People Before Profit blog

Angry UAW workers unhappy with proposed Fiat Chrysler contract

Wed, 30 Sep 2015 16:33:00 +0000

Many UAW workers are unhappy with the proposed deal between the UAW and Fiat Chrysler. Auto workers at three plants have rejected the proposed agreement. They are Jefferson North in Detroit, the Sterling Stamping Plant in Sterling Heights Michigan and the Kokomo Indiana plant. Workers at Toledo Assembly, Sterling Heights Assembly, the Warren Stamping and Truck plants and Belvedere Assembly in Illinois are voting Wednesday.

Some Toledo workers have rallied against the deal. The UAW International is withholding comments until the workers have all voted. Workers want to abolish two-tier pay scale. At the UAW convention in March, Kathy Smith of Local 2015 spoke for many rank and file workers on two-tier pay and the degradation of once good UAW jobs at Chrysler.

"Not only do I have Chrysler workers making half of what the normal workers make," said Smith, "but I have people inspecting our parts at $8.50 an hour. We have people doing our janitor work at $10 an hour. There's non-union people in there, they're making sub-standard wages. These were all great Chrysler bargained jobs that have gone by the wayside."

The above article is reprinted from Workers Independent News.

Photo: An assembly line worker builds a Chrysler automobile. | Paul Sancya/AP

Silicon Valley labor, religion, community call for "disrupting inequality"

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 16:27:00 +0000

SANTA CLARA -- Pope Francis is traveling the world to bring his message on income inequality, workers' rights, migrant rights and overall economic justice. On September 22, community, faith and labor groups in Santa Clara, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley, honored Pope Francis's arrival to the United States with a call to "disrupt inequality."

Silicon Valley Rising (SVR), UNITE HERE and SEIU-USWW came together to demonstrate their support for the workers at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara and Citrix who are fighting for quality jobs and fair treatment at the workplace. This Hyatt was chosen as the venue for the rally to support workers there who have been fighting for seven years for a fair process to organize. Although many Hyatts across the country have signed contracts with UNITE HERE, and many Santa Clara Hyatt workers have signed cards asking to be represented by the union, the management continues to refuse to refrain from intimidating workers wanting to unionize.

The rally also targeted the treatment of support workers by the hugely profitable tech giants that dominate the local economy. Citrix, for example, contracts their security officers from Universal Protection Service (UPS). UPS is one of the largest security contractors in the country, yet they provide low-paying, part-time jobs that make economic instability a daily concern for their workers.

"It is shameful that multi-million dollar companies like Hyatt and UPS pay their employees poverty wages and deny them a voice on the job," said Ben Field, executive officer of the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. "Income inequality is a serious and growing problem for families in Silicon Valley, and the action by Silicon Valley Rising, UNITE HERE and SEIU-USWW shows hardworking individuals that we will continue to fight on their behalf for economic justice."

"UPS continues to move me from site to site. Because my pay fluctuates between $12 and $15 an hour, I have trouble paying rent from month to month. My children and I are currently sharing one bedroom in an apartment with another family," said Anai Garcia, security officer with Universal Protection Service (UPS).

"Suppressing workers' voices disproportionately hurts Latinos, African Americans and women, most of whom make up the security guards, janitors and food service workers being denied their fundamental workplace rights," said Derecka Mehrens, executive director of Working Partnerships USA. "Further marginalizing these groups creates a larger rift in the vast economic segregation these workers face."

"The faith community takes its role in the fight against income inequality seriously. As people of faith, we are morally obligated to help those who are vulnerable, oppressed and voiceless," said Father Jon Pedigo, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe church in the predominantly Latino east side of San José. "Hyatt and UPS should consider the impact that such low wages have on their workers' families. It is unconscionable to deny those families just compensation."

Silicon Valley Rising is a coalition of faith, labor, and community leaders, led by the South Bay Labor Council and Working Partnerships USA, which has made corporate responsibility a priority. SVR and its partners have been at the forefront of highlighting this issue, gaining support from both the public and elected officials.

Photo: Virgil Lewis/PW

California judge throws out anti-union election, points to grower money

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:32:00 +0000

FRESNO, CA-The strategy by one of the nation's largest growers to shed its obligation to sign a contract with the United Farm Workers was dealt a key setback last week. An administrative law judge not only threw out one of the dirtiest decertification elections in recent labor history, but did so because California growers had given tens of thousands of dollars to set the union-busting scheme in motion.

That election, at Gerawan Farming, has a key role in an even broader grower strategy to invalidate the enforcement mechanism of the state's farm worker labor law. Last week's ruling seriously undermines their case, now before the state's Supreme Court, in which they claim to be protecting workers' democratic rights. Instead, they have been exposed using obviously illegal methods to deny workers union representation.
The decertification election, held in November of 2013, was intended to undo the results of an earlier union election held at Gerawan Farming in 1992. At that time, a majority of workers voted to be represented by the United Farm Workers. That was a dirty campaign as well, and the state's Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) made numerous legal charges against the company. Gerawan laid off workers in 32 crews, the ALRB charged, to eliminate them from the voting list, and fired one crew because workers were UFW supporters. A state hearing officer found the company guilty of tearing down six labor camps where workers lived, to intimidate them.

Five years after that election, having exhausted legal efforts to overturn the vote, Mike Gerawan finally sat down with UFW representatives. He told them: "I don't want the union and I don't need the union." That ended bargaining. Over the next 17 years, with no contract, Gerawan Farming grew to become one of the nation's largest growers of grapes, peaches and nectarines, marketed under the Prima label. Today Gerawan employs about 5,000 field workers, hiring about half through labor contractors.

Gerawan's refusal to bargain, despite its legal obligation, was not unique among California growers. Although the state's farm workers won the right to vote for union representation with passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, there was no effective legal mechanism that could compel growers to sign contracts. As a result, although workers voted for the UFW in 428 farms from 1975 to 2002, they were able to negotiate contracts only in 243.

In 2002 the state legislature then passed two bills that set up a process for mandatory mediation of first-time contracts. Once workers vote for a union, if the grower won't sign an agreement, competing contract proposals are given to a mediator. The mediator then decides on the provisions. Once the Agricultural Labor Relations Board accepts the mediator's report, it becomes a binding union contract. Growers called the new mechanism unconstitutional but lost at the state court of appeals in 2007.

The UFW then began using the law to require growers to bargain where workers had voted for the union. In 2012 it demanded bargaining at Gerawan, and negotiations started the following year. While sitting down with the union's elected negotiating committee, however, the company was actually pursuing a strategy to make those negotiations fruitless.
At the invitation of the company, a Gerawan supervisor took his girlfriend, Sylvia Lopez, to a negotiation session. Outside the room, Lopez got together with Paul Bauer, a management lawyer. In last week's remarkable 192-page decision, Administrative Law Judge Mark R. Soble says, "Sylvia states that on the date of the mediation session, she decided that she was going to take on the lead role of opposing the union." Lopez wasn't even working for Gerawan at the time, although she'd been an employee a few years before.

Lopez was then promptly hired, along with her two daughters - "nepotism runs rampant at Gerawan," Soble comments drily. "Many of the key decertification leaders or signature gatherers had immediate relatives or household members who were company supervisors or foreman." Later in the decision, Soble notes "Silvia admited that she started working at Gerawan specifically to help her son-in-law [a foreman] get rid of the union. Silvia testified that she spent more time working on the decertification effort than actually working in the fields."

Just days after being hired, she was one of several workers taken by owner Dan Gerawan to Sacramento, to lobby legislators against further pro-worker changes to the farm labor law. "Silvia Lopez admitted speaking out against the UFW while in Sacramento, telling Legislators that the UFW had abandoned Gerawan workers," Soble says.

Helped by foremen, she, her daughters and friends then collected signatures on a decertification petition and filed it with the ALRB. The regional office found that there weren't enough signatures. A second lawyer working for Lopez, Anthony Raimondo, then brought in an additional hundred signatures, many collected in crews for contractors that were his clients. Some of them were found to be forged, and the petition was thrown out. This first petition, because it didn't lead to an election, wasn't the subject of Soble's decision. Raimondo, meanwhile, is also being sued by California Rural Legal Assistance for turning an undocumented worker in to immigration authorities in the middle of a grievance hearing, in which Raimondo was opposing another union.

Immediately after the first petition was thrown out at Gerawan, Lopez and her helpers mounted a second petition drive. In his long decision, Soble goes crew-by-crew, witness-by-witness through the testimony about how the signatures on this petition were collected. Some witnesses he believes, some he does not, regardless of whether they are pro- or anti-union. But at the end of 130 witnesses, testifying over the course of 105 days of earings, his conclusions are inescapable. In instance after instance, foremen either circulate petitions or allow Lopez and her friends to do so freely.

For over two months, "Gerawan gave Petitioner Silvia Lopez a 'virtual sabbatical' to facilitate circulation of the decertification petitions, with Lopez working an average of only eight hours a week compared to co-workers who were working fifty hours a week." Her daughter was later promoted to a lighter job as a checker, despite missing 40 of 54 days when she was collecting signatures instead of picking grapes.

Despite their heroic efforts, however, Lopez began to run out of time. The second petition had to be filed before seasonal employment at the company dropped below its peak level. So on September 30, 2013, she and other workers, who were also basically working fulltime on signature collecting, blocked the entrances to the ranches. They wouldn't let anyone go in to start work, while foremen just stood by looking on. With the signatures she collected that day, Lopez filed the petition.

Two days later, Barry Bedwell, director of the California Grape and Tree Fruit League (now the California Fresh Fruit Association), authorized a payment of $13,348 at the request of Lopez and her growing stable of lawyers. Another payment of $5,890 was authorized on October 31. Both were allegedly to cover expenses in bringing workers to Sacramento and Visalia, to demand the ALRB accept the decertification petition and schedule an election.

The Board in Sacramento overruled its staff and director, who'd been investigating the issue of company domination, and ordered them to hold the election. After voting concluded on November 5, the ballots were impounded pending a decision on the validity of the petition. Soble's decision last week throws out that election, on five grounds: payments from Bedwell to Lopez, allowing her to circulate petitions instead of working, allowing her to block workers from working to get them to sign, signature gathering by supervisors, and giving workers a wage raise the day the petition was filed - just weeks before the voting. The decision calls the actions illegal violations of California Labor Code Section 1153.

Soble also notes. "Silvia Lopez confirmed her receipt of financial support from the Center for Worker Freedom" although, because it took place after the vote, he doesn't include it as a reason to set aside the election.
Behind the dry language of the decision is a disturbing picture. At the time Bedwell makes the two payments, Gerawan is represented on the board of the Grape and Tree Fruit League by company vice-president George Nikolich. Other board members include some of the biggest family names in California agriculture: Giumarra, Pandol, Bagdasarian, Zaninovich and others. The money from Bedwell to Lopez comes from the dues these growers paid.

The demonstrations at the ALRB offices are part of a political pressure campaign to lean on the board to hold the election, and create an atmosphere for getting rid of the mandatory mediation law. That campaign included billboards attacking the ALRB and the UFW, paid for by the Center for Worker Freedom. This group is a project of Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, funded by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS and the Koch brothers, among other conservative sources.

The Center's director, Matt Patterson, wrote an editorial for Forbes.com, extolling Lopez and charging, "farm workers in California's Central Valley are finding their civil liberties stripped from them today - by a government agency ... [that] wants to force the union on Gerawan until the election is 'investigated'."

The pressure campaign is based on charging that the UFW "abandoned" the workers at Gerawan after the first election in 1992. With this accusation, the company and its supporters simply ignore the fact that Gerawan had illegally refused to bargain for 17 years. Lopez and other workers made the same "abandonment" charge at the demonstrations paid for by Bedwell. "Abandonment" became the subject of a bill introduced by a Republican legislator, which would prevent unions from using past elections to invoke mandatory mediation.

Most important, the "abandonment" charge was repeated in the company's legal case for throwing out the mandatory mediation law itself. Ruling on Gerawan's challenge, a conservative appeals court judge in Fresno, Associate Justice Stephen Kane, accepted the company's argument that the UFW had "abandoned" the workers. Legal briefs using that argument were filed by the Grape and Tree Fruit League, numerous grower organizations, and the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, far-right legal institute with a long track record fighting against civil and labor rights.
That appeals court decision is now before the state Supreme Court. If the case had come before the Supreme Court thirty years ago, one of the justices deciding it would have been Cruz Reynoso, a son of farm workers. Growers and rightwing Republicans targeted him in 1986, along with fellow justices Rose Bird and Joe Grodin. All were recalled.

Last year Reynoso wrote a short article for the Rosenberg Foundation's website, about the conflict at Gerawan Farming. Dan Gerawan sent him a threatening letter in response, demanding he retract it. Reynoso refused, and in doing so, explained the key issue at the root of the conflict. "Had the negotiations been successful many years ago you would have had years to deal with the union," he advised this powerful grower. "Your employees could have talked to you through their chosen spokespersons. The relationship could have matured and stabilized. You are clearly a leader in agriculture. You can set the example ... What is troubling ... is that your refusal to implement the contract issued by the neutral mediator and the ALRB board means your workers continue to be denied many millions of dollars in wage increases and other benefits they are already owed."

Reposted from The Reality Check

Photo: ©David Bacon

USW-ArcelorMittal steel talks to resume

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 14:29:00 +0000

GARY - After a two-week halt to negotiations on a new contract for nearly 30,000 steelworkers, precipitated by the abrupt walkout of ArcelorMittal company representatives, negotiators are heading back after United Steelworkers officials met with the local membership around the country.

At the USW 6787 union hall in the shadow of the sprawling Burns Harbor, Ind., ArcelorMittal plant, head union negotiator of the ArcelorMittal contract, District 1 Director Dave McCall, explained to the members: management had called him while they were in Pittsburg, and demanded once and for all that the union agree to start having the membership pay for their health insurance and tripling the retirees' payments or else the company would go home. McCall vehemently refused and the company left.

The negotiations had been going on all summer and there had been almost no progress. McCall said that the company had not been negotiating in good faith. The company had proposed sweeping changes to the agreement, including a three-year wage freeze, drastic reductions in compensation for vacation, overtime pay, and incentives for some workers; restrictions on transfers and training, increases in retiree insurance contributions, the severing of support for retirees who lost benefits when Bethlehem and other companies went bankrupt, and much more.

The company claimed that they were losing over $200 million a year and that something had to be done. The union has pushed back, saying that the company was trying to take advantage of a "temporary downturn in the market" to roll back gains steelworkers had made for 30 years, including the elimination of dental and eye care benefits. They have said that trade relief was on the horizon and that the union had made a proposal to save the company almost $300 million a year and that the company negotiators didn't't even consider their proposal.

"Steelworkers work in the dirtiest and hottest jobs around and have worked for lower wages in order to have a better benefit package. These jobs provide decent living wages and help support a lot of other jobs in the community and allow workers to send their children to good schools. The company wants to take that away," McCall told a cheering crowd of thousands at the local's union hall.

McCall explained that the union conceded a three-year freeze on regular wage increases in lieu of payments tied to the cost of hot band steel. He explained that the owner, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, made the statement that automotive steel's price would not go up again for five years. So the union is banking on it increasing from its present import-driven low. These payments would be rolled into the wage rate if the price stayed up for 9 months.

Many workers see this wage concession as risky at best. It is similar to the mistake that the coal miners union admitted they made early on when they also tied their wages to the price of coal. The United Mine Workers were the midwife of the Steelworkers Union, providing the money and staff to organize the steel mills.

McCall also said that because the union was going to save the company so much more money, they could not only afford to keep the present medical benefits but also get increases in some other health care benefits, along with changes in the profit-sharing language that has allowed the company to avoid paying through phony calculations.

Talks were reignited when the boss, Mr. Mittal himself, met with Steelworkers president Leo Gerard, Director McCall and Vice President Tom Conway, who is heading up the US Steel negotiations. They explained the union's proposal, which was given short shrift by the regular negotiators, and then Mittal ordered them back to the table.

The 65-year-old steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal is the 82^nd-richest person on the planet according to Forbes magazine, down from 6^th place in 2011. Mittal flaunts his wealth, owning three of the most expensive mansions on "Billionaires Row" in London. He threw one of the most expensive weddings in history for his daughter in 2004 at the Palace of Versailles and he owns one of the most expensive "Super Yachts" in the world. His company, ArcelorMittal, is the largest private steel company in the world, with plants in 70 countries and all continents and accounting for nearly 10 percent of world steel production.

Tom Conway also told the membership meeting that the negotiations with US Steel are also proceeding slowly, with the union facing almost identical proposals as ArcelorMittal. "It's as if they had met and drawn up their proposals together," he said. Vice President Conway is also leading the union's negotiations with ATI, a steel company that has locked out the steelworkers and is attempting to make steel in Ohio with scabs. Newspaper ads appeared across the country from Pittsburg, Chicago to Denver advertising for scabs. On August 14^th ATI locked out 2200 workers at 12 plants in six states.

"Rather than pay their workers a decent wage and benefits, ATI is ruining their mills trying to run them with untrained scabs," he said. "We will win at ATI," he said to thunderous applause.

Workers on lockout in all six states can draw unemployment, and the company cannot legally hire permanent replacement workers (scabs), because it is a lockout.

Photo: District 1 Director Dave McCall, speaking to the union members. Paul S. Kaczocha/PW.

AFL-CIO's veep: With others unions can change the nation

Tue, 29 Sep 2015 12:23:00 +0000

RALEIGH, N.C. - "Organize, organize, organize - that's how we can overcome income inequality," AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre told union communicators meeting here.

"We can make government more pro-labor," he said, "but it doesn't work to try to change politicians. We must work to change voters," the union leader told attendees last week at the 2015 convention of the International Labor Communications Association. Its members work for unions as journalists, social media experts and spokespersons.

Gebre emigrated to the U.S. from war-torn Ethiopia as a teen and began his union career as a night shift loader at UPS and a member of Teamsters Local 396.

"The issues that are facing working families today are big, and the only answer is to be big in return," Gebre said. "We are too small to do the job by ourselves. We must join with civil rights groups, church members, parents, immigrants, labor councils and foundations."

For example, he said, "we should join the movement against mass incarcerations. The U.S. has more prisoners than China or Russia. Prisons are being privatized. The union movement should join with others who are saying 'instead of building more prisons, we should be creating more jobs and offering more job training.'"

"Union halls," he said, "used to be more than just places where you talk about work. They used to be part of the community, where all people could come and be together. We have to get back to that."

Gebre criticized the way many progressive organizations conduct election campaigns. "What we are doing is not working," he said.

"If we have somebody to run, the first thing we do is hire a pollster. The pollster advises us that 'if the candidate talks about the things that really concern you, she'll lose.' So the candidate says the things she needs to say to get elected.

"But once elected, the candidate sticks to the agenda that got her elected. She's useless to us.

"We have to engage in year-around politics, not just politics around elections," Gebre said. "We can't depend on a hero on a white horse to come and fix things.

"We shouldn't follow the poll results. We should work to create new poll results."

For example, he said, union leaders shouldn't shy away from talking about tax policies. They should try to convince people that better schools are needed, and that costs money.

Gebre was optimistic about what workers can accomplish if they organize.

He described his own experience as an organizer in Orange County, California. "It used to be solid Republican," he said. "But unions joined with many other organizations and community groups in a campaign for a ballot initiative to increase taxes for schools and services.

"Companies threatened to leave Orange County. All the experts said we would never win. But we did."

Gebre said, "If we can win in Orange County by working with others, we can win anywhere the same way, even here in the South.

He concluded: "Don't ever listen to those who say that the workers' movement is dead. Workers will always find a way to organize and fight back. There is no lack of spirit."

Photo: Tefere Gebre, executive vice president, AFL-CIO. N.Y. State United Teachers

Fed up with “Walmart wages,” Alabama auto parts plant goes union

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 15:44:00 +0000

RALEIGH, N.C. - Angry over what they described as their "Walmart wages," workers at an Alabama auto parts plant voted last week, 89-45, to join the United Auto Workers. The employees at Commercial Vehicle Group Inc. in Piedmont, Ala. voted 89-45 for the union to become their collective bargaining agent.

The vote is worrisome to auto parts companies all over the South because, in addition to wages, the impetus for the successful union organizing campaign was anger over use of temp positions to fill regular jobs - something happening at parts plants all over the country. Unionizing at a parts plant scares the companies too because auto parts plants now employ about 75 percent of the nation's auto workers.

What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas, says the conventional wisdom. That same wisdom, however, says that what happens in the South, happens next everywhere else.

"In the same way that anti-union laws enacted in the South eventually spread to places like Wisconsin, union organizing success in the South too will spread to other places. The South is a predictor of what happens to the rest of the country," said Mary B. McMillan to a group of labor journalists meeting in Raleigh on the day the victory at the Alabama plant was announced.

Speaking about the union victory in Alabama, Richard Bensinger, organizing advisor to the UAW, said, "This shows that workers in the South can organize in spite of right-to-work laws. Workers in the South are like workers anywhere: they want a secure future, and more and more are beginning to understand that the way to get this is through working together in a union."

"Our backs were up against the wall - in just a few years the company gutted our health insurance, took away personal days, and started replacing jobs with temp positions that pay less than Walmart," said Tiffany Moore, 34, a mother of two children, who is paid $13.84 an hour at the plant. "I've never been part of a union before, but after years of scraping by while the company ignored our concerns, anyone could see the only option we had left was to join together to demand the change we need to support ourselves and families."

The UAW says that 25 percent of the jobs at the plant had become temp positions that start pay at $9.70 an hour, with no benefits. The most any production worker could earn is $15.80 an hour. From that the company takes $60 per week for health insurance for individuals and $110 for families. Actual take-home pay for workers receiving the top pay grade and family health insurance is just $27,000 per year.

"I made the choice to join together with others at the plant because I don't want the next kid who starts at CVG to have to work more than a decade just to be stuck at $15 an hour," said Alan Amos, 50, who was one of the organizers of the campaign to unionize. His pay is now at the $15.80 per hour level. "Winning this union is life- changing not just for me and my family, " he said, "but for the next generation of people in Piedmont, Alabama who will work at this factory and now have a real chance at a decent living."

The victory is significant also because the plant reflects what is happening in manufacturing jobs all over the country - wage cuts and increased use of temp positions. Some 25 percent of manufacturing jobs in the country now pay less than $11.91 an hour, according to the UAW.

"Jobs in the auto industry helped build America's middle class, but today they are adding to the nation's low-wage crisis," said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel at the National Employment Law Project. "What these workers at the CVG are proving is that a better way is possible, and that by organizing and winning a voice on the job, workers can make the manufacturing industry a ticket to the middle class again."

CVG is a worldwide seat manufacturer operating not just in 11 states in the United States, but also overseas in Mexico, China, India, the UK, Belguim, and the Czech Republic.

Photo: Workers at the Piedmont Alabama plant show their support for the UAW. | Courtesy of UAW

Rev. Barber: Voting rights fight is do or die for labor

Mon, 28 Sep 2015 11:29:00 +0000

RALEIGH, N.C. - Speaking here to a group of labor communicators and unionists from across the U.S., Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP and leader of the Forward Together movement, said: "The labor rights movement and the voting rights movement are interconnected. We must be smart enough to hook up. If we do, we can change this nation."

Barber was the keynote speaker at the 60^th convention of the International Labor Communications Association, an organization affiliated with the AFL-CIO, Change to Win and the nation's Central Labor Councils. Members work for unions as journalists, social media experts, spokespersons, and creators of membership communications.

"The powers-that-be have always tried to split the labor movement from the civil rights movement, but in North Carolina we are going forward together and not taking one step back," Barber said.

He explained that his NAACP branch and its Forward Together movement have brought together "white, black and brown people, native Americans, labor organizers, civil rights advocates, environmentalists, people fighting for better health care and education, and people fighting for the rights of women and the LGBT community."

Barber has led demonstrations of up to 100,000 people protesting newly passed voter suppression laws and cutbacks in Medicaid and school funding.

He said that the labor movement needs to place top priority in the fight for voting rights because denial of those rights is what makes it possible for labor rights to be dismantled state by state. He said labor spent $50 million to unseat Scott Walker, the anti-labor governor of Wisconsin and said that the same level of commitment if not more is needed now from labor to battle against the attacks on voting rights in the various states. Otherwise, he said, the labor movement is in danger of suffering what could be major additional blows.

He sounded a hopeful note, however, regarding developments in his own state.

"White Republicans fed up with attacks on healthcare and hospital closings have been forming NAACP chapters in the hills of North Carolina," Barber said, and Forward Together organizers have been helping workers organize unions.

Barber said that across North Carolina, his organization has been fighting attempts by the state legislature to roll back voting rights and to impose measures that are "constitutionally inconsistent, morally indefensible, and economically insane."

The Forward Together movement, Barber said, is successfully using the "language of morality." He explained that "justice is the centerpiece of our deepest traditions, our faith and our values."

There is a "moral crisis engrossing our country," Barber continued. "It is caused by those who are trying to deconstruct our moral vision."

He pointed out that ever since the late 1860s, blacks and poor whites in the South have attempted to work together, "which scares the daylights" out of those who want to make sure there is plenty of cheap labor in the South.

To illustrate his point, Barber went back to 1868, during Reconstruction. The North Carolina legislature adopted a new constitution. It both guaranteed African Americans the right to vote and established as a "self-evident, inalienable right" the right of all persons to have "the enjoyment of the fruits of their labor."

Barber said that blacks and poor whites began building a society based on equality. However, former slave owners could not allow this. "They formed what they called the 'Redemption' movement," Barber said, "which imposed an agenda of fear, took the right to vote away from black people, passed Jim Crow laws and established segregation.

Tea party people are today's "Redeemers," Barber said. "They got scared in 2008 when Obama carried North Carolina, Florida and Virginia.

"So in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and threw back to Congress the job of re-writing it. Congress has done nothing."

Barber continued, "The day after the Supreme Court decision, the North Carolina legislature began passing laws aimed at making it more difficult for black people, brown people and poor whites to vote.

"This same legislature has attacked women's right to choose, cut back funding for Medicaid and education, and squashed proposals to raise the minimum wage.

"If unions really want to organize the South," Barber said, "they must make front and center the reinstatement of voting rights and, among other things, join the fight for forcing states like North Carolina to accept more federal funds for Medicaid.

"People ask me," Barber said, "if the immoral agenda put forth by those who run this country is based on race or class. I answer: 'yes.'"

He exhorted the audience to "take the high road. Let's build a movement with an agenda for the future, not based on fear."

The movement, he "must be built from the bottom up, state by state. It can't be built in Washington."

He concluded: "Don't underestimate the power of a movement built by uniting all those who are fighting for justice."

Photo: Rev. William Barber speaking at 2015 ILCA Convention in Raleigh, N.C. | Larry Rubin

Labor communicators spotlight “uprising” in the South

Fri, 25 Sep 2015 12:33:00 +0000

RALEIGH, N.C. - Speaking here today at the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA) convention, MaryBe McMillan, secretary treasurer of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, said: "The movement for social and economic justice is growing faster in the South than anywhere else in the U.S."

That's exactly why the leadership of ILCA chose to hold the group's 2015 convention in North Carolina, which has lower union density than any other state in the U.S.

ILCA President Kathy Cummings explained that the group, whose members do news, public relations and member communications for unions and their allies, aims to spotlight the fact that in North Carolina and other Southern states, the union movement has joined with the civil rights movement in leading a broad-based uprising of working people who are fighting for economic and social justice.

McMillan told the convention of labor journalists that in the past, the labor movement was "short sighted" in not devoting enough resources to organize the South.

"The South was considered too stuck in the past," she said. "But in reality, the South is a predictor of the nation's future." Anti-union tactics that are perfected in Southern states soon spread across the nation.

With its right-to-work laws and laws against collective bargaining for public workers, the South, McMillan said, has been a haven for employers trying to escape unions. Southern politicians lure companies to the South by assuring them of the availability of non-union, cheap labor.

The appeal to corporate greed works, McMillan said. Manufacturing and other industries are growing in the South and shrinking in the Northeast.

"Low wages in the South bring down wages everywhere," she explained. The wage gap between workers in the North and workers in the South is shrinking" because everyone's wages are plummeting.

"Let's organize the South," McMillan said, "and change the nation."

In fact, organizing has begun. McMillan said that in North Carolina, unions are bringing together white, brown and black working people and older and newer workers. "We are fighting against bosses who want their workers to work cheap and be meek and docile," she said.

"We are working with the Moral Monday movement, and have adopted its slogan: 'Forward together, not one step back!'"

Until recently, the Moral Movement was called the Moral Monday Movement because, under the aegis of the North Carolina NAACP, it initiated huge demonstrations each Monday calling for economic and social justice. Today the NAACP has expanded its efforts, organizing people across the state to fight on many fronts for a better quality of life.

Following McMillan, The Rev. Nelson Johnson, pastor of the Faith Community Church in Greensboro, N.C., told ILCA members that the strength of today's uprising in the South is that it is based in the community.

"Domination pushes back against justice by trying to separate people," he said. "But if we frame our efforts as community-based, we will win."

Rev. Johnson stressed the need, especially in the South, for unions to build coalitions with ministers and others in the faith community. Such a coalition, including the civil rights movement, recently scored an impressive win in Greensboro: the city council passed an ordinance setting the pay for public workers at no less than $15 an hour.

"We're working to get a $15 an hour minimum wage across the country," said Zaina Alsous, an organizer with the AFL-CIO Raise-up campaign. "We can learn from the people of Greensboro."

Alsous urged ILCA members to answer the question: "what are unions for?"

"Unions must be about more than just negotiating contracts," she said. "We must join with other groups, like the NAACP here in North Carolina, to become a real movement again.

"We can't wait for the laws to change before we organize in the South."

Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, pointed to polls showing that there is a great potential for union organizing in the South. Forty-seven percent of white workers have favorable view of unions, he said, as do fifty-four percent of Latinos and seventy-three percent of African Americans.

Carolyn Smith, executive director of Working America North Carolina, ended the ILCA convention session by describing how her organization, a unit of the AFL-CIO, is "organizing door by door."

She said Working America organizers knock on doors and talk to people. "We bring workers to unions by listening to them, seeing what's on their minds.

"We can organize the South," Smith said, "if we are inclusive, creative and persistent."

Photo: Demonstrators at the first Moral Monday event. | Chris Seward/AP

Video by Rossana Cambron, People's World.

LCLAA report advocates Latino organizing, workers centers

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 13:03:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) - Saying that Latino workers and unions need each other, Labor's Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) is advocating "strategic investment" by unions in organizing Latinos and more use and promotion of workers' centers.

In a 60-page report, Latino Workers and Unions: A Strategic Partnership for America's Progress, earlier this month, LCLAA notes Latinos are both the fastest-growing U.S. minority and the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. workforce - and the most-exploited.

The Latino share of the workforce is calculated to double, to 30 percent, within a few decades, the report, edited by Hector Sanchez, LCLAA's executive director says. LCLAA is organized labor's constituency group for Hispanic-named workers.

But too many of those workers are among the most-exploited, toiling in low-wage occupations and vulnerable to immigration agents' raids, wage theft and other employer exploitation. Unionization can help protect those workers, the report adds.

"For Latinos, the road to social and economic prosperity is mired with hurdles. From wage theft to the increased rates of deaths at the workplace, Latinos are increasingly susceptible to a wide range of attacks on their labor, human and civil rights...More work and advocacy needs to be made in order for Latinos to achieve parity," the report says.

With population, electoral and workforce growth, the future "can be drastically different and positive. But in order to realize this potential, Latinos must harness their strengths and exert their voice in the workplace," it states.

One way is "gaining access to a union," the report says. But it's up to unions to reach out to Latino workers, it adds. And unions and their current members will benefit, from the increased union density due to successful organizing, too.

"Organized labor must make strategic investments in outreach to Latinos. The potential for growth in organizing Latinos is a critical lifeline unions must use in order to stay relevant. More importantly, unions can use this new membership to leverage a more pro-worker agenda and reverse the laws that have weakened collective bargaining for working people.

But the report also pays particular attention to creation and expansion of workers' centers, new less-formal organizations that represent groups of workers, particularly immigrant and exploited workers, nationwide. "Through organizing, mass mobilization and advocacy, labor unions and worker membership organizations raise the quality of life for working people," LCLAA declares.

"All these factors truly highlight why unions and Latinos need each other now more than ever. This mutually beneficial partnership will not only save the American labor movement and improve the lives of Latino working families, but it will also reinforce our nation's economic security and restore the promise of the American dream for all workers," it concludes.

Photo: Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) Facebook.

Alaska hotel workers hang tough with Sheraton, Hilton boycotts

Thu, 24 Sep 2015 12:39:00 +0000

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - Like most Alaskans, hotel workers here demonstrate their toughness, skill and tenacity daily, which are all necessary characteristics to live in a state called the "Last Frontier." However, for Anchorage Hilton and Sheraton workers, instead of battling the weather and wilderness, they have been locked in a lengthy campaign for decent wages and rights at work in the face of fierce corporate union-busting attacks. In 2009, workers called for boycotts on the two hotels, which continue to this day.

Since 2008, Hilton workers here have had to confront hostile hotel and casino giant Columbia Sussex to maintain their union, wages and working conditions. At the Sheraton, the union filed more than 40 unfair labor practice charges against hotel owner Ashford-Remington, a Texas-based hospitality service and asset management company. Ashford has an unprecedented two federal injunctions against the corporation, UniteHere 878 President Marvin Jones said in a Sept. 11 interview here. A combination of employer intimidation and increased workload puts the workers in a "tough" position.

"It's tough up here," Jones said. Housekeepers in particular go through a lot of stress and "experience more injuries than miners." They don't take lunch or breaks because they are so afraid of not finishing their workload, Jones said.

Jones, a St. Louis native, has been in Anchorage for 33 years and part of the union for 27 years. Jones comes from a union family and started out in the hospitality industry at Sheraton Anchorage working as a bellman, at the front desk and PBX - a phone operator position.

Jones, who is African American, was on his way to an NAACP father-daughter bowling event. "I still get calls," he said chuckling, where the caller will say to me incredulously, "'There are black people in Alaska?!'"

Anchorage hospitality workers mirror the city's demographics - white, black, Native - he said, but Mexican and Filipino workers make up the majority of the hotel workers at Sheraton and Hilton.

Federal judges - in 2012 and then in 2014 - ruled against the Sheraton Anchorage. In the first ruling, the judge found that the hotel violated numerous labor laws and issued an injunction that required the hotel to restore the workers' collective bargaining rights that management had declared unilaterally null and void.

"The GM came up to me and said, 'We are no longer a union hotel and I have to ask you to leave.' I said, 'There has to be a vote' and told the workers we were leaving but what they were doing was illegal," Jones said.

The second decision found that the management corporation, Remington, unlawfully:

interrogated and surveilled its employees,
threatened to call the police on its own employees if they exercised their rights,
disciplined numerous employees for exercising their rights, including unlawfully firing three employees in retaliation for their having supported of Local 878,
maintained and enforced unlawful policies restricting worker rights,
banned union representatives from its property, and
unilaterally implemented numerous changed policies without first bargaining about those changes with the union, among many other violations of the law.

Sheraton worker Dexter Ray was forced in what amounted to an "illegal interrogation" when he was placed in an office and threatened until he signed a decertification petition. Four workers were fired for handing out leaflets outside the hotel. Three were hired back but the fourth had lost her home and moved out of state.

"People's lives were ruined and disrupted," Jones said, "because of management's aggressive union-busting behavior."

Sheraton management falsely accused union organizers of sexual harassment, death threats and theft. "They claimed we broke in and stole video equipment; that we issued death threats," Jones said, and that an invitation to an Our Lady of Guadalupe event was deemed sexual harassment.

The Hilton Anchorage has its own management-induced hostile work environment that is bad for workers and hotel guests alike: mold, among other workplace health and safety violations. In 2014, management made multiple claims that it had cleaned up the unhealthy and potentially dangerous fungus. But time and again the union found more problems, including flooding in the laundry room.

The union urges all Alaska residents and visitors to sign the boycott pledge and refuse to meet, eat or sleep at the Sheraton or Hilton in Anchorage.

Photo: Unite Here 878

UAW: Chrysler pact gradually eliminates two-tier wages

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 15:31:00 +0000

DETROIT - The tentative four-year contract between the United Auto Workers and FiatChrysler features gradual elimination of the two-tier wage system that the Detroit 3 automakers instituted after hitting the financial rocks during the Great Recession.

Elimination of that system is important. The pact, which covers 36,000 workers at FiatChrysler plants in the U.S., is supposed to be the "pattern contract" for the union's bargaining with the other two Detroit-based automakers, Ford and the "new" General Motors.

But the pact's details were drawing flak from UAW dissidents even before voting began in late September. They objected to the very gradual elimination of two-tier wages, a health care agreement between the company and the UAW, and the possibility that the pact lets FiatChrysler move plants and jobs to Mexico.

UAW leaders urged members to ratify the contract, which gives more-veteran "Tier 1" workers raises of 3 percent on ratification and again in September 2017, plus 4 percent lump sum bonuses in the pact's second and fourth years. That prompted dissidents to say the Tier 1 workers' pay would essentially stay flat, even after a decade of no raises at all.

Tier 1 workers now get around $28 hourly. Tier 2 workers will start at $17 an hour, a contract summary says. Tier 2 workers' wages would rise to a maximum of $25.35 an hour after seven years. By the end of the contract, new hires in 2015 will rise to $22 an hour, with other workers rising to $23 or $24 an hour. All workers will also get a $3,000 signing bonus if the pact is ratified. Tier 2 covers about 45 percent of FiatChrysler workers.

"Back in 2007, we understood why we had to negotiate a two-tier wage structure," UAW President Dennis Williams and Chrysler Department Vice President Norwood Jewell said in a letter to workers. "But that was then and this is now," as the Detroit car firms are profitable.

"Now is the time to share in those gains. Your bargaining committee has taken a thoughtful and strategic approach to addressing this inequity over time in a way that allows the company to continue to invest in its plants, develop new product and keep our jobs secure."

The health care system that FiatChrysler and the UAW agreed to is a version of the Voluntary Employee Benefits Agreement (VEBA) the Detroit 3 and the UAW created after the Great Recession hit. The VEBA covers retirees and the UAW runs it, with the automakers funding it through a complicated stock arrangement. Williams, in his cover letter, says the union wants to extend the VEBA to active workers at Ford and GM too, producing a larger pool of workers and economies of scale the union can use in negotiating health care costs.

The union and the firm also agreed to discuss - in the future - what to do about the so-called "Cadillac tax" that takes effect, under the federal Affordable Care Act, in 2018. That levy taxes so-called "high value" health care plans, many of which are union plans.

The Steelworkers, the Communications Workers, the Laborers and other unions have banded together in a coalition to roll back the Cadillac tax before it fully takes effect. The Cadillac tax is supposed to force people to buy cheaper health insurance - but its revenues also help pay for the money needed to cover the uninsured.

The dissidents urged a "no" vote against the pact. "Both FiatChrysler and the UAW are working to create even more divisions between workers within the plants, pitting young against old in a drive to increase productivity through relentless speed-ups. The deal includes a special profit-sharing provision for tier-two workers that kicks in when FCA has a North American profit margin of more than eight percent," one dissident blog said.

Photo: An assembly line worker builds a Chrysler automobile. | Paul Sancya/AP

Job fatalities rise in construction, oil, and gas

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:45:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - On-the-job deaths rose from 2013 to 2014 in construction and in the oil and gas industry, the Labor Department reported, while the rate of fatal occupational injuries nationwide stayed unchanged in those two years. And more workers aged 55 and older died on the job last year than ever before.

DOL said preliminary data for last year show 4,679 workers were fatally injured on the job, up two percent from final data from 2013, when 4,585 died. But the fatalities among the oldest workers rose 9 percent, from 1,490 in 2013 to 1,621 last year.

Construction injuries - many of them falls - killed 874 workers last year, up from 828 the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. But the death rate fell by 0.2 deaths per 100,000 workers in construction, to 9.5 deaths last year. BLS said that's because construction, now recovering from the Great Recession, saw a large boost in working hours.

The construction death rate is still triple the death rate among all workers from occupational injuries, which was 3.3 per 100,000 last year, unchanged from 2013.

"Far too many people are still killed on the job -- 13 workers every day taken from their families tragically and unnecessarily. These numbers underscore the urgent need for employers to provide a safe workplace for their employees as the law requires," Labor Secretary Thomas Perez warned.

Increased deaths in construction and oil and gas are "why OSHA continues extensive outreach and strong enforcement campaigns in these industries," he added. "The Department of Labor will continue to work with employers, workers, community organizations, unions and others to make sure that all workers can return home safely at the end of every day."

BLS said 181 oil and gas extraction workers died on the job last year, 17 percent more than the year before. That industry's death rate was 14.1 per 100,000 workers, second only to agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting (24.1 deaths per 100,000 workers) in fatality rates.

The most-dangerous occupations last year were loggers (109.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers), fishers and related occupations (80.8), aircraft pilots and engineers (63.2) and roofers (46.2).

Some of the most economically vulnerable workers are also among groups with high on-the-job death numbers. Perez called 789 Hispanic-named workers who died on the job last year a figure that's "unacceptably high." And 827 of 2014's dead workers were foreign-born.

And 797 contracted workers died on the job in 2014, up from 749 in 2013. More than half of the "contractors" who died last year (415) were in construction.

The number of fatal injuries rose in Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York (and New York City), both Dakotas, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wyoming. Deaths almost tripled, from 11 to 31, in Hawaii. The biggest decline was in D.C., from 25 deaths in 2013 to 11 last year.

Photo: Liz Dufour/AP

Unions lobby lawmakers to prevent government shutdown

Wed, 23 Sep 2015 12:26:00 +0000

WASHINGTON - With yet another federal government shutdown looming, federal workers' unions are giving their members advice on how to cope with a sudden halt to their paychecks, lobbying lawmakers to come to their senses and advert the crisis and advocating legislation that would reimburse employees for lost pay if and when the feds return to work.

That's because political infighting, specifically within Congress' ruling Republicans, could leave the feds on the outside looking in come Oct. 1, and everyone else without vital government functions and services.

The immediate source of the problem is that the new fiscal year starts that day and Congress not only has not passed any of the regular money bills to keep the government going, it hasn't even started work on a so-called "continuing resolution" (CR) that would let agencies limp along at last year's funding levels until solons provide permanent solutions.

And the CR, in turn, is held up because radical right Republicans are insisting that it yank any and all money from Planned Parenthood for women's health services. Two years ago, the same crowd advocating "an ideological agenda," unions say, shut down the government for two weeks in an effort to halt funding for implementing the Affordable Care Act.

But even if Congress comes to its senses and passes a CR, it might decide to use federal workers as a "money pot" for budget cuts the GOP advocates or for sequestration - the mandated cuts imposed starting in 2011 -- the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers' union, warns.

"Fueling the shutdown is the issue over how the government should be funded. While many in Congress agreed sequestration needs to end, they want to replace sequestration cuts with cuts to federal agencies," AFGE explained.

"These are the same elected officials who are not willing to close tax loopholes which allow big corporations to avoid paying taxes that could be used to fund various programs that benefit everyone in this country.

"Having to live with constant threats of a government shutdown every year is extremely demoralizing to the federal workforce and damaging the government's ability to recruit and retain the best and the brightest.

"Federal employees have already sacrificed $159 billion. AFGE is working to make sure that any deal that lifts sequestration does not pay for it by cutting federal employees' pay, health insurance, retirement or benefits any further."

AFGE and the Treasury Employees, the second-largest federal worker union, are also lobbying lawmakers to enact measures ensuring workers would get back pay when they return to their jobs after the end of a shutdown.

"When the government shut down two years ago, federal employees who were locked out of their jobs were left wondering if they would ever get paid, while those who reported to work didn't know when they would get paid," said AFGE President J. David Cox, a retired Veterans Affairs Department nurse.

Legislation to mandate the back pay, introduced by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., "would give federal employees peace of mind in knowing that the government will uphold its obligation to pay them in the event of another lockout. The bill would also allow employees with scheduled leave during a shutdown to take that leave," Cox added.

"Cardin's proposal would treat federal employees fairly in the event of a government shutdown. Employees who are furloughed or forced to work without pay during a shutdown shouldn't be punished because they didn't create the problem," said Treasury Employees President Tony Reardon. "That said, NTEU is working hard to avert a government shutdown on Oct. 1 and ensure that agencies get the funding they need to fulfill their critical missions."

Congressional Democrats are also urging their GOP rulers to come to their senses.

"There are just five legislative days remaining before the end of the fiscal year, but the House failed to take any action to keep the government open," said House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, D-Md. "Instead, House Republicans wasted time on legislation attacking women's health. As they continue to struggle with internal divisions, I urge Republican leaders to work quickly with Democrats to avoid another government shutdown and begin negotiations on a budget agreement to replace the irrational policy of sequestration."

News reports say the GOP leadership has yet to even talk with the Democrats about provisions in a CR. The Democrats are holding out for a "clean" CR with no extraneous provisions, such as defunding Planned Parenthood or dumping the Iran nuclear agreement.

Those talks might be needed if the rebellious right wingers - Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a presidential hopeful, and approximately 30 representatives who call themselves the "Freedom Caucus" -- desert the GOP leaders and vote down any funding for the government, over the Planned Parenthood money issue.

Photo: Voters in battleground states overwhelmingly oppose shutting down the federal government over the issue of funding for Planned Parenthood. The percentages shown here are for the battleground state of Ohio. | Tumblr

At Legislative Conference, jobs for all is the priority

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 13:32:00 +0000

The workshop "Full Employment in the 21st Century: Innovative Strategies for Inclusive Growth" drew a near-full audience at the 45th Annual Legislative Conference of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Held in Washington, DC from Sept. 16-20, the conference's over-all theme was "With Liberty and Justice for All?" The jobs workshop was one of more than 70 sessions dealing with issues of economic and social justice for people of color in the United States. The workshop's honorary host was Representative John Conyers, D. Mich., the Dean of Congress-its most senior member. He made the comment that in his opinion the jobs workshop was the most important one of the whole conference.

Led by a distinguished panel of experts and activists concerning the U.S. economy, the workshop was opened by Economist Dean Baker, Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research, who praised the "great victory" which was won earlier in the day by the Federal Reserve's announcement that it would not raise interest rates. If the Fed had raised rates, Baker said, it would have affected all other interest rates-mortgages, car loans, etc., thus slowing the economy, affecting employment. Currently the African American unemployment rate is two times that of whites. For African American teens, it is six times. "Getting unemployment rates down puts more tax revenue into the economy...Our goal is to get people back to work in an economy that works for working people." Baker said.

One of the people who had protested at the morning rally in front of the Federal Reserve was another panelist, Connie Razza of the Fed Up Campaign and the Center for Popular Democracy. Her group was at the rally, she said, to make sure the Fed heard voices of "real people." She made the point that "corporations and bankers are not necessarily sitting on the same side" of the interest rate question. The goal of Razza's organization is to partner with other groups to prioritize full employment.

Another panelist, Valerie Wilson, Director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy , Economic Policy Institute, showed on a graph that when the national unemployment rate rises/falls by one percent, you see a 2 percent change for African Americans. She pointed to a period of higher wages from 1995-2000 which reflected the higher share of middle income expansion among African Americans. What must be done at the present time? "Target full employment and employment training; public investment in infrastructure; reduction of our trade deficit."

A highlight of the workshop was the appearance of Rep. John Conyers, Jr., who has again introduced into Congress a jobs bill: H.R. 1000, The Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act. Called a "21st Century New Deal," the act currently has 39 co-sponsors, all Democrats. It aims "to provide a job to any American that seeks work and to ultimately create a full employment society." The act includes two separate funds, one to fund job creation and the other to fund training programs. The revenue for these programs would come from "taxing Wall Street transactions to pay for Main Street jobs. "

In speaking about his bill, Congressman Conyers said that his overriding priority in Congress is to get everyone working. Seven years after the financial crisis we still need over three million jobs to get back to pre-recession levels, he said. In hard-hit parts of the country there is 25 percent unemployment. "Building a full-employment society means building a healthy, happy society; and it can be achieved if we have the political will."

However, the government bill tracking website says there is "zero" chance of the H.R. 1000, the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Training Act, being enacted. That's where the kind of partnering done by Connie Razza's coalition comes into play. Massive infrastructure projects were undertaken under President Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1040's. They are sorely needed now when, as reported in the Baltimore Sun, Baltimore's rotting sewage system pipes continue to dump raw sewage into the Chesapeake Bay, both from Baltimore City and Baltimore County.

PW readers can do their part by calling their representatives to urge co-sponsorship of Conyers' H.R. 1000, the Humphrey-Hawkins 21st Century Full Employment and Training Act. The wording of the act can be found at: http://conyers.house.gov/_cache/files/f8dcfc3c-6809-43f8-b03f-e1d1fa3ffdad/HR percent201000 percent20Section percent20by percent20Section.pdf.

Photo: Congressman John Conyers, Jr. emphatically stating "Employment Is a human right. The #1 issue is Jobs for All! | Margaret Baldridge/PW

Radical roots of the great grape strike

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 13:04:00 +0000

Fifty years ago, the great grape strike started in Delano, when Filipino pickers walked out of the fields on September 8, 1965. Mexican workers joined them two weeks later. The strike went on for five years, until all California table grape growers were forced to sign contracts in 1970.

The strike was a watershed struggle for civil and labor rights, supported by millions of people across the country. It helped breathe new life into the labor movement, opening doors for immigrants and people of color. Beyond the fields, Chicano and Asian American communities were inspired to demand rights, and many activists in those communities became organizers and leaders themselves.

California's politics have changed profoundly in 50 years. Delano's mayor today is a Filipino. That would have been unthinkable in 1965, when growers treated the town as a plantation.

But a mythology has hidden the true history of how and why the strike started, especially its connection to some of the most radical movements in the country's labor history. Writer Peter Matthiessen, for instance, claimed in his famous two-part 1969 profile of Cesar Chavez in The New Yorker: "Until Chavez appeared, union leaders had considered it impossible to organize seasonal farm labor, which is in large part illiterate and indigent..."

After 50 years that curtain of silence is lifting. Dawn Mabalon, a history professor at San Francisco State University, has documented the radical career of Larry Itliong, who headed the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), one of the two organizations that carried out the 1965 strike. Itliong not only shared leadership with Cesar Chavez, but actually started the strike. In tens of thousands of words Matthiessen only mentions Itliong twice, in passing.

The Delano strike was not spontaneous or unexpected. It was a product of decades of worker organizing and earlier farm worker strikes. Leaders of the grape strike, like Itliong, had helped organize previous unions, including ones expelled from the CIO in the anti-communist purge of 1949.

The timing of the 1965 strike was not accidental. It took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero contract labor program. Farm worker leaders then acted because growers could no longer bring braceros into the U.S. to break strikes.

The 1965 strike did not, in fact, start in Delano. In Coachella, where California's grape harvest begins, Filipino workers went on strike that summer. They won a 40¢/hour wage increase from grape growers, and forced authorities to drop charges against arrested strikers.

Larry Itliong organized the Coachella strike. He and the Filipino workers of AWOC then started the walkout in Delano. Itliong had a long history as an organizer, going back to the 1930s. He was a protégé of Ernesto Mangaoang, a revered leader of the CIO union for Alaska fish cannery workers, Local 7 of the United Cannery, Agricultural and Packinghouse Workers of America. Itliong himself ran for office in that union.

The Federal government accused Mangaoang of being a Communist during the McCarthyite hysteria, and tried to deport him to the Philippines. After UCAPAWA (renamed the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers) was destroyed in the 1949 purge of the CIO, Local 7 was taken in by Harry Bridges' union, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. It became ILWU Local 37, and today is part of the ILWU's Inland Boatman's Union.

In leftwing unions Filipinos and other farm workers mounted huge agricultural strikes in the 1930s. After World War Two, Local 7 struck Stockton's asparagus fields in 1949. Itliong was active in that strike, as was Chris Mensalvas, who later became Local 37 president. The Federal government also tried to deport Mensalvas as a Communist.

In the early 1950s Filipino farm workers continued to organize with the National Farm Labor Union, headed by Ernesto Galarza (author of Factories in the Fields). They struck the giant DiGiorgio Corporation, then California's largest grower. In 1959 the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was set up by the American Federation of Labor, which had merged with the CIO to form the AFL-CIO in 1953. Despite the federation's conservative politics, AWOC hired Itliong as an organizer because of his long history among Filipino workers. AWOC used "flying squads" of pickets to mount quick strikes, and struck the Imperial Valley lettuce harvest in 1961-2, demanding $1.25 per hour.

Many Filipino workers in Coachella and Delano were members of ILWU Local 37 in 1965, when the grape strike began. Every year they would travel from the San Joaquin Valley (where Delano is located) to the Alaska fish canneries. Through the end of their lives, they were often active members of both Local 37 and the United Farm Workers.

Cold war fears of communism were strong in the 1960s - one reason why the contributions of Itliong and the Filipinos were obscured. The strike in Delano owes much to Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Gilbert Padilla and other Chicano and Mexican leaders who came out of the CSO. But the left wing leadership of Itliong, Philip Veracruz and other rank-and-file Filipino workers was equally important.

The alliance between Itliong's AWOC and the Cesar Chavez-led National Farm Workers Association was a popular front alliance of workers who had, in many cases, different politics. AWOC's members had their roots in the red UCAPAWA. NFWA's roots were in the Community Service Organization (CSO), which was sometimes hostile to Communists. Yet both organizations were able to find common ground and support each other during the strike. They eventually merged to form the UFW.

Both the Filipinos and Chavez, in the CSO, opposed the bracero program. To organize farm labor they sought immigration policies favoring workers, which would keep growers from using braceros to break strikes. The Delano strike was a movement made up of immigrant workers, who wanted to keep growers and the government from using immigration policy against them. Their opposition to contract labor programs is as important for immigration reform today as it was in 1965.

Chavez willingly acknowledged that the NFWA hadn't intended to strike for another two or three years. The decision to act was made by Filipinos - left wing workers. It was a product of their history of militant fights against growers.

The political philosophy of the Filipinos saw the strike as their fundamental weapon to win better conditions. The 1965 grape strike was started by workers on the ground, not by leaders or strategists far away. Although some couldn't read or write, as Matthiessen charged, they were politically sophisticated. They had a good analysis and understanding of their situation as workers, and chose their action carefully.

In Delano Filipinos used popular front ideas they'd used before - that workers and organizations with different politics, or of different nationalities, could work together to win fundamental social change. Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades. When Filipino workers acted first by going on strike, and then asked the Mexican workers, a much larger part of the workforce, to join them, they believed that workers' common interest could overcome those divisions.

Strikers in Delano developed close friendships and personal connections with each other. Many of the Filipinos died as single men, because anti-miscegenation laws prohibited them from marrying non-Filipinas, and the immigration of women from the Philippines was limited until the late 1960s. Cesar Chavez' son Paul recalls the way the older Filipino men looked at him and other children of Mexican strikers as their own family. In the wake of the grape strike, the UFW and scores of young activists from California cities built a retirement home for them in Delano, Paolo Agbayani Retirement Village, to honor their contribution.

Philip Veracruz, a Filipino grape picker who became a vice-president of the UFW and later left over disagreements with Chavez, wrote during the strike's fourth year: "The Filipino decision of the great Delano Grape Strike delivered the initial spark to explode the most brilliant incendiary bomb for social and political changes in U.S. rural life." The contribution of these Filipino workers should be honored - not just because they helped make history, but because their political and trade union ideas are as relevant to workers today as they were in 1965.

This is an expanded version of an article in the Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Photo: Cesar Chavez, farm worker labor organizer and leader of the California grape strike, circa 1965. | George Brich/AP

Groundbreaking report confirms that Latinos in unions are better off

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 11:35:00 +0000

(WASHINGTON, DC) - Today, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement (LCLAA) published a groundbreaking report that confirms that Latino workers who are members of labor unions are much better off than their non-union peers.

The report titled "Latino Workers and Unions: A Strategic Partnership for America's Progress," available in English and Spanish, reveals the latest data that shows how Latinos in unions earn higher wages, and have better benefits. The report reveals that Latinos in unions are much better off than Latinos who do not belong to a union.

"Latino and immigrant workers are making significant contributions to our country, but are facing unprecedented challenges at the workplace and in their communities. Over 6.8 million Latino workers are earning poverty level wages and need the economic security the labor movement has ensured for America's middle class," said Hector Sanchez, LCLAA's executive director. "This report highlights the important partnership that can be achieved through organizing to improve the quality of life for Latinos and strengthen America's labor movement."

One of the most striking findings is that on average, Latinos that belong to a union earn $11,544 more than non-unionized Latinos.

The report makes a compelling case for collective action as a way to empower Latino workers and to give better opportunities for future generations.

"As a bilingual Latino organizer, I know firsthand that in order for unions to succeed, we have to engage Latino workers in a bold way," said Eric Alfaro, LCLAA's Young Latinos United chair. "Union's give Latinos a voice at the job and lift us out of poverty."

This bilingual report contains a section titled "Know your rights at the workplace" that offers useful labor rights advice to workers, including information on joining a labor union and a worker center.

To view the report click here: http://bit.ly/Latino_Union

Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP

Seattle teachers suspend strike, vote Sept. 20 on contract

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:41:00 +0000

SEATTLE - The 5,000 teachers in Seattle's public schools suspended their six-day strike Sept. 17 amid strong displays of teacher, student and community solidarity on their picketlines.

The Representative Assembly of the Seattle Education Association urged the teachers to vote to ratify the three-year agreement when they meet Sunday Sept. 20.

The tentative agreement, while short of their demands, addresses many of the issues raised including increased pay frozen for the past six years and issues of education reform such as curbs on "high stakes testing" and racial equity for students of color.

"We want to go back to school. We want the kids in school but we need a fair deal to do that," said First Grade teacher, Madeline Lawrence in an interview with Channel 5.

The proposed agreement would provide a 3 percent raise in the first year, 2 percent in the second year, and 4.5 percent in the third year. That would be on top of the 4.8 percent cost-of-living increase approved by the Washington State Legislature. Teachers have endured six years without even a cost-of-living increase and the 4.8 COLA leaves Seattle teachers still far behind increases in the cost-of-living.

The proposed deal also guarantees a 30 minute recess for all elementary pupils. It places curbs on "high stakes" testing and ends the policy of basing teacher evaluations on these test scores.

It reduces teacher workload by adding staff.

The teachers had demanded student "equity teams" in every school to reduce the disparity in suspensions and other discipline that falls disproportionaterly on African American, Latino, Native American Indian and other students of color. The administration agreed to establish these 'equity teams' in 30 schools.

It lengthens the school day by 20 minutes. The Seattle public school administration attempted to ramrod this demand without any increase in teacher pay---in effect a salary cut. The administration, however, agreed to increase teacher compensation for this longer day.

The six days in lost instruction will be made up by canceling built-in snow days.

The City Council had approved unanimously a resolution by Socialist Councilwoman, Kshama Sawant, proclaiming Sept. 14-18 "Seattle Educators Week." The resolution hails the teachers for including in their strike demands proposals that would drastically improved the quality of public education for students such as ending "high stakes testing."

The resolution denounces the State Legislature citing a clause in the State Constitution, "It is the paramount duty of the State to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex."

Yet the State Supreme Court has found the legislature "in contempt for its failure to comply with the school funding order" handed down last year by the State Supreme Court. The court ordered the legislature to pay $100,000 daily fines until they comply with their order that the lawmakers abide by the state constitution.

Sawant's resolution also cites I-1351, a ballot initiative approved by Washington voters last year requiring the legislature to provide full funding of the state's public schools. In flagrant disregard of I-1351, the Republican dominated legislature "suspended voter-approved cost-of-livng adjustments" for public school employees "leaving average teacher pay in Washington State 42nd in the nation."

Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP

Unionists lobby to restore, strengthen Voting Rights Act

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 13:19:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (PAI) - Urged on by union leaders, civil rights leaders and sympathetic lawmakers, more than 1,000 people - including hundreds of unionists - descended on Congress on Sept. 16 to demand lawmakers restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act.

The lobbying followed a mass rally that morning on Capitol Hill, organized by the Democracy Initiative, a 51-group coalition created by Larry Cohen when he led the Communications Workers. Speakers, including Cohen declared that without the right to vote, other rights - including workers' rights - are meaningless.

The rally was the culmination of a months-long march of unionists, civil rights activists, clergy - including 200 rabbis carrying a Torah on the Jewish holidays-environmentalists and others from Selma, Ala., to D.C., demanding restoration and improvement of the law.

They all demanded lawmakers approve the Voting Rights Advancement Act, legislation introduced in June to overturn the two-year-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling, on the usual 5-4 partisan vote, that gutted the enforcement sections of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Unionists at the rally, from the Communications Workers, the Government Employees, AFSCME, the Teachers, the Office and Professional Employees, UFCW, the AFL-CIO, the Postal Workers, the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Service Employees, headed for the halls of Congress to explain the issue and demand action, not just supportive statements.

The NAACP provided a huge contingent of marchers, with many coming all the way from Selma. Environmentalists, other civil rights groups, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender groups were among the others at the rally. All of those groups headed inside to lobby, too.

Several of the speakers vowed that if solons did not act now, marchers would be back, with sit-ins and risking arrest, just as the original civil rights marchers crusaded, sat in and were arrested 50 or more years ago.

"We will continue to work, we will continue to fight, we will continue to march until we have justice, the right to vote and democracy in our country," Cohen declared. "We will mobilize millions." Waiting until 2017 or 2018 to pass the legislation is unacceptable, he said.

"We care about workers' rights, which are in a shambles and are a disgrace, but we can't win these fights if 30 million people can't vote," he added.

The legislation, introduced by top Democrats on committees that handle civil rights bills and Congressional Black Caucus members, just picked up its first GOP backer, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, one speaker said. It also would outlaw so-called "voter ID" laws that curb or ban voting by African-Americans, women, Latinos, workers, students, the elderly and others.

And it would extend Justice Department oversight and pre-clearance of jurisdictions with history of discrimination, while extending the Voting Rights Act to cover Native Americans, too.

But the measure faces hostility from Congress' ruling Republicans, especially from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va. "There is a crime in those buildings," said the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, creator and leader of North Carolina's Moral Monday marches and movement, as he gestured to the U.S. Capitol and solons' office buildings.

"Power concedes nothing without a struggle," warned Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Ala., a co-sponsor. Her congressional district includes Selma, Montgomery and Birmingham.

"Those buildings are the scene of that crime," Barber continued. "It is a crime against voting rights. An attack on voting rights is an attack on education. An attack on voting rights is an attack on labor. An attack on voting rights is an attack on health care. An attack on voting rights is an attack on raising the minimum wage to a living wage."

That's "because when you allow extremists, Republican or Democrat, to steal elections, it's a crime against democracy," Barber declared.

"The only major nation trying to restrict the right to vote is the United States of America," added supportive Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., referring to the restrictive so-called "Voter ID" laws the Supreme Court approved several years ago and that many states have since passed. Those states, including Indiana, Texas, Alabama and North Carolina, are virtually all GOP-run.

Cohen's successor, current Communications Workers President Chris Shelton, said "the other side has all the weapons" in "a class war" against minorities, women and workers.

"The Supreme Court has said corporations are people, and taken away our weapon, the right to vote. Are you ready to take that weapon back?" he asked the crowd. "Yes!" was the roared reply.

"No matter what anybody's issues are, we will never be able to fix them unless every goddamn American has the right to vote!" Shelton exclaimed.

"Without voting rights, we have no union rights and we have no marriage rights," said AFT President Randi Weingarten. She particularly appealed to religious leaders and people to join the campaign to restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act. Now is an opportune time to do so, "since the Pope is coming to town," the Jewish New Year has begun and Moslems are observing religious holidays as well, Weingarten noted.

"We're not asking for a handout. We're asking for a seat at the table," AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre summarized. And NAACP President Cornell Brooks brought the 2016 run for the White House into the picture. Addressing all the presidential contenders of both political parties, he said: ""It's a simple moral question. If you are seeking to occupy the White House...If you are asking for our vote, why can't you commit to the right to vote?"

Photo: CWA President Chris Shelton fires up the crowd at the voting rights rally.

Indigenous migrants demand change in the fields

Thu, 17 Sep 2015 14:26:00 +0000

When thousands of indigenous farm workers went on strike in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California onMarch 16, their voices were not just heard in the streets of the farm towns along this peninsula in northern Mexico. Two years earlier, migrants from the same region of Oaxaca struck one of the largest berry growers in the Pacific Northwest, Sakuma Farms, and organized an independent union for agricultural laborers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia (Families United for Justice).

Indigenous Oaxacan migrants have been coming to California for at least three decades, and the echoes of San Quintin were heard as well in towns like Greenfield, where worker frustration has been building over economic exploitation in the fields and discrimination in the local community.

"We are the working people," declared Fidel Sanchez, leader of the Alianza de Organizaciones Nacionales, Estatales y Municipales para Justicia Social (the Alliance of National, State and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice). "We are the ones who pay for the government of this state and country with the labor of our hands." This was not an excess of rhetoric. In just the first two weeks of striking at the height of the strawberry season in April, Baja California's conservative Governor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid estimated grower losses at over forty million dollars.

While the strike demands ranged from a daily wage of 200 pesos ($13) to better conditions in labor camps, Sanchez explained it in basic terms: "We want to work as men, as fathers of our families. Our wives suffer the most from these hunger wages, because they have to stretch 700 or 800 pesos so that it can cover the cost of the food, of the clothes for our children and their schoolbooks and pencils, for their medical care when they get sick, for the gas and water so that we can wash up."

Agribusiness farming started in San Quintin in the 1970s, as it did in many areas of northern Mexico, to supply the U.S. market with winter tomatoes and strawberries. Baja California had few inhabitants then, so growers brought workers from southern Mexico, especially indigenous Mixtec and Triqui families from Oaxaca. Today an estimated 70,000 indigenous migrant workers live in labor camps notorious for their bad conditions. Many of the conditions are violations of Mexican law.

Once indigenous workers had been brought to the border, they began to cross it to work in fields in the U.S. Today the bulk of the farm labor workforce in California's strawberry fields comes from the same migrant stream that is on strike in Baja California. So does the migrant labor force picking berries in Washington State, where workers went on strike two years ago.

Two of the 500 strikers at Sakuma Farms were teenagers Marcelina Hilario from San Martin Itunyoso and Teofila Raymundo from Santa Cruz Yucayani. Both started working in the fields with their parents, and today, like many young people in indigenous migrant families, they speak English and Spanish - the languages of school and the culture around them. But Raymundo also speaks her native Triqui and is learning Mixteco, while Hilario speaks Mixteco, is studying French, and thinking about German.

"I've been working with my dad since I was 12," Raymundo remembers. "I've seen them treat him bad, but he comes back because he needs this job. Once after a strike here, we came up all the way from California the next season, and they wouldn't hire us. We had to go looking for another place to live and work that year. That's how I met Marcelina." They both accused the company of refusing to give them better jobs keeping track of the berries picked by workers - positions that only went to young white workers. "When I see people treat us badly, I don't agree with that," Hilario added. "I think you have to say something."

Rosario Ventura was another Sakuma Farms striker. She lives in California, and comes to Washington with husband Isidro, for the picking season. Ventura is from a Triqui town, while her husband Isidro is from the Mixteca region of Oaxaca. They met and married while working at Sakuma Farms, something that might never have taken place if they'd stayed in Mexico.

But Ventura didn't come to the U.S. for romance. During the dry years in San Martin Itunyoso, "there is nothing with which to get food, nothing. Sometimes we were starving because there would be no money."

Nevertheless, her father wept when she announced she was leaving, saying she'd never return. In some ways he was right. "If you go you aren't going to come back -- it is forever. That is what he said," she remembered. "I don't call or even talk with him, because if I do, it will make him sad. He'll ask, 'When will you return?' What can I say? It is very expensive to cross the border. It is easy to leave the U.S., but difficult to cross back. When I came, in 2001, it cost two thousand dollars."

Miguel Lopez, a Triqui man who lives in Greenfield, in California's Salinas Valley, came for the same reasons, and had an even harder time when he arrived twenty years ago. With no money he couldn't rent an apartment. "I lived under a tree with five others, next to a ranch," he recalled. "It rains a lot in Oregon, and there we were under a tree."

Eventually he found work, and after some years, brought his family. That was a mixed blessing, however, because he and his wife had to work so hard. "My children didn't even know me because I would go to sleep as soon as I got home. It was hard to care for them properly," he explained. And he didn't meet with a warm welcome in Greenfield. "Indigenous people face discrimination at school and around town in general. Many people speak badly of Triqui or indigenous people."

Bernardo Ramirez, former binational coordinator of the Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations) went to Sakuma Farms to help with the strike, and came away angry over that discrimination. "Foremen insult workers and call them burros," he charged. "When you compare people to animals, this is racism. We're human beings." But, he cautioned, discrimination involves more than language. "Low wages are a form of racism too, because they minimize the work of migrants."

The big agribusiness corporations that market the strawberries, blueberries and blackberries sold in the U.S. dispute such charges. Sakuma Farms says it guarantees its workers $10/hour with a piecerate bonus, and workers have to meet a production quota. But these companies should start paying attention to these voices. They are not only coming from their own workers, who produce their profits, but they express a building anger and frustration at the continued poverty among Oaxaca's indigenous migrants. Maybe the growers should learn Triqui and Mixteco, so they can hear what's being said.

Photo: David Bacon

Disgraced United CEO Smisek is major reason for income inequality

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 15:20:00 +0000

Jeff Smisek, the guy forced by scandal to resign last week as CEO of the world's fourth-largest airline, is a major reason American workers can't get a raise.

Smisek and his overpaid boardroom buddies nationwide have swindled American workers and American communities in a scam to amass wealth for themselves and well-heeled stockholders. They've extracted value from corporations and put it in their pockets and shareholders' purses almost to the complete exclusion of investing in their corporations to create new wealth and prosperity.

CEOs like Smisek began sucking the financial lifeblood out of corporations in the 1970s. That's when corporations stopped raising worker wages in tandem with rises in productivity and curbed research and development. Instead, corporations spent increasing portions of profit on dividends and stock buybacks.

This goosed CEO compensation while squashing worker pay. Over four decades, it has degraded corporations and produced the worst income inequality since the Great Depression.

Smisek's failed leadership at United Airlines illustrates exactly how this CEO self-dealing scheme works to the advantage of wealthy executives and shareholders while damaging workers, communities, customers and corporations.

Under Smisek, passengers, workers and taxpayers found the skies decidedly unfriendly.

Ever since United and Continental Airlines merged, at Smisek's urging, the corporation's computer system has failed repeatedly, inconveniencing United customers. Months of computer glitches ensued immediately after United combined systems with Continental in 2012, and since then problems plagued fliers six times, including one in July that temporarily grounded the United fleet globally, and one last week that delayed 4,900 flights for as long as 90 minutes.

This may help explain why United ranked dead last among major domestic carriers in this year's J.D. Power airline satisfaction survey, which measures performance in seven areas including costs, fees, in-flight service and reservations.

Customers have complained bitterly about United's ill-treatment of fliers. And it gets low scores for arriving on time. In June, its performance was by far the worst among the largest domestic carriers. It improved slightly in July, so it was tied for last.

In addition, in five years, Smisek failed to complete combined labor agreements with two major unions, the Association of Flight Attendants representing 21,000, and the Teamsters representing 9,000 mechanics. Smisek made sure he had a personal contract with United guaranteeing him a golden parachute worth millions no matter how badly he performed. But he didn't do anything for the workers who make sure planes and passengers are safe.

Just two months before scandal would force Smisek to resign, he announced United would buy back $3 billion in stock. Smisek took the windfall United got over the past year from dramatically lower fuel prices and used it to gin up the airline's stock price. It rose 2 percent immediately after the buyback announcement. That was great for Smisek because the majority of his compensation was based on stock value.

It wasn't so great for United. Or its workers. Or communities that support the airports from which United flies.

Smisek wouldn't use a penny of that $3 billion to solve United's problems with computers, on-time arrival, customer satisfaction or labor relations. He let those problems mount, weakening United as a corporation. He took out of the corporation billions that could have been used to fix them.

United workers denounced the move. Capt. Jay Heppner, chairman of the leadership council of the Air Line Pilots Association branch at United and a member of the United board of directors, wrote his fellow 12,500 pilots about Smisek's lack of vision: "buying back shares of a company's stock signals to investors that executive management cannot think of anything better to do with its excess cash."

A truckload of United cash - $8.4 million now, and as much as $13.2 million more later - will leave the corporation with Smisek, despite his failures to resolve the airline's problems and the fact that he remains the subject of a federal corruption investigation. A huge chunk of those payments depends on stock price - which, of course, Smisek manipulated with his $3 billion buyback.

Research by University of Massachusetts Economics Professor William Lazonick has established the relationship between worker wage stagnation since the 1970s and increased corporate expenditures on stock buybacks and dividends. Lazonick wrote about it in a paper titled "Profits Without Prosperity":

"As a result, the very people we rely on to make investments in the productive capabilities that will increase our shared prosperity are instead devoting most of their companies' profits to uses that will increase their own prosperity-with unsurprising results."

Lazonick found that from 2003 to 2012, the 449 companies in the S&P index used 54 percent of their earnings to buy back their own stock and 37 percent for dividends. That left only 9 percent for investment in research, development and worker pay.

This reversed historical trends. After World War II, until the late 1970s, Lazonick's research found, companies retained earnings and reinvested them to build corporate capabilities and worth, including decent pay raises for workers whose labor made the firms competitive. Lazonick calls this value creation. At that time, the share of U.S. income taken by the top 0.1 percent of households stood at the lowest point in the past century.

In the 1970s, corporations began allocating increasing portions of profits for stock buybacks and dividends. Lazonick calls this value extraction. CEOs withdraw value, serve themselves and leave corporate shells.

To support value extraction, many corporations also suck communities dry, demanding tax breaks, free installation of infrastructure like roads and rail spurs and tax-supported worker training. They threaten communities that don't comply.

United made such demands of the Port Authority of New Jersey and New York. At a September, 2011, dinner in Manhattan, Smisek told the then-chairman of the Port Authority, David Samson, that United wanted help paying for a new maintenance hangar, expanded transit service from Lower Manhattan to the Newark, N.J., airport and other goodies. Samson told Smisek that he wanted United to reinstate money-losing direct flights from Newark to Columbia, S.C., where Samson had a vacation home.

Three months after Smisek and Samson dined, the Port Authority agreed to give United $10 million for the hangar. Soon afterward, United began arranging the flight to Columbia that Samson wanted, dubbed the "chairman's flight." Just weeks after those flights began, the Port Authority approved the expanded transit service to Newark that United wanted.

This all came to light after Samson resigned last year at the height of the Bridgegate scandal. That involved aides to Gov. Chris Christie closing Fort Lee, N.J., lanes to the Port Authority's George Washington Bridge in 2013 in retaliation for the town's Democratic mayor refusing to endorse Christie, a Republican. United cancelled the "chairman's flights" almost immediately after Samson quit as authority chairman.

By then, though, Smisek's corporation had already gotten most of what it wanted out of the government agency that is supposed to serve the public. The Port Authority paid for what Smisek wanted - although United clearly has plenty of dough to cover its own costs - at least $3 billion anyway.

The Smisek-Samson dealings are the subject of a federal corruption investigation. But what's more corrosive to workers, communities and corporations is CEOs spending more and more on stock buybacks and dividends and investing less and less in research, development and workers.

Lazonick, director of the Center for Industrial Competitiveness, says it best: "If the United States is to achieve growth that distributes income equitably and provides stable employment, government and business leaders must take steps to bring both stock buybacks and executive pay under control. The nation's economic health depends on it."

Steelworkers President Leo Gerard heads one of the nation's most politically active and largest industrial unions.

Photo: In this Nov. 14, 2013 file photo, Gov. Chris Christie, right, listen to United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek at Newark Liberty International Airport, in Newark, N.J. Smisek, the chairman and CEO of United Airlines is stepping down in connection with an investigation into dealings with the agency that operates New York-area airports. United Continental Holdings Inc. said Sept. 8, that Jeff Smisek and two other senior executives had resigned. (AP Photo/Mel Evans, file)