Channel: Corporate Greed
Global Unions: Reform Banks Worldwide
The global union movement is calling on other governments to follow President Obama’s commitment to restructure banks as a key part of comprehensive financial regulatory reform. Obama has proposed a series of urgently needed reforms, including an end to the practice of banks using depositors’ money to engage in the kind of high-risk speculative operations, such as hedge funds and private equity, which helped plunge the world into recession.
As AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said last week:
Financial companies must not be allowed to go back to business as usual—or worse. We urge the President and Congress to make financial re-regulation a top priority.
Scammers Follow Unions from Newsprint to Cyberspace
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As long as there have been labor publications, there have been scam artists masquerading as legitimate union newsletters, magazines or newspapers trying to swindle advertising dollars from unsuspecting businesses looking for a vehicle to reach union members and their families.
Today, as most union publications have migrated to the web, the con artists have followed, reports Andy Zipser, editor of the Guild Reporter of The Newspaper Guild-CWA.
“As print publications have moved increasingly online, so too have the rip-off artists, with such creations as unions.org, unionfriendly.com, unitedworkforce.org, unitedunions.org, unionmembersweb.com and other equally suggestive URLs.
“As the names imply, such bogus websites implicitly suggest—or explicitly state—that they’re union connected, relying on deception rather than the outright extortion of their print predecessors.”
Jobless Workers Get Answers from Trumka, Franken Via Working America
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Lisa in Louisville, Ky., was one of some 20,000 unemployed Working America members who took part in a conference call today with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) to talk about solutions to the jobs crisis and how to make the economy work for working families again.
She posed this question:
We’ve been told for years that cheap goods from China will somehow help our economy, but I believe what really helps is spending our money here. How do we redirect what we’re spending there to our economy here?
Replied Franken:
We can’t allow ourselves to be chumps when it comes to trade.
He and Trumka then went on to outline the changes that must be made in U.S. trade and tax policies that currently encourage U.S. firms to ship jobs overseas.
Illegally Fired Workers Must Get Jobs, Pay Back
Nearly 150 workers at a Michigan auto parts manufacturer could be getting their jobs back—along with back pay—after a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) administrative law judge (ALJ) ruled they were illegally fired.
In early 2008, the workers, members of UAW Local 822, were in negotiations for a new contract with Douglas Autotech Corp. in Bronson. In May, according to a press release from the NLRB, the union called a brief strike
but quickly realized that the strike was not lawful because certain timely notice was not given….The union made an unconditional offer to return to work on the third day of the strike.
L.A. Hotel Worker Rally Caps off Trumka’s California Jobs and Justice Tour
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At a rally last night in front of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told a cheering crowd of about 1,000 members of UNITEHERE! Local 11 and supporters from the unions of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor:
It’s time to take on the Hyatt Hotel Corporation!
The rally, filled with hundreds of people and chanting drums so loud they echoed off high rise buildings, wrapped up his jobs and hotel worker justice swing through California.
The Hyatt is one of several national hotel chains that are using the recession as an excuse to demand cuts in health care benefits and other concessions in contract talks. In Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, some, 20,000 UNITEHERE! members since last year have been working without contracts, while contracts for hotel workers in a half dozen other cities are set to expire soon.
Tax on Health Care Will Erode Coverage for Middle Class
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A new year brings with it lots of hope.
Let’s hope 2010 brings a health care reform bill that does not penalize working families with a tax on their coverage. Because right now, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert aptly describes it, there is a ”middle-class tax time bomb ticking in the Senate’s version” of the health care reform legislation.
The bill that passed the Senate with such fanfare on Christmas Eve would impose a confiscatory 40 percent excise tax on so-called Cadillac health plans, which are popularly viewed as over-the-top plans held only by the very wealthy. In fact, it’s a tax that in a few years will hammer millions of middle-class policyholders, forcing them to scale back their access to medical care.
Chamber the Bah-Humbuggiest in JwJ’s Scrooge of the Year
Do you hear chains rattling? That’s the ghost of Christmas Past tracking down the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is the 2009 winner of the annual contest by Jobs with Justice (JwJ) to spotlight the greediest, most cold-hearted organization or person that personifies the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge.
Voters singled out the Chamber for its narrow, radical agenda advocating for anti-worker, profit-focused solutions to the broken health care, labor and environmental systems.
Jobs with Justice Executive Director Sarita Gupta says the Chamber was up against some pretty Scrooge-worthy opponents.
[But] the similarities between Scrooge and the Chamber of Commerce were hard to beat. The ghost of years past would show that the policies they’ve promoted, including deregulation and maximizing profits at the expense of workers, are directly connected to the destruction of America’s middle class.
L.A. Drivers: Carwash Workers May Live on Tips
Drivers in Los Angeles are getting the message: Carwash workers often are being exploited by their employers.
As KCET-TV reported in recent days:
“The next time you visit a carwash, think twice about how much you tip the person who wipes down your vehicle. That may be the only pay he receives. Correspondent Angie Crouch investigates widespread labor violations at Southern California car washes.”
The investigation of the workers’ plight comes more than a year after carwash workers in the area joined together to win basics rights at their workplaces—like actually getting paid. The Community-Labor-Environmental Action Network (CLEAN) Carwash Campaign, a coalition of community, religious, environmental and immigrant rights organizations, formed in March 2008 to aid Los Angeles carwash workers in their efforts to form a union with the United Steelworkers (USW).
Working More, Getting Paid Less
Productivity rose 8.1 percent in the third quarter, the largest gain since 2003, as employers pile more on their staff. Meanwhile, pay is stagnating and worker stress increasing because of the larger workloads and the constant fear of being thrown out of a job to join the more than 15 million workers officially unemployed.
A Los Angeles Times story points to how rising productivity, while good for the economy, is not benefiting America’s workers. According to Thomas A. Kochan, a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, productivity gains are troubling because so far,
they haven’t been accompanied by wage increases….The threat of outsourcing has also made employees more reluctant to press for higher wages, he said, when they know that if they push too hard, their jobs could disappear.
The result?
Anxiety is rippling across the workplace. A survey by CareerBuilder released last month indicated that a quarter of employers rated their employees’ morale as low. Nearly half of employees said their workload had increased in the last six months, and 40% said their stress level at work was high. About one in five workers surveyed were dissatisfied with their work-life balance.
Read the full article here.
Cast Your Vote for ‘Scrooge of the Year’
It’s the holiday season and time once again to say “bah humbug” to the most cold-hearted and greedy CEOs, corporations and politicians who exemplify the spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge.
This is the 10th year that Jobs with Justice (JwJ) has “honored” the person or group that has done the most to “scrooge” workers. And given the current crop of nominees—Bank of America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Hyatt Hotels, Publix Supermarkets and student loan providers—it looks like it will be a hard decision to pick just one.
You can cast your vote for any of these deserving nominees here. The winner will be announced Dec. 21.
First, there’s Bank of America, which had a hand in the worst of the subprime lending excesses, providing financing to four of the top five largest subprime lenders during the years prior to the crash. Among them, these four firms issued more than $320 billion in subprime loans from 2005-2007. As a result of these kinds of abuses, Bank of America helped crash the economy and then accepted bailouts and backstops totaling $199.2 billion.
