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  • Tuesday, May 15, 2012 San Francisco Bay Guardian: Union rights are civil rights

    By Dick Meister

    Read the article at the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

    The right of U.S. workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers unhindered by employer or government interference has been a legal right since the 1930s. Yet there are workers who are unaware of that, and employers who aim to keep them unaware, meanwhile doing their utmost to keep them from exercising what is a basic civil right.

    Many employers often claim working people are in any case not much interested in unionization, noting that less than 15 percent of workers currently belong to unions.

    But as anyone who has looked beneath the employer claims has discovered, it's the illegal opposition of employers and the failure of government regulatory agencies to curtail the opposition that's the basic cause of the low rate of unionization.

    If most workers do indeed oppose unionization, then what of the recent polls decisively showing otherwise? And why do so many employers go to the considerable trouble and expense of waging major campaigns against unionization ? Why do they take such illegal actions as firing or otherwise penalizing union supporters?

    Could it be that union campaigners might be able to persuade workers to vote for unionization, despite what their employers might have to say? Or despite employer threats to punish them for voting union?

    Some employers have now taken the outrageous step of trying to keep employees from even knowing of their legal right to unionization.

    Under a National Labor Relations Board ruling last August, employers were to be required as of this April to post notices at their workplaces telling employees of their union rights.

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  • Monday, May 14, 2012 Market Playground: How J.P. Morgan Chase Has Made the Case for Breaking Up The Big Banks and Resurrecting Glass-Steagall

    By Robert Reich

    Read the article at Market Playrground.

    J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the nation’s largest bank, whose chief executive, Jamie Dimon, has lead Wall Street’s war against regulation, announced Thursday it had lost $2 billion in trades over the past six weeks and could face an additional $1 billion of losses, due to excessively risky bets.

    The bets were “poorly executed” and “poorly monitored,” said Dimon, a result of “many errors, “sloppiness,” and “bad judgment.” But not to worry. “We will admit it, we will fix it and move on.”

    Move on? Word on the Street is that J.P. Morgan’s exposure is so large that it can’t dump these bad bets without affecting the market and losing even more money. And given its mammoth size and interlinked connections with every other financial institution, anything that shakes J.P. Morgan is likely to rock the rest of the Street.

    Ever since the start of the banking crisis in 2008, Dimon has been arguing that more government regulation of Wall Street is unnecessary. Last year he vehemently and loudly opposed the so-called Volcker rule, itself a watered-down version of the old Glass-Steagall Act that used to separate commercial from investment banking before it was repealed in 1999, saying it would unnecessarily impinge on derivative trading (the lucrative practice of making bets on bets) and hedging (using some bets to offset the risks of other bets).

    Dimon argued that the financial system could be trusted; that the near-meltdown of 2008 was a perfect storm that would never happen again.

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  • Monday, May 7, 2012 SumOfUs Petition to Walmart: Stop human rights abuses in your factories

    Sign SumOfUs' petition HERE.

    Earlier this month, in a factory in Thailand that processes shrimp for a major supplier to Walmart there was a revolt. 2,000 guest workers from Cambodia and Myanmar angrily protested the seizure of their passports by factory owners in Thailand. Police were called. Shots were fired.

    But it wasn’t just the passport seizure that incited the workers’ anger — it was management slashing wages again. Their wages already didn’t cover the most basic needs, and this action put workers deeper into the factory’s debt — it’s called debt bondage. At this moment, many of them are still legally and financially trapped at the factory, victims of human trafficking.

    Sign our petition to Walmart’s VP of Ethical Sourcing Rajan Kamalanathan to demand these factory owners end human trafficking immediately and allow independent monitors to audit all of their factories.

    This is not an isolated incident. Also in Thailand, a pineapple factory had similar protests over wage reductions. There are now reports of human trafficking and that children under 15 have been bought and sold to work there. More than 73% of this factory’s shipments to the USA go to Walmart.

    Walmart’s own internal system claims to protect against these abuses, some of which the Bangkok Post Editorial staff have described as “the equivalent of actual slavery”. But these two cases highlight a chronic problem — human trafficking, identity document seizure, child labor, forced unpaid overtime, and debt-bondage are found across Walmart’s supply chain.

    Walmart’s internal system that audits factories to prevent these kind of abuses is broken at its core.

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  • Friday, May 4, 2012 Economic Policy Institute: CEOs made 231 times more than workers did in 2011

    Read the article at the Economic Policy Institute.

    In CEO pay and the top 1%: How executive compensation and financial-sector pay have fueled income inequality, EPI President Lawrence Mishel and research assistant Natalie Sabadish find that CEO compensation has grown exponentially in recent decades, while worker compensation has been relatively stagnant. The report found:

    -From 1978 to 2011, CEO compensation increased more than 725 percent, compared with an increase in compensation for workers of only 5.7 percent.

    -CEOs were paid, on average, 231 times more than workers in 2011. This CEO-to-worker compensation ratio includes the value of stock options exercised by executives. An alternative measure of CEO compensation that includes the value of stock options granted in a given year yields a CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 209.4-to-1. By comparison, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was roughly 20-to-1 in 1965.

    While previewing data that will be further examined in the forthcoming 12th edition of The State of Working America, scheduled to be released this August, CEO pay and the top 1% is already drawing media attention to widening wage-growth disparities. Its findings were reported in outlets such as MSNBC.com, Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and MSNBC’s Ed Show.

    Class of 2012 faces high unemployment and depressed wages

    Young workers are still struggling to overcome the deep crater the Great Recession left in the labor market, a new EPI briefing paper shows. In Class of 2012: Labor market for young graduates remains grim, Heidi Shierholz, Natalie Sabadish, and Hilary Wething find that 2012 graduates face high unemployment and underemployment rates, depressed wages, and burdensome student-loan debts. The report’s findings include:

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  • Wednesday, May 2, 2012 The Nation: End the Cover-Up at Walmart

    Read the article at The Nation.

    On April 21, David Barstow reported in the New York Times that Walmex, Walmart's largest foreign operation, had passed more than $24 million in bribes to politicians who could grease the wheels of its expansion in Mexico. After discovering the corruption, the retail giant's top mangement in the US moved to cover up the scandal. Barstow's expose, a triumph of investigative reporting, was well-timed for activists seeking to change the company as Liza Featherstone points out in The Nation. A call for resignations at the company is mounting , with the massive New York City Pension Funds, a Walmart shareholder, now on board.

    TO DO

    Among those leading the efforts to reform Walmart are company employees like Venanzi Luna, who created this petition calling for a change in leadership at America's largest retailer and a thorough and accountable investigation into Walmart's reported cover-up of bribery in its Mexico operations. Join her call and then share this post with family, Facebook friends, Twitter followers and your local media outfits. A new website—6degreesofwalmart.com—is also looking to change Walmart's behavior by targeting the company's political spending for right-wing causes, calling on the company to disclose its political spending and allowing citizens to directly challenge Walmart on political spending.

     TO READ

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