First, Let's Kill All the Bosses

This weekend I saw an NBC promo that featured some CNBC analyst purporting to advise people who are having problems with their boss.

Short version: stop forcing your boss to "explain your behavior to other people."

Fact: If your boss is spending even five seconds "explaining your behavior to other people," then you do indeed have a big problem.  Your big problem is that your boss is an asshole.

Your boss is an asshole because your boss is undermining and sabotaging you by publicly disparaging your skills and professionalism.

More broadly, your boss is an asshole because 45 years ago repug/conservative capitalism began to flip the New Deal system of powerful labor/worker that prevented owners and bosses from abusing workers to one that allows employers to treat employees as serfs without rights.

It's Labor Fucking Day, people. Let's stop giving bosses power.  Let's stop putting employers in charge. Let's stop pretending owners are "job creators."

If every boss, employer, owner disappeared tomorrow, the work - the actual work of keeping the economy humming - the work would continue without a hiccup.

Workers create jobs. Workers build and run the economy.  Workers are irreplaceable.

What would a worker-centered economy look like?  Let's start with what we lost 45 years ago and build on that.

• Criminalize non-worker interference with organizing and collective bargaining. Every workplace that votes to unionize gets a union. Every unionized workplace requires collective bargaining.
• Repeal all pro-rentier, anti-worker legislation, regulations and tax breaks.
• Permanently bar from all government contracts, tax breaks and subsidies all corporations that take anti-worker actions (not just layoffs and off-shoring but also a worker-management pay ratio of more than 50 to 1). 
• Ban all future and reverse all previous mergers/acquisitions that give any entity control of more than five percent of any economic sector. Criminalize anti-trust behavior.
• Minimum wage of $25 per hour, indexed to inflation.
• Social Security equal to minimum wage, and available at age 55.
• Medicare for All or Single Payer medical insurance.
• Universal Child Care.
• Construct 100 million new units of affordable housing.
• Build mass transportation that gets every worker to their workplace.  

This is fun!  Let your imagination run wild!  No pro-worker policy or program is too much!

The Resistance: Solidarity

from Down With Tyranny:

And Repugs Want To Take It Away

Blatantly stolen from Down With Tyranny:



So with every bite of hot dog and sip of beer, thank those commie union agitators for:

The Weekend
The 40-hour Week
Safe Workplaces
Lunch Breaks
Overtime Pay
Minimum Wage
Workers' Compensation
Paid Vacations
Sick Days
Pensions

If you're getting paid, thank a Union.

Because if it weren't for Unions, and the hundreds of union members who have given their lives to ensure we have decent wages, an eight-hour day, a forty-hour week, weekends, safety regulations and workers' compensation, we'd all be getting pennies a day to suffer in some Trumpian sweatshop.

Think Progress:

When Labor Day was originally conceived as a federal holiday, it was as a concession to the labor movement after bloody union unrest that left 30 striking workers dead. It was meant as a day to celebrate the efforts and sacrifices of unionized workers.

A shrinking share of Americans are union members today. But the benefits brought about by the union movement are still just as strong, particularly when it comes to workers’ pay.

Being in a union is particularly helpful for marginalized groups that tend to be paid less than white men. A new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that black union workers earn wages that are, on average, 16.4 percent higher than black workers who aren’t in a union. The same is true for women: a report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women in a union earn 30.9 percent more than women who aren’t unionized.

Unionization also yields salary benefits for white men, who get a 20.1 percent boost for being in a union. But the wage-boosting power of unions has been hampered as the share of workers who belong to one has declined. In 1983, the earliest year the Bureau of Labor Statistics has data for, 20.1 percent of the workforce belonged to a union. Today that share has been cut nearly in half, down to 11.1 percent.

That’s hurt everyone’s wages, not just unionized workers. The wage-boosting power of unions usually spills out into other workplaces because they set standards that everyone ends up adopting. A new report from the Economic Policy Institute found that for men working in the private sector who aren’t in a union, their weekly wages would be about 5 percent higher if union membership had stayed at the same rate as it was in 1979. That would mean an extra $2,704 per year on average.

Non-union women would also benefit, but the impact would be smaller — a 2 to 3 percent increase in wages — because women have historically been a much smaller share of union workers.

The drop in union membership, and the subsequent erosion of the wage benefits for all workers, has played a role in widening wage inequality, holding down pay at the bottom of the scale but less so at the top. In fact, other researchers have found a strong correlation between the fall of union power and the rise of income inequality.

Eat and Drink Union

From Think Progress:

No More Permatemps. Thanks, Obama!

We created the National Labor Relations Board 80 years ago to help Unions fight criminal employers.  But for decades, as repugs kept it neutered, NLRB has been less a friend to workers than our worst enemy. 

But not now.

Loomis at LGM:

In their myriad ways to avoid not only unions but also responsibility for their own employees, employers have come up with any number of ways to control workers without having any legal obligation to them. One of the most effective ways is to use temp agencies for long-term workers who labor on the shop floor next to actual employees, doing the same work with lower wages and fewer if any benefits. The Japanese auto industry’s investment in American factories for instance has relied heavily on this sort of arrangement. How can a factory unionize when the workers are technically employees of different companies? This is of course half the point of it, the other half being lowering employee compensation. Before this week, the rule was that the temp company would have to grant permission for their employees to be included in such a bargaining unit, which is of course laughable that they would grant. But by a 3-1 vote, the NLRB overturned that rule this week.

The National Labor Relations Board is reaffirming its view that labor law must now address the brave new world of the fissured workplace—where workers are often separated from their actual employer by layers of subcontractors and staffing agencies. On Monday, the board announced a decision on the case Miller & Anderson, ruling that unions that want to represent bargaining units including direct employees as well as “permatemps,” contract workers, and other indirect workers that share a “community of interest” are no longer required to get permission from the parent company.

The old standard, established by George W. Bush’s NLRB in 2004, which required unions to gain such parent-employer consent, allowed companies to use staffing agencies and subcontractors as a barrier to organizing drives. Under the new ruling, a nurses union, for example, can now more readily expand bargaining units at a hospital to include registered nurses who are directly employed by the hospital, as well as nurses who work for staffing agencies hired by the hospital.

This is absolutely huge and another enormous advance in labor law by Tom Perez’s Department of Labor.

In an increasingly fractured world of labor relations, it’s hard to understate how big of a deal this is for easing union organizing efforts. And coming less than a year after its Browning Ferris ruling that established a bold new standard for defining when parent companies are joint employers of subcontracted workers, the Miller & Anderson decision is yet another important step that increases employer accountability to their workers by expanding the responsibilities of joint employers.

Not only does the decision mark an emerging new jurisprudence on labor relations, it also serves to burnish President Obama’s second-term record on labor and worker rights, which includes a rash of bold new policies enacted through executive power.

You can read the decision in this PDF

 

This is why I have zero patience with anyone voting for Jill Stein. While there’s no guarantee that Hillary Clinton will have as strong a DOL as Obama has since naming Perez to his cabinet, there’s also no question that her NLRB appointees will build on these sorts of decisions to improve conditions for workers. I simply assume that most people who refuse to “compromise their values” by voting for Hillary basically don’t actually care about working class people.

It's Our Day, Workers: The Day to Go Union!

Celebrate the huge Union victory at Verizon back in June.  Why would you not want one of these for yourself? Unions are the only protection workers have. Oganize!

Erik Loomis at LGM:

The Verizon strike is over and it is a landslide victory for the workers and their unions, the Communication Workers of America and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

The four-year contracts would give workers a nearly 11 percent increase in pay over all, up from the 6.5 percent increase that Verizon had proposed before the strike, as well as modest ratification bonuses and profit-sharing.

SNIP 

The unions managed to beat back proposed pension cuts, including a cap on the accrual of pension benefits after 30 years of service. 

The company also agreed to withdraw a proposal that would have allowed it to relocate workers for up to two months anywhere in its geographic coverage area, although it had already expressed an openness to withdrawing the proposal before the strike.

Proposals to change seniority rules and to make the company’s sickness and disability policy more strict were also withdrawn, and the company agreed to change a performance review program in New York City that many workers considered abusive.

Significantly, the new contracts also cover some 65 unionized workers at Verizon Wireless stores, signaling the first time that retail wireless workers at the company have been included in a union contract, a potentially important precedent.

This is an incredible contract. The workers win nearly twice as much money as they originally asked for. They force Verizon to cave on all the benefits and the relocation drive that infuriated workers. They make Verizon back down on outsourcing jobs overseas. They force the company to create 1000 new union jobs and allow Verizon stores to become part of the bargaining unit. In return, the workers give up basically nothing. They allow individual workers to take a buy out if they want it. OK. And they open up slightly on who precisely takes a given call, but maintaining that the worker taking it is a union worker. Who cares. They also had to do some givebacks on health care, but these are the compromises that must be made sometimes. Overall, this is an outstanding contract and a gigantic win for workers.

 

SNIP

For Hamilton Nolan, the lesson is that strikes work and that we should all go on strike when we feel the need to do so.

Strikes work. Strikes have always worked. Strikes still work. Pro-business forces like to deride unions as socialist parasites, but strikes are, in a sense, one of the purest free market actions that workers can take: the refusal to sell labor at a price that is deemed too low. This has the effect of raising the price of labor.

Though “Economics 101″ idiots like to pretend that the free market will always magically produce the perfect wage for every job, the reality is that working people—people with less money—are always at a disadvantage when it comes to asserting the leverage necessary to raise their own wages, because they can’t afford to stop working and lose a paycheck. This is the biggest hurdle that strikes have to clear. It’s hard for working people to leave work, demanding better wages and working conditions. It’s a gamble. But it tends to pay off.

As much as workers need wages, businesses need labor even more. The free market has not raised your wages in decades. The government has not raised your wages in decades. You need to raise your own wages. Organize. Then strike. It’s always good to be reminded that it works.

I’m a bit less sanguine about this. After all, there certainly have been disastrous strikes. But he’s mostly right. If workers stand up and act upon their demands, their chances of living a dignified life are much higher.

For me, the real lesson is that if you don’t support joining a union, you are a fool because you are only hurting yourself. Almost all of us should have unions. Even if you are a faculty member or public employee in the South and live in a right-to-work state, you should still have a union because it will serve as an organized voice and point of power, even if you can’t win a contract. I know, because I helped one get off the ground. Entry-level lawyers at big law firms should have unions. Workers at every private factory or establishment should have unions. Starbucks and McDonald’s workers should have unions. We should all have unions. Organizing like the Verizon workers is not a throwback to the past. It should be an entryway into the future.

For Freakazoid Refuseniks on Labor Day

DDM at Wonkette:

 History.com describes it like this:

“[T]he average American worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks in order to eke out a basic living. Despite restrictions in some states, children as young as 5 or 6 toiled in mills, factories and mines across the country, earning a fraction of their adult counterparts’ wages. People of all ages, particularly the very poor and recent immigrants, often faced extremely unsafe working conditions, with insufficient access to fresh air, sanitary facilities and breaks.”

Sidenote: If the worst kind of working conditions you face is lifting a pen and signing a piece of paper so that two dudes can be married, maybe you should SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU BIGOTED ASSCLOWN WANNABE MARTYR.

Also, the people denying human rights to human beings were, are and always will be the employer bad guys, not the worker good guys.

"We've got to keep fighting" for a higher minimum wage

As long as we're talking pie in the sky, Mr. President, how about repealing Taft-Hartley and giving the NLRB some teeth.



Video embed not working; here is the link to the video.


Full transcript here.

Why Repugs Hate and Fear Good Jobs

Because people with good, secure jobs aren't easy to intimidate.

Via under the mountain bunker:

Labor Day

via alternate world comics and under the mountain bunker.



Full-size version here.

American Exceptionalism: Shit Pay

Via underthemountainbunker:

It's Not CEO Day

But maybe it should be, with the way the rich and their congressional lackeys have systematically undone both the workers rights and the middle-class economy fought for by labor unions 80 years ago.

We had to fight for those then, and now we have to fight for them again.

Jim Hightower:

Webster’s dictionary tells us that Labor Day was “set aside for special recognition of working people.”

That's nice, but “set aside” by whom? It certainly wasn’t the Wall Street corporate and political powers that be. They nearly swallowed their cigars when the idea of honoring labor’s importance to America’s economy and social well-being was first proposed in 1882. Rather, this holiday was created by the workers themselves, requiring a 12-year grassroots struggle that finally culminated with an act of Congress in 1894.

The campaign helped coalesce unions into a national movement. And its message of labor's essential role also countered the haughty insistence of the robber barons of that time. The barons insisted they were America's "makers" — the invaluable few whose monopolistic pursuits should be unfettered. For they claimed that they and their corporations were the God-ordained creators of wealth.

Despite their bloated sense of self-importance, notice that the American people do not celebrate a CEO Day.

SNIP

Yet on Labor Day 2013, robber barons are again ascendant, declaring that they owe nothing — not even a shared prosperity — to the workers, consumers, taxpayers, and other American people who sustain them. Quite the opposite, they and their political henchmen are blithely shredding America's social contract and again insisting that the corporate elite must be unfettered, unions eliminated, and middle-class jobs Wal-Marted.

SNIP

This is no way to run a business, an economy, or a society. Fast-food giants are hugely profitable. (Yum! quaffed down $1.3 billion in profits last year alone.) They are more than able to pay living wages and decent benefits, as many local, independently-owned fast-food businesses do. Deliberately and unnecessarily holding down an entire workforce by funneling rightful wages into the coffers of a few ultra-rich executives and big investors is shameful — and dangerous. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over ... and being kicked.

At last, workers are beginning to kick back. All across the country, broad coalitions of religious leaders, unions, civil rights groups, community supporters, and others are joining thousands of fast-food workers in a rolling series of one-day strikes against particular chains, publicly shaming them for profiting through gross exploitation of employees. As one Baptist church leader said of his presence in these protests, "It's a matter of justice."

Yes — and that's what Labor Day has always been about.

Thanks to the Real Job Creators

Via Crooks and Liars:


credit: The Other 98 Percent

"So that everyone who works hard in America has a chance to get ahead"

Right now, Mr. President, it's the ones who work hard in America who are not getting ahead.



Full transcript here.

It's the Inequality - and the Rich Are to Blame

Robert Reich:

The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top – among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people – and the steady decline of the great American middle class.

Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.

Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.

But as the middle class’s share of total income continues to drop, it cannot spend as much as before. Nor can most Americans borrow as they did before the crash of 2008 — borrowing that temporarily masked their declining purchasing power.

As a result, businesses are reluctant to hire. This is the main reason why the recovery has been so anemic.

Read on for how the rich use their super-wealth to prevent Democracy from restoring the middle class.

"The Only Ones Who Can Stop the Onslaught"

I was horrified on Monday to witness a small-town "Labor Day" parade with dozens of vehicles not one of which mentioned a union, workers, labor or the real point of the day in any way. However, at least three vehicles flaunted their support for treason by flying large confederate flags.

I should have gone to Louisville.

Kenneth Quinnell at Crooks and Liars:

On Labor Day, despite all the focus on Jimmy Hoffa's comments, it was actually Vice President Joe Biden whose speech was the most important one of the day. He gave the type of speech that labor supporters have long wanted to hear from the White House. The speech was fiery and was an accurate portrayal of the struggle that labor faces in the United States. The problem is we should've heard this speech from the president and it should've been given years ago and been matched with significant action. If the vice president finds him self unemployed in January 2013, this failure might be a key reason as to why.

The speech had particular resonance because of where Biden made it. Zandar:

Here in Cincy, the annual AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic at Coney Island is always a big draw, and following last year's visit by President Obama, this year Vice President Joe Biden showed up to talk about the GOP's assault on Ohio unions.

Thousands of Greater Cincinnati union members say they are energized following a speech by the Vice President on Monday.

Vice President Joe Biden told crowds of people at the annual AFL-CIO Labor Day picnic at Coney Island repealing SB5, now Issue 2, is the fight of their life.

“You are the only folks keeping the barbarians in the gates. You are the only non-governmental power, the only non-governmental power, the only one that has the power and the capacity to stop this onslaught.”

Issue 2, the referendum to overturn GOP Gov. John Kasich's bill that removes collective bargaining power from the state's unions, means Democrats have a big opportunity to send a major message to anti-labor Republicans in just two months. Kasich's law removes strikes, collective bargaining, sick pay for teachers, and lets local, county and state government have the final say on labor issues, basically eliminating unions in the state, period. Some 400,000 Ohio workers are affected by this law, and it's unleashed an anti-GOP backlash among Ohio's working class.

Hey Ohio? Vote NO on Issue 2 and remember what Kasich tried to do to Ohio workers.

If the total takeover of the Democratic Party by corporate owners finally forces liberals to form a party that genuinely represents the middle class, we should call it the Labor Party.

By Crushing Labor, Capitalism Destroys Itself

Because all wealth comes from labor

Capitalism's fundamental error is rejecting this fact: without labor, there is no capital.

The only time capitalism has truly thrived n this country is when working people earned good pay with good benefits: the four decades between World War II and the Reagan Regression.

As soon as Big Money decided they could do better by crushing workers - and persuaded politicians of both parties to help them do it - the Great Liberal Prosperity began to decline.

But plutocrats toasting the imminent death of unions and the rise of a lords-and-serfs economy are celebrating their own demise.

Shamus Cooke at Truthout:

"Karl Marx got it right, at some point capitalism can destroy itself," said Mr. Roubini, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "We thought markets worked. They're not working."

The world economy is in shambles and about to get worse, according to even mainstream economists. How bad is anybody's guess. Some things, however, are certain: the recovery that politicians have been promising for years existed only in their heads. The reality of the situation is now apparent to millions of people across the globe, who, before, clung to the empty promises of economic recovery. This newfound consciousness will inevitably find expression in the political realm and, more importantly, the streets.

A key aspect of this sudden mass awareness is in response to high unemployment and the deeply unpopular measures that politicians are forcing upon working people, both byproducts of the Great Recession. Politicians are blaming "the markets" for demanding austerity measures, but "markets" are simply places where wealthy people invest their money. To guarantee a profitable return on their money these investors demand that labor laws be squashed and social programs be eliminated, all over the world.

Spain, for example, is one of many countries having austerity measures forced down their throats. Reuters reports:

"Analysts see the shaking up of the country's inflexible labor laws [laws that protect workers] and the easing of hiring and firing [so older, activist, or slower workers can be fired] as vital to restoring the country's competitiveness. The labor reforms are crucial. They will help to restore growth [profits] in the long term. Growth is the only way out of these adverse fiscal trends,' said Luigi Speranza, analyst at BNP Paribas." [May 27, 2010]

To summarize, creating new laws that enable Spanish corporations to work their workers harder will be better for profits.

Greece faces a similar austerity plan, according to The Guardian UK:

"Tax increases, spending cuts and wage reductions and a sweeping privatisation programme have led to violent protests in Greece, with many arguing that the International Monetary Fund and European Union have demanded too high a price for their financial support." [August 2, 2011]

In the United States, these policies find expression in the attack against public-sector unions and the targeting of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for cuts, while mass unemployment is allowed to act as a very efficient way to lower wages for all workers.

Politicians have made it clear that economic growth, especially corporate profits, will increase in response to these anti-worker policies. They are only partially right. Corporate profits in fact have been on the rise, but the austerity measures have been responsible for the depressed economies throughout Europe and the US. When workers' wages are lowered and social programs are decimated, working people and the poor are left with little money for any purchases other than the bare necessities. Without consumer demand for their products, corporations curtail operations even more. This global dynamic has been decades in the making, with the recession having finally forced the issue into the forefront.

SNIP

Since illusions of an economic recovery have now been shattered, it's up to working people to demand that their labor unions and community groups unite to tax the rich and corporations in order to finance a massive jobs program. Fortunately, the AFL-CIO is organizing actions for the first week of October to demand jobs and oppose cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Many within the labor movement are calling for massive demonstrations across the country for October 1. It will take these types of actions to unite working people to fight for a positive solution to the economic crisis.

Read the whole thing.

Then find your local Labor Day parade and get out there and march for workers, for capitalism, for America.

What Are You Doing Tomorrow to Support Labor?

Kenneth Quinnell at Crooks and Liars:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is very active in advance of the Labor Day holiday. In addition to releasing the video above (and another video, see below), the organization released it's "America Wants To Work Action Plan." The plan (which can be read in detail here) includes six planks:

1. Rebuild America’s schools and transportation and energy systems: The plan argues that reinvesting in this critical, but crumbling, infrastructure will create millions of new jobs.

2. Revive U.S. manufacturing and stop exporting good jobs overseas: A number of policy proposals are included in this section, including strong opposition to free trade deals.

3. Put people to work doing work that needs to be done: This one is largely a repeat of No. 1 above, but also includes other policy options proposed by progressive members of Congress.

4. Help federal, state, and local governments avoid more layoffs and cutbacks of public services: This is an important focus -- the bipartisan assault on government workers at all levels is a big problem with the current failure in boosting the job market.

5. Help fill the massive shortfall of consumer demand by extending unemployment benefits and keeping homeowners in their homes: These moves are so obvious, it's a crime that they haven't been done yet.

6. Reform Wall Street so that it helps Main Street create jobs: Wall Street used to help Main Street, but they've moved away from that. Maybe we should do something about that.

The organization also launched a "Who Do You Heart" campaign for Twitter and Facebook, asking everyone to let everyone know what group(s) of workers they are thankful for this Labor Day. Anyone can post to Facebook or Twitter via a web interface for the campaign.

Gordon Skene has a historical reminder:

In 1941 it was only a matter of time before the U.S. would be engaged in a shooting war. On that Labor Day it was about building up military strength for what was going to be a very long haul and the Labor Movement was crucial to what would become a Herculean War Effort.

In this Labor Day Address (which fell on September 1st), President Roosevelt called on the American people to put aside fundamental differences and focus on what needed to be done.

Pres. Roosevelt: “On this day, this American holiday, we are celebrating the rights of free laboring men and women. The preservation of these rights is vitally important now, not only to us who enjoy them, but to the whole future of Christian civilization.”

In 1941 Labor was regarded an an integral part of American society.

Today, it's all different.

Hear the speech here.

And get the latest labor news roundup here.

How to Excite Democratic Voters

What President Obama's Labor Day speech yesterday cried out for, more than anything else, is massive, Blue-Dog-crushing follow-through.

Susie Madrak has some suggestions:

Dear President Obama,

We've had our differences. But because we're looking at a major disaster for the Democrats in November, I'm hoping for once you're willing to look for advice that doesn't reinforce what you and the other DLC-Third Way fetishists already believe.

If you preside over massive electoral losses in November, you have no one to blame but yourself. But you have some options, and if you're willing to take some bold steps that excite Democrats and independents, you can still mitigate your losses. When in doubt, ask yourself what FDR would do -- and do it! Talking like a real Democrat got you the White House. Acting like one will help you keep it.

1. Announce that you're going to allow everyone over 55 to buy into the Medicare program. More important, make Medicare the primary payer for the employed middle-aged:

The large health care expenses that many older adults incur raise the costs of employing them and may reduce their employment options. Employers who provide health benefits face higher insurance costs from older workers, and age discrimination rules limit their ability to offset these costs by paying lower wages. As a result, employers may prefer younger workers, reducing the demand for older employees.

One way to lower employment costs for older workers and perhaps improve their employment opportunities would be to raise the share of health care expenses paid by Medicare. Under current rules, Medicare is the secondary payer of health care costs for most workers ages 65 and older with employer-sponsored insurance. Employer-sponsored insurance reimburses health care costs first, while Medicare pays only for Medicare-covered services that it does not cover. But the available evidence suggests that making Medicare the primary payer for older workers would not substantially improve employment options for older adults, because the savings for employers would amount to only a small share of total employment costs.

What a great relief this would be, to so very many people right now. And short of funding WPA-style work programs, this would be the single best way to get people back to work.

Read the whole thing.