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Labor Law Loses Its Watchdog As NLRB Grinds To A Halt

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Labor Law Loses Its Watchdog As NLRB Grinds To A Halt
http://inthesetimes.com/article/14785/labor_law_loses_its_watchdog/
WEB ONLY// FEATURES » MARCH 26, 2013
Labor Law Loses Its Watchdog
Employers are waking up to the fact that they are no longer required to follow the NLRB’s orders.
BY BRUCE VAIL
Because of the Canning decision, Rhinehart explains, any employer can now go to a federal appeals court and be granted an indefinite delay in enforcement of any NLRB action taken in the last 14 months.

The day-to-day application of key federal protections for workers’ collective bargaining rights is becoming paralyzed, say legal experts and union organizers, as employers across the country realize that a recent federal court decision effectively allows them to ignore the enforcement of the landmark National Labor Relations Act.

The implementation of the New Deal-era law—which protects the right of most workers in private industry to form unions and negotiate collectively with employers—is reported to be slowly grinding to a halt as result of a January 25 court decision in Noel Canning v. NLRB [PDF]. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that President Barack Obama improperly employed the recess appointments clause of the constitution to name new members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This means, in effect, that almost 800 NLRB actions taken since the January 2012 recess appointments are unenforceable and that the current board is powerless to implement new orders. Or, as former NLRB Chairman William B. Gould IV tells In These Times: “Compliance with NLRB enforcement is voluntary for employers at this point.”

“There is plenty of evidence that it is having a huge impact on the ground,” says Lynn Rhinehart, co-general counsel of the AFL-CIO. She describes the decision’s effect on union organizing campaigns across the country as “deep and problematic.”

Because of the Canning decision, Rhinehart explains, any employer can now go to a federal appeals court and be granted an indefinite delay in enforcement of any NLRB action taken in the last 14 months. More than 60 employers have filed such cases since the January 25 decision, NLRB spokesperson Nancy Cleeland confirms, and more are expected. All of these cases are officially being held in abeyance pending U.S. Supreme Court action to either affirm or overturn the Canning ruling. That could take up to a year, Cleeland estimates.

Many employers aren’t bothering to formally request delays, but simply ignoring the NLRB rulings that remain in legal limbo. A March 23 story in the Huffington Post details how West Virginia union members mistreated at the hands of anti-union coal operators must now wait indefinitely to see their jobs and backpay restored. Similarly, some Connecticut nursing home workers are being deprived of their legal wages and benefits, says Deborah Chernoff, a spokesperson for the New England division of the healthcare workers union 1199SEIU. In a case notable for both its bitterness and complexity, strikers at five nursing homes operated by HealthBridge are back at work, but not at the compensation levels ordered by the NLRB last year. Instead, they are receiving lower wages and reduced benefits ordered by a bankruptcy judge, and the NLRB is powerless to enforce its order or challenge the bankruptcy court's decision, Chernoff says.

Meanwhile, the decision has stopped some organizing campaigns in their tracks. Ann Twomey, president of the New Jersey-based Health Professionals and Allied Employees union, says that about 200 nurses fighting for a union at Memorial Hospital of Salem County are “on hold” because of the legal uncertainty at the NLRB. The employer—notoriously anti-union Community Health Systems (CHS)—is stalling talks toward a first contract, despite the union’s 2010 victory in a representation election, Twomey says. Normally in such a case, the union could call on the NLRB to order the employer to the negotiating table. But that’s not an option until the legal authority of the NLRB is re-asserted, says Twomey. “The nurses are functioning as a union and are doing their best,” she says, “But they don’t have a contract, and there isn’t a way forward” without the NLRB.

Resolution of outstanding legal issues in older cases is even affected, says Michael Beranbaum, organizing director of Washington state-based Teamsters Joint Council 28. A Teamsters strike against Oak Harbor Freight Lines in 2008 created legal issues around pensions and healthcare benefits, he tells In These Times, but resolution is being further stalled because the trucking company went to federal court seeking new delays under the Canning decision. “This is an example of the pitiful mess in Washington, D.C.,” resulting from Republican Party obstruction of President Obama’s legitimate appointment powers, he says.

According to a March 11 story in the Wall Street Journal, high-profile employers such as Starbucks, Time Warner, Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings, Domino’s Pizza and McDonald's are entering the courts in efforts to hamper the actions of the NLRB. In addition to requests for enforcement delays, cases have been filed as a preemptive step to discourage NLRB involvement in workplace disputes at those companies, the newspaper reports.

A common element in many of these cases is that employers are being aided and abetted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to Rhinehart and other worker advocates. The Chamber assisted the managers of the Noel Canning Corp. in advancing their court case and the Chamber’s Litigation Center is currently maintaining a Web-based “resource page” for employers to coordinate action against the NLRB. The Chamber is also said to be mobilizing Republican members of the Senate to prevent the confirmation of any new NLRB appointees in its ongoing efforts to immobilize the board, Rhinehart indicates.

“It looks like they [the NLRB] are just out of business for the next nine months, at least,” says former NLRB chairman Gould, who teaches at Stanford Law School and is the author of Labored Relations: Law, Politics, and the NLRB–A Memoir. “It will take at least that long for the Supreme Court to act,” he says, and an anti-union ruling could very well create even more delay and confusion.

“They [the NLRB] are trying to march right along, issuing new decisions and acting as if the D.C. Circuit Court will inevitably be overturned, but employers don’t see it that way at all,” Gould says. “I can tell you right here in the Bay Area that NLRB subpoenas are not being enforced. Employers are just refusing to honor their subpoenas.”

NLRB’s Cleeland confirms Gould’s report about the agency’s subpoenas. “We’ve seen challenges at every level” of the legal process, she says.

Gould says the current situation is reminiscent of the first two years following the 1935 enactment of the original law, also known as the Wagner Act (after its chief sponsor Sen. Robert Wagner, D-N.Y.). Employers actively resisted the new law on a large scale, Gould says, and many refused to cooperate in any way until the Supreme Court ruled on its validity.

“Back in those days there was something called the Liberty League that cheered the employers on. The Chamber of Commerce is playing that role today,” Gould says. “So this is not new. Their antipathy to labor law and to the NLRB is longstanding. The only thing that’s new is that they [NLRB opponents] are sitting pretty ….They don’t have to do anything” to comply with the Wagner Act until the Supreme Court clarifies the situation.

Not all union organizing is affected by the Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to neuter the NLRB. For example, railroad and airline workers are not covered by the Wagner Act, and campaigns in those sectors are going forward unaffected because they are under the aegis of the separate National Mediation Board. Likewise, public sector employees are not covered by the 1935 law, so the Canning decision does not impact their union initiatives at local, state and federal levels.

AFL-CIO’s Rhinehart says the mess at the NLRB could best be cleared up if the U.S. Senate simply confirmed the new NLRB nominations submitted this year by the Obama Administration. A new board could then re-certify the decisions already made and return to work as normal, she says. But that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon, Rhinehart reluctantly concedes, and thus some action by the Supreme Court seems required to get labor law back on track. Until then, it appears that the Chamber of Commerce has succeeded in effectively preventing the NLRB from doing its job.

USW, Mondragon Co-op from Spain

Why Unions Are Going Into

the Co-op Business?

 

Why Unions Are Going Into the Co-op Business

 

The steelworkers deal that could turn the rust belt green.

“Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollow out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants,” said United Steelworkers (USW) President Leo Gerard in 2009. “We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Gerard was announcing a formal partnership between his 1.2-million-member Union and Mondragon, a cluster of cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain.

Mondragon employs 83,000 workers in 256 companies. About half of those companies are cooperatives, and about a third of Mondragon’s employees are co-op members with an ownership stake in their workplace. Mondragon companies do everything from manufacturing industrial machine parts to making pressure cookers and home appliances to running a bank and a chain of supermarkets. With billions of Euros in annual sales, Mondragon is the largest industrial conglomerate in the Basque region and the fifth-largest in Spain.

The cooperatives use workers’ cash investments as part of the capital needed to finance new projects, and worker-owner co-op members get to vote on strategy, management, and business planning. The highest-paid managers’ salaries are capped at six to eight times what the lowest-paid workers make—as opposed to the United States, where CEOs now make 380 times more than the average worker.

Building union co-ops

As manufacturing in the United States continues in free fall, the USW is working to bring the Mondragon cooperative model to the Rust Belt. It aims to use employee-run businesses to create new, middle-class jobs to replace union work that has gone overseas.

A March 2012 report from the USW, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), lays out a template for how “union co-ops” can function. “A union co-op is a unionized worker-owned cooperative in which worker-owners all own an equal share of the business and have an equal vote in overseeing the business,” the report states.

But how do union co-ops differ from traditional worker-owned co-ops? The report explains that the key difference is that workers in a union co-op can appoint a management team (from within their own ranks or from outside the co-op) and then bargain collectively with management. The resulting collective bargaining agreements can set wage rates for all the co-op’s jobs, choose health care and other benefit packages, decide how workers will earn time off, and determine a process for grievances and arbitration of workplace disputes.

In addition to producing the union co-op template, the USW has worked to get pilot cooperatives started in the United States. The union has carefully examined the Evergreen Cooperatives, which were started in Cleveland in 2009 with a blend of foundation money, public funds, and private investment capital. Drawing from Mondragon’s principles of shared prosperity for workers and democratic governance, Evergreen launched a commercial laundry that now cleans more than four million pounds of laundry per year and employs 30 people. It also has plans for a solar installers’ cooperative and a greenhouse that grows high-end salad greens and herbs for the Cleveland Clinic, as well as universities and restaurants. The example was an important one for the USW’s pilot projects, suggesting a blueprint to keep jobs local, tie new businesses to existing city institutions, and give workers a voice in company operations.

OEOC Director Bill McIntyre worked with the Cleveland Foundation on crafting the organizational framework for the Evergreen Cooperatives. At a March 2012 press event at United Steelworkers headquarters, he observed that employee-owners more often kept their jobs during the recent economic meltdown. “Employee-owned companies,” he said, “have more stable, loyal, and experienced work forces, which translates into real cost savings, productivity, and quality advantages.”

Reviving a Pittsburgh laundry

A group of unions, including the USW, is helping to launch the Pittsburgh Clean and Green Laundry Cooperative, a new industrial laundry. Several years ago, a local laundry closed, leaving more than 100 people without work. Together with the USW, the workers began exploring the idea of creating a cooperative to take over the business. The union has now completed a feasibility study for the business and is lining up commitments from clients such as local hospitals and clinics. A full laundry plant is scheduled to be up and running soon, thanks in part to the support of the Steel Valley Authority (SVA)—Pennsylvania’s publicly funded initiative for saving and creating industrial jobs—and other local foundations.

“Right now, several of the larger hospitals are sending their laundry out pretty far to get it done, so [going local] makes sense cost-wise, and it makes sense green-wise,” says Rob Witherell, the USW’s cooperative organizer and strategist.

“The intent is that the folks who worked at the previous laundry would be the first to join as worker-owners,” Witherell adds.

Under the union-cooperative model, the laundry’s employees would be able to join the union of their choice, and the jobs offered at the plant would provide a living wage, benefits, and a collective bargaining agreement. As worker-owners, the employees would also gain equity in the business.

“The way it works in Cleveland is the folks working at the laundry—if they’re to become owners—have their initial ownership investment financed by the company,” explains Witherell. “Fifty cents an hour is deducted from their wages for a period of three years, until they have met the requirements for ownership.”

Worker-owners vote on decisions about the management of the company. And, as in Mondragon, a share of profits is added to the ownership accounts, so that long-term workers can retire or leave the company having accrued a significant stake. “In Cleveland, they’ve done the math, and they’ve figured out that in eight years—if they meet their business targets, which they have so far—those folks will each have $65,000 in their ownership accounts,” Witherell says.

For the SVA, the model is one it hopes to spread further: It has announced a goal of establishing a technical assistance center and a revolving loan fund to help worker groups that want to use the Mondragon model.

Cooperative harvest in Cincinnati

In the past year, the USW has supported work to create the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative (CUCI). CUCI has two projects in the pipeline: a railway manufacturing co-op and a cooperative for retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency. A third project, already in operation, pairs commitment to food sustainability with a worker-ownership model in the Our Harvest cooperative.

Our Harvest is a “food hub” that will allow institutions in the metropolitan region—such as universities, hospitals, and hotels—to buy produce that is grown, harvested, and packaged by worker-owners. Currently, says CUCI President Kristen Barker, the nascent project has an incubator farm for training farmers and food production workers, with two apprentice farmers, a mentor farmer, and three part-time support staff.

The apprentices, who are cardholding members of the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), are learning farming and production methods from the mentor farmer and are running a community-supported agriculture (CSA) business from the incubator farm in the heart of Cincinnati. The CSA currently serves 60 residential customers, plus three restaurants and three retail locations.

Our Harvest grows its food on a 30-acre farm in an urban neighborhood. “It’s amazing that that exists,” says Barker. “We’re interested in being on bus lines,” says Barker, pointing out that the co-op considers making jobs accessible by public transit to be part of a sustainable, fair approach to job creation.

In order to serve the large institutions Our Harvest hopes to make the mainstay of its operation, the farm has to expand. “We need to get to 1,000 acres’ worth of production,” Barker says. “To get up to 1,000 requires a ton of skill, and a lot of land.”

CUCI isn’t going it alone in the effort to expand Our Harvest. The Ohio State Cooperative Development Center is doing a study of how Our Harvest can scale up to the 1,000-acre mark. Efforts are under way to house an expanded apprenticeship program at a local community college. And Mondragon is working closely with CUCI to firm up Our Harvest’s structures and locate additional financing.

Co-op strengths and limitations

The “union co-op” model imports some of Mondragon’s structural innovations to the American economy: most importantly, it gives workers a say in the direction of the business as well as in their own pay and working conditions. It remains to be seen exactly how workers’ voices will be heard through the union co-ops’ collective bargaining processes, but it will likely have some of the flavor of worker empowerment already in effect at Mondragon.

Michael Peck, the North American delegate for Mondragon, describes the type of decisions employees make within Mondragon’s worker-owner structure: “They vote to lower their salary, they vote to raise their salary, they vote to make sacrifices, they vote to reward themselves if the situation calls,” he says. “They are totally involved, and it’s that kind of participation that produces a successful company that is attuned not only to the marketplace but to itself.”

For the U.S. labor movement, this point is a critical one. A cooperative model places union members firmly in the role of being innovators. It allows the labor movement not only to promote a positive vision of members realizing their best selves in the workplace, but also to provide the skills that will enable people to do that. Therefore, while it may not rebuild labor’s ranks with significant numbers of new union members, this model might do something even more important: Give working people a way to become true stewards of the economy.

But union co-ops don’t address some difficult issues. For instance, they do not directly address the forces of global competition that have been undermining the U.S. manufacturing base. In particular, by adopting NAFTA-model “free trade” agreements, the United States has encouraged corporations to seek out competitive advantage in places with the lowest wages and fewest environmental regulations. At best, co-ops such as the Evergreen co-ops in Cleveland work around this problem by limiting themselves to making goods or providing services that cannot be offshored, like growing heirloom salad greens for local consumption.

When asked about how the model union co-ops might take on the offshoring issue, Peck acknowledged the difficulties, but he also expressed hope. “Now there’s a renewed interest in manufacturing as labor wages rise in developing countries,” he says. Moreover, he believes the recent economic crisis has also expanded public receptivity: “Even in the outer regions of the Midwest, where I spend a lot of time, people know that they’ve been victimized,” Peck says.

“Most people don’t want to be victimized again and they are interested in trying new models.”“At Mondragon, we have a saying: ‘This is not paradise and we are not angels.’ I think that’s important, because there’s a tendency to gush up Mondragon as this perfect ideal in the sky, when it’s not perfect and it’s not in the sky. It’s in factories. it’s in valleys, it’s in making things. But our story has a happier ending because people feel engaged in the process and they see the equality of opportunity, which is missing in more vertical structures.”

Amy Dean wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Amy is a fellow of The Century Foundation and principal of ABD Ventures, LLC, a consulting firm that works to develop new organizing strategies for social change organizations. Dean is co-author, with David Reynolds, of A New New Deal: How Regional Activism Will Reshape the American Labor Movement. You can follow her on twitter @amybdean, or she can be reached viaamybdean.com

 

Anti-Trust Laws Suit Wall St Fish Too Fat to Fry

Big Bank Immunity: When Do We Crack Down on Wall Street?      
    By Dean Baker, Truthout | News Analysis  

Attorney General Eric Holder speaks at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Oct. 9, 2012. Holder has told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department may have to restrain its prosecutors in dealing with the big banks. (Photo: Luke Sharrett / The New York Times) The Wall Street gang must really be partying these days. Profits and bonuses are as high as ever as these super-rich takers were able to use trillions of dollars of below-market government loans to get themselves through the crisis they created. The rest of the country is still struggling with high unemployment, stagnant wages, underwater mortgages and hollowed-out retirement accounts, but life is good again on Wall Street.
Their world must have gotten even brighter last week when Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Justice Department may have to restrain its prosecutors in dealing with the big banks because it has to consider the possibility that a prosecution could lead
to financial instability.
Not only can the big banks count on taxpayer bailouts when they need them; it turns out that they can share profits with drug dealers with impunity. (The case immediately at hand involved money laundered for a Mexican drug cartel.) And who says that times are bad?

It's hard to know where to begin with this one. First off, we should not assume that just because the Justice Department says it is concerned about financial instability that this is the real reason that they are not prosecuting a big bank. There is precedent for being less than honest about such issues.

When Enron was about to collapse in 2002 as its illegal dealings became public, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was at the time a top Citigroup executive, called a former aide at Treasury. He asked him to intervene with the bond-rating agencies to get them to delay downgrading Enron's debt. Citigroup owned several hundred million dollars in Enron debt at the time. If Rubin had gotten this delay, Citigroup would have been able to dump much of this debt on suckers before the price collapsed.
The Treasury official refused. When the matter became public, Rubin claimed that he was concerned about instability in financial markets.

It is entirely possible that the reluctance to prosecute big banks represents the same sort of fear of financial instability as motivated Rubin. In other words, it is a pretext that the Justice Department is using to justify its failure to prosecute powerful friends on Wall Street. In Washington, this possibility can never be ruled out.

However, there is the possibility that the Justice Department really believes that prosecuting the criminal activities of Bank of America or JP Morgan could sink the economy. If this is true, then it makes the case for breaking up the big banks even more of a slam dunk, since it takes the logic of too big to fail one step further.

Just to remind everyone, the simple argument against too big to fail is that it subsidizes risk-taking by large banks. In principle, when a bank or other company is engaged in a risky line of business, those who are investing in the company or lending it money demand a higher rate of return in recognition of the risk.

However, if they know that government will back up the bank if it gets into
 trouble, then investors have little reason to properly evaluate the risk. This means that more money will flow to the TBTF bank, since it knows it can undertake risky activities without paying the same interest rate as other companies that take on the same amount of risk. The result is that we have given the banks an incentive to engage in risky activity and a big subsidy to their top executives and creditors.

If it turns out that we also give them a get-out-of-jail free card when it comes to criminal activity, then we are giving these banks an incentive to engage in criminal activity. There is a lot of money to be gained by assisting drug dealers and other nefarious types in laundering their money. In principle, the laws are supposed to be structured to discourage banks from engaging in such behavior. But when the attorney general tells us that the laws cannot be fully enforced against the big banks, he is saying that we are giving them incentive to break the law in the pursuit of profit.

Our anti-trust laws are supposed to protect the country against companies whose size allows them inordinate market power. In principle, we would use anti-trust law to break up a phone company because its market dominance allowed it to charge us $10 a month too much on our cable. How could we not use anti-trust policy to break up a bank whose size allows it to profit from dealing with drug dealers and murderers with impunity?

 

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission of the author.

Unions Fight Foreclosure Epidemic

 Home Is Where the Fight Is

 

English »

March 05, 2013 / Alexandra BradburyEnlarge or shrink textlogin or register to comment

757 117

It took police four tries to evict the Cruz family in Minneapolis. After 39 arrests, the police broke the door down at 4 a.m. Many defense attempts have prevented evictions and saved homes. Photo: Peter Leeman.

Ramon Suero fell behind on his mortgage payments after he got fired for organizing a union.
Suero, a hotel worker and UNITE HERE Local 26 member in Boston, got his job back after a year. But then his wife had to quit hers and travel to the Dominican Republic to care for her sick mother—and they fell further behind.
They applied to modify their home loan, but federally sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac said no, foreclosed, and demanded the family get out by February 1.
The Sueros aren’t leaving.
“I want to send a message to the banks: we deserve a second chance,” Suero said. “That’s why I decided to fight—not only for my family, but for our community.”
Local 26 members and activists from the housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana vow to thwart the eviction with a human blockade if necessary.

BATTERING RAM

In the wake of Occupy, the tactic is spreading. Activists around the country are placing their bodies in the way of police doing the banks’ dirty work.
In the Twin Cities, supporters get text-message alerts from the grassroots group Occupy Homes MN and mobilize quickly to stop surprise evictions.
It took Minneapolis police four attempts—and 39 arrests—to evict the Cruz family last spring. When they showed up at 4 a.m. and attacked the front door with a battering ram, 60 volunteers held them off.
The whole effort cost the city $40,000, and activists carried the battered door down to city hall to shame elected officials for the misuse of public resources.
“It becomes really politically costly—both to the banks who are creating this kind of chaos, and also to city politicians,” said organizer Nick Espinosa.
Many foreclosure resisters his group works with are current or former union members—like Monique White of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 26, who lost her youth-counselor job to state budget cuts. White kept her house after she confronted the U.S. Bank CEO in front of 200 shareholders.

DUMPSTER DEFENSE

When they evict you in Detroit, they bring a dumpster to throw away your belongings. That’s how the Cullors family found out they were being evicted last Halloween: the dumpster showed up.
The family had struggled to pay its mortgage after Jerry Cullors, a retired bakery truck driver, suffered wage and pension cuts in the run-up to Wonder Bread’s bankruptcy.
So Eviction Defense Committee activists improvised: they filled the dumpster with bags of leaves. The sheriff had to call for another dumpster—buying allies just enough time to win a stay of eviction in court that morning.
A month later, after a march on the bank and a packed court hearing, Fannie Mae backed off and told Bank of America to negotiate a modified mortgage.

‘MORAL HAZARD’

Like millions of other homeowners, at the time of their default the Sueros were “underwater”: they owed more on their mortgage than the house was worth.
Freddie Mac has already lost the money. It will have to resell the house at today’s fair market value, about $80,000, down from $283,000. The question is who will benefit from Freddie’s loss: the Sueros, or some hedge fund investor who buys up the property?
The Sueros want “principal reduction”: a new loan based on the house’s current value. A community bank has offered to buy the house from Freddie for $90,000 and sell it back to the Sueros on those terms.
Fannie and Freddie, which own or insure a majority of home loans in the U.S., could save taxpayers billions by adopting principal reduction, a Federal Housing Finance Agency study found last year.
This is because, when a homeowner defaults on a mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie, taxpayers are on the hook to pay back to the bank all the money still owing on the original mortgage. If the principal is reduced, odds are better the homeowner will be able to keep making payments and avoid default (or re-default).
Bush appointee Ed DeMarco—who still heads the FHFA—says no to principal reduction. His policy is not to sell back to foreclosed homeowners, because that would create a “moral hazard,” encouraging others to follow their example.
“They’re concerned that people will get the wrong idea and strategically default,” said Steve Meacham, lead organizer for City Life. “From our point of view, it’s the right idea. The banks caused the housing crisis. They should pay for it.”
And talk of morality seems laughable from an institution that fueled the rampant financial speculation that caused the housing collapse. Community groups are lobbying the president to replace DeMarco.

DOWN FOR DIRECT ACTION

Supporting the Sueros was a no-brainer for UNITE HERE Local 26 President Brian Lang. The union has long worked on housing issues. It negotiated a housing trust fund in the late ’80s to help members make down payments—and lobbied Congress to allow this.
Help from the fund “has made the difference for many in being able to own homes,” Lang said. “We see our union as trying to transfer wealth to our neighborhoods and communities.” Local 26 has begun comparing its member list against foreclosure lists to identify other potential resisters.
Grassroots group Occupy Our Homes Atlanta is helping Gulf War veteran Mark Harris fight for principal reduction to keep his home.
Harris was a Teamster for 20 years, so organizers encouraged him to reach out to his union brothers. Teamsters and Jobs with Justice members started coming to rallies to support Harris, doubling or tripling Occupy Our Homes’ usual turnout.
“It’s exciting working with Teamsters, because they’re more than down,” Occupy Our Homes organizer Tim Franzen said. “They understand direct action. The lengths they’re willing to go to protect one of their brothers is pretty far.”

NO SHAME

You don’t have to look far to see the connection between workplace and housing struggles. People lose their homes or get evicted from rentals because of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, or health care bills.
“Anyone who’s facing a housing crisis will also have a job crisis story to tell you,” said Tony Romano, organizing director of the national coalition Right to the City Alliance, many of whose member groups fight foreclosures.
So political education is key. “One of the big things is always breaking down the shame,” said Malcolm Chu, lead organizer for the Massachusetts group Springfield No One Leaves. “So many members come into our space and say, ‘It’s my fault. I should have done better.’”
In reality, “everybody who got a loan in the bubble is a predatory loan victim,” City Life’s Meacham argues, since housing prices were inflated by rich speculators. “When the 1% don’t know what to do with their money, they speculate and cause bubbles.”
“It’s another example of the banks trying to generate ridiculously huge profits for investors, at great cost to everyone else,” agreed Ron Patenaude, president of United Auto Workers Local 2322, representing health and human services workers in Western Massachusetts.
His union supports Springfield No One Leaves with turnout and what financial support it can muster. A few union members are working with SNOL to fight their own foreclosures.
The solidarity goes both ways. When Verizon workers struck against concessions in 2011, SNOL invited union members to explain their issues to housing activists.

NOT ASKING NICELY

Activists occupied the sheriff’s office in Portland, Oregon, in January until he agreed to pursue a moratorium on foreclosure evictions.
The win showed that “what works is demanding and taking action, not asking nicely,” said Angela MacWhinnie, organizer with We Are Oregon, a branch of SEIU’s Fight for a Fair Economy, “because we had asked nicely for over a year.”
In We Are Oregon’s network of rapid responders, volunteers take shifts answering the distress hotline and staying at resisters’ houses, so no one has to be home alone when the riot cops show up to evict—“and the people getting support commit to come help others,” MacWhinnie said.
The freedom of strategy is a refreshing change from worksite fights, she said. Labor law imposes heavy penalties for some of the most effective union tactics, such as sit-downs or intermittent strikes.
Housing struggles offer “a lot more openness to think creatively and make effective uses of our strength,” said MacWhinnie.

BIGGER DREAMS

Many of the groups described here borrow City Life’s organizing model: the Sword (legal defense), the Shield (public protest), and the Offer (alternative financing).
Last year City Life toured to 12 cities to spread the model. Romano says Right to the City Alliance plans to invite unions to join a national campaign, One Million Homes for People Not Profit—targeting not only foreclosures but also high rents, unstable public housing, and homelessness.
He hopes to train unions in eviction defense and vacant home takeovers.
Organizing works: activists consistently force the banks and mortgage lenders to back off specific homes. “But for every case we win, there’s probably a thousand people who don’t fight back and who lose their house,” said Dianne Feeley, active with Detroit’s Eviction Defense Committee. “We need a systemic solution.”
Her group calls for Fannie and Freddie to halt all evictions and start doing principal reductions. The committee is also launching a federal court challenge, arguing that Fannie Mae’s foreclosures violate the constitutional right to due process.
In Atlanta, Franzen too is envisioning next steps.
In neighborhoods that are falling apart, it wouldn’t be hard to “liberate” vacant homes—whether buying them cheap, getting them donated, or “straight-up taking them in militant direct action,” he said. But the houses need serious rehab.
He’d like to unite with unions and “force the city to invest in those communities by hiring folks in those neighborhoods to fix up the houses,” he said. “We need a solution like that, that creates jobs and puts people in homes at the same time.”

Home Is Where the Fight Is

English »

March 05, 2013 / Alexandra BradburyEnlarge or shrink textlogin or register to comment

757 117

It took police four tries to evict the Cruz family in Minneapolis. After 39 arrests, the police broke the door down at 4 a.m. Many defense attempts have prevented evictions and saved homes. Photo: Peter Leeman.

Ramon Suero fell behind on his mortgage payments after he got fired for organizing a union.
Suero, a hotel worker and UNITE HERE Local 26 member in Boston, got his job back after a year. But then his wife had to quit hers and travel to the Dominican Republic to care for her sick mother—and they fell further behind.
They applied to modify their home loan, but federally sponsored mortgage company Freddie Mac said no, foreclosed, and demanded the family get out by February 1.
The Sueros aren’t leaving.
“I want to send a message to the banks: we deserve a second chance,” Suero said. “That’s why I decided to fight—not only for my family, but for our community.”
Local 26 members and activists from the housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana vow to thwart the eviction with a human blockade if necessary.

BATTERING RAM

In the wake of Occupy, the tactic is spreading. Activists around the country are placing their bodies in the way of police doing the banks’ dirty work.
In the Twin Cities, supporters get text-message alerts from the grassroots group Occupy Homes MN and mobilize quickly to stop surprise evictions.
It took Minneapolis police four attempts—and 39 arrests—to evict the Cruz family last spring. When they showed up at 4 a.m. and attacked the front door with a battering ram, 60 volunteers held them off.
The whole effort cost the city $40,000, and activists carried the battered door down to city hall to shame elected officials for the misuse of public resources.
“It becomes really politically costly—both to the banks who are creating this kind of chaos, and also to city politicians,” said organizer Nick Espinosa.
Many foreclosure resisters his group works with are current or former union members—like Monique White of Service Employees (SEIU) Local 26, who lost her youth-counselor job to state budget cuts. White kept her house after she confronted the U.S. Bank CEO in front of 200 shareholders.

DUMPSTER DEFENSE

When they evict you in Detroit, they bring a dumpster to throw away your belongings. That’s how the Cullors family found out they were being evicted last Halloween: the dumpster showed up.
The family had struggled to pay its mortgage after Jerry Cullors, a retired bakery truck driver, suffered wage and pension cuts in the run-up to Wonder Bread’s bankruptcy.
So Eviction Defense Committee activists improvised: they filled the dumpster with bags of leaves. The sheriff had to call for another dumpster—buying allies just enough time to win a stay of eviction in court that morning.
A month later, after a march on the bank and a packed court hearing, Fannie Mae backed off and told Bank of America to negotiate a modified mortgage.

‘MORAL HAZARD’

Like millions of other homeowners, at the time of their default the Sueros were “underwater”: they owed more on their mortgage than the house was worth.
Freddie Mac has already lost the money. It will have to resell the house at today’s fair market value, about $80,000, down from $283,000. The question is who will benefit from Freddie’s loss: the Sueros, or some hedge fund investor who buys up the property?
The Sueros want “principal reduction”: a new loan based on the house’s current value. A community bank has offered to buy the house from Freddie for $90,000 and sell it back to the Sueros on those terms.
Fannie and Freddie, which own or insure a majority of home loans in the U.S., could save taxpayers billions by adopting principal reduction, a Federal Housing Finance Agency study found last year.
This is because, when a homeowner defaults on a mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie, taxpayers are on the hook to pay back to the bank all the money still owing on the original mortgage. If the principal is reduced, odds are better the homeowner will be able to keep making payments and avoid default (or re-default).
Bush appointee Ed DeMarco—who still heads the FHFA—says no to principal reduction. His policy is not to sell back to foreclosed homeowners, because that would create a “moral hazard,” encouraging others to follow their example.
“They’re concerned that people will get the wrong idea and strategically default,” said Steve Meacham, lead organizer for City Life. “From our point of view, it’s the right idea. The banks caused the housing crisis. They should pay for it.”
And talk of morality seems laughable from an institution that fueled the rampant financial speculation that caused the housing collapse. Community groups are lobbying the president to replace DeMarco.

DOWN FOR DIRECT ACTION

Supporting the Sueros was a no-brainer for UNITE HERE Local 26 President Brian Lang. The union has long worked on housing issues. It negotiated a housing trust fund in the late ’80s to help members make down payments—and lobbied Congress to allow this.
Help from the fund “has made the difference for many in being able to own homes,” Lang said. “We see our union as trying to transfer wealth to our neighborhoods and communities.” Local 26 has begun comparing its member list against foreclosure lists to identify other potential resisters.
Grassroots group Occupy Our Homes Atlanta is helping Gulf War veteran Mark Harris fight for principal reduction to keep his home.
Harris was a Teamster for 20 years, so organizers encouraged him to reach out to his union brothers. Teamsters and Jobs with Justice members started coming to rallies to support Harris, doubling or tripling Occupy Our Homes’ usual turnout.
“It’s exciting working with Teamsters, because they’re more than down,” Occupy Our Homes organizer Tim Franzen said. “They understand direct action. The lengths they’re willing to go to protect one of their brothers is pretty far.”

NO SHAME

You don’t have to look far to see the connection between workplace and housing struggles. People lose their homes or get evicted from rentals because of unemployment, underemployment, low wages, or health care bills.
“Anyone who’s facing a housing crisis will also have a job crisis story to tell you,” said Tony Romano, organizing director of the national coalition Right to the City Alliance, many of whose member groups fight foreclosures.
So political education is key. “One of the big things is always breaking down the shame,” said Malcolm Chu, lead organizer for the Massachusetts group Springfield No One Leaves. “So many members come into our space and say, ‘It’s my fault. I should have done better.’”
In reality, “everybody who got a loan in the bubble is a predatory loan victim,” City Life’s Meacham argues, since housing prices were inflated by rich speculators. “When the 1% don’t know what to do with their money, they speculate and cause bubbles.”
“It’s another example of the banks trying to generate ridiculously huge profits for investors, at great cost to everyone else,” agreed Ron Patenaude, president of United Auto Workers Local 2322, representing health and human services workers in Western Massachusetts.
His union supports Springfield No One Leaves with turnout and what financial support it can muster. A few union members are working with SNOL to fight their own foreclosures.
The solidarity goes both ways. When Verizon workers struck against concessions in 2011, SNOL invited union members to explain their issues to housing activists.

NOT ASKING NICELY

Activists occupied the sheriff’s office in Portland, Oregon, in January until he agreed to pursue a moratorium on foreclosure evictions.
The win showed that “what works is demanding and taking action, not asking nicely,” said Angela MacWhinnie, organizer with We Are Oregon, a branch of SEIU’s Fight for a Fair Economy, “because we had asked nicely for over a year.”
In We Are Oregon’s network of rapid responders, volunteers take shifts answering the distress hotline and staying at resisters’ houses, so no one has to be home alone when the riot cops show up to evict—“and the people getting support commit to come help others,” MacWhinnie said.
The freedom of strategy is a refreshing change from worksite fights, she said. Labor law imposes heavy penalties for some of the most effective union tactics, such as sit-downs or intermittent strikes.
Housing struggles offer “a lot more openness to think creatively and make effective uses of our strength,” said MacWhinnie.

BIGGER DREAMS

Many of the groups described here borrow City Life’s organizing model: the Sword (legal defense), the Shield (public protest), and the Offer (alternative financing).
Last year City Life toured to 12 cities to spread the model. Romano says Right to the City Alliance plans to invite unions to join a national campaign, One Million Homes for People Not Profit—targeting not only foreclosures but also high rents, unstable public housing, and homelessness.
He hopes to train unions in eviction defense and vacant home takeovers.
Organizing works: activists consistently force the banks and mortgage lenders to back off specific homes. “But for every case we win, there’s probably a thousand people who don’t fight back and who lose their house,” said Dianne Feeley, active with Detroit’s Eviction Defense Committee. “We need a systemic solution.”
Her group calls for Fannie and Freddie to halt all evictions and start doing principal reductions. The committee is also launching a federal court challenge, arguing that Fannie Mae’s foreclosures violate the constitutional right to due process.
In Atlanta, Franzen too is envisioning next steps.
In neighborhoods that are falling apart, it wouldn’t be hard to “liberate” vacant homes—whether buying them cheap, getting them donated, or “straight-up taking them in militant direct action,” he said. But the houses need serious rehab.
He’d like to unite with unions and “force the city to invest in those communities by hiring folks in those neighborhoods to fix up the houses,” he said. “We need a solution like that, that creates jobs and puts people in homes at the same time.”
 

Venezuelan Participatory Democracy

THE BOLIVARIAN EXPERIMENT
Venezuelan Community Councils are Direct, Participatory Democracy
by William Floyd, PDWA

Throughout Caracas and greater Venezuela there are COMMUNITY COUNCILS

(Consejos Comunales) of 200-400 families. They sponsor free suppers, organize water committees, decide neighborhood planning and many, many local issues. They are also responsible for conducting Social Audits (Contraloria Social) of local elected Officials and Administrations. (!)

In 2005 there were 3,700 Community Councils. The Federal Government funds all local County, City and Town Councils, Mayors, etc. In 2005 the Bolivarians split the funding: 30% for Community Councils, and 70% for elected Officials. The 3,700 Community Councils received about $1.5 billion in 2005.

By 2007, Community Councils had blossomed to 16,000. The Bolivarians raised the funding of the Councils to 50%, or about $5 billion. Today, according to SOA Watch activists, there are 37,000 Venezuelan Community Councils.

Democratic decisions of Councils are final. When Council votes conflict with local Mayors or Town Halls, the CC takes precedent over these elected officials.

75% of TV and Daily Newspapers are 24/7 "Hate Chavez". To counter this propaganda, many Community Councils have their own local Radio stations.

Key Accomplishments of Bolivarian “21^st Century Socialism”
Tripled social security retirement payments

• Free food, clothing, free healthcare and dental care
• 2 million illiterate adults have gained elementary school degrees
• Land redistribution to poor farmers (7.5 million acres to 200,000 families
• Worker-owned/controlled plants 2006 (500), 2010 (7000)
• Army units are encouraged to help out on social projects.
• This integrates soldiers in the social transformation.
• 10-15 Social Missions for the poor, handicapped, single women

On September 26, 2010, Venezuela elected a new National Assembly (Congress).
The State Department poured $50 million of US "Depression" dollars to steal the election from the Bolivarians. When will our US Congress call for a HEARING?

Someday in the future, “Citizen Assemblies,” consisting of (term-limited) Reps from all the Community Councils, will eventually replace elected representatives of the National Assembly.

Ref: “Changing Venezuela” by Gregory Wilpert - web "www.Venezuelanalysis.com"

PROGRESSIVE DEMOCRATIC WORKERS PDWAmerica.blogspot.com

State of ILL Reaches Agreement With AFSCME Union

Illinois State reaches contract deal with AFSCME

The State of Illinois and its largest employee Union have reached tentative agreement on a new contract.
Both Gov. Pat Quinn's office and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, commonly known as AFSCME, put out statements today announcing the deal for a new, three-year pact covering roughly 35,000 state workers.
Details were not immediately available, though the union is believed to have won a pay hike of some size, despite the state's rocky financial condition.
"AFSCME is very pleased that we were able to reach an agreement that protects our members' standard of living, and is fair to them and all Illinois citizens, even in these very challenging economic times," Henry Bayer, president of AFSCME's Illinois Council, said in a statement.
"This agreement is fair to both hardworking state employees and all taxpayers of Illinois," Mr. Quinn said, also in a statement.
The sides have been engaged in often very contentious talks for well over a year. Among issues that have been on the table are the closure of facilities the state says are not needed, pay, health care benefits and pensions.
I'll give you more details if and when I get them.
11:15 a.m. update — I now have some details, from sources familiar with the negotiations.
Agreement was reached at 1 a.m. this morning after what I'm told was the longest negotiation process in state history.
Workers will get a pay raises — assuming they ratify the pact. I'm told they're around the current inflation rate, which would be about 1.5 percent a year or a tad lower. In exchange, retirees would begin paying toward their state-provided health care, something that recently was mandated by lawmakers but has not been implemented. That's said to be worth some hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'd like to read the fine print.
There are no new limits on management's (Mr. Quinn's) power to close what he views as unneeded facilities and programs and force layoffs. But neither is there any agreement on pension reform, which is being left to the General Assembly to resolve.


Follow Greg on Twitter at @GregHinz.
- See more at: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130228/BLOGS02/130229742#sthash.3G9DzGmZ.dpuf
February 28, 2013

Sequester Is a Moral Right for the Extreme Right

Why Ultra-Conservatives Like the Sequester

By George Lakoff, Reader Supported News

26 February 13

aul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Robert Reich and other major economists have pointed out that the deficit is not an urgent economic problem and that, to the contrary, the economy would be helped by an increase in public investment and harmed by drastic cuts. The Sequester would hurt the economy, millions of people, and the country as a whole.President Obama has detailed the vast range of harms that the sequester would bring. They are well-known. And they are not necessary. The president sees the sequester, if it happens, as an enormous self-inflicted wound, inflicted on America by a Republican-dominated House elected by Americans.

But pointing out Republican-caused harms to millions of people -- many of them Republicans -- does not sway the ultra-right. Why? Democratic pundits say that Republicans want to hurt the President, to show government doesn't work by making it not work, and to protect "special interests" from higher taxes. All true. But there is an additional and deeper reason. Ultra-conservatives believe that the sequester is moral, that it is the right thing to do.

Progressives tend to believe that democracy is based on citizens caring for their fellow citizens through what the government provides for all citizens -- public infrastructure, public safety, public education, public health, publicly-sponsored research, public forms of recreation and culture, publicly-guaranteed safety nets for those who need them, and so on. In short, Progressives believe that the private depends on the public, that without those public provisions 

Americans cannot be free to live reasonable lives and to thrive in private business. They believe that those who make more from public provisions should pay more to maintain them.

Ultra-conservatives don't believe this. They believe that Democracy gives them the liberty to seek their own self-interests by exercising personal responsibility, without having responsibility for anyone else or anyone else having responsibility for them. They take this as a matter of morality. They see the social responsibility to provide for the common good as an immoral imposition on their liberty.

Their moral sense requires that they do all they can to make the government fail in providing for the common good. Their idea of liberty is maximal personal responsibility, which they see as maximal privatization -- and profitization -- of all that we do for each other together, jointly as a unified nation.

They also believe that if people are hurt by government failure, it is their own fault for being "on the take" instead of providing for themselves. People who depend on public provisions should suffer. They should have rely on themselves alone -- learn personal responsibility, just as Romney said in his 47 percent speech. In the long run, they believe, the country will be better off if everyone has to depend on personal responsibility alone.

Moreover, ultra-conservatives do not see all the ways in which they, and other ultra-conservatives, rely all day every day on what other Americans have supplied for them. They actually believe that they built it all by themselves.So for them the sequester is not a "self-inflicted wound." It is justice. The sequester is not merely about protecting "special interests." It is about the good people who pursued their self-interest successfully, got rich, and have acted "morally" in avoiding taxes that pay for public provisions by the government.

They are not merely trying to harm their own constituents just to hurt the president politically. Yes, they think hurting the president politically is moral, and they believe that any constituents they are hurting need to become more personally responsible. They see the sequester as serving that purpose.

In short, the sequester is not just about money and political power for the Republicans in the House. It is mostly about what they see as the right direction for the country: maximal elimination of the public sphere.

In short, they have an ideology that partially, but only partially, fits what half of our population believes. Overall, it actually fits what about 20 to 30 percent of the population totally believes. Both total progressives and partial progressives don't want to see millions of folks hurt and the economy hurt as well. But thanks to Republican gerrymandering at the state level, Progressives and partial Progressives do not control Congress.

This is the real picture and few people in public life dare to tell it. It is more convenient, and less scary, to think that all that is involved is money and politics as usual. That's what current Democratic messaging says. Democratic messaging hasn't gotten to the heart of the problem: the real moral divide in America. Democratic messaging, in blaming Republicans in Congress for the harm to come, just offends Republicans and fails to speak to moral divide at the heart of our public life.

Would addressing it help? I think so, if it is done with the appropriate sensitivity.