Colorad Labor Blog

The state of Wisconsin is providing a good lesson for America’s rank-and-file union members about the dangers of putting anti-worker candidates in control of both the legislative and executive branches of state government.

The lesson: That trade unionists flirt with disaster when they fail to vote in their own best interest.

In November, Wisconsin voters elected an anti-labor governor and put both houses of the state legislature in control of Republican lawmakers with similar attitudes toward working men and women. Many of the new legislators were Tea Party members, some of whom are in the forefront of the attack on labor.

Wisconsin has always been a good union state, with a high density of union members in the workplace. Obviously, many of them voted for candidates who promised them everything but the good wages, hours, working conditions, benefits and job security offered by their union jobs.

And now they are doing what union leaders said they would do if they were elected: They are embarking on a campaign to destroy unions.

Several governors in other states have joined the chorus in recent weeks by announcing that public sector union members will be targets for states facing huge budget deficits. For the most part, these deficits are caused by a national economy that has not yet fully recovered from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. They are not the fault of state workers.

Some of the governors are proposing reducing the number of state employees, cutting state salaries and benefits, such as pensions.
But Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker has gone a step further.

He has announced a budget plan that strips state workers of nearly all their collective bargaining rights, cuts pay and benefits and says there will be no negotiations.

Then, as if he were a grade B actor in a grade C melodrama, Scott said he has alerted the National Guard to be ready in case state workers strike or rise in protest. He told the Associated Press he’s been working on contingency plans for months.

According to the AFL-CIO, the last time the National Guard was used against public workers was the Memphis sanitation strike in1968, just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The last time the Guard was called out in Wisconsin to quell a labor dispute was the 1934 Kohler strike by the UAW.

The attack on public sector unions is on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers because they make the most convenient target for cash-strapped states.

But they are after all unions.

Private sector unions are also being targeted throughout the country. Right-to-work and/or paycheck deception proposals are being introduced in several states. Project labor agreements and prevailing wage laws are also under siege.

So the anti-worker campaign is not simply an attack on public sector unions. It covers both public and private sector unions. It they manage to get one, they are likely to get the other.

If they do, they will have completed the most effective assault ever on the standard of living of the nation’s middle class.

Governor-elect Hickenlooper’s somewhat surprising choice of Ellen Golombek as director of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment prompted the expected response from Republican legislators.

Mike Kopp, Republican senate minority leader, and Dick Wadhams, Republican Party chairman who presided over the Dan Maes campaign fiasco, were quick to whine about how a single cabinet member could do serious harm to the business community in Colorado.

In a press release, Kopp said the “appointment (of Golombek) to the Department of Labor may certainly take some of the air out of the bipartisan atmosphere he (Hickenlooper) has promised as governor.”

“It is certainly not the direction a pro-business moderate Democrat would head, said Wadhams, according to the Denver Post.

Kopp characterized Golombek as a progressive activist, which she is. He also called her a “union boss,” which– given her petite stature–presents an inaccurate caricature. “Union leader” is a better fit. Republicans oppose Golombek’s appointment because she is a labor person, plain and simple.

It’s an old Republican strategy: try to scare Hickenlooper, so that he won’t make another appointment that doesn’t fit the GOP political ideology. The truth is, though, Hickenlooper will be very good for business, it’s in his DNA. Union leaders can only hope that he will be as good for labor.

At last count, the governor-elect had named three Republicans to his cabinet, and he will probably add to that number.

But, lest Hickenlooper forget, hob-knobbing with giants of business and industry can prove costly to Democrats.

Bill Ritter tried to become good buddies with business when he vetoed a pro-worker bill at the beginning of his only term that would have repealed the onerous Colorado Labor Peace Act. Almost immediately, he lost the support of several major unions. Despite the veto, the business community never gave him the time of day during his term of office. After all, he was a Democrat.

In his press release, Kopp pointed out, somewhat threateningly, that Golombek must go through a senate confirmation process.

“Senators have the constitutional obligation to put to her the same critical questions that every Colorado employer will be asking: Will she promote politics that make it more costly or less costly for business to operate in Colorado? Will she be on the side of the bureaucracy or the taxpayer?”

My guess is that Ellen Golombek will not make her decisions based on such limited choices. Rather, she will do what is best for the commonweal.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued the following statement on the tax cut deal reached between President Obama and Congressional Republicans:

Continue reading “AFL-CIO president blasts Obama’s tax deal with GOP” »

Union workers earn higher wages and get more benefits than workers who don’t have a voice on the job with a union.

Nonunion workers are four times more likely to lack health insurance coverage

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Union Members-2009. Jan. 22, 2010; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2009, September 2009, Employee Benefit Research Institute. EBRI Notes, October

Every politician who will be on the stump from now until the election in November will be talking about the need for jobs in the United States.

The problem with this is they don’t know how to create any jobs.  Most of the nation’s manufacturing base has been moved to foreign countries where wages are lower. The loss of these jobs has left a huge void in the economy that so far we have not been able to fill. You simply can’t replace the benefits provided the nation by good jobs with those paying $7.25 an hour.

There doesn’t seem to be any sector of the economy capable of replacing the lost benefits—consumer buying power, tax revenues to local, state and federal governments and a higher standard of living for everyone. These are the advantages of high paying industrial jobs.

More than five million of these jobs were lost in the last decade. Manufacturing accounted for 25 percent of the nation’s jobs 40 years ago; today it provides only about eight percent. According to the Associated Press, 81 percent of the 630,000 jobs created in 2010 are low-paying service sector jobs.

So the task isn’t only creating jobs, but creating good jobs.

The Republicans say jobs will be created if the Bush tax cuts–enacted in by congress in 2001 for a 10-year period—are extended beyond their expiration date of December 31 this year. Hogwash. Tax cuts do not create jobs, and they haven’t done much else except line the pockets of the wealthy since 2001.

Unemployment was at four percent when the Bush tax cuts were enacted; it is now almost 10 percent. The nation’s poverty rate in 2008, the last year such statistics were available, was 13.2 percent. It is now the highest it has been in about 15 years. Food stamp usage was 1.2 million in 2001; it is now up to 36 million.

Before he was bumped unceremoniously out of the governor’s race, Scott McInnis had a one-word billboard. JOBS, it said boldly, as if he could provide them at the snap of his fingers if we elected him. What a load of stuff.

Democrats, too, spout a lot of nonsense when it comes to creating jobs. They struggle with members of their own party even to extend unemployment benefits to jobless workers. How can they be expected to develop a program to create jobs? It appears they may never be able to do anything to correct the deficiencies of the various international trade agreements that have been so devastating to our workforce.

And with two wars going on, a huge deficit challenging the Obama administration and an opposition party that will not cooperate, Democrats can’t establish any kind of public works program, such as President Roosevelt did in the Depression, to put people to work. Nobody outside of Washington has any confidence in the insider retreads that advise the president on economic issues. They don’t seem to have a clue.

Listen to what will be a litany from the candidates in this election season about how they will create jobs. But don’t believe a world of it if they won’t tell you how they will do it and what kind of jobs they will be.