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By KRIS MAHER
MIAMI -- President Barack Obama told AFL-CIO union leaders Tuesday in a videotaped address that the controversial Employee Free Choice Act will pass, signaling his full backing for legislation that makes union organizing easier.
"We will pass the Employee Free Choice Act," President Obama told more than 100 top labor officials in a closed-door meeting at the labor federation's winter gathering in Miami, according to people at the meeting.
The bill would make it easier for unions to recruit workers because it would let them join unions simply by signing cards rather than through secret-ballot elections in which companies can campaign against the union. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations have been campaigning against the legislation.
The president's remarks were taped on Feb. 20, according to a White House spokesman. Following his remarks, AFL-CIO officials held a meeting with Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.
Separately, on Wednesday, the AFL-CIO is expected to ask the administration to take a controlling stake in banks that receive government funding and a more active role in restructuring their balance sheets. "We believe the debate over nationalization is delaying the inevitable bank restructuring, which is something our economy cannot afford," reads a draft of an AFL-CIO statement. It is the first time the labor group has advocated such a policy, said Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO. Mr. Trumka, a member of the White House Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said government control would be short-lived.
The Employee Free Choice Act is expected to be introduced in the coming weeks in the Senate. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said in an interview that to help get the bill through Congress, it could be amended in the Senate, where support is narrower, before it reaches the House. "We wouldn't be surprised if there were attempts to amend the bill," he said.
Organized labor plans to mobilize workers in states where support is weakest among Democratic lawmakers, lobby lawmakers directly and get companies that support the bill to endorse it publicly. Labor leaders didn't name companies targeted in this effort.
Business groups say they will intensify their lobbying against the bill as it is introduced. Randel Johnson, vice president of labor policy for the Chamber of Commerce, said the group will focus its heaviest lobbying efforts on senators in about seven states, and that an endorsement of the bill by a small number of companies "would not affect the political dynamic," because employer opposition to the bill is "overwhelming."
Unions like the UAW are hard on companies , BUT for the most part most unions keep worker pay and insurance in line with inflation . This keeps the workers wager livable .
For the record I am registered as a Rep.
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And liberals are like dogs . They bark till everyone is annoyed.
So we should be able to just pass cards out to join and effectively eliminate the companies ability to object?
"We believe the debate over nationalization is delaying the inevitable bank restructuring, which is something our economy cannot afford," reads a draft of an AFL-CIO statement.
That line is what scares me more....we should jsut accept nationalization because it is inevitable?
Why should employees not be able to forum unions? Just as employers should have the right to dismiss employees for any reason they wish, employees should have the right to form whatever group they please.
So we should be able to just pass cards out to join and effectively eliminate the companies ability to object?
"We believe the debate over nationalization is delaying the inevitable bank restructuring, which is something our economy cannot afford," reads a draft of an AFL-CIO statement.
That line is what scares me more....we should jsut accept nationalization because it is inevitable?
Do you know what the card check is compared to a secret ballot? It already exists and always has, it was basically a techincal loophole they are planning on resolving. here is a simplified, sterile explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_check
but the most important thing about the legislation is this:
- forces employers to acknowledge either method (card check or secret ballot)
- allows the employees the choice of which method to employ
The only real argument I ever see is that the businesses claim it allows union manipulation... while the unions claim the current method allows businesses to intimidate and fire workers. which they do, soo... yeah.
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and on the topic of nationalization... again I think you don't understand exactly what they are referring to in regards to scope and length of time. and yes, we should accept the idea of limited nationalization in certain cases.
so we should be able to just pass cards out to join and effectively eliminate the companies ability to object?
in a perfect world companies would pay their employees a "living" wage and there would be no need for unions. This did not take place so unions are here and yes some are hurting business. Greedy company owners only have themself to blame. Research the history of unions and what brought them about. Check out coal industry history for one.
"we believe the debate over nationalization is delaying the inevitable bank restructuring, which is something our economy cannot afford," reads a draft of an afl-cio statement.
That line is what scares me more....we should jsut accept nationalization because it is inevitable?
This week's UAW strike is a reminder that if the company had heeded union demands during the 1970s, substantial portions of our public policy could look radically different.
In 1970, in the midst of the last national General Motors strike (which lasted for a significant 67 days), UAW president Leonard Woodcock urged American businesses to become actively involved in a fight for national health insurance and halt their rising, uncontrolled health care costs. "American management now has the opportunity to help make each American's right to better health a reality -- and at less cost" he said.
Some things have changed. This year's strike lasted a mere two days. Roughly 400,000 UAW members worked for GM then; only 73,000 do now. But some things haven't: Health care was an issue then, and is an even bigger issue this year. And the stakes in the auto industry negotiations involve more than those at the bargaining table. They reflect public policy choices that put workers at a disadvantage. And they have repercussions for the country as a whole, especially other workers, both active and retired.
If business and labor had joined together in 1970 in the fight for health insurance, unionized and non-union auto companies would now be on a level playing field, and GM would not be at such a financial disadvantage against producers like Toyota because of retiree health care costs. GM knows that well: It has praised the cost savings from Canada's single-payer health insurance system, but it has not used its clout to push for such a system in the United States.
And the UAW would not be setting up a VEBA -- Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association, essentially a union-administered trust fund -- to provide retiree health care. The VEBA will allow GM to pay roughly a third less than its currently projected costs for employee health insurance. And retirees will face the risk -- quite high given current health cost inflation -- that the VEBA will not have enough money to continue to pay their health insurance costs. A VEBA at the manufacturing company Caterpillar, for example, went bust in a decade, and some retirees have gone from paying minimal health costs to $1,000 a month.
Health care costs are not the only cause of GM's problems or the insecurity of their employees' jobs. After all, labor costs represent only about 10 percent of the cost of a car. There are vastly fewer GM jobs now than in 1970 because GM's share of the market has been cut in half, because productivity has increased dramatically, and because GM has increasingly outsourced and offshored jobs.
GM would be in a far stronger position if it had listened long ago to the union, in particular former president Walter Reuther. Back in 1956, before the import onslaught, Reuther gave a prescient speech in which he argued American auto companies should build a small, non-polluting, fuel-efficient car. Unfortunately, even though the UAW still promotes a single-payer national health insurance plan, in recent decades it has largely sided with the auto companies in fighting stricter fuel efficiency standards that ultimately would have put GM in a stronger position today.
The union, of course, has long blamed U.S. trade policy, which favors corporate interests and fails to set meaningful labor and environmental standards for undermining much of the domestic auto industry. With a different trade policy, imports probably would have taken a smaller share of the market and there would have been less incentive for GM to move auto and parts production to Mexico and other low-wage countries.
But GM, Ford and Chrysler now face more serious competition from the Japanese, German and other transplant factories in the United States that often produce cars with higher domestic content than many "Big Three" models. Most of them are non-union. They were deliberately located in historically anti-union parts of the country, and management adopted American-style anti-union strategies of threats and intimidation to keep the UAW out. The union may not have organized as hard and effectively as it should have, but American labor laws made it easier for management to fight unionization and harder for workers to join the union free of harassment and fear. If the transplant industry were now unionized, the UAW would have faced less difficult negotiating this year, and GM would be competing on a more level field.
In its heyday, the UAW set the standard for American workers, and other employers felt pressure to come close to matching what the UAW negotiated, thus raising living standards broadly and reducing economic inequality. Now non-union companies, like Toyota or Nissan, set the standard, contributing to stagnating or declining living standards for most American workers, including those at UAW plants.
So public policy -- on energy, health care, globalization, and labor law -- has contributed to GM's problems, even though GM has largely supported those existing policies that now hurt them in many ways.
Nevertheless, GM expects auto workers, including retirees, to pay for the costs of corporate mistakes and bad public policy. The retired workers will bear the risks of the new VEBA health trust, even though they have already paid for the benefits now being placed in jeopardy. Retiree health insurance, like pensions, represents deferred pay, money that went into benefits rather than paychecks. In addition, the union has repeatedly negotiated diversions from pay or cost-of-living increases into shoring up retiree health insurance and when GM and the UAW opened the contract in 2005 for renegotiations, the union agreed to benefit cuts for retirees. In any case, increases in auto industry productivity over the decades have more than paid for the attractive wages and benefits the UAW won for its members.
Current workers are likely to pay with lost jobs. UAW president Ron Gettelfinger said the strike was for job security. In order to sell the often skeptical union members on the VEBA, which the UAW has favored for two years even though it was never debated openly in the union, the UAW needs to provide some convincing promise of security. Apparently temporary workers will win full-time status, but there also will apparently be an increase in two-tier pay schemes, creating a lower-paid category of workers.
In the 1970s the UAW promoted reduced work time as a way of preserving jobs for current and future workers as jobs were lost, partly as a result of productivity increases that ultimately benefited workers as well. Then the UAW shifted to a strategy of requiring the company to produce one new job for every two that were eliminated. If the jobs weren't created, they would be included in a "job bank," and displaced workers could take those jobs until the company gave them a real job. In theory, that created a disincentive for outsourcing and offshoring. In many contracts, the UAW also negotiated to keep certain plants open for the duration of a contract.
But according to former UAW regional director Jerry Tucker, most of those job security strategies were no more than a "will o' the wisp." "Ever since the early 1980s every contract promises we've just entered a historic job security agreement," Tucker said. "And every time we end up with fewer jobs." At the same time, he says, the union bent over backward to cooperate with GM to help it become more "competitive," supposedly to save jobs. Ultimately the union accepted the corporation's notion of competitiveness and agreed to job losses and worsened working conditions as one plant's local union competed with another to see who would get new investment and jobs.
Without a new corporate strategy to produce vehicles people want and without new public policies on energy, transportation, health care, trade and labor law, both General Motors and its workers will continue to be locked into a common, if conflicted, strategy. That strategy leads to riskier and less rewarding lives for workers, not the historic upward march to higher living standards that the UAW once was able to win. The current contract appears to be a way-station on that declining path, not a grand reversal of direction for America's auto workers.
I'm not sure where to put this comment, but since health-care coverage was mentioned in the article, i had a general question.
I've read that high costs related to health-coverage was due in part to 2 main factors: tort and patent rights. I'm not an expert on tort reform, but in my state of New Jersey, i have seen that for my automobile coverage, if i agree to limit the amount that i can sue, it would lower my premiums. I would think that if this applied to health insurance, it would lead to lower premiums as well. Any thoughts?
Also, for patent rights, I'm under the assumption that large pharmaceutical companies have certain patents for their research. However, since intellectual rights seem to be ignored by other countries, wouldn't it be in the best interests of the US and its companies to press the WTO on this issue?
The only thing i am sure of is that lobbying, on behalf of lawyers, seems to make tort reform impossible.
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"If you ain't first, you're last!"
Why should employees not be able to forum unions? Just as employers should have the right to dismiss employees for any reason they wish, employees should have the right to form whatever group they please.
The issue is, in closed shop states, that the company MUST HAVE a contract with a union to do business, and you MUST BE in the union to work there.
There is nothing wrong with a union, so long as the employer has the right to find people who are outside the union to do the work also. Right now, if the UAW strikes in detroit, GM can only replace those workers with OTHER UAW workers because of thier union contracts, and the fact that Michigan is a closed shop state. It allows the union to have the company by the balls, because they dont just controll the labor IN THE PLANT, they controll ALL THE LABOR IN THE STATE.
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In hiding from teh interwebz gestapo.
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Originally Posted by splby
BrickyardZ shows no mercy. just fyi...
Last edited by 03BrickyardZ; 03-04-2009 at 12:41 PM.
yeah, because otherwise the system doesn't make any sense?
how does a company being allowed to close and move states, fire all the union workers or circumvent the union make any sense? it renders a union useless, don't you think?
A union is only as good as it's members. I was part of a union (bakery and confectioners) and they were worthless, from the shop stewart to the people in the main office. I don't see anything good becoming of more unions.
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When was the last time you tried something new?
A union is only as good as it's members. I was part of a union (bakery and confectioners) and they were worthless, from the shop stewart to the people in the main office. I don't see anything good becoming of more unions.
I belong to that union ...and you are right , it is a useless union . Basicly they just collect your dues .
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And liberals are like dogs . They bark till everyone is annoyed.
A union is only as good as it's members. I was part of a union (bakery and confectioners) and they were worthless, from the shop stewart to the people in the main office. I don't see anything good becoming of more unions.
I work in the healthcare industry here in Los Angeles, and were having a big issue with one of the biggest healthcare unions in the states, SEIU-UHW.
Apparently, the UHW side, is accusing the high ranking officials, especially the president, Andy Stern, of mis-use of funds and embezzlement. SEIU is accusing the UHW side with the same thing, but because SEIU is reigning union over UHW, they fired all of them. Questionable, don't you think?
I mean I've read up on most of their background and beliefs, and the head of the SEIU is purely a socialist, he might as well put a mask of Karl Marx on his head while he's at it. He's admitted to using union dues to influence political campaigns for their benefit and securing enough dues to use against them if they don't side with the SEIU.. such political garbage.
Most of union stewards just abuse the priviledge of getting of work and wandering around, and usually when you have a discrepancy with the employer, they side with them... WTF? With rising union dues being utilized for non-sense, makes me think, why do we even have a union for?
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Originally Posted by Motormouth
drop the union then?
I wish we could do this, but in order to work for a hospital, you must be sign on with the local union before you start work. Which to me really bites.
__________________ 03 Chrome Silver Touring Model AND NO I'M NOT THE CHICK IN MY AVATAR!-- That's my wifey Ally..
I don't think a union worker should earn any more or less than a non-union worker.....I'm saying that unions serve to dictate compensation with little regard for the wage the market or the company can/will bear. It's worth pointing out though that the non-union workers at Honda plants and such in the US do make quite a bit less than the non-union GM/FORD/UAW workers do. It's also worth noting those companies aren't going bankrupt nor are they closing all their plants.
no they don't actually. that is false. they earn a comparable wage to the union workers. and there might be reasons the average wage is different (length of employment, overall skill base of workforce, cost of living differences in regions, tax differences, etc) that simply saying 'UNIONS' doesn't account for.
and it's been discussed ad nauseum where the figures for compensation come from. Simplest answer is Honda does not have the legacy costs (obviously) that GM does tacked onto the 'wage' of each employee.
and their reasons for not going bankrupt or closing plants have nothing to do with labor. they have to do with SALES volumes and SIZE of the operations in the US.
Yipee!!!! More Unions!!!! Exactly what we need!
This is exactly what our companies need....our auto industry can attest to this......
With rising union dues being utilized for non-sense, makes me think, why do we even have a union for? 
03 Chrome Silver Touring Model AND NO I'M NOT THE CHICK IN MY AVATAR!-- That's my wifey Ally.. 
