Seattle Transit Workers Action April 4, 2012

Seattle ATU Local 587 Takes Party Of National Day Of Action For Public Transportation

APRIL 4 2012: National Day of Action for Public Transportation

The Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 587 -- Union of Metro / King County transit workers -- will spearhead a day of action in Seattle to DEFEND PUBLIC TRANSIT. Their theme:
"Don't let your commute get thrown under the bus."

This action, in collaboration with the Seattle Transit Riders Union, begins at 11 AM AT 6TH AND ROYAL BROUGHAM (near Safeco Stadium and the-3 busway). Participants will "occupy a bus" (or buses and trains) and travel to downtown for a rally at Westlake (4th and Pine.) From there participants will leaflet buses. Please join Union transit workers, and bus riders to help defend public transit. This is part of a national day of action called by International ATU, and that includes the demand to STOP THE WAR, AND USE THE MONIES TO FUND PUBLIC TRANSIT AND OTHER VITAL PUBLIC SERVICES.

Across the U.S. public transit has suffered severe cutbacks andlayoffs -- even as gas prices rise, along with the need for expanded bus service. In Pierce and Snohomish Counties, transit service has been cut by more than 25 percent. In King County, fares have SKYROCKETED 80 PERCENT! in 4 years. THE ATTACK ON PUBLIC TRANSIT IS ANATTACK ON THE WORKING CLASS. This is an opportunity to push back. Please help forward and distribute the attached leaflet to your union, co-workers, friends, family. Spread the word. Let's say, TRANSPORTATION IS A HUMAN RIGHT! NO PRIVATIZATION, NO CUTS, NO FARE HIKES, NO EXCUSES! FUNDPUBLIC TRANSIT!

See you Wednesday, April 4, 2012 Organized Workers for Labor Solidarity OWLS@riseup.net

 

General Strike in Portugal. Spain and Italy Next

Anti-Austerity Mass General Strike Takes Portugalhttp://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/22-6
- Common Dreams staff

Today in Portugal public services and transportation came to a halt, as unions enacted a 24-hour general strike for the second time in two months. The metros in Portugal's largest cities have closed as well as major ports. The strike was called in reaction to austerity measures agreed upon by the government in return for a European bailout.


A picket at Sao Bento station in Porto. The bib reads "General Strike." (Jose Coelho/EPA) Demonstrations and rallies are planned for the afternoon in 38 cities and towns across the country. Today's events preclude similar strikes in both Italy and Spain among countries facing European austerity.

Spain's two main unions, the General Workers Union and the Workers Commissions, have called for a general strike on March 29 to protest the government's austerity push.
Italy's largest trade union called for a general strike over labor reforms on Wednesday, in protest of Prime Minister Mario Monti and Italy's austerity.

Portugal Hit by General Strike Against Austerity (Agence France-Presse):

Garbage went uncollected, ports closed, trains stood still, public transportation was disrupted and other public services were affected by the country's second general strike in four months. The metros in Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal's second-largest city, were closed because of the strike, forcing tens of thousands of commuters to find an alternative way to get to work or school.

The majority of ports, including the port of Lisbon and Viana do Castelo in the north, were closed, according to the country's biggest union -- the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP) -- which called the strike.  About two dozen ships were forced to change their routes to go to other ports because of the action, it added. [...]

The CGTP, which is close to the Communist Party, called the strike in February to protest against a reform of the labor code that makes it easier to hire and fire workers.
It is also angry over government austerity measures such as the elimination of public employees' Christmas and vacation bonuses -- each roughly equivalent to a month's pay -- among measures to rein in the public deficit. [...]

Italian Union Calls Strike Over Monti's Job Reforms (Reuters):

Italy's largest trade union called for a general strike over labor reforms on Wednesday, escalating a confrontation with Prime Minister Mario Monti that will test his resolve to push ahead with plans to transform the economy.

After weeks of negotiation, Monti announced late on Tuesday that the time for talking was over and he would press on with plans to overhaul employment protection laws dating back to the 1970s, despite stiff opposition from the left-wing CGIL union.

The CGIL proposed an eight-hour general strike to protest the measures, which would allow companies to lay off individual employees for disciplinary or business reasons, saying the changes risked causing massive job losses.   This will not be a flare-up which burns out in a day as the government expects and we have a duty to get results before we see years of mass dismissals from companies," the union's secretariat said in a statement.

The strike would mark the biggest demonstration against technocrat premier Monti, a former European Commissioner who has already imposed painful cuts and tax hikes and an overhaul of the pension system since taking office in November.

General Strike in Spain

Spain to go on General Strike
March 10 – The CNT, Spain’s anarchist labor union, issued a statement yesterday announcing that they will be convoking a nation-wide general strike for March 29 against the labor reform passed on Thursday by the Parliament.

This coincides with strikes that have already been called for Galicia and the Basque Country. In these regions the call was made jointly between “minority” unions such as the CNT and CGT as well as regionally-important unions linked to nationalist movements. On the national scale, however, the CNT has called the strike on its own.

According to Spain’s labor law, strikes are only official if called, or convoked, by a union or another official body. In the message announcing the strike call, the CNT said that they hope to give coverage to any workers’ organizations that want to take action.
Spain’s two main unions, the UGT and the CCOO, have also called for a strike on that day, but speak only of “amending” the labor reform. This is a continuation of their policy of social peace – in February they signed a major agreement with the employers’ confederation in which they gave major concessions. Recognizing the growing disillusion that many workers are feeling towards these unions, the CNT is promoting a different form of unionism, one which is not based on professional bureaucrats and policies of social peace, but rather on the direct action and solidarity of workers.

This appears to be the first nation-wide general strike since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship to be called for by a union other than the CCOO or UGT, though it remains to be which unions, if any, will follow the CNT in calling for a general strike.

The CNT’s statement was clear that, although the strike is only called for March 29, this should be seen only as one step in a growing mobilization which seeks not only to remove this labor reform in its entirety, but also to go on the offensive with the goal of social transformation.
http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/strike-everywhere/#more-2131

British UNIONS Defy Gov't Pension Cuts

Unions say no to Tory pension cuts

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=27811

The NUT, PCS, UCU and EIS unions could be part of a 750,000-strong strike on 28 March. The Tories (Conservatives) have unilaterally declared that the majority of their talks with unions are over. These had been over government plans to “reform” public sector pensions in health, education and the civil service. Talks over local government pensions are continuing. The Tories want to impose serious attacks on millions of workers in these sectors. This is despite the fact that a number of union leaderships have rejected the plans and many are still consulting members. The government wants to force public sector workers to work longer, pay more into their pensions each month and get less when they retire. It plans to impose stark rises on workers’ pension contributions from next month.

Carl, a teacher and NUT member in Bolton, told Socialist Worker, “What’s happening is a disgrace and I’m prepared to strike indefinitely. “I know many people who are considering withdrawing from the pension scheme because of the changes. “Private sector workers often don’t pay into pension schemes because they don’t trust them. Unfortunately we no longer trust ours either. ”DisagreeA treasury minister last week said that talks with the unions over changes to health, education and civil service pensions were “constructive”.

Unions disagree.NUT general secretary Christine Blower said, “The NUT has not signed up to these proposals and neither has the majority of the other teacher unions.“We cannot accept our members being asked to pay so much more and work so much longer for their pensions and receive so much less in retirement.

”PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said, “(Gov't) Ministers’ obstinacy means we have this ludicrous charade of what is now our fourth ‘final’ offer. We will continue to talk to other unions about planning further widespread coordinated industrial action. "Unison said it would ballot its 450,000 members in the NHS on the offer. The GMB promised to consult members in the NHS and civil service. And Unite denounced the government for “having avoided any meaningful negotiations over the last year”. It is “recommending that its members in the NHS, Ministry of Defence and government departments and in teaching reject the proposals”. The union is consulting its NHS members.Workers in public sector unions overwhelmingly voted for discontinuous strikes against the pension attacks last year.

This means that unions already have a mandate to call further strikes, regardless of fresh consultations. Anna, a teacher in Somerset, said, “People don’t see a consultation in the same way as an official ballot and so may not feel the need to vote in the same way. If the turnout is low, unions should still call the strike.“NUT members at my school are for taking action on 28 March. And they don’t just want it to be one day—they support further action after that too.”

 

 

GOP War on Postal Workers

Cost-cutting plan targets hundreds of US Mail processing facilities
The U.S. Postal Service could close or merge with nearby locations in the next year as part of a three-year, $15 billion cost-cutting plan. The consolidations would affect four processing centers in Maryland: Cumberland, Easton, Gaithersburg and Waldorf. The Virginia sites are Lynchburg, Norfolk and Roanoke. 

The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service has announced plans to eliminate dozens of processing centers.  If the plan is enacted, parts of some states would have their mail sorted in another state. That possibility rattled Sens. Barbara A. Mikulski and Benjamin L. Cardin, both Maryland Democrats, who blasted plans to move some sorting responsibilities from Eastern Maryland to Delaware.“There is absolutely no statistical or empirical data to justify consideration of this idea,” they said in a letter sent Thursday to Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe.

But in an interview, Donahoe said his advisers spent the past few months studying the feasibility of shuttering as many as 264 sites by reviewing network delivery models. The study determined that six sites would require further review, 35 would remain open and the affected sites would start closing or merging at some point after a moratorium on closures ends in mid-May. Donahoe said the consolidation plans remain “very fluid.”   “None of this is set in stone,” he said. Making the announcement this week, he said, would permit affected workers to begin weighing their options.  “Some people will retire, some may become letter carriers, some maintenance employees may be vehicle mechanics, depending on how things work,” he said. “We are still awaiting some decisions from a legislative perspective that may lead to some changes. But if we don’t get legislation, we would have to start closing locations.”

Legislative action is expected next month when the Senate begins consideration of a bipartisan reform plan that would permit the Postal Service to close thousands of post offices, end Saturday mail delivery and recoup billions of dollars paid into federal and postal retirement accounts. 

Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), who led a push to delay any further postal consolidations until May, called the new plans “deeply flawed” because closing processing centers would further slow mail delivery.

“Slowing down mail delivery service will result in less business and less revenue,” Sanders said. The Postal Service hopes to eventually operate a delivery network with fewer than 200 processing facilities, and closing the 223 sites could mean the loss of as many as 35,000 mail processing jobs, mostly through attrition, as part of a broader goal of trimming 150,000 positions by next year. The cutbacks also mean the Postal Service would no longer be able to guarantee overnight delivery of some first-class mail....(edited)

Cliff Guffey, president of the American Postal Workers Union, encouraged his members to continue pressing lawmakers and customers to voice their opposition to the changes.“We face an uphill battle, so it is crucial that union members continue to make their voices heard,” Guffey said

ed.okeefe@washingtonpost.com

Saturday, February 25, 2012

War on Postal Workers

12 Faults in New Mortgage Deal

The Top Twelve Reasons Why You

Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement

by Eve Smith "Naked Capitalism"

           1. We’ve now set a price for forgeries and fabricating documents. It’s $2000 per loan. This is a rounding error compared to the chain of title problem these systematic practices were designed to circumvent. The cost is also trivial in comparison to the average loan, which is roughly $180k, so the settlement represents about 1% of loan balances. It is less than the price of the title insurance that banks failed to get when they transferred the loans to the trust. It is a fraction of the cost of the legal expenses when foreclosures are challenged. It’s a great deal for the banks because no one is at any of the servicers going to jail for forgery and the banks have set the upper bound of the cost of riding roughshod over 300 years of real estate law.

2. That $26 billion is actually $5 billion of bank money and the rest is your money. The mortgage principal writedowns are guaranteed to come almost entirely from securitized loans, which means from investors, which in turn means taxpayers via Fannie and Freddie, pension funds, insurers, and 401 (k)s. Refis of performing loans also reduce income to those very same investors.
3. That $5 billion divided among the big banks wouldn’t even represent a significant quarterly hit. Freddie and Fannie putbacks to the major banks have been running at that level each quarter.
4. That $20 billion actually makes bank second liens sounder, so this deal is a stealth bailout that strengthens bank balance sheets at the expense of the broader public.
5. The enforcement is a joke. The first layer of supervision is the banks reporting on themselves. The framework is similar to that of the OCC consent decrees implemented last year, which Adam Levitin and yours truly, among others, decried as regulatory theater.
6. The past history of servicer consent decrees shows the servicers all fail to comply. Why? Servicer records and systems are terrible in the best of times, and their systems and fee structures aren’t set up to handle much in the way of delinquencies. As Tom Adams has pointed out in earlier posts, servicer behavior is predictable when their portfolios are hit with a high level of delinquencies and defaults: they cheat in all sorts of ways to reduce their losses.
7. The cave-in Nevada and Arizona on the Countrywide settlement suit is a special gift for Bank of America, who is by far the worst offender in the chain of title disaster (since, according to sworn testimony of its own employee in Kemp v. Countrywide, Countrywide failed to comply with trust delivery requirements). This move proves that failing to comply with a consent degree has no consequences but will merely be rolled into a new consent degree which will also fail to be enforced. These cases also alleged HAMP violations as consumer fraud violations and could have gotten costly and emboldened other states to file similar suits not just against Countrywide but other servicers, so it was useful to the other banks as well.

8. If the new Federal task force were intended to be serious, this deal would have not have been settled. You never settle before investigating. It’s a bad idea to settle obvious, widespread wrongdoing on the cheap. You use the stuff that is easy to prove to gather information and secure cooperation on the stuff that is harder to prove. In Missouri and Nevada, the robosigning investigation led to criminal charges against agents of the servicers. But even though these companies were acting at the express direction and approval of the services, no individuals or entities higher up the food chain will face any sort of meaningful charges.

9. There is plenty of evidence of widespread abuses that appear not to be on the attorney generals’ or media’s radar, such as servicer driven foreclosures and looting of investors’ funds via impermissible and inflated charges. While no serious probe was undertaken, even the limited or peripheral investigations show massive failures (60% of documents had errors in AGs/Fed’s pathetically small sample). Similarly, the US Trustee’s office found widespread evidence of significant servicer errors in bankruptcy-related filings, such as inflated and bogus fees, and even substantial, completely made up charges. Yet the services and banks will suffer no real consequences for these abuses.
10. A deal on robosiginging serves to cover up the much deeper chain of title problem. And don’t get too excited about the New York, Massachusetts, and Delaware MERS suits. They put pressure on banks to clean up this monstrous mess only if the AGs go through to trial and get tough penalties. The banks will want to settle their way out of that too. And even if these cases do go to trial and produce significant victories for the AGs, they still do not address the problem of failures to transfer notes correctly.
11. Don’t bet on a deus ex machina in terms of the new Federal Foreclosure Task Force to improve this picture much. If you think Schneiderman, as a co-chairman who already has a full time day job in New York, is going to outfox a bunch of DC insiders who are part of the problem, I have a bridge I’d like to sell to you.
12. We’ll now have to listen to banks and their sycophant defenders declaring victory despite being wrong on the law and the facts. They will proceed to marginalize and write off criticisms of the servicing practices that hurt homeowners and investors and are devastating communities. But the problems will fester and the housing market will continue to suffer. Investors in mortgage-backed securities, who know that services have been screwing them for years, will be hung out to dry and will likely never return to a private MBS market, since the problems won’t ever be fixed. This settlement has not only revealed the residential mortgage market to be too big to fail, but puts it on long term, perhaps permanent, government life support.

As we’ve said before, this settlement is yet another raw demonstration of who wields power in America, and it isn’t you and me. It’s bad enough to see these negotiations come to their predictable, sorry outcome. It adds insult to injury to see some try to depict it as a win for long suffering, still abused homeowners.

GOP Strangles NLRB

(GOP) Crippling the Right to Organize

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

UNLESS something changes in Washington, American workers will, on New Year’s Day, effectively lose their right to be represented by a union.

Two of the five seats on the National Labor Relations Board, which protects collective bargaining, are vacant, and on Dec. 31, the term of Craig Becker, a labor lawyer whom President Obama named to the board last year through a recess appointment, will expire. Without a quorum, the Supreme Court ruled last year, the board cannot decide cases.

What would this mean?

Workers illegally fired for union organizing won’t be reinstated with back pay. Employers will be able to get away with interfering with Union Elections. Perhaps most important, employers won’t have to recognize unions despite a majority vote by workers. Without the board to enforce Labor Law, most companies will not voluntarily deal with unions.

If this nightmare comes to pass, it will represent the culmination of three decades of Republican resistance to the Labor Board — an unwillingness to recognize the fundamental right of workers to band together, if they wish, to seek better pay and working conditions. But Mr. Obama is also partly to blame; in trying to install partisan stalwarts on the board, as his predecessors did, he is all but guaranteeing that the impasse will continue. On Wednesday, he announced his intention to nominate two pro-union lawyers to the board, though there is no realistic chance that either can gain Senate confirmation anytime soon.

For decades after its creation in 1935, the Labor Board was a relatively fair arbiter between labor and capital. It has protected workers’ right to organize by, among other things, overseeing elections that decide on union representation. Employers may not engage in unfair labor practices, like intimidating organizers and discriminating against union members. Unions are prohibited, too, from doing things like improperly pressuring workers to join.

The system began to run into trouble in the 1970s. Employers found loopholes that enabled them to delay the board’s administrative proceedings, sometimes for years. Reforms intended to speed up the board’s resolution of disputes have repeatedly foundered in Congress.

The precipitous decline of organized labor — principally a result of economic forces, not legal ones — cemented Unions’ dependence on the board, despite its imperfections. Meanwhile, business interests, represented by an increasingly conservative Republican Party, became more assertive in fighting unions.

The Board became dysfunctional. Traditionally, members were career civil servants or distinguished lawyers and academics from across the country. But starting in the Reagan era, the board’s composition began to tilt toward Washington insiders like former Congressional staff members and former lobbyists.

Starting with a compromise that allowed my confirmation in 1994, the Board’s members and general counsel have been nominated in groups. In contrast to the old system, the new “batching” meant that nominees were named as a package acceptable to both parties. As a result, the board came to be filled with rigid ideologues.

Under President George W. Bush, the board all but stopped using its discretion to obtain court orders against employers before the board’s own, convoluted, administrative process was completed — a power that, used fairly, is a crucial protection for workers. In 2007, in what has been called the September Massacre, the board issued rulings that made it easier for employers to block Union organizing and harder for illegally fired employees to collect back pay. Democratic senators then blocked Mr. Bush from making recess appointments to the board, as President Bill Clinton had done. For 27 months, until March 2010, the board operated with only two members; in June 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that it needed at least three to issue decisions.

Under Mr. Obama, the Board has begun to take enforcement more seriously, by pursuing the court orders that the board under Mr. Bush had abandoned. Sadly, though, the board has also been plagued by unnecessary controversy. In April, the acting general counsel issued a complaint over Boeing’s decision to build airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, following a dispute with Boeing machinists in Washington State. Although the complaint was dropped last week after the machinists reached a new contract agreement with Boeing, the controversy reignited Republican threats to cut financing for the board.

In my view, the complaint against Boeing was legally flawed, but the threats to cut the board’s budget represent unacceptable political interference. The shenanigans continue: last month, before the board tentatively approved new proposals that would expedite unionization elections, the sole Republican member threatened to resign, which would have again deprived the board of a quorum.

Mr. Obama needs to make this an election-year issue; if the board goes dark in January, he should draw attention to Congressional obstructionism during the campaign and defend the board’s role in protecting employees and employers. A new vision for labor-management cooperation must include not only a more powerful board, but also a less partisan one, with members who are independent and neutral experts. Otherwise, the partisan morass will continue, and American workers will suffer.

By William B. Gould, NY Times
William B. Gould IV, a law professor at Stanford, was chairman of the National Labor Relations Board from 1994 to 1998.

Editor:  This Board member thinks there are "neutral Labor experts"?
After the Rethuglian attack on Labor Unions since 1970, there are only
Union Busting Experts working for management, and rank and files'
Union Building Experts.  Obama must appoint Commissioners during
the Recess.