Allied Approaches Archive (Page 3)

The nation’s largest unions and the nation’s largest labor federation both back outlawing employer discrimination against lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender people – a ban bosses are challenging in top cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

And the Oct. 8 argument over whether bosses can discriminate against LGBTQ people – including firing them – solely because of their sexual orientation or gender preference isn’t the only big-ticket civil rights case the justices will hear in the next six weeks.

The other will come up in early November, as Comcast challenges the wide-ranging ban on discrimination written into the Reconstruction Era’s 1866 Civil Rights Act and its famous Section 1981, which lets individuals and firms sue against business racism.

And in both instances, the GOP Donald Trump administration is arguing on the other side, for discrimination.

Both issues are important for the future of civil rights and human rights in the United States, which have been frequently under attack by Trump, right-wing Republicans and their ideological think tanks and, in the Section 1981 case, the corporate class.

The tangle over LGBTQ job discrimination will hit the High Court the day after it starts its 2019-20 term. Four separate lawsuits, consolidated into one long hearing, will force the justices to consider whether employers can discriminate against LGBTQ people.

That’s illegal under the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ban, in its famous Title VII, on employment discrimination based on sex, according to the AFL-CIO, both big teachers’ unions, and a combined brief from the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters and Jobs With Justice – along with other allies of LGBTQ people.

Title VII also bans discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin.

The Section 1981 case will come up in November. It outlaws racial discrimination by businesses in making contracts.

Until now, courts inserted one big caveat into Section 1981 cases: What’s called a “but for” clause, meaning that “but for” specific circumstances – namely that but for the fact that the person hurt was African-American – the discrimination would not have occurred.

The 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco took away even that caveat and ruled the 1866 law means what it says and that victims only need to show race was “a factor” – not the factor – to get their day in court after firms didn’t do business with them.

Culminating several days of in-person lobbying, but continuing a defense that’s been going since Donald Trump’s first day in office, federal worker unions, their congressional allies and other union leaders took their campaign against the GOP president’s edicts to Congress.

The mass rally of several thousand people on Capitol Hill on Sept. 24 drew attention to Trump’s anti-worker actions, from curbs on union representation for all two million federal workers down to sudden declarations that 900 of the lowest-paid disabled workers in the Portland, Ore., Veterans Administration hospital would be laid off – with two weeks’ notice.

Led by the Government Employees (AFGE) and the Treasury Employees (NTEU), unions and workers lobbied for legislation to stop Trump‘s edicts in their tracks in the new fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1.

The Democratic-run House has agreed. The GOP-run Senate is another matter, though one speaker, Sen. Chris Von Hollen, D-Md., promised the crowd he would push the ban on Trump’s edicts through. Whether and when he, and other Senate Democrats, can succeed is up in the air.

The point of the rally was to get them to do so. “Talk is cheap. Let’s get to work,” AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre said. “Something is happening in America,” federation President Richard Trumka declared before challenging Trump: “Bring it on!”

Typical support came from Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio: “You can’t say you love your country and you love workers and then attack unions.”

Trump’s edicts throw federal worker unions out of their small offices in federal buildings; yank away their computers, phones and fax machines; curb due process rights for federal workers; make it easier for bosses to fire workers for no reason at all, and even tell union stewards that when they defend federal workers, they must do so on their own time and on their own dime.

The unions took Trump to court, won in district court – and lost in the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. on Sept. 25. In an unsigned order, the judges declined to hear the case.

Nearly 50,000 members of the United Auto Workers began striking earlier this month, demanding that General Motors pay them their fair share of the billions in profits the company raked in last year.

The response from General Motors was shocking. The automaker, which accepted billions in government bailouts during the last recession, cut off its payment of insurance premiums for the striking workers.

As the news broke, former Vice President Joe Biden was at an AFL-CIO event, campaigning against a single-payer Medicare for All plan that would replace employer-provided insurance. “You’ve broken your neck to get it,” Biden told the crowd. “You’ve given up wages to keep it. And no plan should be able to take it away.”

But what if that’s actually the problem? Why should union workers — or anyone — be breaking their necks to get health care, a basic human right?

Health care has been a constant subject of debate among Democratic presidential candidates. Biden and others have argued that a single-payer system would be unfair to union workers who’ve taken pay cuts in exchange for better health care plans.

But, as GM showed, our current system turns health coverage into leverage for employers. What could unions fight for if they didn’t have to constantly play defense against employers trying to gut their health care?

If we already had Medicare for All, the United Auto Workers could be using their collective power to fight for higher wages and better benefits. Instead, GM gets to use the health of its employees as a bargaining chip.

Auto workers aren’t the only union workers fighting for health coverage.

We cover a lot of ground here at the Alliance for American Manufacturing — Trade! Infrastructure! Tom Cruise! — but there’s nothing that gets us more excited than learning about an American-made product. Whether it’s a small piece of jewelry or a big piece of steel, we love highlighting the amazing workers and companies who manufacture their products in the United States.

After all, a lot of hard work — and often extra expense — goes into that “Made in USA” label. U.S. companies and workers must take care to ensure that “all or virtually all” of their products are made in the United States.

When something is labeled as “Made in USA,” many consumers recognize the effort that is behind it, along with the millions of jobs that American-made products support. The label can be a deciding factor when someone is deciding on what product to buy.

Made in USA means something.

And while nothing gets us more excited than a Made in USA product, nothing gets us more fired up than when a company knowingly mislabels its product as Made in USA. What’s worse is that these cheaters have been getting away with it.

It happens more than you think. In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) caught some pretty brazen Made in USA cheats:

• One company sold military-themed backpacks – including on military bases! – with an “American-made” label.  The FTC found that the vast majority of that company’s products were made in China or Mexico.
• Another company made hockey pucks, and even positioned itself as “the all-American alternative to imported pucks.” All of the company’s pucks were imported from China.
• A direct-to-consumer mattress firm advertised its mattresses as assembled in the United States. The mattresses were made in China.

But in all three of these blatant cases of Made in USA cheating, the FTC politely asked these bad actors to stop this deceitful behavior.

The cheaters paid zero fines — they kept every penny they made deliberately deceiving consumers. No notices to consumers were issued. The companies didn’t even have to admit any wrongdoing!

What’s the point in even having a strong “Made in USA” standard if it isn’t enforced?

By David Cooper and Julia Wolfe

The state income data from the American Community Survey (ACS), released this morning by the Census Bureau, showed that in 2018, household incomes across the country rose—albeit more slowly, and in fewer states, than in the previous year. From 2017 to 2018, inflation-adjusted median household incomes grew in 33 states and the District of Columbia (14 of these changes were statistically significant.) This marks a decline from the broader growth seen between 2016 and 2017 when median household incomes grew in 40 states and the District of Columbia, with 24 of those changes being statistically significant.

The ACS data showed an increase of 0.2% in the inflation-adjusted median household income for the country as a whole—an increase of just $130 for a typical U.S. household and a slowdown in growth compared to the past three years: household incomes increased by 3.8% in 2015, 2.0% in 2016, and 2.5% in 2017. [i] Despite these increases, households in 23 states still had inflation-adjusted median incomes in 2018 below their 2007 pre-recession values, which makes this year’s slowdown particularly disappointing.

From 2017 to 2018, the largest percentage gains in household income occurred in Idaho, where the typical household experienced an increase of $2,085 in their annual income—an increase of 3.9%. Maryland remains the state with the highest median household income at $83,242, having experienced a slight increase (0.6%) from 2017 to 2018. The District of Columbia has the highest median household income in the country at $85,203—though comparing D.C. to states is problematic, since D.C. is a city, not a state. 

From 2017 to 2018, there were 17 states in which the median household income declined or was unchanged: Alaska (-0.8%), Iowa (-0.1%), Maine (-3.6%), Missouri (-0.7%), Nebraska (-3.0%), Nevada (-1.3%), New Hampshire (-0.2%), New Jersey (-0.4%), New Mexico (-1.5%), North Carolina (-0.3%), South Dakota (-2.8%), Rhode Island (-1.7%), Tennessee (-0.4%), Virginia (-1.0%), West Virginia (-1.0%), and Wyoming (-0.5%). Only one of these—Maine, where incomes declined by 3.6% after increasing by 3.8% in 2017—had a statistically significant drop. 31 states and the District of Columbia saw either a slowdown in their growth compared to last year, or experienced even steeper declines, reflecting the disappointing growth seen at the national level.

Talk about greasing the skids for a Trumpite: The GOP-run Senate committee that deals with workers’ issues OKd Donald Trump’s nomination of right-wing corporate lawyer Eugene Scalia as by a 12-11 party-line vote on Sept. 24. The full Senate followed, also totally on party lines, 53-44 on Sept. 26.

The lickety-split confirmation process for Scalia, son of the late right-wing U.S. Supreme Court justice, came over strenuous objections from both the panel’s Democrats and workers and their allies. Nevertheless, he will be in the Secretary’s chair.

“We’ve seen this awful nominee for the Secretary of Labor’s job who spent his career busting unions,” Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told a nearby outdoor rally of workers protesting Trump’s edicts against federal workers and their unions.

But corporate interests from A to Z supported Scalia, who previously made a name by leading business lobbying to kill the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s ergonomic rules and for defending Seaworld, whose killer whale drowned its female trainer.

And Scalia was also Walmart’s lawyer when the monster vicious anti-worker retailer sued to overturn a Maryland law a decade ago saying that any firm with more than 10,000 workers in the state had to devote at least 8% of payroll to health insurance for its workers. Two of the only three – including unionized Safeway stores – did so. Walmart didn’t. Scalia and Walmart won in court.

“Last week’s hearing confirmed my worst fears,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the panel’s top Democrat. “Scalia will be a yes-man for President Trump’s anti-worker agenda, not a champion for working families, that he will let companies off the hook, not hold them account-able, that . . . he will be a Secretary of Corporate Interests, not a Secretary of Labor.”

Scalia “dodged seemingly every opportunity to take a strong stand as a champion for the workers and families the Department of Labor serves,” she added. But “he didn’t shy away from defending his record helping corporate clients hack away at the rules meant to protect workers and families or hesitate to praise President Trump and the so-called ‘virtually unprecedented benefits’ workers are seeing under this administration’s anti-worker agenda.”

“He has fought against workers seeking the wages they were cheated out of, people with disabilities seeking a job opportunity, employees seeking a safer work environment, families seeking reliable advice as they plan for retirement, and even survivors seeking justice for workplace harassment and assault. In other words, the very people we need the Secretary of Labor to fight for,” Murray said.                             

At midnight on Sept. 15, 49,000 UAW-GM workers walked out on strike at locations across the country, a day after their 2015 collective bargaining contract with General Motors expired and the union declined to extend the provisions of the agreement.

In a statement, UAW Vice President Terry Dittes said “While we are fighting for better wages, affordable quality health care, and job security, GM refuses to put hard-working Americans ahead of their record profits of $35 billion in North America over the last three years. We are united in our efforts to get an agreement our members and their families deserve.”

The President promised then punted on saving the GM jobs, and never seemed to imagine that the UAW would later be leading the fight. Given their news coverage from earlier this year, neither did the New York Times imagine the UAW would take on GM.

While the auto industry is increasingly profitable, autoworkers have been suffering. Ground zero of that story is the iconic GM Lordstown plant in northeastern Ohio, which lost the discontinued Chevy Cruze and was shuttered when GM moved production of the revived Chevy Blazer to a Mexican assembly plant.

Beyond its regular reporting, the New York Times committed an amazing level of resources to the story of the Lordstown closing, producing an episode of The Daily podcast on July 5, an episode of The Weekly (on FX and Hulu) on July 7, and an earlier New York Times Magazine interactive piece with photos and text (May 1, 2019).

I have watched The Weekly episode on Lordstown several times, listened to The Daily podcast many more times, and re-read the multimedia piece. I’ve also gone back to review the Times’ 1992-1993 editorials and opinions on NAFTA, the trade deal that eventually caught up with Lordstown and many other manufacturing plants.

Donald Trump and his enablers are hoping that a strong economy will help the American people look past the damage they are doing to the country. That’s why Trump is constantly crowing about job numbers and the stock market in order to paint a rosy picture of the economy.

But when you look closer, the numbers reveal a very different story about Trump’s economy:

1. Wages are still stuck. The median annual earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers in 1979, in today’s dollars, was $43,680. The median earnings in 2018 was $45,708. So much for the $4,000 pay raise Trump and Republicans in Congress promised when they cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations. 

2. Percent of people with jobs is low. While the unemployment rate is low, employment is not nearly as good as it may look when you consider how many people have given up looking for jobs. The labor-force participation rate – the percent of working-age Americans with jobs – is the lowest it’s been since the late 1970s, when wives and mothers first began streaming into paid work to prop up family incomes.

3. Many people are working part-time jobs. Nearly 4 million Americans are stuck in part-time jobs, unable to find full-time jobs. Many of these part-time gigs are either freelance or contract, offering fewer rights and benefits. In turn, this has increased economic insecurity for millions of families.

4. A growing number of college graduates are overqualified for their current jobs. One in 10 college grads are underemployed, which is much higher than 20 years ago. At the same time, the cost of college has skyrocketed, with students going deeper into debt to pay for their education: 45 million Americans now owe 1.6 trillion in student debt.

5. The cost of health care continues to increase. Since 2008, average family premiums have soared 55 percent, which is twice as fast as workers’ earnings and three times as fast as inflation. Prescription drug prices also continue to rise – jumping almost 11 percent in the first half of 2019 alone.

By a party-line 26-21 vote after an all-day work session, the Democratic-run House Education and Labor Committee passed the Protect the Right to Organize (Pro) Act, the most-comprehensive pro-worker rewrite of U.S. labor law in decades. All the Democrats voted for it and all the Republicans voted against it.

The measure, co-written by top lawmakers and union legislative representatives, would restore many of the freedoms and protections workers gained under the original National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The Pro Act, formally titled HR2474, is also expected to pass the Democratic-run House, though the exact date for debate has not been set. The Republican-run Senate is another matter. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., lumps it with other House-approved measures – including federal elections reform – as “socialism.”

And corporate contributors to congressional Republicans can be expected to mount a large and expensive lobbying campaign against it, just as they spent millions of dollars a decade ago to destroy an attempt to rewrite labor law with legislation called the Employee Free Choice Act.

The Pro Act would undo much of the damage done to worker rights by the GOP-passed Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, court decisions, NLRB rulings and other Republican-crafted legislation.

It would also counter a key assumption of the NLRA: That bosses break labor law unintentionally, so penalties should be light.

Eighty-four years of experience shows that’s wrong. The Pro Act recognizes that with high fines for labor law breaking – including fines directed at CEOs and boards of directors, immediate restoration of illegally fired workers to their jobs, and swift court injunctions.

And the Pro Act would remedy two big problems in labor law. The GOP created one in the Taft-Hartley law. It legalized the process under which workers may enjoy the benefits of union membership without joining or paying dues.

The Pro Act would stop employers from constant anti-union harangues in mandatory captive audience meetings and “would ban what I would call ‘right to freeload’ laws,” Rep. Andy Levin, D-Mich., a former AFL-CIO deputy organizing director, said.

The Trump-appointed National Labor Relations Board proposed a rule last week that would rob graduate teaching assistants and other student employees of the rights to organize and collectively bargain. This is just the most recent example of the board’s attack on working people. Last month, the board determined that misclassifying workers as independent contractors does not violate the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Before that, the General Counsel’s office released a deeply flawed memo that found that Uber drivers were not employees under the NLRA.

The trend with the Trump board seems to be to take a statute which broadly protects private sector workers and whittle away at its scope. At a time when worker advocates are demanding more workers have the right to a union and collective bargaining, the Trump board’s graduate teaching assistant proposal demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the modern workforce.

Had the Trump board considered any data or conducted any meaningful analysis of the academic workplace in developing the proposed rule, it would have discovered that the last several decades have seen significant changes in labor conditions. Universities have increasingly relied on graduate teaching assistants and contingent faculty, with the growth in graduate assistant positions and non-tenure track positions outpacing the increase in tenured and tenure-track positions between the Fall of 2005 and Fall 2015.

These positions have dramatically lower compensation than faculty. The average salary of a graduate teaching assistant during the 2015-2016 school year was $35,810. Individuals who are working while enrolled in graduate school deserve livable wages. One way to address this issue is through collective bargaining—the very right the Trump board seeks to rob from these workers.

Further, in spite of the majority’s insistence that collective bargaining will harm “academic freedom,” there is a wealth of evidence to the contrary. Public universities have had graduate student worker unions for 50 years. In 2016, more than 64,000 graduate student employees were unionized at 28 institutions of higher education in the public sector. The colleges and universities with union represented student employees have not reported a loss of “academic freedom” as the Trump board suggests.

In reality, union-represented graduate student employees at public universities have reported that they enjoy higher levels of personal and professional support than that reported by non-union represented students. Unionized and nonunionized student employees report similar perceptions of academic freedom. However, union-represented graduate student workers did report receiving higher pay than non-union represented graduate student workers. Perhaps this is one reason why there have been so many successful organizing campaigns on campuses across the country the last few years. Student employees at several private universities have unionized and won better working conditions–better pay, better health care, better child care. The Trump board’s proposal would rob student employees of these gains.

Wars end with treaties. In the middle of the 20th century, the “class war” that finished off America’s original plutocracy ended with the “Treaty of Detroit.”

Fortune, the business magazine, came up with that catchy turn of phrase back in 1950 to describe the landmark collective bargaining agreement that the United Auto Workers union had just reached with General Motors. What made the pact so historic? America’s most powerful corporation was essentially agreeing to “share the wealth.”

In exchange for labor peace, notes historian Nelson Lichtenstein, GM guaranteed auto workers what amounted to “a 20 percent increase in their standard of living” over five years, along with a new health care benefit and a standard $125 monthly pension, the equivalent of about $16,000 annually in today’s dollars.

This “Treaty of Detroit” would help energize a huge postwar shift in the distribution of U.S. income and wealth. In the quarter-century after 1945, the real incomes of average Americans would double, in the process manufacturing the first mass middle class the world ever seen.

Now UAW workers are once again making headlines, demanding just as they did decades ago that General Motors share the wealth with the workers who toil to create it. And GM is sitting on plenty of wealth. Since 2015, the company has posted $35 billion in North American profits alone. But GM workers today find themselves struggling in a far different — and more difficult — political and economic environment than their UAW forbears.

In 1950, the U.S. labor movement was beginning a third decade of sustained and significant growth. By the mid 1950s, over one out of every three workers in the nation carried a union card. Last year, by contrast, only 6.4 percent of American private-sector workers belonged to a union.

The executives who run General Motors are operating in a different environment, too. In the 1950s, the U.S. tax code subjected the nation’s rich to consistently steep tax rates. Individual income over $200,000 faced a 91 percent federal income tax throughout the decade. In 1950, GM’s top executive, Charlie Wilson, paid 73 percent of his $586,100 total income in taxes.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters weighed in on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, sending the chairpersons and ranking members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees a letter outlining their priorities for the legislation.

First thing on the list? Make sure that the final legislation includes language from the Senate version of the bill that would prohibit “the use of tax dollars from supporting Chinese rail car and bus companies.” Here’s General President James P. Hoffa with more:

“As the proud representatives of American workers who both manufacture and operate thousands of American-made buses, we believe that American companies must be allowed to compete on an even playing field, free from Chinese interference into our transit system and manufacturing base.”

The Teamsters’ support for banning both rail cars and buses is significant. The Senate’s version of the NDAA included language prohibiting China’s state-owned, controlled or subsidized companies from receiving taxpayer dollars to build rail cars and buses, but the House version of the bill only applies to rail cars.

If Congress moves forth with the House version, it would be a huge oversight, to say the least. As we’ve discussed in this space before, there’s widespread bipartisan economic and national security concern about China’s role in building both.

First, there’s the threat to 750 companies and 90,000 jobs up and down the transportation supply chain, as China is aiming to dominate rail car and bus manufacturing via its “Made in China 2025” plan. China heavily subsidizes its state-owned and controlled companies, allowing them to severely underbid on government contracts to build these systems. The point isn’t to make money — China’s ultimate goal is to put competitors out of business and monopolize the global industry.

If you don’t think that’s realistic, just look at what has happened to the pharmaceutical industry.

“When you can subsidize, when you can wholly own an enterprise like China does, you can create a wholly unlevel playing field,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) recently told the New York Times. “We’re used to that unlevel playing field existing between the U.S. and China, but now it’s happening in our own backyard.”

The notion that hard work is all that’s needed to achieve a prosperous or even comfortable living in the United States has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years as stagnant wages for most workers have led to talk about the demise of the American Dream.

Randy Schutt, a long-time progressive activist and researcher, has created a simple model to help illustrate just how much dumb luck, mere chance and circumstance, can play a role in who becomes wealthy and who remains poor.

The project, intended to illustrate certain nuances about economic inequality to students and researchers, is called “The Chancy Islands: A Land of Equally Capable People But With Unequal Luck.”

His imaginary archipelago includes places like Rugged Island and Mercy Island, the first unforgiving, the latter much less so, and everything in between—Flat Island, Combo Island, Parity Island, etc.

“We’re always told that if you work hard and persist through adversity that you can rise above your humble (or horrible) circumstances and become wealthy. But that isn’t true,” Schutt said. “Most people are so beaten down by our economic system that they have to be lucky just to get by. And they have to be very lucky to do well and extremely well to get super rich.”

The statistics bear our Schutt’s narrative. Economic mobility, defined as the chance that someone born in the bottom fifth of the income distribution can sweat their way to the top fifth, is extremely low in the United States (around 7.5%)—and actually much lower than other rich nations, because of a much weaker social safety net.

Nurses providing hospital care, delivery people delivering food to homes, domestic workers cleaning hotel rooms, office workers accumulating overtime hours, restaurant servers taking on two or three jobs to make minimum wage: no one would consider these to be dangerous occupations. And yet today, more than ever, they have become high-risk jobs.

In 2019, you no longer have to hang from scaffolding to risk your life on the job. Precariousness, stress, and overwork can also make you sick, and even kill you, at a much higher rate than accidents.

Of all of the work-related deaths recorded each day (7,500 according to the International Labour Organization, or ILO), less than 14 percent occur at the workplace. The vast majority (approximately 6,500) were the result of long-term physical (circulatory, respiratory, professional cancer) or mental illness.

We work in safer environments than we did 30 years ago but the physical and emotional health of workers remains fragile. Traditional risks persist – the European Union, for example, has seen a recent uptick in fatal accidents in the construction sector – while at the same time, emerging risks, psychosocial risks, and risks associated with the digital economy are increasing. These include stress, fatigue, and harassment related to the organization of work, working hours, demands, and uncertainty.

“Psychosocial risks are the great pandemic of this century and they are related to the precarious conditions of the labour market,” warns Ana García de la Torre, secretary of occupational health of Spain’s General Union of Workers (UGT).

The union’s latest prevention campaign focuses precisely on “invisible” threats such as overloading and hyperconnectivity. “They are not new, we’ve been suffering from them for a while, but they have definitely gotten worse.”

When it comes to enforcing the nation’s labor laws, Eugene Scalia promises to do so. But when it comes to policy recommendations, or to increasing the troops – federal job safety and health inspectors, for example -- needed for such enforcement, GOP President Donald Trump’s nominee for Labor Secretary sang quite a different tune.

It was, frequently, answering questions from Democratic senators on Sept. 19, a variation of “let me look at that” or “I’ll get back to you” or “I need to consult” stakeholders or “I want to look at the case” or “it needs to be a top priority for policymakers” in the future.

He even used that last phrase when tackling one of the most-urgent current issues: The fate of approximately 100 financially imperiled multi-employer pension plans, whose assets and payouts were sunk by the financier-caused Great Recession a decade ago. A million workers and retirees are in peril.

On that issue and others, Scalia pledged to enforce the law. He never pledged to change it, or to lobby Trump for policies, people and money needed to enforce it.

Despite the ducking, bobbing and weaving, Scalia is on a fast track to sit in the Labor Secretary’s corner office. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, scene of his confirmation hearing that day, will vote on the nomination on Sept. 24. None of its GOP members voiced any qualms about the management-side labor lawyer.

And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kent., has abolished the filibuster for Cabinet nominees, meaning unless all 45 Senate Democrats and two Democratic-leaning independents can coax four Republicans to join them, 55-year-old lawyer-lobbyist Scalia will head DOL.

General Motors intransigence on reversing financial hits workers took during and after 2008 Great Recession forced 49,200 Auto Workers toiling for the largest Detroit-based car company to strike at midnight Sept. 15. The firm retaliated by yanking their health insurance, dumping the cost on UAW.

The old pacts between the Detroit 3 – GM, Ford and FiatChrysler – expired the day before, but the union kept talking, and workers kept toiling, at the other two car companies.

At GM plants nationwide, they walked off at the end of the four-to-midnight shift. GM “refuses to give even an inch” in last-minute weekend bargaining, union spokesman Brian Rothenberg said.

GM disputed that, saying it offered raises, a signing bonus and proposed to reopen – at some unspecified future time – two of the six U.S. auto plants it closed this year, one in Detroit and a partial reopening of another in Lordstown, Ohio. GM shifted their machines and jobs to Mexico.

It also announced on Sept. 17 that it would not pay health insurance any more for the workers. UAW stepped in and said it would, using its strike fund.

“Taking our health care is sickening,” the union said in introducing a video about Laura Prater, a hospitalized GM worker in Springhill, Tenn., who woke up the morning of Sept. 17 worrying about how she would pay the bill, rather than how she would get well after surgery.

“The company’s decision was made without any warning to the UAW, leaving more than 48,000 members and their families at risk of being suddenly uninsured,” the union said.

Prater’s Local 2164 union president, Jack Bowers, called GM’s decision pretty bad.  I mean, traditionally, they’ve not done that (paid the insurance costs),” Bowers told WKU, a public radio station. “We’ve got people out there that need insulin. That’s a lot of money for anybody. I think it’s kind of wrong. That’s the nicest word I can think of right now.”

So check it out, we’ve got another economic indicator out. And this one – unlike another recent one – is good!

The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that U.S. manufacturing output rose by 0.6% in August on the back of machinery and primary metals production. That may sound like only a little, but it beats a forecast returned by a poll of economists conducted by Reuters. From the story:

Motor vehicles and parts production fell 1.0% last month after increasing 0.5% in July. Excluding motor vehicles and parts, manufacturing output increased 0.6% in August after declining 0.5% in the prior month. Machinery output rebounded 1.6% after dropping 1.7% in July.

The jump in manufacturing output in August together with a 1.4% rebound in mining, lead to a 0.6% increase in industrial production last month. That was the largest gain in industrial output since August 2018 and followed a 0.1% dip July. Industrial production rose 0.4% on year-on-year basis in August.

Capacity utilization rates were up too. It’s a nice rebound in fortunes from the recently released ISM Manufacturing index, which signaled a further slowdown in economic activity.

So while its numbers aren’t astounding, manufacturing isn’t completely tanking. But the longer-term forecasts aren’t great, either. MarketWatch asked around, and those it spoke to said that the negative trend is likely to continue.

We’ve said it before and we’ve said it again: Infrastructure spending is the right way to turn this around.

***

Reposted from AAM

About 46,000 GM workers went out on strike yesterday. It’s another case study in how the economy still doesn’t work for the 99%. The company has had strong profits for years. It’s already paid out tens of billions of dollars to stockholders. But it wants worker concessions – even as it’s scheduled to pay investors another half-billion dollars this Friday.  

Here’s what’s on the table in GM contract negotiations, according to media reports:

• Permanent jobs for the 7% of GM’s employees who are now working as temps. The UAW wants these jobs to be permanent – better jobs with better wages. (Right now, GM temps earn about 30% less than permanent workers.)
• Reopening idled plants. Last winter, GM announced it would stop operations at four US factories – upending the lives of thousands of families just before Christmas. The Lordstown, Ohio plant was idled even though its workers had agreed to $118 million/year in concessions to keep it open. The union wants these factories reopened.
• Capital investment. GM released a press statement touting its offer to make “$7 billion in investment at its US plants” – over the next four years – as somehow being a concession to the labor union. Once upon a time, corporate managers invested in their company’s future as a matter of routine prudence. (How can a corporation last, without it?) Now our economy is so upside-down that GM’s management wants special credit for investing in its own factories.

And here are some things that, in our opinion, should be on the table:

• Stockholder dividends. Last year, GM paid out more than $2 billion in dividends to stockholders. But its profit-sharing with employees was only about one-quarter that amount. Who do you think was more responsible for the corporation’s 2018 profits?
  
  Stockholders get dividends just because they owned a share of stock on a particular day. They haven’t done anything to “earn” that money other than buy the stock. Yet GM gives stockholders four times as much profit-sharing through dividend payments as employees receive.
  
  This Friday, September 20, GM will pay another half-billion dollars to its stockholders. As of Saturday, GM will have paid a total of about $10.7 billion in dividends since 2015.
  
  Yet management wants to keep the idled plants closed, and keep 7% of its workforce as lower-paid, short-term hires.

The weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American lives.

The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from the Census Bureau. Researchers there have just released results from their latest annual sampling of U.S. incomes. In 2018, the new Census stats show, incomes for typical American households saw a “marked slowdown.”

In effect, average Americans have spent this entire century on a treadmill getting nowhere fast. The nation’s median — most typical — households pocketed 2.3 percent fewer real dollars in 2018 than they earned in 2000.

The “vast majority” of American households, note Economic Policy Institute analysts Elise Gould and Julia Wolfe, “have still not fully recovered from the deep losses suffered in the Great Recession.”

America’s most affluent households have been having no such problem. Average top 5 percent incomes have increased 13 percent overall since 2000, to $416,520. The new Census Bureau figures, based on a sampling of U.S. households, tell us that top 5 percenters are now collecting 23.1 percent of the nation’s household income.

But these Census Bureau figures significantly understate just how much income America’s richest are annually grabbing, mainly because Census researchers “top code” high incomes to keep the identity of sampled deep pockets confidential. All incomes above fixed top-code levels get recorded at the top code. These levels have changed over the years, but the Census Bureau’s continuing reliance on top coding leaves us with figures that fudge the real extent of our inequality.

Analyses based on other data sources — like IRS tax return records — show that top 1 percenters alone are pulling down over 20 percent of America’s household income, essentially triple the top 1 percent income share of a half-century ago.

This morning, the Census Bureau released new data on health insurance coverage, poverty, and middle-class incomes. While the data are for last year, they shine an important light on key aspects of families’ living standards that we don’t get from the more up-to-date macro-indicators, like GDP and unemployment.

As the economic recovery that began over a decade ago persisted through 2018, poverty once again fell, by half-a-percentage point, from 12.3 percent to 11.8 percent. Other results from the report show that anti-poverty and income support programs lifted millions of people out of poverty, including 27 million through Social Security alone. Though the real median household income—the income of the household right in the middle of the income scale—increased slightly less than 1 percent last year, the increase was not statistically significant. Median earnings of full-time men and women workers both rose significantly, by over 3 percent for each (for reasons discussed below, sometimes earnings rise significantly but income does not).

Health coverage, however, significantly deteriorated last year, as the share of the uninsured rose for the first time since 2009, from 7.9 percent to 8.5 percent. In total, 27.5 million lacked coverage in 2018, an increase of 1.9 million over 2017. This result is partially driven by actions of the Trump administration to undermine the Affordable Care Act (note that Medicaid coverage was down by 0.7 percentage points), and in this regard, it should be taken as a powerful signal of the impact of conservative policy on U.S. health coverage.

Taken together, the poverty, income, and health coverage results tell a tale of three powerful forces: the strong economy, effective anti-poverty programs, and the Trump administration’s ongoing attack on affordable health coverage. A strong labor market is an essential asset for working-age families, and the data are clear that poor people respond to the opportunities associated with a labor market closing in on full employment. Anti-poverty programs are lifting millions of economically vulnerable persons, including seniors and children, out of poverty. But while a strong labor market and a responsive safety net help to solve a lot of problems, the history of both U.S. and other countries shows that it takes national health care policy to ensure families have access to affordable coverage. The ACA was and is playing that role, but efforts to undermine its effectiveness are evident in the Census data.

Poverty, Income, Inequality

The Census provides two measures of poverty: the official poverty measure (OPM) and the Supplement Poverty Measure (SPM). The latter is a more accurate metric as it uses an updated and more realistic income threshold to determine poverty status, and it counts important benefits that the OPM leaves out. While the two measures often track each other, year-to-year, that wasn’t the case last year, as the SPM rose an insignificant one-tenth of a percent, from 13.0 to 13.1 percent, while the OPM fell a significant half-a-percent, from 12.3 to 11.8 percent. Because the SPM has a higher income threshold than the OPM, 4.4 million more people were poor by that more accurate measure.

Because it counts anti-poverty policies that the official measure leaves out, one particularly useful characteristic of the SPM data is that it breaks out the millions of people lifted out of poverty by specific anti-poverty programs. For example, refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit lifted about 8 million people out of poverty in 2018; SNAP (food stamps) lifted 3 million more out each, and Social Security was the most powerful poverty reducer, lifting 27 million out of poverty in 2018, 18 million of whom were elderly (65 and older).

The Trump-named GOP majority on the National Labor Relations Board “celebrated” Labor Day a few days before the actual date – by giving bosses, not workers, another gift-wrapped ruling.

By a 3-1 vote on Aug. 29, over the strong dissent of sole Democrat Lauren McFerran, the majority declared that just because the boss arbitrarily declares workers are “independent contractors” does not mean the boss automatically breaks labor law.

The ruling is important for the nation’s workers, especially when the so-called “gig economy” is growing. Firms in that sector, such as AirBnB and the ride-sharing firms Uber and Lyft, arbitrarily declare their workers “independent contractors.”

When workers are “independent contractors” under labor law, unions can’t organize them. The boss also doesn’t have to pay workers comp, Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes or money to cover unemployment benefits.

If a worker is an “employee” under labor law, the law covers the worker. And that includes the right to organize, as well as Social Security, Medicare, workers’ comp and jobless benefits payments by the firm for all the covered workers.

The board majority used a case involving Jeannie Edge, a driver for Velox Express, Inc., a transporter of medical specimens from Arkansas and western Tennessee to a lab. Velox arbitrarily called all its drivers “independent contractors.”

The drivers complained they were really employees, since Velox controlled everything about the job, except for ordering them to buy their own vehicles. Edge spoke for the group and Velox fired her in retaliation three years ago.

The board used the case to discuss the whole independent contractor dodge. The AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, the Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Carpenters all filed briefs backing Edge. So did the National Employment Law Project. The Chamber of Commerce, other corporate lobbies and one right-wing ideological group sided with Velox.

The NLRB’s administrative law judge found Velox broke the law by arbitrarily classifying all the drivers as contractors and by firing Edge. The judge ordered her reinstated with back pay and ordered Velox to post a we-won’t-do-it-again notice. The board majority agreed with the judge. It said the drivers are really employees – but that the arbitrary decision to call them contractors does not, by itself, automatically break labor law. 

“The board has never previously found an employer’s misclassification of its employees as independent contractors standing alone, is a per se violation of the (National Labor Relations) Act.” the board’s GOP majority, led by Chairman John Ring, said. “An employer does not violate the act by misclassifying its employees as independent contractors.”

A little over a year ago, AAM President Scott Paul chatted with health care expert Rosemary Gibson for an episode of The Manufacturing Report podcast. Gibson had just co-authored a new book examining an overlooked part of America’s trade relationship with China.

The book’s title says it all. In “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine,” Gibson and co-author Janardan Prasad Singh outline how China now dominates pharmaceutical manufacturing — and why that is such a big problem for the United States.

Along with making a significant amount of medication, China also has a virtual monopoly on many of the essential ingredients that go into the pharmaceuticals that Americans depend on, including everything from over-the-counter vitamins to cancer meds to almost every antibiotic and blood pressure medication.

China’s dominance of the pharmaceutical supply chain means it has the power to cut off access to many of the medications Americans need to, um, live.

Think tariffs on cotton sweaters and bed linens are bad? Think about what would happen If China decided to cut off our medicine.

Pharmacy shelves would sit empty. Hospitals would close. People would die.

“Children and adults with cancer will suffer without vital medicines,” Gibson recently told the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. “For people on kidney dialysis, treatment would cease, a veritable death sentence.”

It’s all very scary stuff. Keep you awake at night kind of stuff.

Never let it be said that Cecil Roberts met a written speech he really likes.

Instead, the veteran United Mine Workers president produced a detailed, free-form and interesting discourse on climate change, politics and coal’s future at a talk to a crowd of reporters, plus UMWA members and retirees at Washington’s National Press Club. His 13-page prepared speech? Uh…he used a few phrases.

Roberts is really a preacher, not a button-down president. He likes to rev up crowds, and he got applause during his remarks. But also got his points in during the September 4 NPC Newsmaker session. Among them, few of which were laughing matters:

• The Mine Workers aren’t against coping with climate change. They know it’s occurring, and they know the U.S. must do something about it.

But miners have two big domestic problems with the Green New Deal. One is its utopian goal of no U.S. dependence on fossil fuels, including coal, oil and natural gas, by 2050. That’s not doable without developing clean coal technology to scrub carbon out of power plant emissions, Roberts says.

Otherwise “you’ll never – write that down – solve climate change,” he ordered.

UMWA advocated carbon scrubbing for years, but the last legislative effort, in 2009, was filibustered. And abolition puts former coal miners who became natural gas pipeline builders out of jobs.

“We never denied climate change. But how we deal with it is the question…and we want to be part of the discussion.”

New York City held its annual Labor Day Parade on Saturday, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo used the occasion to announce he will advance legislation to make the New York Buy American Act permanent. 

Originally passed in December 2017, the act requires all state-funded road and bridge projects worth more than $1 million to use iron and steel made in the United States. It is set to expire in April 2020, but Cuomo told the crowd that he is making the issue a top priority for next year’s budget session.

“What Buy America has shown, and what Buy America says, is the steel that we buy, the concrete that we buy, the iron we buy, must be American-made,” Cuomo said. “That does two things. No. 1, it protects American jobs and it grows New York jobs — manufacturing is now 5 percent of the New York economy — and it makes sure we have the best quality steel and concrete and iron going into our infrastructure projects.”

Since going into effect, the law has assured that several of the state’s largest infrastructure projects have used American-made iron and steel. This includes 110,000 tons of steel for the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge — also known as the new Tappan Zee Bridge — along with 6,580 tons of steel for the first two phases of the Kosciuszko Bridge and 11,500 tons of steel for the Kew Gardens Interchange. 

Using high-quality, safer steel made by workers here in the United States instead of lower-quality imports not only helps create and sustain thousands of union jobs, it assures the structures will last long into the future.

“We are building more than any state in the United States in America. No state is building what we are building here, over $250 billion in infrastructure, and we want to make sure that these projects last 100 years,” Cuomo said. “To do that, you have to know that steel, that concrete, that iron is top-quality material. And you only know that if that is made right here in the good ol’ USA, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Does the first amendment work the same for all Americans? What kind of freedoms do working people have to read, look at, and say what they want? The subject is on my mind this month as I gear up to host a series of Banned Books Week events in Pittsburgh.

Banned Books Week started in 1982 when First Amendment crusader and super librarian Judith Krug was asked by the American Booksellers Association to organize some events highlighting controversial books. The ABA had noticed a sharp increase in the number of challenges made to books in the early years of the Reagan presidency. Krug’s initiative was so successful that Banned Books Week is still going strong at 37 years.

While it is extremely rare in modern American history for a book to be banned or censored by any branch of the US government, organizations like the American Library Association (ALA) track the hundreds of challenges that individual citizens—frequently in their role as parents—make to public libraries, school libraries, and books included in a particular K-12 curriculum. A typical case is the most recent challenge to the Harry Potter series at a Catholic school in Tennessee. The popular books were removed from Nashville’s St. Edward Catholic School library because the school’s priest claimed that they encouraged children to cast evil spells. You can see the most frequently challenged books of 2018 here.

A quick perusal of the ALA Banned Books site shows that books featuring working-class characters and/or politically left/radical messages frequently find their way onto the banned and challenged list. This is because, as banned book scholar Emily Knox has argued, “banned books are diverse books.” Popular books by and/or about women, people of color, LGBTQ and working-class people are more at risk of being challenged and banned.

Possibly the most famous case of book banning in American history involves involved John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—the pitiful story about a family of “Okies” displaced by the 1930s Dustbowl who migrated to Kern County, CA to work in the orchards. In 1939, despite the fact that Grapes of Wrath was a best seller, the Kern County Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 to ban the novel from the county’s libraries and schools. An intrepid librarian, Gretchen Knief, tried to fight the ban. Though she failed, her efforts resulted in the creation of a Library Bill of Rights which has protected many other books from a similar fate.

Payrolls rose by 130,000 last month and the unemployment rate held at 3.7 percent, close to a 50-year low and the same level as the past 3 months. Still, job growth is cooling (25,000 of this month’s gains were temporary decennial Census workers), as the pace of monthly gains, while still strong enough to support low unemployment, has slowed. Wage growth also stayed parked at about where it has been in recent months, and there’s some evidence that the trade war is taking a toll on factory jobs. However, the job market remains strong, real wages are growing, and consumer spending will continue to be supported by these dynamics.

The slowdown in payrolls

To get a clearer take on the underlying trend in job growth, our monthly smoother shows the average monthly gain over 3, 6, and 12-month periods. This month, however, we add an extra bar to our usual smoother, as we believe it is important to begin to incorporate a recent BLS revision, based on more accurate jobs data, into our assessment of the US job market. This preliminary benchmark revision estimates that employers added 500,000 fewer jobs to US payrolls between April of 2018 and March of 2019 (BLS will officially wedge their final estimate into the payroll data by Feb 2020). The second bar includes the result of this revision, showing that over the past year, payroll growth was likely closer to 150K per month than 175K per month.

To be sure, this is still solid payroll growth at this stage of the expansion and as noted below, in tandem with real wage growth, it’s strong enough job growth to support the recovery and keep unemployment around where it is. However, using the preliminary revised data, the pace of payroll gains has slowed from 1.6% last year to 1.3% this year. Clearly, that’s not a big deceleration, and it’s also not unexpected in a job market closing in on full employment. But it is a slower trend which I expect to persist.

The trade war

The trade war that the Trump administration has been waging is clearly taking a toll on the global economy. While its impact is greater in countries more exposed to trade, like Germany, than the US, our manufacturers have been hit by these new taxes (tariffs) on their imported inputs and by retaliatory tariffs on their exports. To what extent is this showing up in factory employment, hours, and wages?

Manufacturing employment has slowed since the Trump administration began ramping up tariffs at the beginning of last year. Last month, factory jobs rose just 3K and durable manufacturing employment was unchanged. Thus far this year, the factory sector has added 5.5K jobs per month on average, compared to 22K for all of last year.

The product of manufacturing employment and weekly hours yields the aggregate hour index for the sector, a very good proxy for labor demand. The next figure looks at the year-over-year change in this index for blue collar and for all manufacturing workers. Starting about a year ago, a clear deceleration is evident, and for the non-managers—who comprise about 70 percent of the sector’s employment—total hours worked have outright declined in recent months (relative to a year ago).

Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.

Already candidates are outlining ambitious programs to improve health care, combat climate change, and address the opioid crisis — and trying to explain how they’ll pay for it.

President Trump, on the other hand, wants to give corporations and the richest 1 percent more tax breaks to keep goosing a lopsided economic boom — even as deficit hawks moan about the exploding national debt and annual deficits topping $1 trillion.

Eventually someone is going to have to pay the bills. If history is a guide, the first to pay will be the broad middle class, thanks to lobbyists pulling the strings for the wealthy and big corporations.

Here’s a different idea: Whatever spending plan is put forward, the first $1 trillion in new tax revenue should come exclusively from multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Four decades of stagnant wages plus runaway housing and health care costs have clobbered the middle class. In an economy with staggering inequalities — the income and wealth gaps are at their widest level in a century — the middle class shouldn’t be hit up a penny more until the rich pay up.

The biggest winners of the last decade, in terms of income and wealth growth, have not been even the richest 1 percent, but the richest one-tenth of 1 percent. This 0.1 percent includes households with incomes over $2.4 million, and wealth starting at $32 million.

They own more wealth than the bottom 80 percent combined. Yet these multi-millionaires and billionaires have seen their taxes decline over the decades, in part because the tax code favors wealth over work.

This richest 0.1 percent receives two-thirds of their income from investments, while most working families have little capital income and depend on wages. But our rigged system taxes most investment income from wealth at a top rate of about 24 percent — considerably lower than the top 37 percent rate for work.

By Elise Gould and Valerie Wilson 

The Federal Reserve’s decision to lower interest rates by one quarter of one percent at the end of July sends an important message about the current state of the labor market. Nominal wage growth is nowhere near the level at which the Fed is seriously concerned about upward pressure on inflation. The lack of consistently strong wage growth is one of the remaining weaknesses of the labor market; nominal wage growth has stalled in 2019, even though the national unemployment rate has been at or below 4% for more than a year. The last time unemployment fell to 4% and below for an extended period of time—in the late 1990s—wage growth was much stronger across the board, as we describe below.

Wage growth overall is much weaker than it was in the late 1990s

Figure A compares rates of median wage growth over the five-year periods from 1996 to 2000 and 2015 to 2019, by race and gender. This chart shows that during the latter years of the 1990s, median wages grew by more than 9% for all groups shown—black and white men, as well as black and white women. Median wage growth overall was 8.9% from 1996 to 2000 and 5.9% from 2015 to 2019. (The overall numbers include data for racial/ethnic groups not represented in Figure A.

While white men have seen the most wage growth between 2015 and 2019 (a cumulative 6.6%), even that pales in comparison with the lowest rate of growth seen by any group during the earlier period, between 1996 and 2000—which was 9.2% among black women. The last five years of the current recovery, when unemployment rates were closest to those during 1996–2000, has produced only a meager 4.7% increase in the median wage of black women, 5.0% among black men, and 6.4% among white women.

There was new ISM data released today. And it wasn’t good. Oh no!

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM)’s monthly index is considered a pretty good gauge of activity in the U.S. manufacturing sector. ISM goes around, asks a bunch of folks whether they’re buying supplies or not, and averages them (and their comments) out. A score above 50% is good. Below is bad – it suggests a contraction in manufacturing activity. Anyway, it’s now at 49.1%.

This is no guarantee the manufacturing sector is about to slip. Somebody on the Internet who is paid to do economic analysis pointed out:

From 1970 until 2009, the ISM manufacturing PMI fell below 50 on 17 instances during economic expansions.

11 of those 17 instances were in the “middle” on expansions (more than 12 months after the last recessions, but more than 12 months before the economy peaked).

— Callie Cox (@callieabost) September 3, 2019

Meanwhile, another important gauge of the manufacturing sector’s health – employment data – will be out this Friday when the jobs report comes out.

But look, let's say this is fraying your nerves. The trade fight with China is dragging a little bit, the fight seems to be a drag on manufacutirng, and President Trump seems to be trying to influence it all by tweet.

Is there something Congress could do … that polls well … that Trump himself says (or at least implies) he wants … and is incredibly overdue … that could help improve the fortunes of the American manufacturing sector?

Infra … infrastruct … I can’t think of the word!

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Reposted from AAM