Tag: contracts
#EndorseThis: Trump Didn’t Pay Hundreds Of Employees: USA Today

#EndorseThis: Trump Didn’t Pay Hundreds Of Employees: USA Today

USA Today released a groundbreaking report yesterday detailing hundreds of instances in which Donald Trump failed to pay contractors hired to work on his hotels and resorts. The paper counted “[a]t least 60 lawsuits, along with hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings” in which scores of carpenters, painters, waiters, bartenders, lawyers, and other employees and contracted companies accuse Trump of bilking them on the bill, in some cases bankrupting family businesses.

Trump’s response? The same as it’s always been: It’s their fault for not doing the job up to his standards! But then how did a “really smart person” hire so many “incompetents”?

This follows a similar pattern: Trump delegitimizes institutions — in this case, contracts, and elsewhere: the judiciary, the Republican primary, trade deals, NATO, the media — when they become inconvenient for him, and then uses his money and fame to push the victims of his behavior into the shadows.

Now, of course, he’s running for president. Will the American people elect a man who has such a steady pattern of burning his business relationships?

The entire USA Today report is worth a read. For the time-crunched and the Trump-exhausted, here’s their primer:

Photo and video: USA Today

On Docks, Workers Still Have Power

On Docks, Workers Still Have Power

By Chris Kirkham and Andrew Khouri, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

LOS ANGELES — More than 4,400 ships bring nearly $400 billion worth of goods through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach every year, a crucial link in the global supply chain of factories, warehouses, docks, highways and rail lines.

Wages for most blue-collar workers along the chain have fallen with the quick rise of global trade. But the longshoremen who move the goods the shortest distance, between ship and shore, have shrewdly protected pay that trumps that of many white-collar managers.

About half of West Coast union longshoremen make more than $100,000 a year — some much more, according to shipping industry data. More than half of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000. A few bosses make more than $300,000. All get free health care.

Longshoreman pay dwarfs that of almost all other transit employees, such as trucking, railroad or airline workers. At massive warehouse complexes in the Inland Empire, just an hour’s drive from the ports, goods for the nation’s largest retailers are shuttled around by temporary workers making as little as $10 or $11 an hour, with no benefits or job security.

The unique clout of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union came into sharp relief recently with the partial shutdown of 29 West Coast ports. The crisis passed with a contract deal a week ago, but it will take up to three months to clear the backlog of cargo on the docks and ships stranded offshore. Many businesses and workers won’t recover the money they lost because of port gridlock.

Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the shipping companies’ pay figures fail to account for the more than 8,000 so-called casual workers — part-timers who don’t receive benefits and often work for years to become registered union members. The data, released by the Pacific Maritime Association, reflect 90 percent of the “registered” union members or more than 12,000 workers.

The association declined a Los Angeles Times request for similar pay data for casual workers and about 1,100 lower-tier union members.

“They don’t want to talk about the other workers,” Merrilees said. “I don’t think it’s responsible.”

How the Pacific longshoremen have weathered forces that have crippled many other unions is a tale of foresight, geography, and technology.

A deal cut by union leaders half a century ago allowed workers to share in the gains from innovations in efficiency, such as modern shipping containers. Another key move: organizing all West Coast ports in the 1930s under a single contract, which prevents shipping companies from pitting workers at neighboring ports against one another.

More recently, longshoremen benefited from the rise of U.S. trade with other Pacific Rim countries, positioning the ports as a strategic nexus, another key leverage point in wage talks.

“So many labor unions don’t have that power anymore,” said Ruth Milkman, a professor specializing in labor movements at City University of New York. “Here’s a place where globalization has benefited the union, whereas the opposite is true in manufacturing.”

Since 1980, container traffic through West Coast ports has grown more than sixfold, according to the most recent data from the American Association of Port Authorities. Pacific ports now handle 52 percent of U.S. cargo volume, compared with 41 percent at East Coast ports.

Unlike factories, ports can’t be moved to low-wage countries. The jobs are “impervious to outsourcing,” said John Ahlquist, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison who has studied port unions worldwide.

The longshoremen’s union has served as a gatekeeper for new entrants to the industry. There are more than 13,000 registered union longshoremen, clerks, and foremen, according to West Coast shipping industry data from 2013.

But the more than 8,000 casual workers compete daily for hours of dock work, hoping to snag leftover shifts after union members get first pick. Many toil for years in a part-time holding pattern, waiting for a new round of hiring.

Patience can pay off. Full-fledged union members are divided into three classes: longshoremen, clerks, and foremen/walking bosses.

The majority are longshoremen, about half of whom — 4,900 — made more than $100,000 in 2013, according to shipping company data; 1,400 longshoremen made more than $150,000 in 2013, according to the data.

More than half of the 600 foremen and walking bosses took home more than $200,000. At the top end, 85 of them earned more than $250,000.

Overtime, paid at higher rates, accounts for about a third of all hours worked, according to the shipping industry. Longshoremen also get bonuses for specific skills and night shifts.

Michael Dimon got his start on the docks in 1978, following his father and great-grandfather. He’s proud of the wages he earns and credits collective bargaining for allowing him to buy a home and save money for his two children to attend college. Dimon never finished high school.

Before 2013, he said, he never made more than $100,000 a year. That year he made $117,000, he said. Last year, he made more, as port traffic at Los Angeles and Long Beach surged to the third-busiest year on record. He declined to say how much.

“I would never pretend to be ashamed of the wages that we negotiate and fight for — absolutely not,” Dimon said. “What it allows me to do is live the American dream. And sadly to say, it’s dying here in America.”

The longshoreman’s dream was forged by a series of strategic decisions that have given the ILWU unparalleled strength.

In the 1930s, West Coast port union leaders succeeded in negotiating a single contract that linked ports from the Pacific Northwest to San Diego.

In 1960, the ILWU cut a deal that paved the way for a revolution in shipping. For centuries, longshoremen had used highly labor-intensive methods when loading and unloading ships — nets, metal hooks, and pallets. The union offered to embrace the use of containers in exchange for higher pay and benefits, along with richer pensions and buyouts for displaced workers.

The strategy continues to define the union’s approach. In 2002, contract negotiations broke down in part over computer systems intended to replace clerical workers who tracked cargo. The deal led to the elimination of hundreds of clerical jobs, but the union negotiated substantial increases in pension benefits and held on to free healthcare.

In the contract talks resolved last month, one of the main sticking points was over who should maintain and repair the trailers that truckers use to haul goods from the ports. Shipping lines recently outsourced the equipment to third-party companies, threatening the union’s maintenance jobs.

Merrilees, the union spokesman, said the union retained the right to do some inspections and repairs on the trailers. But trade experts said the presence of third-party companies could continue to complicate the issue.

Experts point out that the ILWU’s unique place in the supply chain has allowed it to benefit despite automation. But it’s unclear how long the union can prevent technology from eroding pay and job security.

The union may struggle to maintain high wages in a low-wage transportation network, said Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“The nail’s sticking up,” he said, “and people have hammers.”

Photo: John Morgan via Flickr

House Democrats Seek Probe Of Motorola’s Radio Contracts

House Democrats Seek Probe Of Motorola’s Radio Contracts

By Greg Gordon, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Three senior House Democrats on Tuesday asked the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog to investigate allegations, raised in a McClatchy series, that Motorola’s contracting tactics have led state and local governments to squander millions of dollars on the company’s pricey two-way emergency radio systems.

“If the allegations in the McClatchy articles are true, millions of federal tax dollars may have been wasted, and millions more are at risk,” Reps. Henry Waxman and Anna Eshoo of California and Diana DeGette of Colorado wrote Inspector General John Roth.

“We therefore ask that you initiate an investigation to determine whether the abuses described in the McClatchy articles occurred and if so, whether (Homeland Security) grants were involved,” they wrote.

The three members of the House of Representatives urged Roth to propose changes “to prevent a recurrence of these abuses” if the department’s grants are found to have helped finance any of the contracts in question.

Waxman is the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, while Eshoo and DeGette are the ranking minority members on the committee’s communications and technology subcommittee and the oversight and investigations subcommittee, respectively.

Motorola’s public safety arm, known as Motorola Solutions Inc. since the Illinois-based company split in two in 2011, has for years controlled an estimated 80 percent or more of the market for emergency communications equipment.

In seven stories published in March, McClatchy described how the company has used close relationships with state and local contracting officials, police and fire chiefs and county sheriffs, as well as an array of marketing strategies, to effectively lock in business in all but a smattering of public safety agencies in the nation’s 20 biggest cities. For many years, Motorola froze out rivals by embedding proprietary software in its equipment so it wouldn’t interact with other brands.

Motorola Solutions said in a statement that it “complied with applicable laws and regulations, and competes fairly for our customers’ business by offering them superior products and solutions.”

“We offer solutions and products that achieve cost savings for the taxpayer, improve safety for communities and enable quick implementation for local agencies,” the company said.

Motorola said that it has served public safety around the globe for more than 85 years, that it sells products that “enable seamless communications,” and that it is the company’s state-of-the-art technology “that has allowed us to maintain our customers’ loyalty.”

Photo via WikiCommons

Interested in national news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Privatized Parts: GOP-Connected Contractors Mess Up Indiana Social Services

The Los Angeles Timesreports that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, a former top George W. Bush budget official and a rock star among Republican insiders, authorized his government to dole out hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to well-connected companies that so they could privatize the delivery of benefits to the poor, elderly, and disabled.

In 2008, the efforts to put the system in corporate hands — and replace government caseworkers with call centers — more than doubled the state’s “error rate” to 13%, meaning that a record number of cases and claims were inaccurately denied. (The “error rate” has plummeted–privatization advocates point to the number of success, while critics note that caseworkers have returned to the field.)

“People were being dumped off food stamps and Medicaid in large numbers; people with profound disabilities were told they weren’t cooperating,” said a state lobbyist for the elderly and the disabled, in an interview with the Times.

One of the subcontractors that administered the program, ACS, received an 8-year contract in 2009 that was worth more than $600 million.