Congress Thwarts Another Round of Attacks on Workers
Tom Trotter in the AFL-CIO Legislation Department sends the following.
A group of House Republicans, led by Steven LaTourette (R-Ohio) and Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.), yesterday joined every Democrat except Dan Boren of Oklahoma, in defeating attacks on Davis-Bacon (prevailing wage) and Project Labor Agreements (PLAs) on key appropriation bills moving through Congress. Both Davis-Bacon and PLAs are instrumental in making sure that federally funded projects create good jobs and are done by using skilled labor, are completed on time and on budget.
See how your representative voted.
Click here for the anti-Davis-Bacon amendment vote. A “No” vote was a vote for workers.
Click here for the anti-PLA amendment vote. A “No” vote was a vote for workers.
Rep. Steve King Measures Workers’ Worth in Soybeans
A HT to our friends at Media Matters for catching Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) comparing electricians, teachers and other workers to bushels of soybeans and corn.
King, in a House floor speech calling for the elimination of prevailing wage laws on federal Department of Homeland Security construction projects, argued that the Davis-Bacon Act is an intrusion on the free market and that workers were merely commodities whose worth fluctuates up and down, according to supply and demand—like a pound of pork.
Labor is a commodity just like corn or beans or oil or gold, and the value of it needs to be determined by the competition, supply and demand in the workplace.
The Davis-Bacon prevailing wage law ensures that workers—real life human beings with families, not something traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—on public construction projects paid for with taxpayer dollars are paid a wage comparable to the local standard or “prevailing” wage. They prevent unscrupulous contractors from low-balling bids and undercutting community wages with cheap, unskilled labor.
As Joe Burns points out at Common Dreams.org:
To management, human labor is a simply commodity—nothing more, nothing less. A commodity is an object traded in the marketplace without differentiation, such as lumber, oil, or soybeans. In this context, commodities are inputs into the production process. They are things.
I wonder how many bushels of corn we could get in trade for King.
Five Years After Katrina: Frustration and Determination
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Unemployment in New Orleans is below the national average, but the poverty level is twice the national rate. The reasons behind that stark contrast tell the real story of what is going on five years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Crescent City.
There’s lots of work that needs to be done in New Orleans. The problem is that nobody’s making a living off the work but the “chiefs and the thieves,” says Robert “Tiger” Hammond, president of the Greater New Orleans AFL-CIO.
Even though the federal government just announced a $1.8 billion school construction grant to the city, Hammond says workers will be hard pressed to get good-paying jobs out of the grant. The money is coming to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and doesn’t include Davis-Bacon requirements that workers be paid the prevailing local wage. What’s happening, says Hammond, is that construction workers are being deliberately misclassified as independent contractors so employers can pay them less than if they had a union contract. He adds:
It was hard enough to get a union job before Katrina. Now it’s even harder.
Obama: We Should Make It Easier for Workers to Organize
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Although the focus on the Employee Free Choice Act is on the U.S. House and the Senate, it’s important to remember the reason we’re closer than ever to passing this critical bill is because working people turned out in huge numbers to elect a president who will sign it into law. We got a fresh reminder of that commitment yesterday when Barack Obama paid a visit to Costa Mesa, Calif., to discuss the economy.
In his comments at the Costa Mesa town hall meeting, Obama pointed out that making it easier for workers to form unions is critical to making the economy work for everyone again.
Robert Balgenorth, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of California, was among the attendees, and in a question and answer session, Balgenorth criticized the Bush administration’s failure to enforce prevailing wage laws and other protections for workers. Obama pointed to these protections as key to strengthening the middle class—and added that workers also must have the freedom to form unions if we’re going to build an economy that’s sustainable in the long term:
We think it is important that unions have the opportunity to organize themselves…the business press says that’s anti-business and whenever I hear that I’m always reminded of what Henry Ford said when he first started building the Model T, and he was paying his workers really well. And somebody asked him, they said, “Why are you paying your workers so well?” He said, “Well, if I don’t pay them well, they won’t be able to buy a car.”
