himself to implement bold resolutions passed by the AFL-CIO delegates this week that support full inclusion and participation in the union movement by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender workers and increasing inclusion of workers with disabilities.

And Trumka committed the AFL-CIO to implementing resolutions passed this week for recruitment and training of young workers in the union movement and to continue the struggle to aid women and workers of color in the movement.

“We are going to insist on more and more,” Trumka said, referring to diversity, “We aren’t going to settle for anything less from now on.”

This is historic from the president of the AFL-CIO. This is a new day, one that realizes Randolph’s dream that collective bargaining could give everyone, including the “despised, the neglected, the downtrodden and the poor” a path to the middle class.

By Tom Conway
USW International Vice President

Swiss-Russian owned Duferco Farrell Corp. refuses to comply with the Buy American requirements in the $787 billion stimulus package.

One consequence of that decision is the Duferco rolling mill located in Farrell, Pa., north of Pittsburgh, lost a major customer — Wheatland Tube Co., situated a few hundred yards down the street in Farrell.

Another is that Duferco, which opposes buying American, milked that loss for more tons of false publicity than an overloaded truck of steel coils at a weigh station.

Duferco Farrell made itself out to be a victim of Buy American, claiming the provision cost it a customer, and the Washington Post and New York Times swallowed that whale whole, without making any effort to dissect it.

Here’s what really happened:

Wheatland Tube, a pipe maker, stopped buying rolled steel from its Farrell neighbor because Duferco gets steel slabs from Russia and has refused to buy from domestic producers.

Wheatland is sensitive to the issue of imports, having been burned by unfair competition from China. It is among the plaintiffs in trade cases alleging unfair competition. But, more immediately, Wheatland officials feel that under the Buy American provisions, its products must be produced with American-made steel, or they can’t be bought with stimulus funds.

Bill Kerins, president of Wheatland, said he backs Buy American because it provides opportunities for American workers. It is, essentially, American tax dollars dedicated to providing jobs for American workers. And, polls show, a large majority of Americans support it. They oppose anyone spending their tax dollars to create jobs in foreign countries. He has said that more and more of Wheatland’s customers are demanding that it  meet the requirements of  Buy American.

Kerins made it clear to the Sharon Herald, the local newspaper for the town of Farrell, that he’s perfectly willing to buy rolled steel from Duferco again, if the company obtains slabs from domestic producers. Here’s what he said: “We’re prepared to do business with Duferco Farrell when they’re able to be in compliance with the Buy American provision, and we hope they’re able to work that out.”

That would leave you with the sense that Duferco could work something out, right? Well, not if you read the Washington Post or the New York Times. Neither bothered to quote Kerins or the United Steelworkers. Both limited themselves to quoting Duferco  - a one-sided story. They failed to adequately question. As a result, both provide a completely false impression.

The Washington Post, in a May 15 story, says, “The new buy American provisions, the company said, are being so broadly interpreted that Duferco Farrell is on the verge of shutting down.”

The Post story also says, without citing a source, that Duferco “manufactures its coils at its Pennsylvania plant using imported steel slabs that are generally not sold commercially in the United States.”

Finally it quotes Duferco executive vice president Bob Miller saying, “I’ve got 600 United Steel Workers [sic] out there who are going to lose their jobs because of this. And you tell me this is good for America?”

The New York Times followed, on June 3, with an editorial slamming Buy American and citing the Duferco case. The editorial gives Duferco and one other example as the reason Buy American is ‘perilous,” saying Duferco “has cut 600 jobs in Pennsylvania after it lost orders from its biggest customer because some of its goods are partly produced abroad.”

That’s just not true. And if the New York Times or the Washington Post had done an ounce of reporting work, they’d have known it. Look up the Sharon Herald clips – available on line.

Duferco began furloughing hundreds of workers last fall – long before Wheatland stopped buying from them. When the USW local there signed its labor agreement in November, Duferco already had laid off more than half of the mill’s unionized workers.  Manufacturing workers across American began losing their jobs last fall as a result of the downturn in the economy – not Buy American provisions.

In addition, there are other serious problems with the Post story. It says Duferco uses steel slabs not generally sold commercially in the U.S. If the Post had spent a minute listening to Kerins from Wheatland or to the USW, it would have gotten a different story. Kerins’ quote – saying Wheatland is prepared to do business with Duferco when it complies with Buy American – clearly suggests he knows there’s a way for Duferco to do that.

In fact, there is. Two domestic steel companies have offered to supply Duferco with the 10-inch steel slabs it prefers, at the specifications it says it requires, at a market-based price. Both firms have informed Duferco of those offers.

Duferco mostly imports its 10-inch slabs now from OJSC Novolipetsk Iron & Steel Works (NLMK) of Russia, which is the Russian part owner of Duferco. NLMK also owns a mill in Portage, Indiana, called Beta Steel Corp. Like most U.S. mills, its work force has been cut back, so orders for its 8-inch slabs would give its American workers paychecks again.

Wheatland has informed Duferco that it is willing to modify its specifications so that NLMK 8-inch slab produced in Indiana may be used.

Duferco’s response: shipping slabs from NLMK facilities in Portage, Ind. to Farrell, Pa., a distance of 375 miles, is prohibitively expensive, as is the cost of shipping the 10-inch slabs from the Maryland or Alabama mills to Pennsylvania. So Duferco must continue sending steel the thousands of miles from NLMK facilities in Lipetsk, Russia to Farrell, Pa.

Really?

Somehow that doesn’t smack of the truth. In fact, it sounds like Duferco is making every effort to avoid buying American, while its customers, its workers and even potential suppliers are all scrambling to help it buy American and re-employ its workforce.

What is really going on here is Duferco perverted this situation in an attempt to smear the Buy American provision. The Washington Post and the New York Times made no serious attempt to check out the multi-national’s lame allegations.

Not much more could be expected from a Swiss-Russian-owned corporation. That multi-national has no allegiance to America. It just wants to use this country to generate profits. If Duferco can get its hands on American tax dollars to profit in Lipetsk, it will be all the happier. But for the Washington Post and the New York Times to support that is, really, un-American.

Fred Redmond

By Fred Redmond
USW Vice President Human Affairs

Four hours into the New Year, a political activist who was also a well-known trade unionist was celebrating at a party in the town of Montoso when a political opponent stabbed him numerous times in the chest.

As Adolfo Tique lay dead, his six children fatherless, police interrogated the assassin.

Then they let him go.

By American standards, it’s a shocking story. But in Colombia, where it occurred, it’s not. It’s the kind of story I heard repeatedly, heartrendingly when I visited Colombia last month with a delegation of British Parliamentarians and unionists led by the United Steelworkers and Unite the Union, which together last year formed Workers Uniting, the first transatlantic union.

The visit left us with no reason to believe Colombia suddenly had become worthy of a Free Trade Agreement with the U.S., Canada or the European Union.

The fact that Colombia is the most dangerous place in the world for trade unionists seemed to have made the same impression last year on Democratic candidate Barack Obama. In April of 2008, at an AFL-CIO convention, he promised to oppose the proposed Colombia Free Trade Agreement. He said, “The violence against unions in Colombia would make a mockery of the very labor protections that we have insisted be included in these kinds of agreements.”

This April, however, President Obama stung U.S. unions, which worked hard for his election and the FTA’s defeat. After Obama and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez sat together at lunch and spoke several times at the Fifth Summit of the Americas, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs announced that Obama had asked U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk to work on the FTA.

Say it ain’t so, Mr. President! Say you haven’t turned your back on unionists just because you shared a sandwich with another head of state. Tell us you won’t ignore Tique’s six orphans or 2,700 slain unionists over the past 25 years because of Uribe’s charming banter over soup.

Terrible, disquieting signs suggest it is so, however. Uribe bragged that he’d gotten Obama’s autograph with this note: “To President Uribe, with admiration!” And later Kirk would say Obama is a “great admirer” of Uribe and the strides he has made in reducing violence against union officials.

Also, Uribe bragged that he’d explained to Obama how his administration had protected unionists. He said that before he took office in 2002, there were only two convictions for the murders of workers, but since then there have been 184.

The most reliable source of such statistics, however, the Colombian National Labor School, provides radically different numbers.  Luciano Sanin Vasquez, the school’s director, testified before the House Education and Labor Committee Feb. 12, that the number of successful prosecutions was 91.  So either Colombia doubled convictions within the two months’ time between Mr. Sanin’s testimony and the Fifth Summit of the Americas, or Uribe exaggerated his success in beginning to deal with the 40-year blood bath his country has endured as right wing militias fought left wing guerillas with trade unionists and human rights activists and rural populations caught in the cross fire.

And even Uribe’s inflated conviction number is hardly impressive. It still represents a 99 percent impunity rate. Kill a Colombian unionist, and 99 out of 100 times you’ll get away with it – the police may question you, but then they’ll just let you go, like they did in the Tique murder.

At lunch with President Obama, Uribe wrangled himself an invitation to the White House. No big deal, really. Uribe had been to Washington before, and Bush had never been able to persuade Congress to pass the FTA.

But Uribe also persuaded Obama to drop by Bogotá the next time he’s visiting Latin America. This, however, is significant. This is a trip Obama should make.

Having just returned from Colombia, I believe this excursion could make all the difference in the Colombian FTA for President Obama. But only if President Obama makes his own schedule and does not adhere to some sham show tour set up by Uribe’s people.

Obama needs to meet with some of the Colombian people who spoke with my delegation, including peasant farmers, human rights defenders and trade unionists. While I was in Colombia early in April, Hernan Polo Barrera, the head of the teachers trade union, SITRAENAL, was shot dead in front of his house. Because he’d received numerous threats, he’d asked for protection, but the government refused to provide it. He was the 13^th trade unionist killed so far this year.

When Obama goes to Colombia, I want him to speak with Mr. Polo’s 16-year-old daughter, Liseth, who was standing next to her father when he was gunned down and who was wounded in the attack. She was rushed to the hospital as the killers escaped on motorcycles. They have not been caught.

I also want President Obama to spend some time with the six year old son of Arled Samboni Guaca, an active member of the Colombian agricultural workers’ trade union, FENSUAGRO, who had received numerous death threats from Colombian paramilitary groups. Father and son were walking to a shop on Jan 16 when two gunmen approached them and shot Mr. Samboni seven times. The gunmen escaped. The little boy watched his father die.

Then there’s José Jair Valencia Agudelo, an activist in the Colombian teacher’s union EDUCAL. President Obama should speak with this assassination-attempt survivor. He was shot six times Feb. 26 in the town of Filadelfia a week after authorities refused to give him the transfer and protection that he’d sought because he’d received death threats.

President Obama must speak with one more grieving unionist. He is Jorge Caicedo, leader of the health workers trade union ANTHOC in the Colombian region of Narino. Paramilitaries tried to get to him through is wife, Cecilia Montano. They shot her three times in the head in the town of Tumaco on Jan. 5^th.

Before the new president is drawn in by Uribe’s contention that Colombia should be awarded an FTA because fewer trade unionists and human rights activists and rural peasants are murdered each year now, Obama must hear from the victims. And he should remember what Human Rights Watch wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last fall:

“Free trade should be premised on fundamental respect for human rights, especially the rights of the workers producing the goods to be traded. In Colombia, workers cannot exercise their right without fear of being threatened or killed. Without concrete and sustained results in addressing this basic problem, ongoing anti-union violence and impunity would, as President-elect Barack Obama has noted, make a “mockery” of labor protections in the agreement. We believe that Colombia should be in compliance with such protections before the accord takes effect, as has generally been demanded with FTA commercial provisions.”

Jon Geenen

By Jon Geenen
International vice president

The American business community is pulling together to ensure that workers’ democratic rights in the workplace are preserved. In fact, they are spending millions and millions of dollars on behalf of the workers whose rights they seek to protect. What?

The absurdity of this is obvious. These are the same people who have fought every initiative to increase minimum wage. These are the people who provided unwavering support of NAFTA and other offshoring efforts that have decimated our manufacturing base. These are the people who worked tirelessly to defeat new health and safety regulations and environmental efforts related to cleaner water and air and safer chemicals, not to mention their vehement opposition to health care reform.

The American business community claims there is a travesty associated with the Employee Free Choice Act, and they are right. But the travesty has nothing to do with secret ballots. Like the master illusionist creating an act of prestidigitation, corporate America is undermining democracy, while at the same time pretending to be its biggest defender in the workplace.

The media efforts and the unlimited money provide a glimpse to the general public about how far corporations will go and how much they will spend to prevent workers from organizing a union. To be sure, their “democracy campaign” is a textbook strategy straight out of the union-busters handbook, complete with intensive misinformation campaigns, threats of plant closures, doom and gloom and the ostracizing and isolation of pro-union workers as un-American or out of sync with their peers. This time, rather than doing it to a worker in a plant, they are doing it to the general public.

The corporate-funded campaign attacks EFCA as undemocratic and warns that if passed into law, workers would lose access to a secret ballot election as a way to determine majority status for union representation. There is one problem with that. Workers absolutely would be entitled to a secret ballot election under EFCA.

EFCA would not prohibit or otherwise limit the use of the secret ballot. What it would do is say that the decision for workers about how and whether to form a union is a decision that is left workers – not to their bosses.

These opponents also would have you believe that somehow signing your name on a card to indicate your interest in a union is somehow a new or novel approach to organizing. There is a problem with this, too. That is how it works today and, for the most part, how it has worked since the 1930s. In order for workers to gain collective bargaining rights, workers always have had to demonstrate majority support. Signing cards or providing signatures is the first step in forming a union.

So what really would change with EFCA? Employees alone would decide how to show majority status in a unionization campaign. Why does corporate America really care? Because their ability to “intervene” becomes limited. You see, even though many progressive employers recognize unions by the card check method today, those that don’t know that by demanding a National Labor Relations Board election, they gain 42 precious days to run an anti-union campaign where they can fire, demote, coerce, threaten and intimidate workers with little consequence and effectively block workers’ attempts to (ironically) democratize the workplace. Under EFCA, employees would be more likely to have made that decision before the boss finds out, making the matter a decision for workers and workers alone as the Wagner Act originally envisioned.

Unfortunately, business knows what we all know: that except for the small minority of people who are simply philosophically opposed to unions, the rest of us believe, whether we belong to a union or not, that the right to unionize is a critical component of a democratic society. Democracy does not and cannot exist where strong and independent trade unions do not exist. In our country, the rise and fall of personal rights and liberty have paralleled the rise and fall of the labor movement. Why? Because the labor movement is a unique social movement that lends its voice to all working families, uniting the masses. This is what corporate America fears but doesn’t dare say – because that truly would be undemocratic.

The so-called democracy card is simply a red herring.

This piece was first published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 13, 2009

By Fred Redmond
Vice President for Human Affairs

Just off the coast of Liberia, an African country founded by freed American slaves, is the largest rubber tree plantation in the world, where, until last month, Bridgestone Corp, a Fortune 500 company that pocketed a profit of $1.16 billion last year, paid its 10,300 workers between $2.65 and $3.38 a day.
Not an hour. A day.
In a 1990 interview with a New York Times reporter, Terry J. Renninger, then president of the Firestone Synthetic Rubber and Latex Company, a Bridgestone/Firestone division that leased the 1 million square mile farm from Liberia, described it this way:
“The best way to think of it is an old Southern plantation.”
That’s right. A Southern slave-holding plantation, a place from which the original Liberians would have escaped. So thoughtful of Bridgestone/Firestone to replicate it for them in their country of liberation.

Mark of Modern Slavery

That’s not hyperbole. A non-profit group in Liberia called The Save My Future Foundation investigated conditions at the plantation in 2005 and wrote a report entitled, “Firestone: The Mark of Modern Slavery.”
This is what unrestrained, immoral and disloyal multinational corporations have reduced us to: modern slavery. They’ve forced pay down worldwide by transferring manufacturing from one low wage nation to the next lower wage nation.
We can shrug our shoulders and accept this wage race to the bottom, while corporations and corporate executives continue to grow wealthy from the profits squeezed from our paychecks, pensions and benefit packages.
Or we can do something about it.
To stop it, workers must embrace our similarities and stand together in solidarity. That is what the United Steelworkers, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center and the workers at the Bridgestone/Firestone plantation did. Together we achieved election of independent union officers to represent the Liberian rubber workers, a just and dignified labor contract and hope for a future without bounds. It is an example of what can be accomplished to pull all workers up if we link arms.

Save My Future Foundation

The USW involvement began with a letter. While investigating the plantation, representatives of Save My Future urged dissidents there to write unionists in the United States for help. Eleven sent a letter to the AFL-CIO. President John Sweeney forwarded that letter to USW International President Leo W. Gerard because the steelworkers represent Firestone workers in the U.S.
Gerard assigned me to investigate the child labor and environmental law abuses alleged in the letter. I took with me Harmon Lisnow, who then was director of a labor management training program for the Steelworkers but who served in Liberia in the Peace Corps in the 1960s and still had contacts there, as well as a Firestone worker and representatives of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center. It was almost exactly three years ago, July of 2005.
On the first day, we got an official tour of the plantation. We saw an 18-hole golf course, tennis courts, modern two-story brick homes complete with normal Western amenities like plumbing and electricity. In these, company managers live. We saw workers tap rubber trees, but we were prevented from speaking with them. This made us suspicious.
The next morning, before dawn, we slipped away from our hotel in Monrovia and evaded guards to tour the plantation without official company guides. Then we found the plantation the overlords had tried to prevent us from seeing, the one described in the letter and The Mark of Modern Slavery report.

Life in squalor

Workers live in squalor. They reside in the same lean-to huts the compnay constructed in 1926 when the plantation was founded by Harvey Firestone. They’ve got no electricity or plumbing. They share outhouses and a community pump.
In the dry season, if the pump does not draw water, they drink from the creeks and rivers, many of which Save My Future Foundation says Firestone has polluted. They are posted against fishing because of the toxicity.
Workers earned $3.38 a day if they tapped 750 trees, collected the latex in two 75 pound buckets, and carried it for miles on their shoulders to weigh stations. The weight, to ensure that their daily wages wouldn’t be halved, needed to total 150 pounds, a mind-bending, shoulder deforming amount.
Because this task is a physical impossibility for one person in a day’s time, most tappers enlist their spouses and children as helpers. Whole families work 12 hour days to fulfill Firestone’s demands for 75 pound buckets of latex. The spouses and children, of course, are not on the official payroll. That is how Firestone says with a straight face that it does not “employ” children and that the “hiring” of children violates company policy.
Like in the American south of the early 1900s, schools are separate and unequal. Those for the black workers lack teachers and books and supplies. Youngsters may not attend unless they have birth certificates, which the company-owned hospital failed to issue during the 14-year Liberian civil war. They may be purchased, but at half a month’s salary, precious few workers can afford them. This is another way children are forced into labor.

A company union

We also found a company union. This is a union that the company controls to its benefit. In this case, the UN found that Firestone, which hand-picked union officers had “compromised” their independence, so that that they were unable to advocate properly for the workers.
Within hours of our unapproved tour’s commencement, company security officers surrounded our jeeps and escorted us off the plantation. But we had what we came for, first hand stories and the photographs.
The next day, a company official showed up unannounced at our hotel and demanded I relinquish the film.
I refused. I told him told him the only way he would get the pictures was to go to the U. S. Embassy. We quickly made arrangements to leave the country. Though we feared we’d be searched and the photos confiscated at the airport, we managed to escape the country with our evidence of corporate depravity.
Six months later, in January of 2006, workers on the plantation engaged in something forbidden – a wildcat strike. They demanded better working conditions and elections for union officers who would represent their best interests.
When the USW heard about it, our Firestone workers took plant gate collections to help support their brothers and sisters in Liberia. The Liberian workers needed money to buy rice and other food rations while on strike, and our collections helped. The money also partially subsidized union training.

Government intervened

The government of Liberia intervened to help settle the strike. Firestone agreed to improve housing, medical facilities, and schools.
Once it was clear that a solid group of activists was ready to challenge the leadership of their union, the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL), the USW and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center sent trainers to Liberia. In the Fall of 2006, we trained the aggrieved workers committee on union structure and elections.
In the spring of 2007, the workers struck again demanding union leadership elections. During a demonstration, there was a melee in which a worker was killed and others were beaten and tear gassed. The assailants remain unknown and unprosecuted.
Ultimately, again, the government intervened and a date was set for union elections. On July 7, 2007 ballots were distributed across the plantation. Because so many workers are illiterate, having been denied educational opportunities, the ballots contained photographs of the candidates seeking to represent them. The USW and the Solidarity Center were there to ensure fairness. The group of officers put forward by the aggrieved workers committee won by a large margin.
Still, the struggle was not over. The General Agricultural and Allied Workers Union of Liberia challenged the election results in court, attempting to reinstate the Firestone-supported officers.
By December, when the workers still didn’t have a decision, they struck again. Another worker was killed. Many others were beaten and arrested.

Firestone ordered to recognize officers

Finally, on Dec. 21, 2007 the Liberian Supreme Court ordered Firestone to recognize the new union officers. This occurred because the country had a president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and new minister of labor, Samuel Kofi Woods, who would not stand for the corruption of the past. International organizations, including the United Nations, made it clear they were watching. And the AFL-CIO and the USW, including Leo W. Gerard himself, applied every bit of pressure they could.
Firestone workers in the US continued to donate money to support the Liberian workers, this time for training to negotiate with Bridgestone/Firestone.
Talks began early in 2008. Firestone officials told the workers to present them with a contract proposal and then were surprised by the sophistication of what they got.
By summer, when they’d reached a contract both sides generally agreed upon, Firestone objected to the union officers’ plan to present it to the workers to ratify – an accepted union practice. That had not been done by the company-union. The company had control then.
The newly elected union officers insisted. Workers would have the last say, not officers. Workers approved the contract earlier this month.

A 24 percent wage increase

It gives them a 24 percent wage increase retroactive to the expiration of their previous agreement in January of 2007; a 20 percent reduction in the daily tree quota for tapping, and mechanized transportation for conveying latex to weigh stations so tappers no longer must walk for miles carrying 150 pounds yoked to their backs.
This will change their lives. And the lives of their children, many of whom hopefully will no longer have to work alongside them on the plantation to meet the quotas. They will be able to go to school instead.
It is proof that they have a union now that requires management to treat them with dignity and respect.
In October, 2006, during the second trip that the USW made to the plantation, several of the Liberian union activists made it clear to us that is what they wanted.
Mike Zielinski, a member of our strategic campaigns, global bargaining and international affairs department, went on that trip to conduct training, right about the time the USW went on strike against Goodyear in the U.S.
He and several of the activists were distributing rice and other rations to families near a health clinic operated by the company when the head of security drove up and demanded to know what Zielinski was doing there.
Zielinski gave his name and identified himself as a member of the United Steelworkers.

A union whose name causes frenzy

The guard, a man from Mississippi, immediately began yelling, “Oh, Shit! The USW is here? Oh Shit! Oh Shit!”
After he drove off, one of the activists told Zielinski, that was the kind of union the Liberian workers wanted, the kind where all you had to do was say the name and it drove the company into frenzy.
These workers suffered though wildcat strikes, tear gassings, beatings, the deaths of fellow workers to achieve a strong union and a fair contract.
And they have, in turn, made a commitment to the USW. At our international convention in July, FAWUL leaders thanked USW members for our support and promised FAWUL members would reciprocate if ever needed.
Workers are brothers and sisters. We must pull each other up.