Month: July 2008

Dept. Of Labor Screws Workers

In an unlikely team-up, impartial investigators from the Government Accountability Office joined a low-income workers’ advocate at Congressional hearings July 15 to tell lawmakers that President Bush’s Labor Department has failed to enforce minimum wage and overtime laws and that low-wage workers are routinely being robbed of their earnings.

Enforcement of laws that require employers to pay at least the minimum wage and overtime rates has sunk to record lows under the Bush administration, they said.

Investigators for the GAO described for members of the House Education and Labor Committee how the Wage and Hours Division of the Labor Department routinely fails to count complaints, refers workers with legitimate complaints to private lawyers and closes half its cases with perfunctory calls simply requesting employers to settle the matters. Workers lose most of the cases, they said.

Kim Bobo, executive director of the Interfaith Worker Justice program in Chicago, joined GAO investigators at the hearing. Her group operates counseling centers and sponsors activities, including assistance with union organizing, for low income workers around the country. “The wage and hour division is so understaffed,” she said, “that it is actually now doing fewer investigations of wage and hour complaints than it did in 1941, the year it was founded. Wages are simply being stolen.”

What Will The Deficit Mean?

There is an overwhelming consensus in the economic and political establishment that ordinary Americans will have to pay for the crisis of American capitalism and a budget deficit that has been fueled by massive war spending, tax cuts for the wealthy and the provision of unlimited public resources to bail out major financial institutions.

“This is going to make it extraordinarily difficult for whoever’s going to become president,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (Democrat-North Dakota) told the Washington Post. “I don’t care who the president is—when they come and meet with their secretary of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve chairman, their top economists, it will be a sobering moment.”

If he wins the November elections, whatever minimal spending proposals Barack Obama has made during the campaign—including his so-called universal health care plan, tax credits for middle and low-income families and miniscule increases in infrastructure spending—will quickly be shelved in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

So what does that really mean?  That means that all those pie in the sky campaign promises will not be forthcoming.  And if McCain wins in the Fall it will be even worse for the programs that benefit the American people.  Sorry, to be the bearer of crappy news.

Today In Labor History

30 July

President Cleveland appoints a commission to investigate the causes of the Pullman strike. Four months later the commission issues its report, blaming Pullman and the railroads for the conflict – 1894

President Lyndon Johnson signs the Medicare Act, providing federally-funded health insurance for senior citizens – 1964

Former Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa disappears. Presumed to be dead, his body has never been found – 1975

United Airlines agrees to offer domestic-partner benefits to employees and retirees worldwide – 1999

Is It Speculation?

After the binge comes the purge. Merrill Lynch (MER) announced after the close of trading on July 28 that it had sold $11.1 billion in collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), or nearly 60% of its exposure to mortgage-related securities, to private equity firm Lone Star Capital Management for $6.7 billion as part of its latest effort to repair its tattered balance sheet.

At the same time, Merrill reduced its exposure to troubled XL Capital (XL) and other bond insurers, who provided insurance on Merrill’s CDOs. This “purging of assets,” as Oppenheimer (OPY) analyst Meredith Whitney described the sale in a July 29 research note, places the Wall Street stalwart closer to the end of its mortgage related troubles.

NOw, The Prez and McCain have flatly stated that speculation would not be rewarded.  Does that mean, if things turn south will the company that bought the troubled loans be part of the bailout?  The buyer is gambling that things will get better–that is speculation in my book.

House Apologizes For Slavery

The House yesterday apologized to black Americans, more than 140 years after slavery was abolished, for the “fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery and Jim Crow” segregation.

The resolution, which passed on a voice vote late in the day, was sponsored by Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), a white Jew who represents a majority-black district in Memphis. Cohen tried unsuccessfully to join the Congressional Black Caucus this year.

“I hope that this is part of the beginning of a dialogue that this country needs to engage in, concerning what the effects of slavery and Jim Crow have been,” Cohen said. “I think we started it and we’re going to continue.”

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) is considering introducing a companion measure in the Senate, he said.

In February, the Senate apologized for atrocities committed against Native Americans, and the body apologized in 2005 for standing by during a lynching campaign against African Americans throughout much of the past century. Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for interning Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

Is Media Biased Toward Obama?

The news media has devoted significantly more attention to the Democrat since Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign and left a two-person contest for the presidency between Obama and Republican John McCain, according to research conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

News executives say there are reasons for the disparity, such as the continuing story about whether Clinton and Obama’s supporters can reconcile. They even partly blame McCain. By criticizing Obama for a lack of foreign policy experience, McCain raised the stakes for Obama’s trip, “especially if he winds up going in to two war zones,” said Paul Friedman, senior vice president of CBS News.

McCain’s group have been whining about this since they both became the presumptive nominees.  McCain says he cannot catch a break and that Obama is getting all the press.  A study done by George Mason University confirms that Obama is getting more press coverage, but that is not as good news as one would expect.  It seems that the coverage of Obama is in the neighborhood of 70% negative.  Yes, he, Pbama, is getting the press, but only about 15% of it is positive coverage.

Will the McCain people stop whining and move on now?  Maybe they should consider that the darling of the 2000 elections, McCain, would get more coverage if he had more to say than “the surge is working” or that the candidate is flipping and flopping just as badly as Obama.  Or maybe the campaign could cease the “poor pitiful me” angle.  They are starting to look desperate and pathetic.

Union Backed Health Care Reform Plan

Kip Sullivan wrote about this plan in Labor Notes.

If Barack Obama wins the fall election, he will be under more pressure to establish universal health insurance than any president in U.S. history. This will be due not only to public disgust with the current health care system, but to the hard work of organizations dedicated to universal health insurance.

But the most powerful of these groups, including the AFL-CIO and Service Employees (the major Change to Win health care union) are promoting a solution that won’t fix the problem.

Their plan would fatten the insurance industry and make it an even more formidable opponent of true reform than it already is.

If SEIU and the AFL-CIO get their way, the day that all Americans have affordable insurance will be pushed into the unforeseeable future.

The labor-backed plan, which they call “guaranteed affordable choice,” would create a public program like Medicare that would allegedly compete with the nation’s 1,500 insurance companies. Americans would get tax-financed subsidies to purchase insurance from either a private insurance company or the public plan. Competition, which has never worked in the health insurance industry, would magically come to life.

By leaving the bloated insurance industry smack in the middle of our health care system, “guaranteed affordable choice” would have taxpayers and premium-payers continuing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on unnecessary administrative costs.

The Coming Deficit

The White House predicted yesterday that President Bush would leave a record $482 billion deficit to his successor, a sobering turnabout in the nation’s fiscal condition from 2001, when Bush took office after three consecutive years of budget surpluses.

The worst may be yet to come. The deficit announced by Jim Nussle, the White House budget director, does not reflect the full cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential $50 billion cost of another economic stimulus package, or the possibility of steeper losses in tax revenues if individual income or corporate profits decline.

The new deficit numbers also do not account for any drains on the national treasury that might result from further declines in the housing market.

What they forgot to include is that it does not include the funds for the wars of aggression or the wars of revenge or the wars of……..whatever you want to call them.  This deficit figure does not include the latest forclosure bill that the Prez has said he will sign.

This is just the WH trying to manipulate the figures to make the deficit look better than it really is.  Keep in mind that when there is a deficit and the WH wants to try and balance budget the funds with entitlements are the first to be hit.  That includes Social Security, education, and healthcare, if there is any progress there.  In other words, to balance a budget, programs designed to assist the American people will be hit.  The people will suffer while NOTHING is asked of corporate America.  Something to think about.

Longshoremen Reach A Deal

As was reported in the WSJ,

West Coast port operators reached a tentative deal with dockworkers on a new contract, thereby averting the risk of any further work disruptions at 29 ports in California, Oregon and Washington.

The two sides reached the agreement after what they labeled “a marathon weekend bargaining session.” The deal comes more than three weeks after the 26,000 dockworkers’ last contract expired July 1.

The deal will come as a relief to shippers who had watched with increasing worry as the dockworkers engaged in a series of work slowdowns in recent weeks at the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland.

The agreement is subject to ratification by both the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents the dockworkers, and the Pacific Maritime Association, which represents terminal operators, ocean shippers and stevedores at the 29 ports.

In a press release late Monday, leaders from the two sides said they wouldn’t reveal details of the tentative six-year agreement for the time being.

If ratified, the agreement will avoid a repeat of what happened in 2002, the last time the union’s contract expired, when a negotiation impasse and a series of slowdowns at the docks eventually led to a 10-day lockout, snarling the nation’s supply chain and costing the economy billions of dollars.

Automakers May Get Loans

Backers of a program that would lend up to $25 billion to automakers and auto parts suppliers said today they had garnered 71 U.S. House members to support their search for $3.75 billion in funding over the next couple of months.

The program, known as the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentive Program, was meant to help automakers meet fuel economy standards of 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Created but not funded by Congress last year, the program would provide low-cost loans to cash-strapped automakers and their suppliers for engineering fuel-efficient vehicles or converting old plants.

The $3.75 billion would cover the government’s borrowing costs for up to $25 billion in loans, along with a small reserve for defaults.

While House and Senate Democrats have raised the idea of a second economic stimulus plan — the most likely carrier for such a proposal — the Bush administration has opposed it so far, and the prospects are murky. Congress won’t consider any such plan before leaving for August recess this week, and with no plans to convene after the election, the plan would need to be passed sometime in September.

My reaction is why?  These companies were aware of the coming crisis but yet did nothing to avoid it.  Their answer has been to fire or layoff workers.  I say screw them!