Carols—and Coals—for Verizon
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This is a cross-post from the Metropolitan Washington (D.C.) Central Labor Council Council.
Holiday carolers serenaded Verizon board member Rodney Slater yesterday with new words to an old favorite:
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, Verizon gave to me: Profits over people, less respect for workers, more corporate greed, less health insurance, dividends for stockholders, cutting our pensions, billions in profits, OUT-SOURCING JOBS, unfairly fired workers, dishonest bargaining, a cut in starting pay and a few million for the CEO!
Activists from the Communications Workers of America (CWA), other unions, Jobs with Justice and the Occupy movement sang carols about corporate greed outside Slater’s downtown Washington, D.C., office. Slater, the U.S. secretary of transportation under President Bill Clinton, made $219,000 last year as a Verizon board director and helped stuff the stockings of the company’s top five executives with a cool $258 million over the past four years, earning Slater and his Verizon board colleagues a lump of coal from the protesters.
In August, Verizon workers went on strike, as bargaining broke down over give-backs in health care and pensions demanded by the company. Two weeks later, employees were back at work on the promise of good-faith bargaining—yet they still have no contract. Since then, a new report found Verizon has paid no federal taxes since 2007 and in fact, paid a -2.9 percent tax rate from 2008-2010.
Unions Take Up White House $4 Billion ‘Better Buildings Challenge’
At a White House event today featuring President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton, AFT President Randi Weingarten represented labor leaders in joining university presidents and corporate executives in support of the presidential Better Buildings Challenge initiative.
President Obama announced that nearly $4 billion of investments have been committed already, including $2 billion by workers’ pension funds, CEOs, mayors and university presidents for energy-saving upgrades. The labor movement committed to work to invest $150 million in energy-efficient retrofit projects in the coming months.
The goal of the initiative, which builds on work begun by the AFL-CIO earlier this year with the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), is to spur job creation by harnessing private sector investment in energy upgrades in commercial and industrial buildings.
Working with the AFT, a broad coalition of public-sector unions, and the Read the rest of this entry »
Bill Clinton: Unions Are ‘America’s Employment Bankers’
Former President Bill Clinton yesterday singled out the efforts of the union movement in creating massive numbers of jobs through union pension fund investments. Speaking yesterday at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Clinton praised the AFL-CIO and AFT for already providing $1 billion in pension fund investments to improve infrastructure and increase energy efficiency. (Watch the video of the event here. )
He also called on financial institutions and corporations–which are sitting on $2 trillion in cash without creating jobs–to follow the lead of the union movement and “loosen up all this money and put America back to work. If you did that, you’d have a million jobs in no time.”
With AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and AFT President Randi Weingarten on the stage with him, Clinton said: Read the rest of this entry »
UAW Donates $500,000 to Haiti Relief as Unions Continue Strong Aid Efforts
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Despite the impact of one of the worse recessions in U.S. history, union members continue to generously support efforts to help survivors of the devastating earthquake in Haiti. You can take action now to help the Haitian survivors by clicking on the AFL-CIO Haitian Disaster Relief site here.
The UAW yesterday announced it is donating $500,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation to help victims of the earthquake. Says UAW President Ron Gettelfinger:
The people of Haiti desperately need food, water, medical care and hope. The women and men of the UAW stand with thousands of other organizations and ordinary citizens in their desire to help the Haitian people meet their basic human needs.
Government Grows the Economy
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Economist Jeff Madrick, director of policy research at The New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, is among several key speakers at next week’s Building the New Economy conference here in Washington, D.C. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard also are among keynote speakers. Here, Madrick shares with us why government involvement in the economy is essential to ensure a robust, successful nation.
America had been living a free-market myth for a generation until the credit crisis of 2008 and 2009 descended on the nation—and the world. One expression of that myth, found frequently on the editorial pages of the popular media, was that government does not grow economies, business does. In other words, government, don’t meddle where you’re not needed. Politicians are even easier to belittle than government itself.
Inauguration Day: Party with a Program
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| ‘Lynn for Obama’ volunteers get ready to knock on New Hampshire doors in October as part of the effort to elect Barack Obama president of the United States. |
At our November local union meeting, our vice president, Alex Brown, posed the question: What do you hope for from the Obama presidency? There were a dozen answers, but they boiled down to “bring the jobs back,” “health care” and “bring our soldiers home.”
If hope was results, this would already be the greatest presidency of all time. I admit it—I’ve wasted too much of my time parsing lists of possible Barack Obama appointees and pestering people in Washington I think might know something about who might get which job.
The appointments Obama is making look like the ultimate Bill Clinton comeback. I was happy to work for Clinton over Dole. But President Clinton also brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the “end of welfare as we know it” and the repeal of Roosevelt’s Glass-Stegall Act, which prevented the banks from participating in some of the worst financial speculation. Clinton announced that “the era of Big Government is over.” Each of these acts was a rejection of the New Deal and an accommodation to the neo-liberal policies of free trade, privatization and deregulation. We went from Nixon’s “We’re all Keynesians” to an unspoken, “We’re all neo-liberals.” This is not what I had in mind when I spent my weekends tracking down undecided voters in New Hampshire.
