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Bear Sterns B.S.
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“We just lost a big chunk of our retirement,” grumbled more than one person down at the Union Hall last week, when General Electric Co. (GE) stock tumbled. “I got two houses on my street under foreclosure already,” added Pete Capano, an IUE-CWA Local 201 Executive Board member and Ward 6 city councilor in Lynn, Mass. We are entering the fear stage of the recession, where people swap stories about the trouble we’re in.
We in the United States work the longest hours of any workers in the industrialized world.
Our productivity is up by any standard—two-thirds or more in the past 10 years.
So why were 102 houses in Lynn facing foreclosure in February, more than double the 44 houses one year ago? Why did GE workers and retirees take a beating on their 401(k)s last week, when GE stock dropped $4 a share? Why have more than one hundred people stopped by my office for help in getting jobs—jobs that I don’t have to offer? Why is nearly every city and town in Massachusetts facing layoffs?
Why is the economy falling apart?
Why Not Health Care?
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Andy, an IUE-CWA Local 201 member, looked at his pension check from General Electric as he sat in my office at the union hall. The local vice president and the president of the retirees association usually respond to benefit questions like this. But they were both on vacation, and I was struggling to catch up and be of some help.
“I got the $40 raise you told us about in December” he told me. “Then in January, I lost it again, plus another $6. What good was it? What happened?”
A conference call or two later, and we both knew three things had happened. In December, his pension went up $40. In January, his health care went up $46. So when the dust settled, his pension check dropped by $6. And keep in mind that he is one of the lucky ones: The share of employees offering any group health insurance at all to their retired workers dropped from 66 percent in 1988 to 33 percent in 2007.
Confessions of a Boston (Union) Sports Fan…or, in Search of an Underdog
The Orioles fan in the next seat turned to me and said, “Good, we’re only down two runs.” I was sitting in Camden Yards, the baseball stadium in Baltimore. I thought he was joking. It was the top of the first inning, and he was glad that his team was only down two runs to the visiting Boston Red Sox. But there was no smile on his face, just visible relief. Down two after half an inning, and he was all but celebrating!
This was a moment to consider just how long I, as a union guy who has supported underdogs all my life, could continue rooting for big-market, big-spending teams that have become the new Evil Empire.
Jeb’s Parting Gift to the People of Florida Has Lessons for Everyone
Politics is full of old adages, little nuggets of truth like “all politics are local,” that have been repeated by the political class so many times that they have taken on the qualities of scientific laws like the law of gravity. I would like to add my own truism to the mix, one based on a question: What do you get when you elect politicians who profess their disdain for government and all taxes and run their campaigns by promising to eliminate both?
A poorly run, bankrupt government that does so little for the people that it negates the reason for having a government to begin with. This is surely true at the national level where George W. Bush and his cadre of cronies have presided over an administration that historians already are calling the worst in U.S. history, bungling through world affairs like a bull in a china shop, grossly mismanaging disasters like Hurricane Katrina and turning a historic budget surplus into the biggest national debt we have ever seen.
‘They Got Walter’
My daughter told me, when I dropped her off at work at Market Basket last week: “They got Walter.” The police, or the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had come to the supermarket and picked up “Walter.” He was a young Latino who had worked his way up to full-time. Nobody on the job knew where he was taken, and nobody knew why he was taken. In the following days it was said he had a false Social Security number. The large-scale raids were supposed to be aimed at the MS-13 gang, but others, including a union organizer, were caught up, and terror spread through the “New Immigrant” communities like a thunderstorm across the Kansas plains.
White neighborhoods didn’t even know about the raids. But the Latino neighborhoods were deserted. Around the corner from my union hall in Lynn, Mass., Union Street has been transformed in the past 20 years from an abandoned district inhabited largely by drug dealers into a bustling commercial center of Latino businesses. When news of the raids was spread by the Spanish radio stations, an eerie silence spread over Union Street and other Spanish neighborhoods down into East Boston. The little store selling religious icons of Jesus and Mary was empty. White employers complained their workers disappeared. Parents kept their children home from school, behind locked doors.
Margaret Thatcher Was Wrong
Actually this column is about a fire at my house. Bear with me, I’ll get back to Margaret Thatcher.
My house in Lynn, Mass., burned last March. Nobody was hurt, not even the cat. We’ll be fine. Most of the furniture and belongings are gone, but we had insurance.
If you’ve been through something like this, you know it’s a hassle, a million things to deal with. Insurance companies, contractors, special dry-cleaners, folks who help you save your books, folks who scrub the remaining walls, someone to re-frame your pictures, etc.
There But For The Grace of God Go I
The morning following the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis, I was glad to see people I knew in my neighborhood. Oh good, you weren't caught on the bridge, I said. I heard stories of close calls. My letter carrier reported her husband had crossed the bridge less than 15 minutes before it fell. My neighbor said his young son was returning from a day camp field trip on a school bus and crossed the bridge about 45 minutes before it fell. I myself cross the bridge several times a week. Yesterday I might have gone that way, too—at just the wrong time—except for my determination to finish a project at work.
I was working in my office about one-half mile from the I-35W bridge when the structure collapsed about 6:15 p.m. I heard sirens, not unusual at our busy intersection just across the river from downtown Minneapolis. Then I heard more and more sirens. I looked out the window and I saw emergency vehicles speeding by, some towing boats. The street was clogged with an unusual amount of traffic. I checked the website of a local TV news station and learned that the I-35W bridge had collapsed.
A Bridge Falls in Minneapolis
When disaster strikes, union members often are the first to respond. We saw that in New York City and Washington, D.C. in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. We saw that here in Minneapolis yesterday.
The busy Interstate 35W bridge spanning the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed yesterday during evening rush hour. The morning newspaper today reported nine people dead, 20 people missing, and 60 people taken to area hospitals. The missing and wounded included an Operating Engineers union member working on the bridge and AFSCME members inspecting construction work on the bridge.
Championing Workers: Restoring Government’s True Role
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| A memorial to labor hero Floyd B. Olson, Minnesota governor 1930-1936, now overgrown with weeds. |
Greetings from Minneapolis, where we've had so little rain this summer that I've cut my grass only once.
During another hot summer—73 years ago in July—workers here shed blood in the streets in a struggle for better wages and working conditions and for the right to organize unions and bargain collectively. The Minneapolis Teamsters strikes of 1934 helped make Minneapolis a union town and also helped lead Congress to pass the landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
In my work as editor of the Minneapolis Labor Review, I've been learning more about those hard-won victories of 70-plus years ago and every day see how workers' struggles for justice continue today. I hope to share some of those stories here in the weeks and months ahead.
A Three-Generation Contract
Contract negotiations with the General Electric Co. (GE) are so brutal that the main thing local union leaders are thinking about at the end is just “thank God it's over.” Although the company's take-it-or-leave-it tactics (known as Boulwarism*) were long ago ruled illegal, management has adjusted its tactics just enough to stay this side of the legal line. National union negotiators from the 13 unions that make up the Coordinated Bargaining Committee sit in New York for five weeks—and nothing really moves until the last three or four days.
We have a lot to be proud of the contract we just ratified. Best of all, we achieved a raise for current pensioners, based on their years of service and when they retired. So the retirees who are really hurting, who retired before 1984 and are living on $500–$600 a month (half for surviving spouses) will get the biggest raise. We also defended benefits for future hires, people who aren’t working at GE or paying dues to the union yet. Some 30,000 management employees lost various pension, retiree health care and early retirement benefits back in 2005, so we knew they were coming for us this year. But we saved 80 percent of benefits for future hires—even though they, too, don’t work for GE (yet) and don’t pay dues.
