The AFL-CIO is inviting you to join President Bartlet aka Martin Sheen aka Ramon Estevez in
saying thanks to a worker who makes a difference in your life this Labor Day.
These newly unionized Cablevision workers in Brooklyn, meanwhile, are celebrating that "We Are Union."
(Continue reading below the fold.)
A fair day's wage
- Thursday night, Mitt Romney said, "Or when you lost that job that paid $22.50 an hour with benefits, you took two jobs at 9 bucks an hour and fewer benefits." Emptywheel takes a closer look at that, pointing out that the jobs Romney keeps bragging he helped create at Staples are overwhelmingly, yes, $9 an hour jobs.
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- The Chicago Teachers Union has issued a 10-day strike notice. That doesn't mean they'll definitely strike, and union leaders say they plan to continue negotiating, but it's one more step toward the first Chicago teachers strike in decades.
- The National Football League plans to start the regular season with scab officials. Context:
Just remember: This isn't a strike. It's a lockout. The owners are trying to teach the officials a lesson. For a league with revenues far north of $8 billion a year, the petty cash in dispute is laughable. Especially when you consider there are only 119 NFL officials. And that they're employed part time.
If Roger Goodell and the NFL and the NFL owners were serious about player safety and player conduct, for $50 million a year -- less than 1 percent of total revenue -- they could hire 200 well-trained full-time officials at $250,000 each.
Tell Commissioner Roger Goodell and the NFL's owners to end the use of scabs and bring back the league's experienced officials.
- Here's an interesting case study in what goes on behind stories constructing the image of the union thug. A Philadelphia labor dispute has drawn some media attention focusing on alleged violence by union members angry that a large construction project is being done with non-union labor after the small number of union workers initially on the project pulled out in protest—a major departure in a city with lots of skilled union construction workers. But while the media focus has been on what union protesters are supposedly doing, Raging Chicken Press's Paul Williams, Jr. shows that's not all that's going on.
Matt and Mike Pestronk and their company, Post Brothers, have a history of pushing out "mostly Black, elderly, fixed-income, disabled" tenants on short notice. Now the Pestronks have hired a major security force—to protect their project from union protesters, they claim, but, Williams reports, their idea of "security" has been more than a little aggressive:
Some examples of the security staff’s actions include: shouting at the demonstrators, flashing weapons, threatening and assaulting protesters and bystanders, and arguing with Police. I would like to highlight a few examples. A demonstrator was walking alongside the jobsite and one of the security guards started to shout at him. A police officer repeatedly told the guard to stop yelling at the passerby, but the guard refused to relent and was eventually arrested taken away in a police car for the verbal abuse.
But, you know, violent union protesters!
- Insecurity has become one of the defining facts of middle-class life, and it's a big factor separating Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan from the middle class.
- After all the publicity about how Apple and its contractors were going to improve working conditions and wages in the Chinese plants where Apple's popular products like iPads and iPhones are made, it doesn't look like much is changing. At least not if it costs Apple and Foxconn any money.
So basically, Apple got its good headlines by claiming it would clean up its act, and now it's trying to keep on screwing workers without anyone noticing. I guess money-saving decisions like this are why Apple CEO Tim Cook is the highest-paid CEO in the country?
- Their recent strike will bring Houston janitors from $8.35 an hour now to $9.35 an hour in 2016. Management had been pressing for a contract that would have paid the janitors $8.85 an hour in 2017. Josh Eidelson explains what else the janitors won, what they conceded, and how they made it happen.
- Crystal Sugar workers have been locked out for a year, because the CEO of this very profitable company sees the union contract as a "tumor" to be gotten rid of at whatever cost. It's one of the most depressing, infuriating stories out there.
- Greenskeepers are picketing a country club in Oakland, California, after the club unilaterally changed their health care plans.
State and local legislation
- A ballot initiative that would put collective bargaining rights in the Michigan constitution took another step toward actually getting a vote when the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered the state Board of Canvassers to put it on the November ballot. But that's not the final word—opponents of the measure will be appealing to the state Supreme Court.