CWA Cohen on Collective Bargaining

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CWA's Cohen: America Needs a Mass Movement for Workers' Rights

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05/22/2012

Robert Struckman

The crushing of collective bargaining rights—which started 40 years ago with attacks on the rights of private-sector workers and which is aimed today at public employees—has destroyed the demand curve in America, and it will take a mass political movement to fix it, Communications Workers of America (CWA) President Larry Cohen said today.

Cohen led an informal discussion at the Center for National Policy examining strategies for addressing America’s jobs crisis. He was joined by Leo Hindery Jr. of InterMedia Partners, and the audience included former Sen. Donald Riegle Jr. (D-Mich.). Speaking candidly and, at times, passionately, Cohen estimated that the true number of U.S. jobless workers—if the under-employed and workers who have given up searching for jobs are counted—is 26 million or 27 million, at least twice the official number of 13 million active job seekers. It will take demand-fueled growth to create the kind of long-term economic upswing to provide sufficient jobs.
Yet, the political movement for workers’ rights also must address the flood of corporate cash in the electoral process, Cohen said.

“Money in politics, we’ve got to get it out,” he said, while saying open seats for the U.S. Senate easily cost $25 million and congressional seats cost $5 million.
Also, the rules of the Senate must be streamlined, or necessary bills will never reach the desk of the president, he said.

"The Senate is the worst it’s ever been,” he said. In 2008 and 2009, 400 bills that passed the House never even got to the floor of the Senate.

In addition, the union movement must also target new state-level laws intended to limit the voting rights of young people, the elderly, poor people and people of color.

This is voter suppression. It’s not about voter fraud, and everybody knows it.

Yet the nation's underlying economic problems all come back to a basic structural problem—without the ability to bargain, workers’ wages have flat-lined for nearly 40 years. That’s why credit got out of hand—as a way for the country to continue buying without wage growth. He also said manufacturing was needed to rebuild a new American economy.

 

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Larry Cohen

AFL-CIO on Labor Movement

Labor Movement Must Be Broad, Inclusive, Innovative Worker-driven Organization...


Mike Hall

The future of the union movement, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler told some 600 members of the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee (LCC), depends on showing the public that through our actions on the ground we are a:  broad, inclusive, innovative worker-driven organization….We need to build a broader, stronger, more effective movement for all working people—union and nonunion. That means organizing. It means advocacy. It means grassroots mobilization.

Shuler said the AFL-CIO’s young worker initiative, Next Up, is "connecting with the next generation of union activists, engaging them, activating them, helping bring them into leadership, making sure union policies and priorities reflect the realities young people face in the workplace today.”

So many of the Next Up generation can’t find jobs at all, and when they do, they’re often in nontraditional work arrangements—freelancing in benefit-free, low-paying “gigs.” But the AFL-CIO, our affiliates and labor councils are helping young people set up young worker groups all across the country, and the LCC does a fantastic job mentoring young lawyers.

Speaking at the group’s annual meeting in Chicago this morning, Shuler pointed to the AFL-CIO’s “Work Connects Us All” outreach initiatives in Austin, Texas, Portland, Ore., and Pittsburgh, Pa.

As part of this new effort, a comedy show in Portland with Laughing Liberally and a demonstration supporting the city’s cab drivers “took the Portland community by surprise—and they liked us.”

In our everyday work, we have to show that Unions are working people, not outside institutions.

She also said the union movement continues to connect with nonunion workers and families through the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America and by working closely with: Nontraditional and even excluded workers—like the immigrant taxi workers in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston and San Francisco who have formed the AFL-CIO’s newest union, and the domestic workers and day laborers who are organizing, and the low-wage immigrant carwash workers in Los Angeles who now have access to health care through collective action.

She also praised the work of the LCC for “being the guardian angels of the 99 percent.”

I know that your work is not a job—it’s a calling. You are not just excellent lawyers, whose legal skills help workers and their unions, day in and day out. You are activists and advisers, educators and mobilizers—protecting the right to vote on Election Day, protecting the rights of the Occupy protesters, leading teach-ins. Working people and the labor movement are fortunate to know that the lawyers of the LCC have our back.

NNU's Robin Hood Tax

Nurses Lead Chicago Rally for Robin Hood Tax
by Mike Hall

Thousands of National Nurses United (NNU) activists and others called for a Robin Hood tax on Wall Street in a massive demonstration in Chicago. Said NNU co-President Karen Higgins, during the rally in Daley Plaza: We are watching and seeing Wall Street throwing our money away as we see people suffer and die. It will not continue. We pay sales tax. It is time for Wall Street to start paying back what they owe the rest of the country and they need to pay sales tax. The small financial tax on speculation by banks and financial institutions would create jobs and rebuild the economy that Wall Street broke. As NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro told reporters: We want a financial transaction tax where we can restore our communities and jumpstart a new strategic approach to the economy invested in the people in this country.

Worldwide, we're joined in movement with 40 countries that are already part of the Robin Hood movement and the Robin Hood tax and we're bringing it to America. The rally coincided with this weekend’s G-8 Summit of the eight top western economic powers, originally set for Chicago, and the NATO summit immediately following. But the G-8 moved to Camp David, Md., to avoid the large crowds of protesters.

Tom Morello spoke and played.  After the rally, actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith performed, “Tell Us Where It Hurts, America’s Nurses Are Listening,” a theatrical piece derived from real-life stories of nurses and their patients gathered by NNU. “Tell me where it hurts? I'll tell you were it hurts," Smith said, her voice roaring from the stage. "It hurts when you see how privilege works...and when poor people die."

Chomsky on Occupy and Labor

The Occupy movement is the first real, major, popular reaction that could avert this. But it’s going to be necessary to face the fact that it’s a long, hard struggle. You don’t win victories tomorrow. You have to form the structures that will be sustained, that will go on through hard times and can win major victories. And there are a lot of things that can be done.
Toward Worker Takeover
I mentioned before that, in the 1930s, one of the most effective actions was the sit-down strike. And the reason is simple: that’s just a step before the takeover of an industry.

Through the 1970s, as the decline was setting in, there were some important events that took place.  In 1977, U.S. Steel decided to close one of its major facilities in Youngstown, Ohio. Instead of just walking away, the workforce and the community decided to get together and buy it from the company, hand it over to the work force, and turn it into a worker-run, worker-managed facility. They didn’t win. But with enough popular support, they could have won.  It’s a topic that Gar Alperovitz and Staughton Lynd, the lawyer for the workers and community, have discussed in detail.

It was a partial victory because, even though they lost, it set off other efforts. And now, throughout Ohio, and in other places, there’s a scattering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of sometimes not-so-small worker/community-owned industries that could become worker-managed. And that’s the basis for a real revolution. That’s how it takes place. 

In one of the suburbs of Boston, about a year ago, something similar happened. A multinational decided to close down a profitable, functioning facility carrying out some high-tech manufacturing. Evidently, it just wasn’t profitable enough for them. The workforce and the union offered to buy it, take it over, and run it themselves. The multinational decided to close it down instead, probably for reasons of class-consciousness. I don’t think they want things like this to happen. If there had been enough popular support, if there had been something like the Occupy movement that could have gotten involved, they might have succeeded.  (Don't forget the workers' takeover at Republic Windows and Doors. -ed)

And there are other things going on like that. In fact, some of them are major. Not long ago, President Barack Obama took over the auto industry, which was basically owned by the public.    And there were a number of things that could have been done. One was what was done: reconstitute it so that it could be handed back to the ownership, or very similar ownership, and continue on its traditional path.

The other possibility was to hand it over to the workforce -- which owned it anyway -- turn it into a worker-owned, worker-managed major industrial system that’s a big part of the economy, and have it produce things that people need. And there’s a lot that we need.
We all know or should know that the United States is extremely backward globally in high-speed transportation, and it’s very serious. It not only affects people’s lives, but the economy.  In that regard, here’s a personal story. I happened to be giving talks in France a couple of months ago and had to take a train from Avignon in southern France to Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris, the same distance as from Washington, DC, to Boston. It took two hours.  I don’t know if you’ve ever taken the train from Washington to Boston, but it’s operating at about the same speed it was 60 years ago when my wife and I first took it. It’s a scandal.

It could be done here as it’s been done in Europe. They had the capacity to do it, the skilled work force. It would have taken a little popular support, but it could have made a major change in the economy.
Just to make it more surreal, while this option was being avoided, the Obama administration was sending its transportation secretary to Spain to get contracts for developing high-speed rail for the United States, which could have been done right in the rust belt, which is being closed down. There are no economic reasons why this can’t happen. These are class reasons, and reflect the lack of popular political mobilization. Things like this continue.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.  A TomDispatch regular, he is the author of numerous best-selling political works, most recently, Hopes and Prospects, Making the Future, and Occupy, published by Zuccotti Park Press, from which this speech, given last October, is excerpted and adapted. His web site is www.chomsky.info

CAL NURSES STRIKE MAY 1st

Re: M1GS (Los Angeles May 1st General Strike - all our resources are going towards a 4,500 Registered Nurse Strike against Sutter Health in Northern California. This has been targeted to exert the maximum leverage at a critical point in the struggle against the 1%. Sutter has proposed outrageous cuts - to our members' standards, but more importantly to "unprofitable" aspects of patient care, mostly services to the most vulnerable members of the 99%. Would we be striking Sutter at some point anyway if not for the Occupation's call for  a General Strike? Absolutely - this is the only language they understand and the struggle against market based healthcare goes on 24/7/365. But the date is not an accident, and we stand in solidarity with the Occupation and support all the actions nationwide taking place for International Workers' Day.
-James Moy

http://www.nationalnursesunited.org/blog/entry/northern-california-sutter-rns-to-strike-may-1-to-protest-attack-on-patient/
Northern California Sutter RNs to Strike May 1 To Protest Attack on Patient Care, RN Standards
Where to Join the Picket Line, and at Strike Rallies Tuesday
Northern California RNs will strike eight Sutter corporation hospitals Tuesday, May 1 to once again protest the wealthy corporation’s outrageous demands for more than 100 reductions in patient care protections and RN standards.
The nurses will also protest ongoing cuts in patient services – the latest being the expected announcement by Sutter next week that it intends to close the San Leandro hospital, abandoning the thousands of patients who depend on that hospital every year for acute care.
Sutter is making these demands for contract concessions and sweeping cuts in care despite making over $4 billion in profits since 2007, and handing its chief executive Pat Fry at 215 percent pay hike to over $4 million a year, in addition to salaries of over $1 million a year to some 20 other top executives.

Join the Sutter RNs on the picket line, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the following facilities:

Alta Bates Main Campus, 2450 Ashby Avenue, Berkeley 
Alta Bates Herrick Campus, 2001 Dwight Way, Berkeley (psychiatric care facility)
Alta Bates Summit Campus, 350 Hawthorne Avenue, Oakland
Eden Medical Center, 20103 Lake Chabot Rd, Castro Valley
San Leandro Hospital, 13855 E. 14th St., San Leandro
Mills-Peninsula Medical Center, 1501 Trousdale Drive, Burlingame
Mills Health Center, 100 S. San Mateo Drive, San Mateo
Sutter Lakeside Hospital, 5176 Hill Road East, Lakeport
Novato Community Hospital, 180 Rowland Way, Novato
Sutter Solano Medical Center, 300 Hospital Drive, Vallejo 
Sutter Delta Medical Center, 3901 Lone Tree Way, Antioch
Rallies are planned at the following locations:
Alta Bates, Ashby hospital, Berkeley – 11 a.m. 
Sutter Solano, Vallejo – 11 a.m.
Sutter Delta, Antioch – 12 noon
Eden Medical – 12 noon
Alta Bates, Summit hospital – 1 p.m.
Peninsula – 2 p.m.
Sutter Lakeside- 3 p.m.
San Leandro – 3 p.m., followed by Town Hall meeting, San Leandro Senior Community Center, 13909 E. 14th Street
Among the many concession demands at various Sutter hospitals:
Eliminating paid sick leave, effectively forcing nurses to work when ill, exposing already frail and vulnerable patients to further infection.
Forcing RNs to work in hospital areas for which they do not have appropriate clinical expertise, again a safety risk for patients.
Huge increases in nurses’ out-of-pocket costs for health coverage for themselves and family members.
Limits on the ability of charge nurses, who make clinical assignments for nurses, to address staffing shortages, subjecting patients to the danger of unsafe staffing.
Forcing RNs to work overtime, exposing patients to care from fatigued nurses who are more prone to making medical errors.
Eliminating retiree health plans.
Eliminating all health coverage for nurses who work less than 30 hours per week.
Reduced pregnancy and family medical leave, undermining RN families.
Concurrently, Sutter continues to make substantial cuts in patient services throughout the region, especially in areas it considers inadequately profitable, such as mental health, cancer screening, and services for women, children, and seniors.

“Sutter’s tone at the bargaining table has been dismissive and disrespectful of nurses' concerns,” said Mills-Peninsula RN Genel Morgan. “They have misjudged our resolve to stand up and safeguard our nursing standards, and to ensure our patients don’t suffer from Sutter wanting to cut these standards. Sutter has used half truths and lies to justify their objectives, but we see right through them, much as the community sees through them whenever Sutter cuts services. “
“Sutter has passed the stage of ‘too big to fail’ going to ‘too big to care’,” said CNA/NNU co-president Zenei Cortez, RN. “They have shown they are far more interested in amassing wealth than caring about community health or the nurses who provide care for the patients who are the base of Sutter’s huge profits. Sutter RNs will never accept a reduced voice to speak out for patients, or an erosion in their own standards.”
Sutter’s additional abandonment of communities and patients (partial list):
End breast cancer screening for women with disabilities and most bone marrow transplant services for cancer patients at Alta Bates Summit in Oakland and Berkeley.
Stop providing psychiatric services under contract with Sacramento County for more than 225 Sacramento children.
Close specialized pediatric care, acute rehabilitation, dialysis, and skilled nursing care services at Mills and Peninsula hospitals in Burlingame and San Mateo.
Close home health services and limit acute-care hospital stays in Lakeport.
Close acute rehabilitation services, skilled nursing care, and psychiatric services, and substantially downgrade nursery care for sick children at Eden Hospital in Castro Valley.
Sharply cut psychiatric care at Herrick Hospital in Berkeley.
Close a birthing center at Sutter Auburn Faith, forcing new mothers and families to travel up to 100 miles for obstetrics care, while giving a $1 million gift to the Sacramento Kings.
Close pediatric, psychiatric, lactation, and transitional care services in Santa Rosa.

British Unions Strike for Pensions May 10

In UK 475,000 to strike 10 May: let’s kick David Cameron and keep kicking
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Brits Hits the Bricks
by Sadie Robinson
Up to half a million workers will strike over pensions on 10 May.
The action will bring together members of the Unite, PCS, UCU, Nipsa and RMT unions. It will hit hospitals, colleges, job centres, transport and other key public services.

And it will show that the mood to fight the Tory (Conservative Party) attacks has not gone away. The strike will see 100,000 Unite workers in the health service walk out.
Frank Wood is on Unite’s national executive committee and is a bio-medical scientist at King’s Hospital in London.

He told Socialist Worker, “It is absolutely critical that we don’t retreat on pensions. This attack is part of a coordinated attack by the government—we need a coordinated response.
“People are looking to the Unions to give a lead. We must get organised now.”
Laura Miles, a member of the UCU’s national executive committee, said, “This is a fight against the government, not individual employers.
“That means we need to work with other unions to build serious action. Everyone knows that one-day strikes won’t be enough to win.
Sustained
“In the UCU lecturers are fighting for more action after 10 May—including rolling strikes. We need to rebuild a sustained, national campaign.”
The Tories have already forced attacks on millions of public sector workers.
They have increased monthly pension contributions and switched the inflation measure that pensions are linked to—slashing their value.
They also want to force people to work longer before they can receive their full pension.
Frank said, “This week NHS staff will be getting their pay slips with an average £30 less as a result of the attack.
“This is quite a blow on top of a three-year pay freeze, attempts to introduce regional pay and harsh cuts.”
A magnificent coordinated strike on 30 November last year saw around 2.6 million workers take action together.
But since then many union leaders have either refused to call more action or have dithered over the next steps.
The NUT and UCU unions called a strike in London on 28 March. Other workers are glad to be joining this new strike.
Laura Jowell is a PCS rep in Bradford, west Yorkshire. She told Socialist Worker, “People are relieved that we’re coming out again on 10 May.
“There’s a sense that we’re building towards something bigger in June. This strike can kickstart the dispute again.”
Rage
Aileen Scott-McFarlane is a Unite rep and lab technician in London.
She said that in her workplace “the feeling of rage is now at boiling point”.
“It’s as though the feeling to fight is stronger than before. Now we are getting organised to make sure the strike is solid.”
The Tories’ policies will pave the way for more harsh attacks on ordinary people’s living standards.
The government plans to raise the state retirement age for men and women to 66 by 2020.
One study found that four in 10 firms expect that by 2020 workers will retire at 67 or later. And one in six companies expects the typical retirement age to be between 68 and 70.
“My quality of life is being threatened,” said Aileen. “And this isn’t a one-off—if they get this through, they’ll come back for more.”

Jefferson and Buffet Rule

Thomas Jefferson and Obama's Buffet Rule

I don't know what Founding Father and President Thomas Jefferson would have thought about TV, cars, spaceships, cellphones, skyscrapers, computers or nuclear weapons.  But I do know what Jefferson would have thought about the Buffett Rule.  He would have liked it.
The Buffett Rule is the Obama Administration's proposal to adopt a 30% minimum tax rate on personal income above $1 million a year.  It would promote one of the central tenets of progressivism:  that the burden of taxes should fall on the rich, not the poor.
In 1811, two years after Jefferson left the Presidency, Jefferson wrote a letter to General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the American Revolution.  Jefferson said that he supported taxes (then Tariffs, since there was no income tax yet) falling entirely on the wealthy.  As Jefferson explained: "The farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of this country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings."

Here is someone else who was an outspoken proponent of progressive taxation:  Adam Smith, who literally "wrote the book" on capitalism.  In 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote:
"The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor.  They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it.  The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess.  A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything unreasonable.  It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

(I wonder:  When Adam Smith wrote about the "luxuries and vanities" of the rich, was he contemplating Mitt Romney's elevator for Romney's car?  Or is that simply beyond contemplation?)

Two hundred years ago, when America was founded, progressive taxation was viewed as just common sense.  We still have common sense, don't we?

First, let's see the Buffett Rule for individuals.  Then the Buffett Rule for corporations.  That would be progressive.  And that would be progress.
Courage,
Alan Grayson
Congressman with Guts