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Senate Confirms Hilda Solis as Labor Secretary |
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Hilda Solis is the new secretary of labor. After Republicans backed away from an expected filibuster and agreed to stop their weeks of delaying tactics, the Senate this afternoon approved Solis’s nomination by an 80-17 vote.
Says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney:
The confirmation of Rep. Hilda Solis is a huge victory: Finally, Americans will have a secretary of labor who represents working people, not wealthy CEO’s. It is also a historic moment as Rep. Solis becomes the first Hispanic secretary of labor.
The delay of Rep. Solis’s nomination for partisan and ideological reasons was overcome by the grassroots support of millions of Americans who are struggling and desperately need a secretary of labor who will be their voice.
In the vote, 54 Democrats, 24 Republicans and two Independents voted for confirmation. All 17 votes against confirmation were cast by Republicans. Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) did not vote.
Solis, a Democratic member of the U.S. House from California, was announced in December as President Obama’s choice to lead the Department of Labor, and her confirmation hearing took place Jan. 9. However, Big Business groups and some far-right Republican senators loudly complained about Solis’s long record of support for working families and unions and delayed the confirmation vote until today.
After a scheduled Feb. 12 vote was postponed because of Republican objections, the union movement created a Facebook page, Americans for Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor to build some e-roots support for Solis. Nearly 2,000 people signed on.
During the floor debate today, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) said Solis’s working family background—both her mom and dad were blue-collar union members—gives her a real connection to the problems and trials those families face—something those on Capitol Hill might not be as close to. Dodd said:
We may be aware, but do we really understand? None of us are facing losing our jobs, our homes, our retirement security….We need a secretary of labor who understands what working families are going though.
During the past eight years, the Department of Labor has moved away from protecting employees to protecting employers and weakened the right to organize….I don’t believe that’s its role, and neither does Congresswomen Solis. It is essential that the Department of Labor recommit itself to protecting the rights of workers.
Sweeney said:
She understands that the Employee Free Choice Act is critical to rebuilding our economy because working men and women deserve the freedom to choose whether to form a union without employer harassment and intimidation.
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said that in the past eight years, the voices of working families “haven’t been heard enough” and the voices of corporations and the powerful have been far too loud at the Labor Department.
President Obama, with the selection of Hilda Solis as secretary of labor, has given working families a voice back. Throughout her career, she has been a forceful advocate for working men and women.
In the U.S. House, Solis earned a 97 percent AFL-CIO working family voting record.
Before her election to Congress in 2000, Solis served in the California legislature, first in the Assembly and then in 1994 becoming the first Latina elected to the state Senate.
Solis’s confirmation is a boon for all of America’s workers and is supported by a range of groups nationwide. Says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club:
Hilda Solis was a champion for workers’ rights, a champion for the environment and a tireless advocate for environmental justice during both her service in California and in the Congress.
Click here to go the Sierra Club’s website and send Solis a congratulatory e-mail.
In his statement, Sweeney added:
Rep. Solis is uniquely qualified to help struggling families through these difficult economic times because she knows firsthand what they are going through. She grew up in a working class family and understands what programs our nation’s workers need the most.
She will fight to improve skills development and job-creation programs, including development of “green collar” jobs. She will work to assure that workers get the pay they have earned and that they work in safe, healthy and fair workplaces. She’s ready to address the retirement security crisis and will work hard to protect every worker from job discrimination, regardless of race, sex, veteran status or disability.
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Congratulations to Labor Secretary Solis! I am so happy to have hope that
members of Labor will be paid attention to. Members of Labor Unions are caring helpful people, we care.
Hurrrrray! Finally …. maybe just maybe Republicans are learning that their sabotaging of Obama policies is not winning them any more approval than the 23% who are still ideologues driven by hatred of gays and women.
i’m a 42 year union member. now i have hope for working people that they have earned
Senate voted 80-17 to confirm Hilda Solis as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor
Hilda Solis Confirmed YES!
The Department of Management Will Now Be Known as the Department of The Workers Rights!
Dear Employee Free Choice Act Now . Org,
I am pleased to report that earlier today, the Senate voted 80-17 to confirm Hilda Solis as President Obama’s Secretary of Labor. I strongly supported her confirmation.
Secretary Solis comes from a proud union family, and has been fighting for the rights of workers her entire career. She understands the difficult issues facing our economy, and I have every confidence that she will work tirelessly at the Labor Department to make sure working families are not left behind.
At a time when we have 11 million workers unemployed in America, it is inexcusable that her nomination was held up due to partisan politics. I am glad the Senate was finally able to move her nomination forward, and I look forward to working with her on the issues that are so important to Michigan’s working families.
As always, please don’t hesitate to contact my office if we can be of assistance to you or your family.
Sincerely,
Debbie Stabenow
United States Senator
http://efcanow.blogspot.com/
http://www.employeefreechoiceactnow.org
Tags: Employee Free Choice Act, Free Choice Act, EFCA, Hilda Solis, Senate, Senator Debbie Stabenow, Labor Union News, Labor Union
There could be no better investment in America than to invest in America becoming energy independent! We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources.Create cheap clean energy, new badly needed green jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. The cost of fuel effects every facet of consumer goods from production to shipping costs. After a brief reprieve gas is inching back up.OPEC will continue to cut production until they achieve their desired 80-100. per barrel.If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV’s instead had plug-in electric drive trainsthe amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota.There is a really good new book out by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com
Congratulations to Labor Secretary Solis! I will say it is amazing how these union busting companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to stop their employees from forming a union. The union busting companies tell the workers that unions are bad for business. Here is a thought: If unions are SO BAD for business, why do they spend thousands of dollars to keep unions out of their company?
This is the best news I’ve heard since the election of President Obama! I am a employee who has been organizing my company, FedEx Freight.
We have been organizing for 3 years now and have been making some good progress in that time. But now hearing the conformation of Rep. Solis as Secretary of Labor now we will have a friend of Labor to hear our voice!
As a California resident, my wife and I live in the adjacent district to Congresswoman Hilda Solis. (Unfortunately, our representative is David Dryer) My wife worked within the bounds of Congresswoman Solis’ district as a community organizer for youth and on several occasions received important support and encouragement from Congresswoman Solis. We are extremely happy and hopeful for President Obma’s choice of this fine woman for the position of Secretary of Labor. It is a refreshing change to have a president who is willing to appoint people on the basis of their qualifications and not on the basis of their financial contributions or political pull. Thank you President Obama for such an excellent choice.
We have achieved an important 1st step: we have an Executive Branch of government that is pro-labor: but lets not get too cocky! The Employee Free Choice Act is not on the table yet in Congress and it may go the same way the Stimulis Bill went: While everyone is celebrating: the money for new school construction went south!
I am one of those constuction workers who would have benefitted from that and while I am sitting home waiting for the next job to be ready for me to go to, I have nothing to go to!
I am sure Our new Secretary of Labor will also work to assure Project Labor Agreements and seek full enforcement of the Davis Bacon Act in all current ant new construction projects. One battle has been won, but the fighting isn’t over yet!
New Report Reveals Why GOP Hates Unions: They Raise Wages, Boost Economy
Thursday 19 February 2009
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by: Art Levine, The Huffington Post
The Hoover-like GOP has been working overtime to oppose President Obama’s stimulus package while hoping he fails. Meanwhile, a report released yesterday by the Center for American Progress Action Fund essentially underscores the real reasons Republicans and the business community have taken another equally short-sighted economic stance: fighting workers’ right to organize. As Unions Are Good For the American Economy points out with irrefutable statistics, unionization raises wages and boosts the economy because it puts more money in the pockets of American workers.
(The report itself, of course, doesn’t directly accuse the GOP and corporate interests of opposing economic growth and recovery, but reading its measured analysis of the economic benefit of unions leads to the inescapable conclusion that anti-union business leaders have a misguided zeal for low wages at all cost - regardless of the impact on their own workers, their firms’ productivity, their own long-term profits or the broader economy.)
In a conference call with reporters to discuss the report, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed: “One reason we’re in the crisis we’re in is because consumers have run out of money…. If they can’t borrow anymore, and they have to rely on sinking wages, the entire economy is in trouble, because there’s not enough demand out there.” Reich added, “The point of the Employee Free Choice Act is to end intimidation and allow workers to join unions as they have a right to do. Workers want to be in unions [nearly 60% say they'd join if they could], and if they did have unions, they’d have higher wages and benefits. And if they had higher wags and benefits, they’d have the purchasing power to buy more goods and services.”
In fact, the relative stagnation of wages over the last few decades - due in large part to effective unionbusting aimed at keeping labor costs low - helped bring on the economic meltdown because too many low-income workers were suckered into mortgages they really couldn’t afford. Those mortgages were in turn bundled into the “toxic assets” - those various nearly-worthless investment vehicles - that have weakened the world’s financial systems and brought on our free-fall recession. As Daily Kos diarist Trapper John reported last year, “AFL-CIO Associate General Counsel Damon Silvers lays out how the decline in unionization which began in the mid-Seventies led to the burst of the sub-prime bubble, and ultimately to today’s recession. And he wrote it way back in April.”
In contrast, this new Center for American Progress report points out, if unionization rates today were the same as they were in 1983, an additional $49 billion could be pumped into the economy by workers represented by unions. As the report co-authored by David Madland and Karla Walter says, “In 1983, 23.3 percent of American workers were either members of a union or represented by a union at their workplace. By 2008, that portion declined to 13.7 percent.” And, as Reich and the report noted, “Workers in unions earn 30% higher than non-union workers.”
As Beth Shulman, author of The Betrayal of Work, observed during the conference call: “A union job transforms a low-wage job into a good job” - and a pathway to the middle-class. And those workers will be able come into showrooms, real estate offices, auto dealerships and stores across America to start buying again and paying down-payments for a home. Shulman quoted a grocery store worker who joined a union, Linda, telling her, “For the first time, I can dream for my child,” and who started putting away money for her child’s college education. “Having unionization gives people a stake in the American dream,” Shulman said.
But, as usual, big businesses and the GOP have taken a short-term, greedy look at their economic self-interest and determined they must fight the Employee Free Choice Act with all the weapons at their disposal. These include $200 million worth of smear ads , lobbying and misleading talking points; they’re claiming (falsely) that it takes away the secret ballot and will wreck the economy.
Yet, as Shulman says, “The business community knows the basic facts that are in this report: when workers have unions, they have better wages, they have better benefits, they have a voice in the workplace, so it’s not surprising they would take a hard line with this. This [bill] is important to ensure a road to the middle class and a right to organize.” She’s confident that the goals of the legislation will trump corporate special interests and right-wing ideology: “Clearly, it will get passed, because it’s in the interest of working America.”
And as Walter and other pro-union advocates point out, a level playing field for union organizing helps the economy. The higher wages paid by unions boosts productivity, reduce turnover and can even improve profits. Partially unionized Cosco, she says, has nearly 40% more in labor costs than its sister company, Sam’s Club, but has almost double the per-employee profit margin. “They invested in the jobs and lowered turnover,” she observes.
In fact, even the Heritage Foundation’s much-hyped index of “economic freedom” in countries around the world pointed to economies with the highest rates of unionization in the workforce.
As for the right-wing’s favorite whipping boys, the auto industry and the UAW, Walter and other experts say the blame should fall on the executives’ poor manufacturing decisions - not the 10 percent of a car’s cost made up by labor costs. And, despite the demonization of the UAW, the American auto-industry workers’ wages are now roughly comparable to those in non-unionized Japanese factories, but it’s the added costs of health care and pensions for union retirees over the decades that have actually raised costs. In addition, as the latest restructuring and cost-cutting plans show, the UAW has been willing to compromise - after giving up important gains in negotiations in earlier years.
The important new report shows that the original goal of the UAW - helping their workers achieve a decent, middle-class standard of living while working in factories - could also help today’s low-paid workers, especially in the growing service and health-care sectors, boost their incomes if they had the right to join a union. As the AFL-CIO Now blog reports:
The report also provides a state-by-state analysis of increased union membership on wages. An increase in the rate of union membership of just 5 percent would increase total wages by $176 million in Nebraska, $503 million in Wisconsin and $852 million in Pennsylvania.
These wages would be spread across the entire labor market.
“The essence of what labor unions do - give workers a stronger voice so that they can get a fair share of the economic growth they help create - is and has always been important to making the economy work for all Americans. And unions only become more important as the economy worsens.
“One of the primary reasons why our current recession endures is that workers do not have the purchasing power they need to drive our economy … what is sustainable is an economy where workers are adequately rewarded and have the income they need to purchase goods. This is where unions come in.”
Walter and Madland point to the disconnect between productivity and wages as a major factor in our economic crisis. Indeed, if wages had kept pace with productivity increases, rather than falling behind as they have in recent decades, average wages would be 42.7 percent higher. That’s a sizable share of the economy that workers have lost, undermining consumer purchasing power and economic security - which, in turn, hurt the nation’s entire economy in a vicious downward spiral.
That’s why protecting union rights becomes so critical to economic recovery. As Karla Walter summed up her research, “The Employee Free Choice Act is not only important because it makes it harder for anti-union companies to harass workers, it boosts unionization rates, and improves millions of Americans’ economic standing, providing families of those with union jobs a path to the middle class and pumping billions into the American economy every year.”
At the heart of all this is a drive for fairness and a level playing field for workers - the right to bargain for decent pay and benefits. As Stewart Acuff, the special assistant to the president of the AFL-CIO, says caustically, “If the bosses can bargain with their boards of directors for their $200 million salaries and $10 million bonuses while they were screwing up their companies, workers ought to be able to bargain for their kids’ health care and wages they can count on.”
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Art Levine co-hosts “The D’Antoni and Levine Show” on BlogTalk Radio at 5:30 p.m. ET, every Thursday, then archived online. This week’s guests, Berkeley economist Brad DeLong and the Campaign For America’s Future senior fellow, Bernie Horn, explain President Obama’s bailout, stimulus and recovery packages - and the political fights over them.
I hope a lot of “blue collar” workers that supported John McCain in the past election start to take notice of whom the Republicans really support. During the election cycle they will talk a lot about helping the hard working white blue collar worker but after all elections they constantly prove to us that they are sole supporters of corporate America and has NEVER done anything to support union workers. Let us not be divided by the “covert racism” and stay focus. We are ALL in this together. Solidarity.
It will be great to actually have a Pro-Labor Secretary at DOL for a change! . Let me add my hope that Ms. Solis looks within the DOL, specifically the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs, as a place where major clean-up needs to take place. I was employed there 8 years - 4 under the Bush Administration with Secretary Elaine Chao, and witnessed this program for injured Federal Employees go from bad to worse. The guidelines of being impartial and non-adversarial went out the window, as more quotas and numeric “standards” were put in place, creating conflicts of interest. An Examiner’s evaluations, chance for promotion, and piece of the bonus pie depended on how well s/he played the “numbers game”. So much energy was focused on reducing the rolls, and for Examiners already overburdened with huge caseloads, the pressure was great to take shortcuts. I saw this happen often, and tried my best to not work that way, but ran into conflicts with Management when I spoke out against adversarial adjudication practices. This was quite a stressful situation, when my own Supervisor would parrot “Deny now, they have their appeal rights.” I believe Ms. Solis needs to clean up OWCP, from DC, down to the District and Regional levels, including all Supervisors who enforced and/or encouraged adversarial adjudication procedures. Our Federal Employees deserve better. I realize the Secretary wil have her hands full with many issues, but truly hope genuine reform finally comes to OWCP.
For American workers, 2008 was a disastrous year. The U.S. economy lost nearly 2 million jobs during the last four months alone, and most economists see things getting worse before they get better.
Unfortunately, President Obama’s choice to head the Department of Labor gives millions of unemployed and underemployed American workers little hope of gaining access to the 8 million jobs estimated to be held by illegal aliens or raising wages depressed by cheap foreign labor. In appointing Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) as Secretary of Labor, the president chose an implacable foe of immigration enforcement generally, and specifically enforcement in the workplace. Coupled with the selection of Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security, there is little reason to expect either department to vigorously enforce laws against businesses that employ illegal aliens.
During her time in Congress, Solis supported or co-sponsored just about every effort to grant amnesty to illegal aliens and expand the number of foreign guest workers in the U.S. While a member of the California Legislature, Solis fought to provide taxpayer supported benefits and services to illegal aliens and to allow them to obtain driver’s licenses.
In Congress, Rep. Solis has co-sponsored or supported numerous bills that would have harmed American workers, including:
The AgJOBs amnesty, which would have granted green cards to virtually every illegal alien employed in some agriculture-related industry.
The 2007 STRIVE Act, which would have granted amnesty to most illegal aliens in the U.S. In addition, the bill would have allowed an additional 400,000 to 600,000 foreign guest workers to enter the U.S. labor force each year.
The DREAM Act, which would have granted green cards to illegal aliens who entered the country before age 16, and would have granted them subsidized college tuition benefits.
The Department of Labor can play a significant role in preventing the employment of illegal aliens. It is the department’s responsibility to promote “the welfare of the job seekers, wage earners, and retirees of the United States by improving their working conditions, advancing their opportunities for profitable employment…[and] helping employers find workers.”
While President Obama has embarked on an ambitious jobs creation program to deal with the unemployment crisis, millions of existing jobs could be made available to American workers by enforcing laws against employing illegal aliens. Given Secretary Solis’s long history of siding with illegal aliens, if she is confirmed by the Senate in that position, it will require strong direction from the White House to ensure that the Labor Department fulfills its stated mission.
FAIR will be reaching out to Congress and the new administration to stress the added importance, in this time of economic crisis, of vigorous enforcement against employers who rob American workers of job opportunities and seek to suppress wages. The first test of the Obama administration’s and the Congress’s commitment to protecting American jobs is likely to come in early March when the E-Verify program will need to be reauthorized.
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fairus.org