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Cincinnati Fire Fighters (IAFF) member Doug Stern says yesterday’s overwhelming rejection of Gov. John Kasich’s (R) attempt to eliminate collective bargaining rights of workers like firefighters, nurses, teachers, bridge inspectors and others shows:

[T]he citizens of Ohio spoke and they made it loud and clear that the focus of government should be on creating sustainable middle class jobs, rather than  pushing a partisan political agenda.

Stern, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Louise Foresman, a member of Working America from Cleveland, took part in a telephone press conference this afternoon about the stunning victory for working families that sent Issue 2 down to a 61 percent to 39 percent defeat. Says Trumka:

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Organized labor racked up a big win in a crucial state, Ohio, on Nov. 8, defeating Right Wing GOP Gov. John Kasich’s plan to kill collective bargaining for state and local workers by a 63%-37% margin.

The Associated Press called the referendum on Kasich’s law, SB5, just before 10 p.m., Eastern Time, with 904,391 “no” votes against the scheme, compared to 558,570 “yes” votes. And that was with only fragmentary returns from Cleveland, expected to be a stronghold of pro-union votes. There, Kasich’s law was losing by a 2-to-1 margin.

The Ohio victory wasn’t labor’s only win on Election Day. Right Wing GOP Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce, author of that state’s notorious anti-Hispanic, anti-immigrant law, was bounced in a recall election by GOP businessman Jerry Lewis, 52%-48%. The state AFL-CIO and the Communications Workers campaigned for Lewis, who made opposition to Pearce’s law – and its bad impact – a campaign plank.

After months of strong mobilizing and campaigning, the Ohio results elated unionists and their leaders. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, led the frenzied final campaigning against Kasich’s law, which killed collective bargaining rights for 350,000 state and local government workers, including police, teachers and Fire Fighters. (more…)

On Nov. 8, Ohio voters repealed SB5, which took away the right of public employees to bargain for a middle-class life. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka joined working families at the phone bank and walking door to door to get-out-the-vote against the law, pushed by Gov. John Kasich and passed early in 2011.

Ohio voters today resoundingly overturned the anti-worker agenda pushed by Gov. John Kasich (R), Republican state lawmakers and outside interest groups, which took away the right of public employees to collectively bargain for a middle-class life.

Moments ago, the vote was called: Buckeye State voters said “No” to Issue 2. The Associated Press reports it was defeated by a 63 percent to 37 percent margin. The “No” vote on Issue 2 repeals Kasich’s S.B. 5 that eliminated the collective bargaining rights of some 350,000 public employees, including teachers, nurses and firefighters.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who joined working families in phone banking and canvassing said Issue 2′s defeat ”is a major victory for working families in Ohio and across the country.”

Ohio’s working people successfully fought back against lies pushed by shadowy multi-national corporations and their anonymous front groups that attempted to scapegoat public service employees and everyone they serve by assaulting collective bargaining rights.

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Business and liberal elites have long invested in developing collaborative leadership. In Occupy Wall Street and beyond, grassroots progressives are now getting into the game of working together.

Something huge is happening in this country. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen this level of populist activity directed at the right targets: the big banks and the corporate elites that dominate our political system.

But there’s something else going on, behind the scenes. Though largely obscured by the Occupy Wall Street story, we are seeing a rare and welcome level of unity: progressive groups are maintaining a better level of coordination than at any time in recent memory. It’s a trend toward cooperation that should be recognized and celebrated.

With the Occupy protests, it’s been wonderful to see a wide range of labor, community and nonprofit groups come together to embrace the struggle — even though the activists who launched the new movement embody very different organizational cultures. When New York Mayor Bloomberg threatened to evict the Zuccotti Park demonstrators a couple of weeks ago, AFL-CIO president Rich Trumka declared that his federation “Stands with Occupy Wall Street” and encouraged union members to help protect the occupation from a police raid. For their part, Occupy activists have supported workers organizing at companies including Sotheby’s, Wal-Mart and Verizon. Historian and Nation writer Jon Wiener calls it an alliance of “hard hats and hippies.” And it’s not just labor. An impressively diverse coalition of community groups and nonprofit advocates have marched in solidarity as well.

But the kind of cooperation that’s been on clear display in the past month thanks to the Occupy movement didn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, coordination among progressives has been quietly growing for over a decade. (more…)

There are reams of reports, tons of studies and rivers of statistics that prove investments in infrastructure pay off in jobs and economic boosts to the communities. When more people have good paychecks in the pockets, they pump money into their local economies.

But it’s the up close and personal examples that can be the most convincing to anyone who doubts the economic wisdom of spending money to create jobs by rebuilding roads, bridges and schools.

Before Senators cast their votes on the Rebuild America Jobs Act—we’re talking primarily to you, Republican lawmakers—they should read this article from the Seattle Times on how a massive bridge building project in Aberdeen, Wash., “is pumping new life into a once-thriving timber town that fell on hard times and stayed that way for years.”

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Who will rebuild America? Despite the indisputable decay of our roads, bridges, ports, airports and schools, no one has come forward to patch them up, much less build their more efficient and attractive successors.

“Prior to 1975,” says Bernard Schwartz, the former CEO of defense and aerospace manufacturer Loral Corp., who has taken the rebuilding of our infrastructure as a personal crusade, “we spent 3 percent of our GDP on infrastructure. Since then, we’ve spent 2 percent. If you add up that difference over the years, it comes to about $2 trillion, which is the amount that the American Society of Civil Engineers says would be required to bring our infrastructure up to par.”

What happened in 1975? It’s roughly the midpoint between the federal government’s enactment of Medicare and the indexing of Social Security, which greatly diminished poverty among U.S. seniors, and the Howard Jarvis/Ronald Reagan tax revolt, which greatly diminished government revenues. That left fewer funds for public construction projects, but at the time, our infrastructure was still pretty spiffy — the interstate highway system had only recently been completed, and the jet-age airports in major U.S. cities were still relatively new.

Today they’re sagging, and dragging the country down with them. But government, hamstrung by austerity-obsessed centrists and the anti-government radical right, is not stepping up to rebuild them. A bill to establish a federal infrastructure bank has been introduced in the Senate by Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry and Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, but it’s hard to imagine the do-nothing House Republicans supporting such a measure.

Which leaves — whom? U.S. banks and corporations are sitting on trillions of dollars, but there’s scant indication they want to invest it in America. A recent column in the Wall Street Journal called on U.S. billionaires to put their money into public projects in return for tax benefits and naming rights. (The Rupert Murdoch Sewage Treatment Plant? Has a ring to it.) I’m not aware of any takers who’ve come forth, however, to answer this plea.

But there are other pots of money in the United States — most prominently, our pension funds. And one group of pension funds has already begun to pony up the bucks to rebuild the nation: those controlled (at least in part) by America’s unions.

The retirement set-asides for unionized public employees and construction workers go into funds that their unions and their employers jointly control. In June, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka announced that his organization’s unions’ funds would invest $10 billion over the next five years in infrastructure projects. Since then, the federation’s construction-worker division has put $200 million of pension money into to retrofitting buildings, while the retirement funds of California teachers and other public employees have committed between $1.1 billion and $1.4 billion to infrastructure projects in the state. (Bound by their fiduciary responsibility to the retirees, the funds’ trustees must be confident that the projects will generate revenues, through tolls, fees, and the economic growth that such projects engender.) (more…)

Despite favorable public opinion polls, Ohio unionists are taking nothing for granted and are ramping up their campaign to repeal Right Wing Gov. John Kasich’s anti-worker anti-union law, as a Nov. 8 referendum on it nears.

Workers are pounding the pavements showing the everyday impact of Kasich’s measure, SB5, which he pushed through the GOP-run Ohio legislature earlier this year.

They’re also advertising. In one spot, a woman says Fire Fighters saved her 2-year-old granddaughter’s life, yet Kasich’s law would take away the Fire Fighters’ right to collectively bargain for equipment and staffing to make such rescues possible. But the unionists are not really relying on an air war to win. Their troops are on the ground.

“Last weekend we had over 2,000 volunteers” on the streets, says Ohio AFL-CIO spokesman Jason Perlman. Unions expected to field even more on Halloween weekend and 10,000 in get-out-the-vote drives in the final weekend before the election.

“What’s really been great is that every union has come aboard – AFL-CIO, Change To Win, you name it,” even though Kasich’s law would end collective bargaining rights only for Ohio’s 400,000 state and local government workers, Perlman adds. (more…)

Last Friday, the Social Security Administration released its figures on how much money Americans made in 2010 from wages, salaries, and tips (but not from capital gains, dividends or rents). Turns out that the 150,398,796 Americans for whom employers issued W-2 forms made just over $6 trillion in net compensation. If you calculate the raw mean average, that comes out to $39,959.30 per worker. But 66 percent of wage earners actually made less than that (or that amount exactly)—which means, the high level of pay for upper-income workers produced a much higher mean average than the average American worker actually makes. The median wage—the dollar amount that 50 percent of wage earners made more than, and 50 percent made less than—was $26,363.55. Twenty-six thousand bucks is what the average American worker makes on the job. That’s right in line with the figures for median household income, which hover around $49,000 once you total the income for everyone at home who has a job.

To be sure, once you allow for the income that people don’t report, or that they make on investments, the income level may rise a bit, even though the vast majority of Americans don’t have significant investments. If the minimum wage were higher, and indexed; if the rate of private sector unionization hadn’t been battered down to its current 7 percent; if manufacturing hadn’t shrunk to 11 percent of the GDP, employing less than 10 percent of the work force; if we hadn’t offshored our industry to China and stood idly by as wages in the States declined accordingly – if we had done any of the things that could have preserved our once-vibrant middle class, then that figure would be higher than 26 thou. But we didn’t and it ain’t. (more…)

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