Clean Energy Could Create 850,000 New Jobs
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With more than 2 million U.S. manufacturing jobs lost since the beginning of this recession in December 2007, a new report says developing a clean energy economy in the United States could create some 850,000 new manufacturing jobs.
The report, “Building the Clean Energy Assembly Line: How Renewable Energy Can Revitalize U.S. Manufacturing and the American Middle Class,” by the Blue Green Alliance, recommends major policy changes to build markets for clean energy and provide the financing and capacity building to create clean energy jobs.
Speaking at a telephone press conference today, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said federal policies gave a boost to the auto, medical and other industries, and they can do the same for clean energy.
Clean energy can revitalize U.S. manufacturing. Clean energy technology utilizes many of the same components manufactured for the auto industry. Done right, clean energy policy will create new demand for…manufacturing.
Global Unions Condemn Mexico’s Move to Bust 44,000-Member Union
The global union movement is accusing Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, of systematically trying to bust independent unions and is demanding that he respect the rights of workers to form unions.
The latest example of Calderón’s anti-worker bias is the takeover last month by federal agents and police of the country’s second largest electrical power distributor, Luz y Fuerza (Central Light and Power). Calderón used an executive decree to dissolve the utility, but, in doing so, he also fired the entire 44,000-person workforce and disbanded their union, the 95-year-old Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union (SME), a frequent critic of the government’s policies.
CWA Cautions Frontier Shareholders on Verizon Transaction
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| CWA member Elisabeth Choate, fourth from right, warned shareholders about Frontier’s transaction with Verizon. |
Robert Masciola of the AFL-CIO Organizing Department describes how workers at Frontier Communications are calling attention to a deal with Verizon that workers say is bad for shareholders and workers.
Shareholders for Connecticut-based Frontier Communications and its top executives heard from an employee about how the proposed deal to acquire Verizon’s assets in West Virginia and 13 other states “may be good for Verizon, but will leave Frontier a much weaker company.”
With support from CWA Local 1298 in Connecticut and the AFL-CIO, Elisabeth Choate traveled to Stamford, Conn., to attend the Frontier special meeting where shareholders voted to approve the deal.
A movement in West Virginia and 13 other states led by CWA and the Electrical Workers (IBEW) opposes the deal—and the unions are not alone. Fran Hughes, chief deputy attorney general for West Virginia, doesn’t believe Frontier has the ability financially to live up to the commitments it has made to the West Virginia Public Service Commission.
Taxing Benefits: The Wrong Way to Pay for Health Care
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One of the principles that must be at the heart of health care reform is making sure it’s paid for fairly. Unfortunately, some members of Congress are trying to fund it in the wrong way—by taxing working families’ health benefits.
The Senate Finance Committee’s bill, unlike the bills passed by committees in the U.S. House, relies on an excise tax on health coverage, starting in 2013, to fund health reform. That’s a short-sighted policy that could hurt millions of people that health care reform is supposed to help.
A new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) shows that, under the current Senate Finance Committee proposal, the excise tax would hit about one-third of health insurance plans within the next decade. This could cause millions of middle-class families to suffer a tax increase or to get their benefits pared back, the report says.
To the extent that workers choose less expensive health plans for themselves and their families to avoid the excise tax, they will be faced with higher out-of-pocket costs. All else equal, lower premiums translate into less comprehensive coverage. Less comprehensive coverage often takes the form of higher deductibles, increased co-pays, higher out-of-pocket maximums, or other increased cost-sharing.
1,800 Boeing Workers Ratify Pact with Pay Increases—and More Bargaining News
Some 1,800 Boeing workers ratify pact with pay increases, and more news from the “Bargaining Digest Weekly.” The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily, bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 1,200 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.
SETTLEMENTS
UAW, Boeing: Members of UAW Local 1069 at Boeing’s Rotorcraft plant near Philadelphia ratified a new five-year contract yesterday, after their contract expired Oct. 1. The new pact covers nearly 1,800 workers and includes annual raises between 2 percent and 4 percent and improves pension benefits.
Proposed Health Care ‘Excise Tax’ a Tax on the Middle Class
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The Senate Finance Committee’s 40 percent excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” health care plans would hit 37 percent of family health insurance plans and 41 percent of single plans by 2019, according to an analysis of the committee’s original health care reform bill conducted by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT).
By 2015, according to this analysis, the excise tax would slam 24 million households, growing to 39 million households by 2019. Nearly one-third of middle-class households making between $50,000 and $100,000 would be affected by 2019.
According to a just-released Communications Workers of America (CWA) report on the JCT estimates, the excise tax-part of the health care reform legislation that the Senate Finance Committee passed on Tuesday,
will have a dramatic effect on those plans forcing steep reductions in benefits, shifting costs to workers, and a significant increase in taxes on millions of middle-class families.
Workers Rally Against Child Labor in Uzbekistan
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Outside the embassy of Uzbekistan today, nearly 100 union members and allies from the Washington, D.C., area rallied to show their support for Uzbek children subjected to child labor. Millions of children, some as young as age 7, could be subjected to long hours of labor in cotton fields this fall.
As young people across the United States have returned to school, children in Uzbekistan are being removed from their classes to pick cotton during the current harvest season. Every year, Uzbek state officials order millions of children, as young as 10 years old, and their teachers to leave school and harvest cotton under hazardous working conditions.
In a statement read on behalf of AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, Stan Gacek from the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department said forced child labor is in violation of not only international labor standards, but basic decency.
Uzbekistan is the sixth largest producer of cotton in the world, earning over $1 billion yearly, and the cotton picked by Uzbek children is processed into the clothes we buy in the United States. Where does this money go?
Health Care Action: Union Activists Visit Congress, Deliver Letters from Consumers
This morning, more than 100 local and state union activists and leaders kicked off a two-day National House Call on Congress action, delivering the first batches of more than 42,000 letters from union members demanding real health care reform.
An Arkansas couple is personally delivering to Capitol Hill their story of a near fatal accident and a four-year struggle with their insurance company that’s led to their bankruptcy.
The union leaders, from more than two dozen states, also are reminding lawmakers that the union members and working families who worked so hard on their campaigns last fall are the same people who strongly back health care reform. They are telling senators that reform must control costs, not tax benefits, include a strong public option, require employers to pay their fair share and hold insurance companies accountable.
AT&T Workers, Flight Attendants and Writers Win Union Victories
More than 300 workers at AT&T Mobility have chosen a voice with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) in the past five weeks, providing more proof that workers want the Employee Free Choice Act. If enacted, the bill would give workers the option of choosing whether to join a union through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process or via majority sign-up or “card-check.” AT&T workers used the majority verification process to join CWA.
Most recently, in Vermont, 81 AT&T Mobility retail store workers voted for CWA Local 1400 through majority sign-up. Since Aug. 21, some 230 workers gained CWA representation at AT&T Mobility in Washington State, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Idaho, and at the online website, truthout.org, which operates in five states and Washington, D.C.
More Than 1,000 March in Boston for Jobs, Corporate Accountability
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After the new U.S. jobless figures came out Friday, union activists in Massachusetts took to the streets to demand jobs and corporate responsibility, an action highlighted here in this cross-post from the Massachusetts AFL-CIO.
On the same day it was announced that unemployment had reached a 26-year high, more than 1,000 union members, unemployed workers and community activists gathered on Boston Common and marched through downtown Boston to protest layoffs and continuing unemployment, call out rampant corporate greed and demand an economy that works for all.
