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Tag: right to work
WATCH: Biden's Bold Pro-Labor Remarks Win Cheers From The Left

WATCH: Biden's Bold Pro-Labor Remarks Win Cheers From The Left

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

In Alabama — a deeply Republican state known for its anti-union right-to-work laws — Amazon employees are voting on whether or not to organize a union. And President Joe Biden has offered support for the push in a pro-union video that many progressives and labor advocates are applauding.

In the video, Biden declared, "I've long said that America wasn't built by Wall Street. It was built by the middle class, and unions built the middle class. Unions put power in the hands of workers. They level the playing field. They give you a stronger voice for your health, your safety, higher wages protections from radical discrimination and sexual harassment. Unions lift up workers, union and non-union."

Although Biden didn't specially mention Amazon by name, the president mentioned "workers in Alabama" and stressed that workers who want to unionize shouldn't be intimidated by management.

"Let me be really clear: It's not up to me to decide whether anyone should join a union," Biden said in his video. "But let me be even more clear: It's not up to an employer to decide that either. The choice to join a union is up to the workers full-stop. Full stop. Today and over the next few days and weeks, workers in Alabama and all across America are voting on whether or not to organize a union in their workplace. This is vitally important."

The Democratic president went onto say, "There should be no intimidation, no coercion, no threats, no anti-union propaganda. No supervisor should confront employees about their union preferences. You know, every worker should have a free and fair choice to join a union. The law guarantees that choice."

Here are some responses to Biden's video:

5 Things To Remember About John Kasich

5 Things To Remember About John Kasich

Governor John Kasich of Ohio declared his run for the presidency on Tuesday, becoming the 16th Republican to do so. A seasoned politician, he was the youngest person elected to the Ohio state Senate at 26, spent 18 years in the House, and was chairman of the House Budget Committee in the mid-’90s, where he was a key player in the bill that ultimately ended the government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996.

He’s a religious man who practices his faith with political actions, not just words, but it’s the mix of moderate and conservative positions that makes him something of an outlier from the gaggle of hard-right wingers on the campaign trail, and has led him to become a potential dark horse who could go far in this race. As he tries to make up lost ground and distinguish himself from the other candidates, here are five things worth remembering about John Kasich.

1. He’s got a symbiotic relationship with Fox News.

Fox News and the Republican Party are undeniably tied to each other. In fact, there’s an old argument that many GOPers running for president these days — some of whom have little real chance of winning the nomination — are just angling for a show on Fox News and an opportunity to make boatloads of money.

John Kasich already had his own Fox News show from 2001 to 2007, In the Heartland with John Kasich. He left the network to run for governor in 2009.

While there, he used his platform to talk about balancing the budget – his pet issue – setting the stage for his future candidacy. And Fox News repaid his services: Both anchors Megyn Kelly and Sean Hannity have promoted him as a candidate, whether as governor or president.

Hannity especially is a fan, hosting Kasich on his programs many times, conducting softball interviews and openly promoting his candidacy.

In one appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, Kasich asked for donations while the network flashed his website information onscreen, triggering a complaint that was later dismissed.

As Media Matters for America outlines, numerous Fox News employees, from Rupert Murdoch to Mike Huckabee, have contributed money to Kasich’s gubernatorial campaigns. (Huckabee is, of course, now also running for the Republican nomination.)

2. He’s got a temper.

He might appear to be a pretty mild-mannered guy – more Scott Walker than Chris Christie. But his temper has pushed away donors before and even other politicians have sent out warnings about Kasich’s occasional outbursts.

His temper has been noted by reporters both local and national, from the ‘90s to the present day. “Abrasive” is a term that is commonly attributed to him, as in the following incidents:

  • He called a cop an idiot because the officer had the gall to pull him over for passing too close to an emergency vehicle.
  • He told The Atlantic’s Molly Ball that neither he nor his wife read the magazine. Then he insulted Ball, saying that her job was “really a dumb thing to do,” later berating her for asking what he “considered a stupid question” in front of a meeting of cabinet officials.
  • He has a history of being hostile to the media, too: He’s said he doesn’t read Ohio newspapers because they aren’t an “uplifting experience” and was said to be a complete jerk to both the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s editorial board and his gubernatorial opponent, Ed FitzGerald, last year in a meeting with both. Acting like a petulant child, he refused to acknowledge FitzGerald and answer the board’s questions.

Yet despite all that, those who point out his temper also mention how he’s a font of ideas and is always willing to do the work involved in governing. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who worked closely with Kasich while they were both in the House, told Politico, “He has intensity, urgency and passion issues. He doesn’t see public policy as some abstract intellectual thing, but rather as an emotional, right and wrong process that can help or hurt people.”

“He does have a tendency to ready-fire-aim,” said Mike Hartley, who has worked with Kasich both on his 2010 campaign for governor and in his administration. “But here’s the thing – he makes things happen. His will is tremendous, and he gets people to follow him. He’s an ass kicker.”

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3. He’s one of the few Republican governors to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act.

To Kasich, expanding health care to vulnerable populations is a moral imperative and a cornerstone of his faith. He shrugged off criticism from other Republicans, saying simply that it was the right thing to do.

“A lot of government is improvement. It’s not slashing and burning. It’s making things work better at a lower price,” Kasich said, as reported by the Columbus Dispatch. “Our party needs more compassion. We need more empathy. Every once in a while, we’ve got to get people out of a ditch so they can live their God-given potential and they change the world.”

His compassionate conservatism has shaped a lot of his policies, from increasing spending on the mentally ill (his younger brother suffers from mental illness) to increasing tax breaks for low-income residents. But it’s his passion for expanding Medicaid that irks Republicans because he ties policies that are anathema to the party with a sense of Christianity-oriented social justice that Republicans are always trying to own. He famously said, “When you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor.”

“I think there is among both parties – both parties – a growing antipathy towards poor people,” he told National Journal’s Michelle Cottle. “One party believes in investing in bureaucracy, and the other one kind of doesn’t get it sometimes.”

4. He’s a proponent of restricting collective bargaining rights.

In this respect he is like his fellow Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker, but while Walker may be winning this round in Wisconsin, the issue is politically dead in Ohio. One of Kasich’s biggest defeats was when a ballot initiative repealed a measure that would have prohibited public employees from striking and affected their ability to bargain on terms of employment, wages, and other issues.

Voters overwhelming vetoed it, so much so that Kasich had to adjust his strategy to be less focused on winning than on stemming the loss. Kasich conceded the defeat gracefully, saying that the voters had spoken. When asked to revisit the issue, he said that there was no reason to do so.

“If people in this state feel that you need right-to-work, I don’t think people even know what that is,” Kasich said. “So, if you’re interested in pushing that kind of legislation, you’ve got to explain to people what it’s all about.”

5. He was involved in Lehman Brothers directly before it filed for bankruptcy.

Kasich is touting his Wall Street experience, specifically as a Lehman Brothers managing director, as one reason why he’d make a good president.

Although he was there in the years leading up to the 2008 economic meltdown, Kasich wasn’t exactly at the center of the big deals that contributed to it. He worked in a two-man office in Columbus, the smallest office Lehman had, but only because Kasich wouldn’t move.

His boss at the time, Gary Weinstein, told Cleveland.com that Kasich threw himself into the job. “He took it really, really seriously. It was ‘I don’t know how to be a banker, but can I learn?’ And you can’t necessarily learn to be a banker in your 50s, but you can learn to be a part of meaningful team. John was that.”

It’s not uncommon for pols to cross over to the private sector and never look back, but Kasich’s decision to turn to investment banking seems to have been driven by an intention to build a war chest and return triumphantly to politics. He joined Lehman shortly after a failed run for president in 2000 – a loss he blamed on not having enough money.

Kasich made $1.4 million in 2008, though at his announcement speech Tuesday, he conceded he didn’t have as much money as some of his GOP opponents, but he had the “statistics.”

Photo: Marc Nozell via Flickr

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

Defending Unions Against The Haters

Defending Unions Against The Haters

By Robert Bruno, Chicago Tribune (TNS)

Joining a union is the best investment a worker can make.

Unions need defending, maybe more than ever, because of the attacks they face. The passage of a right-to-work law in Wisconsin and Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s proposal for union-free zones show how distorted the lens is when the focus turns to organized labor.

Right-to-work laws are intended to limit union growth, but advocates never cite political motives or antipathy for working people. Instead, their calls for reducing labor market protections are based on the claim that unions restrain personal liberty and restrict economic development.

Nothing is further from the truth.

The “labor hater,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once called the corporate and political conservatives who mobilize against organized labor, argues that if you reduce unionization, economic prosperity will be unleashed. Yes, but for whom? Restricting union growth has always been bad for workers’ economic and political freedom. The cumulative weight of decades of social science has unquestionably demonstrated that union-bargained contracts provide workers with higher incomes, more and better benefits, and a stronger “voice” in the workplace.

Implementing a statewide right-to-work law in Illinois would be punitive for working men and women. According to a 2013 University of Illinois study that I co-authored, workers would suffer an income loss of 5.7 percent to 7.3 percent. Additionally, fewer workers would have health and retirement benefits, and with workers earning less, poverty would likely rise by 1 percent.

As King warned in the 1960s, after mostly Southern states moved to adopt right-to-work, the losses would be particularly harsh on people of color. Per-hour work incomes are at least $2.49 lower in right-to-work states for African-American, Latino, and Asian workers, compared with their wages in collective bargaining states. With lower earnings, annual state income tax revenues in Illinois would shrink by $1.5 billion.

To be fair, Rauner has not called for a statewide law. So what would the effects of a more limited local jurisdiction approach be on Illinois workers?

The premise of the local zones is that unionization suppresses job growth. But like so many claims for opposing policies that protect workers, the criticism doesn’t hold up.

A look at recent data for the Chicago area suggests that union membership levels have no direct correlation to higher unemployment. The opposite’s true, in fact. Around Chicago in 2013, the county with the fewest union members had the six-county area’s highest unemployment rate.

When you look more broadly, you find that the average unemployment rate for all eastern Illinois counties bordering right-to-work Indiana was 5.7 percent, compared with 7.6 percent for those Indiana counties just across the border. And while right-to-work prophets predict a paradise of unparalleled job creation, in 2014, Illinois added 103,000 jobs (fourth highest in the nation), compared with Indiana’s 89,000.

Union defenders should never suggest that collective bargaining is either the primary or sole driver of job creation; nor should right-to-work supporters argue that limiting union dues is a sure-fire way to put people to work.

What is assured is that the loss of income that would result from a reduction of union members will exacerbate existing income disparities. If just half of Illinois’ counties transitioned into “union free zones,” total employee compensation would drop an estimated $1.2 billion.

It’s also possible that with or without right-to-work, employment could spike in Illinois. For example, the state could take up large-scale hydraulic fracturing. But no matter the reasons that jobs appear, what is important is how the workers are valued.

Robert Bruno is a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He wrote this for the Chicago Tribune.

Photo: Wisconsin workers protest the state’s right-to-work policy (Preston Austin via Flickr)