Thousands of Workers Without Jobs Due to One Senator: Kentucky’s Bunning
The filibuster started Friday by Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) not only has halted a desperately needed unemployment insurance (UI) extension for millions of America’s jobless workers. By blocking the UI bill, Bunning has caused the furlough of 2,000 transportation workers, halted construction on 41 economic recovery projects in 17 states, forced doctors to take big cuts in Medicare payments and left 1.2 million jobless Americans without COBRA.
And Bunning doesn’t seem to care about who suffers because of his move. This morning, when another Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, asked for unanimous consent to extend the unemployment benefits, Bunning objected again.
Deck Stacked Against Airline, Railroad Workers
Proposed rule changes for airline and rail union elections are overdue and will make the current process more democratic, transportation union leaders say. Yesterday was the last day for comments on the new rule, and workers are urging the agency to act quickly to correct the unfair election process.
Currently, elections in these industries require that all eligible workers who do not vote are arbitrarily assigned a “No” vote. This veto by silence is completely at odds with the principles of U.S. democracy. The National Mediation Board (NMB), which oversees airline and rail union elections, has proposed rule changes that would permit a majority of workers who actually vote to decide the election and stop assigning “No” votes to workers who do not participate.
“The deck is currently stacked against airline and railroad workers,” says AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department President Edward Wytkind.
Mediation Board Proposes Changes to Democratize Union Elections at Airlines, Rail
Bt a 2-to-1 margin, the National Mediation Board (NMB) says it’s time to bring democracy and majority rule to rail and airline workers voting whether to join a union.
The NMB today proposed changes to airline and rail election rules to mirror the rules that govern every other democratic election—the outcome is decided by the side that receives the majority of votes cast. Under current rules, every worker who does not cast a vote is counted as a vote against forming a union.
Edward Wytkind, president of the AFL-CIO Transportation Trades Department (TTD), says the NMB’s proposed changes are “fair and sensible.”
The deck is currently stacked against airline and railroad workers. The NMB is proposing new rules that would finally permit airline and rail workers to vote for unions under the same standards found everywhere else in our system of democracy. With this change, never again will workers in these industries seeking to form a union be thwarted by such un-democratic rules.
Recovery Bill ‘Good News for the Economy’
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an economic recovery package to create and save up to 4 million jobs and stabilize the nation’s rapidly tumbling economy. The bill passed without a single Republican vote, despite President Barack Obama’s White House and Capitol Hill meetings with Republican lawmakers in an outreach effort to set a more bipartisan tone in Washington.
The Republicans offered their vision of a recovery plan—tax cuts, mostly for Big Business.
On the House floor during debate on the bill, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, described Republican opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this way:
I must say that I truly admire the courage of my friends on the other side of the aisle. In the middle of the worst economic downturn that any of us can remember, our parents told us about the Depression, an unprecedented and accelerating job loss all across the American economy in every sector, our friends on the other side of the aisle ask us just for one last time to do what they’ve been doing the last eight years; to just one more time give the tax cuts to the richest people in the country; to just one more time dive into the tank of fiscal irresponsibility.
