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On Dec. 18, a dozen retirees, men and women in their 60s, 70s, even 80s, began occupying a median strip along Route 33 in front of the closed Century Aluminum smelter in Ravenswood, W.Va. In tents and under tarps, a small group stays overnight, despite hypertension, arthritis and other old age ailments. One has suffered a stroke.

These vulnerable people expose themselves to weather extremes although some have no health insurance at all. Century cancelled it. That’s why they’re occupying Century.

The retirees labored their entire lives for wages and pensions comparably lower than those of other aluminum workers. They did it believing they made those sacrifices in exchange for good, lifelong health coverage. Over the past two years, however, Century evicted them, about 540 retirees altogether, from the insurance plan.

The betrayal burns. Executives at Century, corporate 1 percenters, committed the same sort of treachery that is being condemned by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators representing the victimized 99 percent across the country. Thus the retirees adopted the grandchildren’s protest tactic of encampment.

Century shuttered the 50-year-old Ravenswood smelter in February of 2009, throwing 651 workers out of jobs. Century, headquartered in Monterey, Calif., didn’t go bankrupt though. It still operates aluminum plants in Kentucky, South Carolina and Iceland. And it didn’t immediately cancel promised insurance for retirees.

Nine months after the shutdown, it announced it would terminate as of June 1, 2010 health benefits for retirees eligible for Medicare.  Then on Nov. 1, 2010, Century told its retirees who weren’t yet eligible for Medicare that it would stop paying for their coverage as of Jan. 1, 2011.

This revoking of earned benefits isn’t an isolated incident or a fluke. It is part of a pattern documented by Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Ellen E. Schultz in her new book “Retirement Heist.”  The subtitle is, “How companies plunder and profit from the nest eggs of American workers. (more…)

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…)

USW members accepted concessions to help Cooper Tire out of economic trouble. When Cooper returned to big profits, it repaid those workers by locking them out.

David Brancaccio’s Marketplace story Tuesday, Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business traced the decline of Kodak and the loss of Rochester, NY’s good, middle-class jobs to Kodak’s failure to tend its “industrial commons.” This is a national problem. For 2012 let’s resolve to restore our industrial commons and bring manufacturing back to the U.S.

Kodak on Marketplace

Listen to Tuesday’s Marketplace story, Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business.

Click to listen.

Story summary: Kodak didn’t tend its “industrial commons,” the local concentration of expertise in making the things that go into a camera.

You make your money by selling cameras. And you now needed to make components. You needed to make lenses; you needed to make shutters — all kinds of things that the skills for which no longer existed in Rochester.

This is what we have done in our country, too. We have been dismantling our “industrial commons.” By sending manufacturing out of the country we have been taking apart the supply chains and abandoning the expertise and skills and culture that go with it.

Other Warnings

Last year, former Intel CEO Andy Grove sounded a warning about this problem. In How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late. Grove wrote that we are not just losing jobs to China, we are losing the “chain of experience” that enables new companies and industries to form and to create new jobs and argues for a national economic strategy to preserve our manufacturing and technology base. He lays out a plan: “rebuild our industrial commons,”

The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability—and stability—we may have taken for granted.

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The New York Times prescribes an additional (to OWS) “cure” for what ails us, “Worker-Owners of America, Unite!” by Gar Alperovitz. The United Steelworkers (USW) union has a couple of things to say about that – and so do I.

My wife and I grew up in a housing co-op created by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. There were other such initiatives, started by International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, etc.

Workers as owners is a great idea. IF it is done right. But some of these have been mislabeled, and the workers put up the money, but management retained the power. There was at least one such “Employee Stock Ownership Plan” where the workers, members of the United Steelworkers, actually had to go on strike to get management to behave properly

Like many things we buy, or ideas we buy into, it’s important to see that what’s on the label matches what’s inside. There were, for example, too, too many LMC’s, “Labor-Management Cooperation” schemes, where the workers did most of the cooperating, and management took advantage of them. I ran into one such example in Bolivar, Ky. “Fools rush in…”

Fortunately, USW International President Leo Gerard and the USW generally are aware of the potential booby traps. They are closely studying the Mondragon Co-ops in the Basque Region of Spain. These manufacturing enterprises have been highly successful, have lasted for decades, are truly “of, by and for the workers” (like our government is s’posed to be). If and when USW ventures into such employee owned and unionized enterprises, we can be assured it will be only after careful study.

As the NYT Op Ed concludes, an expansion of worker-owned manufacturing enterprises, “…would be a fitting next direction for a troubled nation that has long styled itself as of, by and for the people.”

What could be more “In Solidarity” than “Worker-Owners of America, Uniting!”

Martin Morand
USW Associate Member
New York City, NY

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After giving themselves millions in bonuses and a shiny new corporate jet, Cooper Tire executives locked out the workers who actually make the tires. Please visit this site, sign the petition urging Cooper Tire to end the lockout and please share this with all your friends and family via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Exiled Mexican mine workers union leader Napoleón Gómez Urrutia will be honored with the AFL-CIO’s 2011 George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award tonight at a ceremony at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says Gómez Urrutia is a ”truly courageous man who has shown us how difficult and how important it is to be an independent leader of a democratic union.”

Gómez Urrutia, head of the Mine, Metal and Steel Workers Union (SNTMMSSRM), also known as Los Mineros, was forced to flee Mexico to Vancouver, Canada, in 2006. The Mexican government filed criminal charges against him after he publicly accused the government of “industrial homicide” following a February mine explosion that killed 65 miners.

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Voting doesn’t work anymore. If it did, Americans would get what they want — or at least some of it — from Washington.

But they don’t.

Instead of the people’s priority, which is jobs, country club conservatives in Congress stubbornly fixate on deficits. Instead of ensuring millionaires and corporations pay their fair share, House Republicans passed a budget that would destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

Corporate and clandestine campaign contributions have undermined the power of traditional voting, the kind done at polls on election day. Rather than voters, politicians now serve donors — billionaires and banksters — who invest untold millions and demand returns in the form of self-serving policy.

This is demoralizing to those who cherish democracy and the sanctity of one person, one vote.

Hope, however, arrived with the debit card fee victory. The 99 percent forced Bank of America to back off its proposed fee. Average Americans accomplished this by voting differently, not at the ballot box but at the twitter account, the Occupy march and the teller window, where 1 million depositors went to move $4.5 billion from the big Wall Street banks to community banks and credit unions. They found another way to exercise their franchise and force the powerful to respond.

The 99 percent must exploit the method of this triumph to get what they need. Because politicians sure as hell aren’t giving them what they want.

The numbers don’t lie. Coin-operated conservatives in Congress have rejected President Obama’s jobs plan, parts of the jobs plan and Obama’s pitch to raise taxes on the rich to pay for it.

And yet, the electorate strongly supports both surtaxing millionaires and the elements of the jobs plan. In a CNN poll in October, 75 percent favored sending federal money to the states to hire teachers and first responders and 72 percent favored infrastructure investments.

A whopping 76 percent wanted millionaires to pay higher taxes.

In that same CNN poll, there’s another compelling statistic. Sixty-one percent said reducing unemployment was the most important issue. Reducing the deficit didn’t even come close at 35 percent.

The numbers aren’t flukes. Another survey, taken a week later by CBS found the same thing. (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…)

Americans have been worshiping a bull. Too many citizens, and particularly politicians, prostrate themselves to Wall Street’s bronze idol.

They revere financial titans who pay themselves and their minions millions to manipulate money and gamble recklessly. Politicians gave tribute to the financiers with tax breaks and bailouts when the bankers’ bad bets threatened to bankrupt their institutions.

This false idolatry produced a nation gripped by massive unemployment, a nation in which destructive income inequality has risen beyond robber baron levels, a nation where greed has been perverted from sin to good, a nation where politicians genuflect to money changers, not majority citizens.

Salvation for the majority is not more failed trickle-down economics or more deregulation so that Wall Street can resume committing unfettered wagering. Redemption is political and economic systems devoted to serving the common good, not the affluent few.

These concepts — that governments should protect majorities and that the international financial collapse is an opportunity to transform the system into one supporting a more fraternal and just human family — are contained in a report released last week by the Pope’s Council for Justice and Peace. It says:

“The economic and financial crisis which the world is going through calls everyone, individuals and peoples, to examine in depth the principles and the cultural and moral values at the basis of social coexistence.”

Those values mandate economic and political systems that transcend “personal utility for the good of the community,” the report says, then adds:

“The primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics, which is responsible for the common good – over the economy and finance.”

This is exactly what the 99 percenters — the Occupy Wall Street activists of every faith — have been saying. They want systems that work for the vast majority of citizens, not just the 1 percent at the top.

A day after the Pontifical Council reported that inequitable distribution of wealth has increased both between individuals and nations, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office documented a massive spike in income inequality within the United States from 1979 to 2007.

The household income of the nation’s richest 1 percent grew 275 percent during that nearly 30-year period, according to the CBO report.

By contrast, the income of the middle class rose by one-seventh of that — 40 percent. For the poor, the increase was one-fifteenth of that for the rich — only 18 percent over 30 years.

The result is that the richest 20 percent of households got more money in those 30 years than the entire bottom 80 percent.  That is redistribution of wealth – moving it from the poor and middle class to the richest.

The CBO study cites several factors contributing to the rising inequality, including federal tax policy. The CBO says tax policy fed inequity as the incomes of the wealthiest rose astronomically and their federal tax burden shrank.

This pattern is consistent internationally. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development determined that from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s income inequality increased in three-quarters of the 30 developed countries studied. (more…)