Report: Boehner’s ‘Territorial Tax’ Scheme Would Cost More Jobs
Even as millions of U.S. workers can’t find a job and corporate profits are through the roof, House Speaker John Boehner has proposed a change in the tax system that will shrink the job pool even more. Boehner’s suggestion to exempt U.S corporations from paying taxes on offshore profits would give companies even more incentive to move jobs overseas, according to a new report.
The “territorial tax system” would allow CEOs to shift profits and jobs out of the country and disguise U.S. profits as “foreign” profits,” according to Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ).
As CTJ explains, the best alternative would be for Congress to repeal the rule allowing U.S. corporations to “defer” their U.S. taxes on offshore profits. Corporations could continue to get a credit for any taxes paid to a foreign government just as they do now. Read the CTJ report here.
Too Much Money Can Make the Boss Mean
Here’s another reason to do away with runaway CEO pay. A study shows bloated CEO pay can make the boss mean.
The study examined the corporate behavior of 261 companies and found a close correlation between pay inequality and poor treatment of workers. In companies where CEOs made much more than their average workers, the companies were more likely to underfund pensions or cut corners on health and safety. Often, according to the study, the bosses engaged in a cost-benefit analysis, calculating that a fine would be a cost of doing business, compared with the profits they could make.
“You end up basically thinking of those at the bottom as numbers,’’ Sreedhari Desai, a Harvard research fellow who co-authored the study, told The Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss. “You feel somehow that they aren’t even worthy of the normal people that you’d meet. They’re disposable.’’
U.S. Workers Earned Less in 2009 Than in 2008
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Looks like Santa is bringing a lump of something to working families, and it isn’t a fatter paycheck.
New data show America’s workers earned less in 2009 than in 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compensation was down by 3.2 percent in 2009 with declines in construction and manufacturing fueling the plunge. St. Louis County, the hardest hit, saw a decline of 11.5 percent. Read the rest of this entry »
BCTGM Members Protest American Capital’s Greed
The company is famous for making little colored candy hearts with messages like “True Love” and “Tweet Me” that children—and some adults—exchange on Valentine’s Day. But the purchase of the New England Confectionery Co. (NECCO) by a leveraged buyout firm is sending a bitter-tasting message to workers.
Members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) rallied this morning outside the shareholder meeting of American Capital in downtown Washington, D.C., to protest the company’s investment strategy of leveraged buyouts of businesses like NECCO.
In 2007, American Capital purchased NECCO where workers had made concessions to help keep the company afloat. While American Capital invested only $100,000 in equity in NECCO Holdings, it has saddled the company with nearly $10 million in debt. The union believes this high debt level threatens NECCO’s financial stability and the company’s future in these tight economic times.
Inside the shareholders’ meeting, BCTGM Secretary-Treasurer David Durkee delivered a letter from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka to American Capital Chairman and CEO Malon Wilkus. In the letter, Trumka strongly urged the company to:
develop a new approach to financing its companies that will strengthen, not weaken, our country’s economy.
You can read Trumka’s letter here.
Union Values: Made In America
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Dave Johnson writes for the Campaign for America’s Future and adapted this post for us.
Our country was born out of a fight to cast off colonial rule by a wealthy elite and govern ourselves as We, the People. This fight continues, and nothing more clearly represents this American effort to lift each other up than organized labor. On July 4, as we celebrate our independence I encourage people to recognize our ongoing battle by buying Made in USA goods, and by working for democracy and the rights of workers everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »
2010 PayWatch Exposes Corporate Lobbying on Financial Reform
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The nation’s biggest banks helped create the current financial crisis that required a $700 billion taxpayer bailout. In return, the banks cut back on lending to consumers and small businesses but paid out a record $145 billion in total compensation in 2009.
The 2010 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch, which launched today, shows the same Big Six banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo—are spending millions of dollars lobbying on financial regulations, including limits on executive pay and risky actions like the ones that caused the current crisis.
In six case studies, PayWatch examines how the companies paid out big bucks to executives and lobbyists:
- Citigroup received more than $45 billion in bailout funds—the largest bank bailout and employs nearly 50 lobbyists. Citigroup’s highest-paid executive, Institutional Clients Group CEO John Havens, received more than $11 million in 2009.
- At Bank of America, Thomas Montag, the head of global banking and markets, collected $30 million last year. And Kenneth Lewis, who retired as CEO at the end of 2009, could collect as much as $83 million over his retirement. The bank has lobbied federal officials and lawmakers on derivatives, executive compensation, oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency.
Labor Across Prime Time TV
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Prime time last night was well worth watching. The NewsHour on PBS profiled AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann hosted California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) Executive Director Rose Ann DeMoro.
NewsHour showcased Trumka’s start as a coal miner in Pennsylvania and his graduation from Villanova Law School, his rise to president of the Mine Workers and his key role in the tough battle against Pittston Coal Co. The segment included clips from those early days, through to his emotional acceptance speech at our convention in September, when he was elected AFL-CIO president.
As NewsHour pointed out, Trumka made his name “as a bulldog against corporate overreach” while he was AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer.
Tribune CEOs seek $70 Million in Bonuses as Company Sinks
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It’s not like we needed one more example of greedy corporate executives at a bankrupt company making a grab for big bonuses while axing hundreds of employees and freezing wages for many others.
But that’s what Tribune Co. executives are doing as the multimedia conglomerate sinks under the weight of $13 billion in debt incurred by its corporate leaders in 2007. And they want to keep the bonuses a big secret.
The company filed for Chapter 11 protection last December and, in its most recent action, is seeking court permission to dole out nearly $70 million in executive bonuses. The company also requested the court seal much of the request. The request was denied.
The Newspaper Guild-CWA and the Teamsters, which represent employees at the Tribune-owned Baltimore Sun and WPIX-TV in New York, has asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware to block the company’s plan to pay up to $69.9 million in executive bonus this year, including $20.6 million to the 10 top managers (about $2 million each). Some 700 other managers would share in the bonus booty.
Economic Blackmail
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Corporate opponents of workers’ freedom to form unions repeatedly have shown they are not interested in the welfare of their employees or any of the pseudo-lofty ideals they cite while fighting the Employee Free Choice Act.
Now, they’ve made clear they will do anything—even destroy jobs, communities and harm the U.S. economy—to ensure that more American workers do not have a voice on the job. (And this just in—they’re now using Joe the Plumber as an anti-Employee Free Choice Act spokes-idiot. That guy can’t seem to keep a job.)
Corporate Greed Behind Opposition to Employee Free Choice
Pundits, journalists and even economists have strained to find the reasons for our nation’s economic meltdown, stumbling over tortured concepts like “structured investment vehicles” and “collateralized debt.”
The underlying problem is much simpler. In fact, it can be described in six words: The corporate search for cheap labor.
While some people may have overextended themselves by taking out loans on their homes or piling up credit card debt for non-essentials, millions of Americans had no choice but to survive through debt. They needed to pay for health care, college tuition and car repairs. Why? Because even working two or three jobs, they aren’t paid sufficiently to support their families. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren repeatedly has discussed how the majority of personal bankruptcies happen after a medical crisis or job loss, rather than because of too many 124-inch flat screen TV sets.
