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…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled 5-4 that as many as 1.6 million women who are current or former Wal-Mart employees cannot sue Wal-Mart for pay discrimination in a class-action suit. A lower court had ruled that the women could join together in a class action.

But the court did not rule on the women’s claims of systematic and company-wide pay and promotion discrimination.

Ten years ago, a group of women who worked at Wal-Mart stores, led by Betty Dukes, filed a lawsuit alleging the corporation engaged in company-wide gender discrimination by paying women less than men, promoting fewer women to management positions and promoting male employees more quickly. (more…)

John Russo

By John Russo
Co-Director, Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University

The State of Ohio provides several forms of public assistance, including Medicaid, food stamps, and cash assistance through the Ohio Works First Program.  Medicaid is the largest line item in the Ohio budget. Through these direct supports to low-wage workers, the state also indirectly subsidizes employers.  They can get away with paying low wages or not providing health insurance because they know that workers can turn to the state. Some even help their workers sign up for state assistance.  The biggest recipient of this form of corporate welfare in Ohio is Wal-Mart. According to the Ohio Depart of Jobs and Family Services, 15,000 Ohio employees receive Medicaid and 12,000 receive food bank assistance. In 2009, this amounted to an estimated $67 million subsidy.  That makes Wal-Mart the biggest “welfare queen” in Ohio.

Over the last four years, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland administratively required the Department of Jobs and Family Services to report on how much the State was subsidizing various corporations. The Republicans who now control the Ohio House, Senate, and statewide offices, including Governor, won’t continue that practice.

Knowing that this would happen, State Representative Bob Hagan (D-Youngstown) attempted to codify the practice by introducing legislation that would have required companies with 50 or more employees to report how many receive public assistance.  During the lame duck session in December 2010, the legislation made it out of the House State Government Committee and to the House floor.  With Republicans controlling the Ohio Senate, it had little chance of passing, but its journey through the House is a reflection of the disconnect between Ohio Democrats and their core constituencies.

The bill barely got enough votes in Hagan’s Comittee, and even though Committee support reflected party affiliations, when it reached the Democratic caucus,  three Representatives refused to support it because they feared offending the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, and the Ohio Manufacturing Association. Democratic party operatives reported that one Democrat Representative, Josh O’Farrell, who had just lost a reelection race, said that he wanted the Chamber of Commerce support should he run for election in the future.  The Chamber had taken no position in his race in the 2010 election.  Another Democrat, Representative John Carney, spoke against it in the Democrat Caucus and walked off the floor just prior to vote – a move referred to as “going to the duck pond.”  Democrat Representative Stephen Slesnick said the bill was anti-business and refused to vote for it.  That Ohio Democrats sold out on a bill that merely required that the public be informed of indirect state subsidies to corporations, a bill they knew had no chance of passing, did not surprise many in the Democratic base. (more…)

Steven Capozzola

 By Steven Capozzola
Media Director, Alliance for American Manufacturing

When will we learn that outsourcing to China proves hazardous to our health?

The Miley Cyrus line of bracelets and necklaces contain toxic levels of cadmium.  As the Associated Press and USA Today are reporting, the jewelry (which was made in China) is dangerous to children’s health.  Cadmium is a known carcinogen, with long-term exposure leading to potential bone softening and kidney failure. Research also suggests that cadmium exposure can hinder brain development in the very young.

As the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) has reported previously, there are a disturbing number of unsafe products coming from China, including: toys, cars, drywall, chocolate, medicine, baby formula, tires, and pet food.

We’d like to know, then, why celebrities would choose the quick-buck option of manufacturing products in China when there are plenty of safe and reliable domestic U.S. producers standing ready to meet their needs? 

Will Miley Cyrus be the Kathie Lee Gifford of her generation?  Or will she recognize that American manufacturers can provide the same products without the safety worries and workplace labor abuses that continue to emerge from China?

“Making it in America” makes good economic sense, too, and as such, the Alliance for American Manufacturing would be pleased to help Miley and Wal-Mart find dependable American manufacturers to meet their needs.

Leo W. Gerard

Richard McCormack

Q&A

Leo W. Gerard: Richard, when you appeared recently at Youngstown State University as a guest of the Center for Working-Class Lecture Series, you talked about how essential manufacturing is to the U.S. economy and how politicians seem clueless about that. In fact, you said, “Politicians don’t get it.” When did that happen because clearly politicians in the 1950s understood that a solid economy rests on manufacturing products of real value?

Richard McCormack:  It happened imperceptibly over the past three decades, but perhaps the defining (though little observed) event was when Wal-Mart overtook General Motors as the country’s largest employer. When that happened, the retail industry became one of the most powerful political entities in the country, replacing the manufacturing industry.

The crossover from GM to Wal-Mart is important because retail started setting the terms of the debate not only with politicians, but also with manufacturers. Retailers are driven by increasing profits by pennies on the dollar by paying workers low wages with no benefits and buying cheap imports.

The loss of the manufacturing sector’s political influence also occurred with the rise of the finance sector, which became the dominant force in political gift-giving. The Wall Street financial sector does not give one-half hoot about American jobs.

The loss of America’s industrial capability also coincided with the persistent selling of economic ideology to the American public and its politicians that the country would be a lot more prosperous getting rid of crappy manufacturing jobs and creating jobs in the service and “knowledge” sectors. That grand experiment in creating a “post-industrial economy” just suffered a monumental collapse.

Americans have allowed the big corporate multinational companies and their agents to take control of their political system. It remains to this day a system that is stacked against American workers and American taxpayers. Americans have not entered the fight to save American jobs. I wonder if the middle class is drugged up on Britney Spears, Michael Jackson and Tiger Woods; addicted to sugar, salt and fat; fake “news” shows on television; and Prozac to deal with depression and lull them into thinking that their condition is beyond control. Something is stopping Americans from getting off their couches and demanding a voice in America’s economic future. Americans have lost their country to a few people who make a lot of money off outsourcing, off-shoring and importing everything Americans used to make and continue to buy. Americans must take their country back before it is too late.

Gerard: You have written about this problem in the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” and elsewhere. How do we make politicians understand how vital manufacturing is?

 McCormack: Politicians need to be hit over their heads with a baseball bat as forcefully as is possible, with Americans insisting that they at least acknowledge that a country that doesn’t make what is consumes is going to fail. It is a simple concept. There are many historical precedents of countries and empires failingafter having lost their productive capacity. It is an ancient concept: a country that does not have industry cannot support an army. 

The United States has just gone through a period of unprecedented loss of wealth. Its citizens have taken a collective economic step down. Yet politicians are sitting smug in the belief that they can borrow more money. They work in Washington, D.C., where I live. This place is humming. Most of them have no idea what the country looks like. Have they been to Detroit, Saginaw, Youngstown – America’s heartland? America’s heartland is dead. That means its heart has stopped beating. What happens to a person when their heart stops beating?

The financial meltdown wasn’t caused by the housing bubble or the financial bubble or the dot-com bubble, although all of those things contributed. It was caused by the simple fact that American consumers have sent all of their wealth to China, Korea, Japan, Germany and Mexico buying all of the things they once made. Tell that to the politicians. They don’t get it. They don’t get it and they don’t get it, which means they have to be hit over the head and be hit over the head and be hit over the head as hard as is possible to hit them with the simple message, over and again: the country cannot survive if it sends all of its wealth offshore. The country has to produce what it consumes. Our politicians do not understand this basic FACT. Have they looked at why China is becoming a superpower? It’s not because China exports its sports heroes and pop culture. It’s because China has embraced manufacturing as THE means to economic superiority. It is the same path the United States took to reach global dominance. Inexplicably, the United States abandoned that path.

Gerard: In Youngstown, you quoted Ralph E. Gomory, the retired IBM senior vice president for Science and Technology and a winner of the Heinz Award for Technology, the Economy and Employment, as saying the interests of American corporations have diverged from the interests of America, yet politicians act as if they’re still the same. Can you explain what that means both in terms of the economy and employment?

McCormack: Ralph Gomory has made one of the most profound and important observations on the current global economic situation. He says that outsourcing is not free trade. Yet the federal government still represents the interests of the powerful companies that are firing millions of American workers and shifting those jobs offshore. 

Domestic manufacturers have told me repeatedly that the greatest protectionists in our country are the corporate and financial companies that are doing everything in their power to protect their assets in China. To influence policy in their favor, the multinationals, retailers, importers and foreign producers fund think tanks, trade associations, lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms. These are the real protectionists, not American businessmen who want to save American jobs and the American middle class.

The U.S. government continues to craft policies that are beneficial for companies that outsource jobs. For instance, the U.S. government refuses to confront China over its currency manipulation because the companies that benefit most from China’s undervalued currency are the American companies that have shifted their production there. Who does the U.S. government represent? The tens of millions of American workers who get the ax due to China’s blatant cheating, or the few CEOs at multinational companies and the financial class who make more and more money?

It was no coincidence that the stock market had its best year ever in 2009 – the same year millions of Americans were losing their jobs. The dynamic still hasn’t changed, despite the financial sector’s meltdown: Every time a company announces American worker layoffs, its stock price goes up. Yet policymakers equate the stock market with a healthy economy. They are as wrong on that as they are on the belief that the world is flat.

Gerard:  You have also said that politicians’ decision to implement the concept of free trade – which is not fair trade – has largely contributed to the nation’s problems. Would you talk about how something as positive-sounding as free trade devastated American industry?

McCormack:  A friend of mine works at the Commerce Department. He says that free trade is a farce. The United States has tariffs of 2 percent or 3 percent on incoming products. Yet the United States trades with countries with tariffs that are 10 times higher. Is that free trade? He has a simple solution to the U.S. trade crisis: hold up a mirror to any nation trading with the United States. Whatever their tariffs are on U.S. products entering their country, that is what the U.S. tariff should be on their products entering America. 

How can U.S. producers compete when they must pay for all of the costs that foreign producers don’t have to add to the price of their product? These costs include things like scrubbers and baghouses on coal plants. Not requiring the generation of clean power is a Chinese subsidy offered to all manufacturers setting up shop in China. It is an unfair subsidy that U.S. companies cannot counter without the U.S. government saying that it is unfair. Even worse, 75 percent of the mercury pollution in the United States can be attributed to Asian coal-fired plants that do not have emissions controls. The majority of these plants are located in China. China is poisoning America. If it was happening in the United States, the federal government would take the American utility or industrial company to court and impose fines of millions of dollars. What does the U.S. government do about China’s toxic emissions drifting over U.S. airspace? Nothing.

U.S. manufacturers have to abide by a thousand EPA rules and OSHA standards. Not so in China. That is a huge advantage. The United States government lets American companies that have set up shop in China get away with not having to abide by American standards – even though their products are being sold in the United States.

It is morally wrong.

Any foreign product sold in the United States should be required to be produced under the same conditions as is required for producers of the same product in the United States. If these requirements are not going to be enforced on overseas competitors, as they are here so vigorously by our federal government, then those cost advantages should be calculated and tacked onto the price of the product entering the United States.

Foreign producers should NOT have this unfair advantage. It is an outrage that the United States has allowed this to occur.

It is time for the country to stop listening to importers, their agents in Washington, including foreign governments, retailers and the financial industry. The U.S. government has to start representing the interest of American manufacturers, workers and business owners. It does not now. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is reality.

Gerard: In the chapter you wrote for the book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” you said something that every American should find frightening. You said that when Congress cuts the taxes of individuals or gives them tax rebates in an attempt to stimulate the economy, the actual effect is to create jobs in foreign countries. Can you explain that?

McCormack: The U.S. government has just spent the past 10 years trying DESPERATELY to stimulate the U.S. economy, with trillion-dollar tax cuts, tax giveaways, low interest rates and even two wars that have lasted for nine years. Then the Democrats took office in 2009 and enacted their own $787 billion “stimulus.” Every time Americans have had a few extra bucks in their pocket (from tax cuts to direct government payments to home equity loans) they have spent that money on products that are now made somewhere else in the world. Is it any wonder why China’s economy was growing by 10 percent per year during the past 10 years, as U.S. consumers shipped more and more of their hard-earned dollars there to buy everything? 

Gerard: You have been critical of the second economic stimulus bill – called a jobs bill – that Congress is now talking about. You contend that the proposed bill won’t create new jobs. Here’s what you actually said, “I don’t see any jobs there. I just see more money being spent.” What’s wrong with that bill?

McCormack:  It is more of the same. Only a very small percentage of the bill encourages investment in U.S. production. There is not a single program aimed at countering the incentives that foreign countries are providing their companies and U.S. producers to set up operations in their country. The United States has to start competing – to start countering those incentives with its own incentives to manufacturing companies. It doesn’t matter if these companies are American companies or foreign companies. To create lasting, decent jobs, the United States needs global companies to open production in the United States to serve the U.S. market.

Small American companies do not need a $30-billion tax cut to hire workers. They need CUSTOMERS. They won’t hire a soul unless they have a customer to sell them a product. Yet the country continues to lose manufacturing plants to China.

Gerard: If you could actually get Congress to listen to you, what would you tell them is necessary to create good new jobs?

McCormick: Ask the 50 economic development officers from each of the states to form a U.S. Economic Development Council. These people and their offices know what is being planned in terms of company expansions. Give them a war chest, some of the TARP money or funding from the proposed “jobs” bill, and tell them to deploy the same tactics they use in their states to attract industry to America. All of the states are competing against each other to attract industrial investment. They should be working together, especially since supply chains cross state borders.

Gerard: When I go to Washington, what I hear is that we don’t need manufacturing. That’s old and dirty. So many politicians say the U.S. can move to a financial and service economy. You disagree with that. Why?

McCormick: I hear it too, though a little less often, thank goodness.  This argument is what has led to the demise of the United States. People are just starting to realize that as manufacturing goes offshore, high-end jobs in design and research and development go with it. When a plant closes, the supply chain disappears. This supply chain includes materials and parts producers, software providers, like CAD (computer-aided design), ERP (enterprise resource planning) and dozens of other high-tech equipment providers, machine tool companies, maintenance, accounting, packaging – the list goes on to include such things as the local restaurants, janitorial services and those dependent on the plant’s tax revenues, like librarians, county clerks, police officers and teachers. These are service jobs, all of which depend on manufacturing. One manufacturing job supports 15 other jobs. No other category of job has such a high multiplier. The United State must do whatever it can to start creating manufacturing jobs.

Gerard: We are losing at the international trade game with imports far exceeding exports and creating a massive trade deficit. Is it over for the U.S., or can Washington actually do something to reverse this situation?

McCormick: The game is not over. Not yet. But the country is perilously close to a period of sustained pain caused by continuing huge trade and budget deficits. The United States is assuming greater and greater debt. The country cannot borrow its way to prosperity. At some point very soon, the United States has to stop accumulating debt and start the process of paying it down. The only way to do this is by producing the products Americans consume – like cellphones, televisions, digital cameras, computers, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, autos, steel, household items, appliances, luggage, clothes – everything – and to start producing a new generation of radical and revolutionary products that the rest of the world needs to buy.

***

Richard McCormack is editor and publisher of Manufacturing & Technology News, a publication he created in 1994. It is read by industry executives, government officials and academics on five continents. McCormack has reported on science and technology, industry and government in Washington, D.C. for 26 years specializing in economic competitiveness and globalization. He has won numerous journalism awards for investigative, analytical and interpretative reporting. He is author of the book, “Lean Machines: Learning from the Leaders of the Next Industrial Revolution.” And he is the editor of the new book, “Manufacturing A Better Future for America,” for which he wrote the first chapter, “The Plight of American Manufacturing.”

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

This week the minimum wage rose by 70 cents to $7.25 an hour, a beggar’s lot really, but still corporations across America decried it. Good times or bad, somehow Wall Streeters walk away with $700,000 bonuses, you know, on top of their salaries, but a 70-cent minimum wage hike is never affordable.

That’s why America’s workers must seize control of their own fates. President Obama said: “Our destiny is not written for us. It is written by us.” Well, on a sweltering July 11, 1,500 civil rights, human rights and workers rights activists in Little Rock began writing a new destiny for American workers.

That destiny includes the freedom to form and join a union and to collectively bargain for a piece of the wealth they helped create. That destiny includes passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

The 1,500 met in Little Rock because Arkansas is the home state of Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat who turned her back on the Employee Free Choice Act this year, succumbing to pressure from the likes of Wal-Mart, a notoriously anti-union corporation headquartered in the Razorback State. Many Wal-Mart workers will be getting a 70 cent raise this week – thanks to that minimum wage hike.

Rich Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and I met with Sen. Lincoln a couple of weeks before the rally, and she kept telling us how she had passed legislation to help children and how she really wanted to help families. The best way to help families is to let them help themselves through collective bargaining.

I’ll tell you what I told the 1,500 in Little Rock that day. Write her. Call her. E-mail her. “Tell her the best way to help the children, the best way to help families, the best way to help the seniors, the best way to get to the middle class is for workers to have the right to join a union and bargain collectively for a piece of the pie that they helped to make and for a piece of the wealth they helped to create.”

That is what the Employee Free Choice Act does.

The rally in Little Rock started at Central High School where nine Black youngsters braved violence to desegregate in 1958. Fifty-one years later, we are engaged in another civil rights struggle. And Rev. Wendell Griffin, a Baptist pastor and judge on the Arkansas Court of Appeals, expressed that best.

Rev. Griffin asked the 1,500, “Are we free?”

No one yelled yes.

He repeated, “Are we free?”

Again, no affirmative response.

He explained, when one person is not free, all people are not free. “We are brothers and sisters, and when one worker is not paid fairly, all workers are not paid fairly.”  And, he said, the way for all workers to be paid fairly, is for workers to have the right to organize.

He told the story of his father working, without a union, in a saw mill; how he later got  union representation, a raise, a pension and better working conditions. And, importantly, how that changed his family’s life.

Finally, he told the crowd:  “What my father had is what every worker ought to have in Arkansas.”

Every worker should have the right to join a union, receive a pension and labor in safety.

He noted that the people of Arkansas have given that to Blanche Lincoln – voted to provide her with a government job, good benefits and a pension.

“Now is our time,” he said.

“Employee Free Choice Act Now.”

Watch the Video.

Leo W. Gerard

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Randel K. Johnson, vice president of that esteemed group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, recently revealed a corporate-squelched truth in a slip of the tongue.

During a debate on May 15 with Stewart Acuff of the AFL-CIO about the Employee Free Choice Act, Johnson admitted – finally – that the act preserves secret ballot elections for unions. The act would allow workers – rather than employers – to decide whether to form a union by conducting a secret ballot election or by collecting signed membership cards from a majority of workers.

Incredibly, for as much as unearned-bonus-grubbing-CEOs have lied about secret ballots in their relentless campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act, that was not Johnson’s revelation.

No, here’s what he disclosed: If the act passes, he said, “It would be a rare union that would decide to risk a normal secret ballot election.” 

Risk. Interesting word, Mr. Johnson.

The Chamber of Commerce knows there’s a huge risk to secret ballot elections. And the Chamber likes it that way. Employers stack the deck against workers in secret ballot elections. They don’t publicly admit it though. That’s why Johnson’s use of the word “risk” was so surprising.

The Chamber and big corporations like Wal-Mart are intent on defeating the act because it would remove from employers the power to force workers to conduct secret ballot elections.  It would strip from employers that ability to generate risk, to defeat unions, and thus to further shrink wages and the American middle class.

A Cornell University professor, Kate Bronfenbrenner, who has researched labor issues for a quarter century, issued a new study last week that clearly illustrates the risk of secret ballot elections and how employers have labored long and hard to increase that risk in recent years. It’s called, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organization.”

Among the tactics she documents employers using in the weeks before the “secret ballot” election to thwart unionization are firing of union organizers, threats to close the plant or cut wages and benefits, and forcing workers to meet one-on-one with supervisors who intimidate and interrogate them to determine whether they support the union.

Bronfenbrenner concluded, “This combination of threats, interrogation, surveillance, and harassment has ensured that there is no such thing as a democratic ‘secret ballot’ in the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) certification election process. The progression of actions the employer has taken can ensure that the employer knows exactly which way every worker plans to vote long before the election takes place.”

Her study showed employers implementing these tactics more frequently than in the past. When she compared organizing campaigns in this five-year period to those in the studies over the previous 20 years, she discovered two disconcerting facts: the cases in which employers used 10 of these threatening techniques in the run-up to elections more than doubled. And employers focused much more on coercive and punitive methods rather than positive procedures such as unscheduled raises and promotions.

Not surprisingly, she also found that as employers exploited harsher tactics and intensified their attacks in the weeks before “secret balloting,” the union was more likely to lose. And, conversely, she found that in campaigns where public sector workers tried organizing and government agencies refrained from coercive and illegal tactics, the union was significantly more likely to win.

If it weren’t so easy for employers to create risk for workers, millions more could get the union protection they want. Surveys show an increasing number of American workers desire a union. In the mid 1990s, it was 40 percent. Now it’s 53 percent. Yet only 12.4 percent of American workers have that protection – and the better wages and benefits that go with it.

Bronfenbrenner addressed this issue in her report: “Our findings suggest that the aspirations for representation are being thwarted by a coercive and punitive climate for organizing that goes unrestrained due to a fundamentally flawed regulatory regime that neither protects their rights nor provides any disincentive for employers to continue disregarding the law.”

She continues: “Unless serious labor law reform with real penalties is enacted, only a fraction of the workers who seek representation under the National Labor Relations Act will be successful.”

That reform is the Employee Free Choice Act, and there’s the point of Johnson’s use of the word risk. The Chamber of Commerce intends to kill the act and leave risk fully on the shoulders of workers. As Bronfenbrenner showed, that would mean fewer will be unionized. Middle class wages and benefits would continue to decline.

It is time for American workers to stop bearing all of the risk. They’re working for less and bailing out the very people who are obstructing their ability to fairly bargain for more.

In October, Bank of America, which has received more than $45 billion in taxpayer bailout money, hosted a conference call with conservatives and business officials, including a representative of AIG, which has received more than $100 billion in taxpayer bailout money, to organize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. Then in March, just days after the act was introduced, Citigroup Inc., which got $50 billion in bailout money, hosted a similar conference call, this one led by Glenn Spencer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

During the October call, Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, said he should be on a 350-foot boat in the Mediterranean, but he thought fighting the Employee Free Choice Act was more important because, “This is the demise of a civilization. . . This is how a civilization disappears.”

Yes, the Employee Free Choice Act could contribute ever so slightly to dissipation of a decadent class. Unionization is how the middle class re-emerges. America could do without a few filthy-rich boys lolling on yachts in the Mediterranean. At the heart of America, however, must be a strong and broad middle class.

QUESTION: Polls show strong support for “Buy American” legislation – which requires that government entities using tax-dollar supported stimulus grants buy domestically-produced products such as steel whenever possible. From your conversations with friends and neighbors, do you think most people really understand why it is so crucial to the American economy right now?

Yes we can Buy American

We think that Americans are currently far more aware of the values of stimulus and buying American products than they have been permitted to be for the past several years.  Because of the trust level in the current administration, driven by continuing efforts by the president to communicate with us, people are willing to make choices in line with what is best for our economy.  Hopefully, this trust we have will extend to believing in Obama’s efforts on behalf of unions too.
Jay and Lucia Weinroth
Big Prairie, Ohio

Little thought of Buy American

We are already very strongly “buying American,” but my sense is that most people have not really thought about it very much.  Local car dealerships are doing strong advertising along these lines, however, so that may pay off.
Bill Prentiss
Orlando, Fla.

Tariff now

In this day of global economy, global stimulus plans, and Uni Global Union, we must, finally, admit Americans are in a GLOBAL COMPETITION for jobs, standard of living and national economic standing. The surrender policy this nation’s corporations and politicians have given this great nation in condemning it to a service economy is a travesty. All great economic powers are based on their MANUFACTURING ability. Due to other nations taking advantage of our corporate policies of off-shoring, union busting and desperate allegiance to higher profit margins, we are in position to become a second tier economy. While other nations devalue their currency, pirate American technology, and use all protectionist measures available to them, our leaders continue to see the global economy as first priority over American security. If no one HERE has a job manufacturing American goods at a livable wage, how do they expect us to be able to

BUY anything other than Wal-Mart Chinese goods on the Chinese wages we’re receiving? I say don’t blame the Unions. Blame political and corporate greed. Give us a level playing field: tariff now.
John Buck
Point Pleasant Borough, N.J.

More Buy American education

People seem to understand the sentiment of buying American made goods, but they fall short in the practice.  I even know of a New York affiliate that distributed Chinese made “union logo” jackets at their December holiday meeting.  “If we bought American we couldn’t distribute them for free to our members,” I was informed by that local’s President.  He seemed only slightly embarrassed as he said this.

Sad, but true.  More ”Buy American” education is necessary.
Kevin Sexton
Flushing, N.Y.

Buy American and protectionism

I’ve been a union man since before I was born (my grandfather was a baker, my grandmother a seamstress, I’m a professor) and I strongly support almost every union initiative and position: except pushing for protectionist, “Buy American” legislation. Protectionism can lead to an uncontrollable retaliatory spiral that will ruin the world’s and America’s economy for years to come. “Buy American” is the wrong approach to a real problem: unfair competition, cheap wages and poor conditions in foreign countries.

The right solution includes:

1) enactment of single-payer national health so that we get guaranteed health and so that American business won’t be saddled with a competitive barrier compared to foreign companies that do not have to pay health care benefits;

2) a militant campaign against environmental and labor standards violations in other countries (not boycotts, but demonstrations at embassies, visits to the countries involved);

3) strong ties with and funding support for unionists in other countries — even symbolic short, large-scale sympathy strikes;

4) leverage our political strength to ensure that NAFTA, WTO etc. really get modified to promote better labor conditions world wide;

5) aggressive unionization here in America of all the industries that they CANNOT ship overseas, and aggressive struggles to raise the wages in those industries and sectors: food service workers, hospital workers, sanitation workers, doormen and janitors, transit workers, etc.;

6) repeal all right-to-work laws, the NYS Taylor Law penalties, etc. here and worldwide.
David Arnow
Brooklyn, N.Y.

Build America

The case has not been made strongly enough yet.  The Obama Administration could help make direct links between people’s basic concerns about the current state of the economy and job loss to a brighter future for every American family based on development of green industry and business built by Americans.    Unfortunately,  most people I know perceive “Buy American”  as strictly a ‘union’ issue which they don’t particularly identify with personally, and don’t understand what is good for unions is good for them.  I would like to see the issue framed as “Build America” instead of “Buy American” so that people might come to understand its importance to every American and to the global economy.   People painfully understand the economy needs to be rebuilt, and are being told to save not buy at this time.   The word “Build” instead of “Buy” better describes immediate needs.

After the last eight years of national trauma, people are skittish about ‘patriotism’ and the “Buy American” slogan may be off-putting.  So, yes, “Build America” first could lead us into a future of “Buy American.”  Also, the case for “Build America” and “Buy American” must be made by leaders outside the trade union movement as well as by our own Blue-Green Alliance.  It’s time for coalition building again.
Beth Omansky
Portland, Ore.

American imbalance

I suspect that most people do not understand that our balance of trade is so far out of balance; they may have heard that China holds around a trillion dollars of our debt, but they do not realize how much more the USA has bought from Chine than it has sold to China.  To a lesser degree, we are out of balance to Europe, Japan, and Korea. If we slow our purchasing of foreign goods, perhaps the balance will tilt back toward a more normal position.
David G. Wagner, MD
Portland, Ore.

American-made frustration

My friends feel very strongly about “Buy American,” but are frustrated because it is not easy to find American-made goods.  I would not know where to go to find American-made shoes or clothing.  Furniture and appliance stores have American, Canadian, and Asian items side by side and it is difficult to know which is which. Food and paper goods are often not labeled.  American-owned car companies purchase parts abroad, and ”foreign” ones purchase U.S. parts.
Judy Ferro
Caldwell, Idaho

Corporations selling out America

The tax structure must be changed. Freightliner closed American plants and went to Mexico. Hershey Chocolates moved to Mexico.  We have to keep the work in USA
Franz  Ortloff
Helena, Mont.

Circumventing Buy American

I think most people are not aware of the importance of Buy American and do not realize foreign countries exploit their workers. I myself think that to import to the extent that our own country has almost no domestic production of items like washers, dryers or structural steel is wrong. Some government contracts require Buy American in their subsidies for say, rail coaches, and they get around this requirement by assembling a small final component in the U.S.
Martin LaCarbonara
Woburn, Mass.

Consumers’ ignorance; manufacturers’ greed

For too long American consumers have made their purchases based on price and neither quality nor country of origin. This, coupled with the greed exhibited by manufactures and our nation’s trade policies has led to the demise of millions of good family wage jobs in the USA.

However, when the question is posed, should taxpayers dollars, meant for job creation, be spent overseas, I think that a vast majority of citizens would answer, “Of course not.”  I also believe that the recovery of our nation’s economy cannot be achieved to a great degree until we return to a nation that manufactures the goods we purchase and not a nation whose economy is based on services.
Harold Abbe
Camas, Wash.

Build American manufacturing

Instead of just passing out free money to the incompetent financial wizards at inept and possibility criminal Wall Street organizations, maybe the U.S. government should build manufacturing plants to make consumer products like refrigerators, washing machines, clothing, TV’s, and eventually all of the consumer goods that we import with that money.  We should impose import taxes high enough on these products so that US-made products are competitive in price with imported goods.  These plants should periodically and/or constantly be for sale based upon competitive bidding, but at a minimum price at least equal to as much as the government investment.  The money passed out to the financial industries does nothing to create jobs or eliminate the problems with the US economy.  Maybe it helps pay for the commissions of the U.S. salesmen of the expensive new French-manufactured private jet airplanes.  The French people making these (Falcon 20-25) airplanes are probably very thankful for Obama’s generosity.
Gerald R. Spencer, P.E.
Houston, Texas 

More solutions

Given that we are thoroughly enmeshed in World Trade, an attempt at nationalism would probably be counter productive.  Other countries would retaliate.

Instead, I should like to suggest the following changes:

1.  Re-write our trade policies to correct the off-set balance of payments.

2.  Make importers legally responsible for the safety of their products.

3.  Reward businesses that create jobs for U.S. workers.

4. Give tax relief for small businesses.
Suzanne Orr
Port Angeles, Wash.

Think past price

I don’t think most Americans think past the price. I admit I personally succumb to the temptation to pay less for imports manufactured with slave labor, although if there’s an American made product for not too much more, I will buy it.

I do make an effort to buy locally-grown food and wood products, as farming and lumber products support my neighbors. Companies like ADM and Cargill need their feet held to the fire with heavy tariffs or outright bans on importation of slave products.

Hopefully, the Obama administration will implement fair-trade mandates on imports, which will make U.S.-made products price-competitive and return our jobs.

Live long and perspire,

Jerry (Steve) Dodge
Springdale, Wash.

David Nassar

By David Nassar

Executive Director Wal-Mart Watch

Sometimes symbols appear unexpectedly. Jdimytai Damour, a temporary Wal-Mart worker, became a symbol to millions of low-wage workers last Friday when he died a needless death because Wal-Mart failed to take the necessary precautions to protect him. He became a symbol of those workers quietly yielding to unsafe working conditions because they have no voice. Americans need Congress to pass the Employee Free Choice Act next year so that deaths like Mr. Damour’s, and so many other deaths and injuries to low-wage workers on the job can be avoided in the future.

In 2007 a respected human rights watchdog group, Human Rights Watch, released a report critical of Wal-Mart’s union-busting policies and practices in the United States. According to the report, “while many American companies use weak U.S. laws to stop workers from organizing, the retail giant stands out for the sheer magnitude and aggressiveness of its anti-union apparatus.” Wal-Mart’s opposition to its workers exercising their legal right to organize has even extended to terminating entire departments and closing entire stores.

For example, in February 2000, ten employees of the Wal-Mart meat department in a Jacksonville, Texas, store elected United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) as their union. Wal-Mart immediately scrapped their entire network of in-store butcher departments nationwide. And in Jonquière, Quebec, after the birth of a certified UFCW Local at a Wal-Mart store and a decision by the Minister of Labor for Quebec to grant the union’s request for contract arbitration, Wal-Mart announced that it would close the Jonquière store.

The result of this behavior is that workers are denied a seat at the table to contribute to setting standards that protect them on the job. In the absence of such contributions, management is free to set whatever standards it deems appropriate and workers are obligated to go along if they wish to keep their jobs. To make matters worse, Wal-Mart store management’s compensation is based on bonus systems that encourage cutting labor costs, resulting in more temporary workers. Temporary workers like Damour are particularly vulnerable in that environment because they have neither the context nor the influence to express reservations when asked to perform certain duties.

Without a union it is entirely up to Wal-Mart’s management to determine whether or not they took legitimate precautions to prevent this incident. In the absence of union representation, let me suggest if it is not already obvious from the events that unfolded, that Wal-Mart failed on at least a few levels to protect its employees and its customers.

First, it appears there was a shortage of adequate security at the doors. Wal-Mart has still not released how many guards were present at the time to control the rushing crowd of 2000 people. Second, the company used at least some temporary workers including Mr. Damour who were not familiar with what to expect on Black Friday. Third, as some news reports have pointed out, unlike other retailers Wal-Mart did not provide tickets for store entry or offer rain-checks for any items that were sold out. All of these choices contributed to the tragic events of that day and the workers who were on the line that morning had no say in making any of them.

More low-wage workers need a voice in their workplace. The current system of certifying a union has failed because employers have found ways to thwart the process, and the federal government has failed to prevent that interference or to protect workers right to organize in any meaningful way. It is time for a change.

Next year, by passing the Employee Free Choice Act, Congress can provide that change. No one will force workers to organize a union, but they will be freer to do so if they choose. I believe that many of them will seek a union for all the reasons that people have wanted unions in the past including workplace safety. Sadly and unexpectedly, Jdimytai Damour will be a symbol for that fight and a powerful reminder of how workers are taken advantage of every day.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

Kosher abuse
In May, when immigration officials raided the kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa and hauled out 389 undocumented workers, the news was all about immigration violations, but now the focus is on the employer, Agriprocessors Inc.
That’s because it turns out that while purportedly giving ritual consideration to the animals to be slaughtered, Agriprocessors failed to treat with dignity, or legality, the teenagers, and children, some as young as 13, in its employ. The 57 adolescents, some working 17-hour shifts, six days a week, testified to wielding knives and other dangerous tools prohibited for young workers.
The Agriprocessors incident raises difficult questions in the Jewish community. If meat is denied the kosher label because the animal does not die within seconds of precise slitting, is it kosher when the 13-year-old child who processed it was illegally hired, worked a 17 hour day and was refused overtime pay? What if a 16-year-old undocumented youth, who put in 17-hour shifts, six days a week, leaving no time for anything but work and sleep, said in an affidavit, “I felt like I was a slave?”
These violations happened in Iowa, but they occur elsewhere as well, for a simple reason: the Wal-Mart mentality.

Soulless corporate mindset

We have allowed that soulless, unpatriotic global-corporate mindset to control government policy. As a result, the rich have gotten richer while the middle class has paid the bill and gone bankrupt. The great builder and protector of the middle class, collective bargaining, has been eroded by deliberate corporate actions over the past quarter century. Meanwhile, the national debt has increased; inflation and unemployment are up, and foreclosure signs mar every neighborhood.
Corporate lobbyists secured from compliant politicians so-called free trade agreements that have resulted in the loss of millions of good paying, often unionized manufacturing jobs. Those jobs have gone to third-world countries where investigations have shown workers often labor long, grueling hours and are not even paid their own countries’ minimum wage. Then their products are shipped back to the U.S. to be sold at cheap prices at Wal-Mart by workers who are paid less than a living wage and are denied full-time status and health insurance.
What comes around, goes around in the Wal-Mart world. When uninsured Wal-Mart workers get sick, American taxpayers foot the bill. They pay for coverage through Medicaid, the health insurance plan for the poor. That’s what the Walton family, which owns Wal-Mart, banks on. Literally banks on. When American taxpayers step up and pay for half of all Wal-Mart employees’ health care, that certainly helps the Waltons stay among the 25 wealthiest families in the world.
Wal-Mart workers would benefit tremendously from forming a union. Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than nonunion workers, and they are 59 percent more likely to have employer-provided health insurance. The same goes for those workers at Agriprocessors. If they had a union, it could file grievances over the hiring of children, against unpaid overtime and about unsafe working conditions.
In surveys, more than half of U.S. workers, nearly 60 million, say they would join a union immediately if they could. But they don’t get that opportunity under the current Wal-Mart mentality global-corporate system. The political system has been stacked against collective bargaining. Global corporations hire “union busters” to intimidate, harass and fire workers who try to organize unions. Workers are fired in a quarter of the campaigns where workers try to organize unions at private companies. Even when workers successfully form unions, they can’t get a first contract 44 percent of the time because companies refuse to bargain meaningfully.

Employee Free Choice

There is a solution for this problem. It’s called the Employee Free Choice Act. It would restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain. It would allow workers to create unions by collecting signatures from a majority of workers. As it is now, a company can demand an election for a union. Under the Employee Free Choice Act, workers may have an election if they want one, but the signatures are sufficient in most cases. This puts the workers in control of their union instead of the company.
The Employee Free Choice Act also would increase penalties for companies that intimidate and fire employees trying to form unions. And it would establish mediation and binding arbitration when the employer and the workers cannot agree on a first contract.
The Employee Free Choice Act has bipartisan support in Congress and polls show it is backed by two-thirds of the American public, including Republicans. It passed easily in the House last year, but in the Senate got only 51 votes, not the 60 needed to stop a Republican filibuster.
Fearing the Employee Free Choice Act could win in the Senate if a few more Democrats secure seats there in the fall elections, Wal-Mart took action in recent weeks. Obviously, Wal-Mart fears that Employee Free Choice means less money for the Waltons, and more free choice for its employees.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Wal-Mart executives began indoctrinating thousands of store managers and department heads about what the company claims are the evils of unionization in an attempt to get them to vote Republican. These managers told reporters that the executives informed them that workers would be forced to pay large amounts of union dues and get nothing in return and be obliged to go on strike and get no compensation.

Contracts like CEOs

Apparently the nation’s largest private employer failed to mention that a portion of union dues goes into a strike fund to provide money for workers who vote to strike. In addition, what workers get for union dues is a contract, guaranteeing them certain salaries and benefits – like the contracts CEOs demand when they are hired by boards of directors.
All of this from a company that flies rapid response teams out to any of its more than 5,000 Wal-Mart stores worldwide to quash brewing union activity.
Global corporations like Wal-Mart have hired the likes of Coalition for a Democratic Workplace and Employee Freedom Action Committee, run by former tobacco lobbyist Rick Berman, to blockade the Employee Free Choice Act. They are trying to make big business out to be David in this David and Goliath struggle, although it is union membership that has shrunk to David size over the past half century. Since its height in 1953, when 35 percent of workers belonged to unions, membership has now fallen to 12.1 percent.
A big part of the reason for that is constant harassment by big business. Let’s go back to Agriprocessors. Three years ago, Human Rights Watch investigated working conditions in the meatpacking business and found, among other things, that companies often use illegal tactics to crush union organizing efforts. The report, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in U.S. Meat and Poultry Plants,” says that when workers tried to defend themselves against harsh working conditions by forming unions, employers used fear and intimidation to stop them. “U.S. law does little to protect workers who try to organize. Enforcement efforts drag on for years, and even decisions that favor workers are usually too little, too late,” report author Lance Compa wrote.
He offered this example: At the Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Tar Heel, N.C., management fired union supporters, threatened plant closure, stationed police at plant gates to intimidate workers and orchestrated an assault on union activists. When the National Labor Relations Board ordered a new election, Smithfield immediately appealed. In 2000, Smithfield created a company security force that under North Carolina law had public police powers. In 2003, it used trumped-up charges, Compa said, to arrest workers who were active union supporters.

Human rights

The meatpacking industry chooses to use undocumented workers, Human Watch found, because they are easily intimidated. As in Agriprocessor, immigration officials will swoop in and take away a large chunk of a meat packing work force at the drop of a quarter in a pay phone. Human Rights Watch found that some employers use this ability as a threat against undocumented workers who are trying to organize unions.
In addition, what employers like Smithfield and Agriprocessor have up their sleeve is a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling saying that undocumented workers who are illegally fired for union organizing are not entitled to back pay for lost wages.
Despite all of Wal-Mart’s money and conniving, on rare occasions, a union organizing effort wins. And then, the global giant responds by shutting them down.
In 2000, when the United Food and Commercial Workers finally organized a small number of butchers in East Texas, Wal-Mart immediately phased out butchers at all of its stores and stocked prepackaged meat. Similarly, when a store in Canada voted to unionize, Wal-Mart closed the whole store, contending it had been unprofitable.
This really comes down to a moral issue, just like it does for Jews who question whether meat processed by child laborers in abusive, illegal conditions is really kosher. The question for this country is whether it is moral to allow continued rule by Wal-Mart mentality, with its cheap imported wares of dubious safety manufactured under questionable conditions in foreign countries, then imported and sold in stores by American workers paid less than a living wage and denied health care and the right to organize a union.
Restoring workers’ freedom to organize and bargain collectively would protect them against the kinds of abuses alleged Agriprocessors. And it would begin to rebuild America’s great middle class as well as re-establish one of our country’s fundamental liberties: the right of free association.