Tag: union
Uber Drivers In U.S. Cities To Join Planned Worker Protests

Uber Drivers In U.S. Cities To Join Planned Worker Protests

By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Drivers for ride service company Uber will join planned nationwide protests on Tuesday, when activists and low-wage workers renew their call for better pay and the right to join a union in the wake of Donald Trump’s U.S. presidential election win, organizers said.

Hundreds of Uber drivers in two dozen cities, including San Francisco, Miami and Boston, for the first time will add their voices to the union-backed “Fight for $15” campaign that has helped convince several cities and states to raise starting pay significantly above the U.S. minimum wage of $7.25.

Justin Berisie, 34, drives for Uber in Denver and is joining Tuesday’s protests.

“Someone who lives in America and goes to work every day, that person deserves a decent living,” said Berisie, who has a 5-year-old daughter and is struggling to make ends meet. He said he earns $500 or less, before expenses such as gasoline, during an average week where he is on duty for 50 to 60 hours.

The four-year-old “Fight for $15” movement includes fast-food workers, home care aides, airport baggage handlers and other low-wage employees. Organizers from “Fight for $15,” which is backed by the Service Employees International Union, say the campaign’s Nov. 29 demonstrations will take place in 340 cities and nearly 20 of the nation’s busiest airports.

U.S. policy is expected to become less worker friendly following the election of Trump, a international businessman who will be president as fellow Republicans control both chambers of Congress as well as federal agencies that govern the formation of unions, overtime rules and more.

Uber drivers have sued the company in several states, accusing it of depriving drivers of various employment protections by misclassifying them as independent contractors.

The lawsuits are a test for companies such as Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL], a high-profile player in the so-called “sharing economy,” which say that their contractor model allows for flexibility that many see as important to their success. A legal finding that drivers are employees could raise Uber’s costs and force it to pay Social Security, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance.

(Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

IMAGE: An Uber car is seen parked with the driver’s lunch left on the dashboard in Venice, Los Angeles, California, United States July 15, 2015. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Scott Walker: Uncle Scrooge’s Lackey In Wisconsin

Scott Walker: Uncle Scrooge’s Lackey In Wisconsin

Economically speaking, all 237 GOP presidential candidates are selling the same magic beans.

Everybody knows the script by now: Tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” bring widespread prosperity; top off Scrooge McDuck’s bullion pool, and the benefits flow outward to everybody else, the economy surges, budget deficits melt away, and the song of the turtle dove will be heard in the land.

Almost needless to say, these “supply side” miracles have never actually happened in the visible world. State budget debacles in Kansas and Louisiana only signify the latest failures of right-wing dogma. Hardly anybody peddling these magic beans actually believes in them anymore. Nevertheless, feigning belief signifies tribal loyalty to the partisan Republicans who will choose the party’s nominee.

However, with everybody in the field playing “let’s pretend,” a candidate needs another way to distinguish himself. I suspect that Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, may have found it.

See, Walker won’t just put money back in “hardworking taxpayers’” pockets. Like a latter-day Richard Nixon, Walker will also stick it to people he doesn’t like: lollygagging schoolteachers, feather-bedding union members, and smug, tenured college professors who think they’re smarter than everybody else. If Walker lacks charisma, there’s an edge of ruthlessness in his otherwise bland demeanor that hits GOP primary voters right where they live.

No less an authority than Uncle Scrooge himself — i.e. David Koch of Koch Industries, who with his brother Charles has pledged to spend $900 million to elect a Republican in 2016 — told the New York Observer after a closed-door gathering at Manhattan’s Empire Club that Walker will win the nomination and crush Hillary Clinton in a general election “by a major margin.” 

Viewed from a distance, the determination of prosperous, well-educated Wisconsin to convert itself into an anti-union right-to-work state like Alabama or Arkansas appears mystifying. To risk the standing of the University of Wisconsin system by abolishing academic tenure, as Walker intends, is damn near incomprehensible.

Attack one of America’s great public research universities for the sake of humiliating (Democratic-leaning) professors over nickel-and-dime budgetary issues? Do Wisconsinites have the first clue how modern economies work?

Maybe not. But Walker’s supporters definitely appear to know who their enemies are, culturally speaking. Incredulity aside, it would be a mistake not to notice the craftiness with which he’s brought off the transformation. Not to mention that Walker’s won three elections since 2010 in a “blue” state that hasn’t supported a Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan.

Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes don’t mean much by themselves, but throw in Michigan and Ohio, Midwestern states also trending similarly, and you’ve definitely got something.

Act 10, the 2011 law that took away collective bargaining rights for many public employees in Wisconsin (except, at first, for police and firefighters), brought crowds of angry teachers (also mostly Democrats) to the state capitol in Madison for weeks of demonstrations. As much as MSNBC was thrilled, many Wisconsinites appear to have been irked.

In the end, the state ended up saving roughly $3 billion by shifting the funding of fringe benefits such as health insurance and pensions from employer to employee, costing the average teacher roughly 16 percent of his or her compensation. Mindful of budget shortfalls, the unions had proposed negotiations, but that wasn’t enough for Gov. Walker.

For the record, Act 10 was an almost verbatim copy of a bill promoted by the Arlington, Virginia-based American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a think-tank largely funded by, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch.

Four years ago, a documentary filmmaker caught Walker on camera telling wealthy supporters that the new law was just the beginning. “The first step is, we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public-­employee unions,” he said, “because you use divide-­and-­conquer.”

“If we can do it in Wisconsin, we can do it anywhere — even in our nation’s capital,” Walker wrote in his book, Unintimidated, notes Dan Kaufman in the New York Times Magazine. Elsewhere, Walker has boasted that as president, he could take on foreign policy challenges because, he’s said, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.”

Ridiculous, of course, but it plays.

Meanwhile, rueful trade unionists who endorsed Walker in 2010 are crying the blues, because they never imagined that having vanquished the women’s union he’d come after the ironworkers and the electricians in their pickup trucks. Divided, they’ve been conquered.

So right-to-work it is: diminished salaries, job security, pensions, health and safety regulations will inevitably follow.

More bullion for Scrooge McDuck’s pool.

So now it’s the professors’ turn. Walker, a Marquette dropout, has described his new law as “Act 10 for the university.” Tenure’s a dead letter in cases of “financial emergency…requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.” 

So who gets redirected first? Left-wing culture warriors or climate scientists? Hint: Scrooge is a fierce climate-change denier.

Meanwhile, Democrats underestimate Scott Walker at considerable peril.

Photo: Wikicommons

Endorse This: Ted Cruz Meets The Crickets

Endorse This: Ted Cruz Meets The Crickets

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You have to give Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) some credit: He gives the same exact speech to any audience — even if the ones outside of his Tea Party base aren’t going to cheer him on.

Click above to watch a clip reel of Cruz’s standard lines all going flat, when he journeyed this week into the Fire Fighters union convention — then share this video!

Video via NowThis News/MSNBC.

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Supreme Court Says Home Health Workers Cannot Be Forced To Pay Union Dues

Supreme Court Says Home Health Workers Cannot Be Forced To Pay Union Dues

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a setback to the union movement Monday, ruling personal home care employees cannot be forced to pay dues to a union.

In a 5-4 ruling written Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the court said these employees, some of whom care for their disabled children at home, have a constitutional right not to support a union they oppose.

The decision is a victory for the National Right to Work Foundation, which took up the cause of several mothers who objected to paying union fees. It is a defeat for Service Employees International Union and Illinois Governor Pat Quinn.

Beginning in 2003, Illinois officials agreed to deem these home care workers “public employees” because they are paid with Medicaid funds to care for disabled adults. That cleared the way for the SEIU to organize them into a union.

Union officials say they have won higher wages and better benefits for 20,000 of these home care assistants in Illinois. But anti-union lawyers sued the state, arguing these private assistants are not truly public employees and should not be compelled to pay fees to a union.

In keeping its ruling narrow, the court refrained from dealing an even greater setback to unions. Some had urged the court to rule that all public employees have a right to opt out of paying union dues, reversing its 1977 ruling that upheld mandatory union fees.

By law, public employees cannot be required by law to join a union and pay full dues as members. These dues may pay for lobby and political spending.

But since 1977, the high court had upheld so-called “fair share” fees that require all the employees to pay a lesser amount to cover the cost of collective bargaining.

In recent years, however, more conservative justices raised doubts about whether the practice violated the First Amendment. They argued that the government usually cannot force individuals to support private groups, yet the mandatory fees forced some government employees to support organizations they opposed.

In the Illinois case, known as Harris v. Quinn, the National Right to Work Foundation urged the justices to either limit who can be forced to support a union or to strike down mandatory fees entirely.

A ruling casting doubt on mandatory fees could have a significant effect in Democratic-leaning states, which authorize unions and mandatory fees. These so-called blue states are in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest and on the West Coast. Most of the Republican-leaning red states in the South and the Great Plains have “right to work” laws that allow employees to opt out of unions.

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb