It didn’t happen overnight
by Ken Melvin
3rd World
—
It didn’t happen overnight.
The nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in, say, Southeast Asian, African, South American, … countries, invariably refer to the tenuous hold on life of their working poor; they don’t really have a job. Each day they rise and go forth looking for work that pays enough that they and their family can continue to subsist. It is, in some countries, a long-standing problem.
Sound too familiar? Sometime in the late 80s (??) Americans began to see day labors line up at Home Depot and Lowe’s lots in numbers not seen since The Great Depression. Manufacturing Corporations began subbing out their work to sub-contractors, otherwise known as employees without benefits; Construction Contractors subbed out construction work to these employees without benefits; Engineering Firms subbed out engineering to these employees without benefits; Landscapers’ workers were now sub-contractors/independent contractors; … Here, in the SF Bay Area, time and again, we saw vans loads of undocumented Hispanics under a ‘Labor Contractor’ come in from the Central Valley to build condos; the white Contractor for the project didn’t have a single employee; none of the workers got a W-2. Recall watching, sometime in the 90s (??), a familiar, well dressed, rotund guest from Wall Street, on the PBS News Hour, forcefully proclaiming to the TV audience:
… American workers are going to have to learn to compete with the Chinese; Civil Service employees, factory employees, … are all going to have to work for less …
All this subcontracting, independent contractors, … was a scam, a scam meant to circumvent paying going wages and benefits, … to enhance profit margins; a scam that transferred more wealth to the top.
Meanwhile back at The Ranch, after the H1B Immigration Act of 1990, Microsoft could hire programmers from India for one-half the cost of a citizen programmer. Half of Bill Gates’ fortune was resultant these labor savings; the other half was made off those not US Citizens. Taking a cue, Banks, Bio-Techs, … some City and State Governments began subcontracting out their programming to H1Bs. Often, the subcontractors/labor contractors (often themselves immigrants) providing the programmers, held the programmers’ passports/visas for security.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, friends of Bush/Cheney made fortunes on clean up contracts they subbed out for next to nothing; the independent/subcontractor scam was now officially governmentally sanctioned.
By about 2000 we began to hear the term gig-workers applied to these employees without benefits. Uber appeared in 2007 to be followed by Lift. Both are scams based on paying less than prevailing wages, on not providing worker benefits, …
These days, the nightly news, when talking about the effect of the pandemic on the populace in America, shows footage of Food Banks in California with lines 2! miles long. Many of those waiting in these lines didn’t have a real job before; they were gig-workers; they can’t apply for Unemployment Benefits. It is estimated that 1.6 million American workers (1% of the workforce) are gig-workers; they don’t have a real job. That 1% is in addition to the 16 million American workers (10% of the workforce) that are independent contractors. Of the more than 40 million currently unemployed Americans, some 17 million are either gig-workers or subcontractors/independent contractors. All of these are scams meant to transfer more wealth to the top. All of these are scams with American Workers the victims; scams, in a race to the bottom.
Ken,
Read this by the SEIU counsel Andrew Strom — and tell me what you think:
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
Democrats in the so called battle ground states would clean up at the polls with this. Why do you think those states strayed? It was because Obama and Hillary had no idea what they really needed. Voters had no idea what they SPECIFICALLY needed either — UNIONS! They had been deunionized so thoroughly for so long that they THEMSELVES no long knew what they were missing (frogs in the slowly boiling pot).
In 1988 Jesse Jackson took the Democratic primary in Michigan with 54% against Dukakis and Gephardt. Obama beat Wall Street Romney and red-white-and-blue McCain in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. But nobody told these voters — because nobody seems to remember — what they really needed. These voter just knew by 2016 that Democrats had not what they needed and looked elsewhere — anywhere else!
Strom presents an easy as can be, on-step-back treatment that should go down oh, so smoothly and sweetly. What do you think?
Not overnight, but a few days in 1972 when Nixon fouled the defaults and none of us knew how badly at the time.
Reseting prices takes a long time, it is not magic and Nixon had fouled the precious metals market, overnight. That and all the commodities market needed a restructure to adapt to our new regime.
Our way out was to export price instability to Asia. My suggestion this time is to think through the math a bit before we all suddenly freak and do another over nighter. Think about how one might spread the partial default over a 15 year period.
All of us, stuck with 40 years of flat earth economic planning without a clue. Now we have a year at best to nail down the Lucas criteria and get a default done with some science behind it.
I doubt it. I figure we will all go to monetary meetup with our insurance contracts ready to be confirmed. That is impossible and Trump will be stuck doing a volatile, overnight partial default, like Nixon.,
Dennis,
The states you mentioned have overwhelmingly voted Rep for the last 3 decades in their state races. One of them has instituted right to work laws, and the other two have come very close to doing the same.
The white working class cares nothing about unions at all. They have been voting against them for decades. It’s why union rights and membership has deteriorated for 5 decades.
EM:
Notably, I had posted the 2016 presidential election numbers numbers for MI, PA, and WI which resulted in an “anyone but Trump or Clinton vote” and gave th election to Trump. The “anyone but Trump or Clinton vote” resulted in a historical high for the “others” category and was anywhere from 3 to 6 times higher than previously experienced in other presidential elections. It also resulted in those three states casting Electoral votes for a Republican presidential candidate since 1992 – MI, 1988 – PA, and 1988 – WI. While this does defeat your comment above on those states voting Republican, it does not take away from your other comment on Sarandon. People punished themselves with Trump in spite of every obvious clue he demonstrated of being a loon. In this case the white working class voted against themselves for Trump and those of Sarandon’s ilk helped them along by voting for “others.”
Run, I stated in “state elections”.
Y’know one other thing I have seen in MI voting is that the amount of people who voted did not cast a voted for President also was the highest ever. Thinking these are the same people like Sarandon. It was close to 90,000 in MI.
“87,810: Number of voters this election who cast a ballot but did not cast a vote for president. That compares to 49,840 undervotes for president in 2012.
5 percent: Proportion of voters who opted for a third-party candidate in this election, compared to 1 percent in 2012.”
https://www.mlive.com/politics/2016/11/michigans_presidential_electio.html
EM:
I am going to put the numbers out here for Presidential Election 2012 and 2016. It is easier to look at them and the percentages.
In this site, you can look year to year on the vote. US Election Atlas
Denis
Thanks for your comment and the link. Wow! Where to start, huh?
SEIU was a player from the get go, but I don’t want to go there just now.
Before Reagan, there was the first rust belt move to the non-union south. Why was the south so anti-union? I think this stuff is engendered from infancy and most of us are incapable of thinking anew when it comes to stuff our parents ‘taught’ us. MLK was the best thing that ever happened to the dirt-road poor south, yet they hated him and they hated the very unions that might have lifted them up. They did seem to take pleasure in the yanks’ loss of jobs.
I think the Reagan era was prelude to what is going on now, i.e., going backward while yelling whee look at me go. No doubt, Reagan turned union members against their own unions. But, the genesis of demise probably lay with automation and the early offshoring to Mexico. By Reagan, the car plants were losing jobs to Toyota and Honda and automation. By 1990, car plants that had previously employed 5,000, now automated, produced more cars employing only 1200. At the time, much of the nation’s wealth was still derived from car production.
Skipping forward a bit, the democrats blew it for years with all their talk about the ‘middle-class’ without realizing it was the ‘disappearing middle-class’. They ignored the poor working-class vote and lost election after election.
I’ve come to not like the term labor, think it affords capital an undeserved status, though much diminished, I think thought all workers would be better off in a union. Otherwise, as we are witnessing, there is no parity between workers and wealth; we are in a race to the bottom with the wealth increasingly go to the top.
Matthew – thanks for your comment
I think that we are into a transition (about 45 yrs into) as great as the industrial revolution. We, as probably those poor souls of the 18th and 19th centuries did, are floundering, unable to come to terms with what is going on.
I also think that those such as the Kochs have a good grasp of what is going on and are moving to protect themselves and their class.
EMichael, thanks for the comment
Are you implying that the politicians are way behind the curve? If so, I think that you are right.
Let me share what I was thinking last night about thinking:
Descartes’ problem was that he desperately wanted to make philosophy work within the framework of his religion, Catholicism. Paul Krugman desperately wants to make economics all work within the Holy Duality of Capitalism and Free Markets. Even Joe Stiglitz can’t step out of this text. All things being possible, it is possible that either could come up with a solution to today’s economic problems that would fit within the Two; but the odds are not good. Better to think anew.
We see politicians try and try to find solutions for today’s problems from within their own dogmas/ideologies. Even if they can’t, they persist, they still try to impose these dogmas/ideologies in the desperate hope they might work if only applied to a greater degree. How else explain any belief that markets could anticipate and respond to pandemics? That markets could best respond to housing demand?
Ken Melvin,
Interesting and fine writing.
Paul Krugman @paulkrugman
Glad to see Noah Smith highlighting this all-too-relevant work by the late Alberto Alesina 1/
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-05-30/racism-is-the-biggest-reason-u-s-safety-net-is-so-weak
Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak
Harvard economist Alberto Alesina, who died last week, found that ethnic divisions made the country less effective at providing public goods.
7:50 AM · May 31, 2020
The Alesina/Glaeser/Sacerdote paper on why America doesn’t have a European-style welfare state — racism — had a big impact on my own thinking 2/
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/why_doesnt_the_u.s._have_a_european-style_welfare_state.pdf…
For a long time anyone who pointed out that the modern GOP is basically a party that serves plutocratic ends by weaponizing white racism was treated as “shrill” and partisan. Can we now admit the obvious? 3/
Ken,
Half the politicians are behind the curve. When George Wallace showed the GOP how to win elections (Don’t ever get outniggerred) the Dem Party failed to see and react to it. Then the Kochs of the world stepped in with the John Birch society (fromerly the KKK) and started playing race against class, which resulted in the white working class supporting anti-labor pols and legislation.
The election of Obama caused the racists to go totally off the reservation with the Tea Party (formerly the KKK and the John Birch Society) and lead us to where we are now.
Of course, the corporate world followed the blueprint.
Way past time for the Dem Party to start attacking on a constant basis the racist GOP. And also to start appealing more to workers, though the 2016 platform certainly did that to a large degree, and the 2020 platform looks to be mush more supportive of labor than ever.
“It’s a detailed and aggressive agenda that includes doubling the minimum wage and tripling funding for schools with low-income students. He is proposing the most sweeping overhaul of immigration policy in a generation, the biggest pro-union push in three generations, and the most ambitious environmental agenda of all time.
If Democrats take back the Senate in the fall, Biden could make his agenda happen. A primary is about airing disagreements, but legislating is about building consensus. The Democratic Party largely agrees on a suite of big policy changes that would improve the lives of millions of Americans in meaningful ways. Biden has detailed, considered plans to put much of this agenda in place. But getting these plans done will be driven much more by the outcome of the congressional elections than his questioned ambition.
A big minimum wage increase
Biden’s commitment to raising the federal minimum wage from its current $7.25 to $15 an hour is one of the least talked-about plans at stake in the 2020 election.
In the 2016 cycle when Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders disagreed about raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, the debate was the subject of extensive coverage. By the 2020 cycle, all the major Democratic candidates were on board, so it didn’t come up much. But it’s significant that this is no longer controversial in Democratic Party circles. If the party is broadly comfortable with the wage hike as a matter of both politics and substance, Democrats in Congress are likely to make it happen if it’s at all possible.
Noji Olaigbe, left, from the Fight for $15 minimum wage movement, speaks during a McDonald’s workers’ strike in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 23, 2019. David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images
The $15-an-hour minimum wage increase is also a signature issue for Biden. He endorsed New York’s version of it in the fall of 2015, back when he was vice president and his boss Barack Obama was pushing a smaller federal raise.
A big minimum wage hike polls well, it aligns with Biden’s thematic emphasis on “the dignity of work,” and it’s a topic on which he’s genuinely been a leader. It reflects his political sensibilities, which are moderate but in a decidedly more populist mode than Obama’s technocratic one. …
Biden has a big Plan A to support organized labor, and a Plan B that’s still consequential and considerably more plausible politically.
Beyond a general disposition to be a good coalition partner to organized labor, the centerpiece of his union agenda is support for the PRO Act, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this year.
That bill, were it to become law, would be the biggest victory for unions and collective bargaining since the end of World War II — overriding state “right to work” laws, barring mandatory anti-union briefings from management during organizing campaigns, imposing much more meaningful financial penalties on companies that illegally fire workers for pro-union activity, and allowing organizing through a streamlined card check process. Separately, Biden and House Democrats have lined up behind a Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act that would bolster public sector workers’ collective bargaining rights. ”
https://www.vox.com/2020/5/26/21257648/joe-biden-climate-economy-tax-plans
One of the big issues here is Biden not committing to killing the filibuster, in addition to Dem Senators not in agreement either. That would be a disaster for any legislation.
Makes sense not to run on ending the filibuster now, as there is a chance trump can win and teh GOP keeps the Senate. But if the opposite happens and Biden wins and Dems take the Senate, they will have to pivot quickly to getting rid of the filibuster. Apply any and all possible pressure to those Dem Senators who do not agree with that. Threaten them with losing committee posts; primary opponents; the kitchen sink.
Yes, it poses a risk in the event the Reps get a trifecta again, but it is time to flood progressive legislation into law, and getting rid of the filibuster is the only way.
And if they can hit the trifecta and bring this platform to fruition, they won’t have to worry about a GOP trifecta for a long, long time. Possibly forever.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/glaeser/files/why_doesnt_the_u.s._have_a_european-style_welfare_state.pdf
September, 2001
Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?
By Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote
Abstract
European countries are much more generous to the poor relative to the US level of generosity. Economic models suggest that redistribution is a function of the variance and skewness of the pre-tax income distribution, the volatility of income (perhaps because of trade shocks), the social costs of taxation and the expected income mobility of the median voter. None of these factors appear to explain the differences between the US and Europe. Instead, the differences appear to be the result of racial heterogeneity in the US and American political institutions. Racial animosity in the US makes redistribution to the poor, who are disproportionately black, unappealing to many voters. American political institutions limited the growth of a socialist party, and more generally limited the political power of the poor.
This dynamic is not limited to low-skill jobs. I have seen it at work in electronics engineering. When I was a sprat, job shoppers got an hourly wage nearly twice that of their company peers, because they had no benefits or long-term employment. Today, job shoppers are actually paid less than company engineers; and the companies are outsourcing ever more of their staffing to the brokers.
Without labor market frictions, the iron law of wages drives wages to starvation levels. As sophisticated uberization software eliminates the frictions that have protected middle class wages in the recent past, we will all need to enlist unionization and government wage standards to protect us.
Rick
The big engineering offices of the 70s were decimated and worse by the mid-90s; mostly by the advent of computers w/ software. One engineer could now do the work of 10 and didn’t need any draftsman.
I was speaking of engineers with equal skill in the same office. Many at GE Avionics were laid off, and came back as lower paid contract empoyees.
Rick
Die biden
beiden
The both
EMichael
Minimum wage, the row about the $600, … all such things endanger the indentured servant economic model so favored in the south. Keep them poor and hungry and they will work for next to nothing. ‘Still they persist.’ On PBS, a black woman cooking for a restaurant said that she was being paid less than $4/hr.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-05-30/dont-understand-the-protests-what-youre-seeing-is-people-pushed-to-the-edge
May 30, 2020
Don’t understand the protests? What you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge
By KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR – Los Angeles Times
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck while Floyd croaked, “I can’t breathe”?
If you’re white, you probably muttered a horrified, “Oh, my God” while shaking your head at the cruel injustice. If you’re black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, “Not @#$%! again!” Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn’t for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store’s video showed he wasn’t. And how the cop on Floyd’s neck wasn’t an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate.
Maybe you also are thinking about the Karen in Central Park who called 911 claiming the black man who asked her to put a leash on her dog was threatening her. Or the black Yale University grad student napping in the common room of her dorm who was reported by a white student. Because you realize it’s not just a supposed “black criminal” who is targeted, it’s the whole spectrum of black faces from Yonkers to Yale.
You start to wonder if it should be all black people who wear body cams, not the cops.
What do you see when you see angry black protesters amassing outside police stations with raised fists? If you’re white, you may be thinking, “They certainly aren’t social distancing.” Then you notice the black faces looting Target and you think, “Well, that just hurts their cause.” Then you see the police station on fire and you wag a finger saying, “That’s putting the cause backward.”
You’re not wrong — but you’re not right, either. The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness — write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change — the needle hardly budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting….
anne:
If you rcomments are not appearing they are going to spam, Just let me know and I will fish them out of spam. Just approved 4 of yours.
The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year. Considering 370 whites over 100 Latinos were killed by cops, many as bad as that guy in minnie. Blacks have a Trumptard mentality. We have a ecological disaster, a economic disaster and pandemic(when th they are spreading). Yet let’s whine about one bad cop related homicide.
This may begin the breakup of the Democratic party and the blacks. The differences are just to large.
It’s rather sad that it takes a massive civil disturbance to get the authorities to arrest a man videotaped killing another. You’d think that would just happen as a matter of course, but that’s how it works in this country.
EMichael,
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
But pinning Mrs. Clinton’s loss on low black turnout would probably be a mistake. Mr. Obama would have easily won both his elections with this level of black turnout and support. (He would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)
“The protests are self centered crap blacks do year after year.”
Please post links to the multistate riots that occurred from 2010 to 2019. Take all the time you need.
Thanks Joel
THE WAY BACK — THE ONLY WAY BACK — BOTH ECONOMICALLY AND POLITICALLY (pardon me if I take up a lot of space — almost everyone else has said most of what they want to say)
EITC shifts only 2% of income while 40% of American workers earn less that what we think the minimum wage should be — $15/hr.
http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/who-makes-15-per-hour/
The minimum wage itself should only mark the highest wage that we presume firms with highest labor costs can pay* — like fast food with 25% labor costs. Lower labor cost businesses — e.g., retail like Walgreens and Target with 10-15% labor costs can potentially pay north of $20/hr; Walmart with 7% labor costs, $25/hr!
That kind of income can only be squeezed out of the consumer market (meaning out of the consumer) by labor union bargaining.
Raise fast food wages from $10/hr to $15/hr and prices go up only a doable 12.5%. Raise Walgreens, Target from $10/hr to $20/hr and prices there only go up a piddling 6.25%. Keeping the math easy here — I know that Walgreens and Target pay more to start but that only reinforces my argument about how much labor income is being left on the (missing) bargaining table.
Hook up Walmart with 7% labor costs with the Teamsters Union and the wage and benefit sky might be the limit! Don’t forget (everybody seems to) that as more income shifts to lower wage workers, more demand starts to come from lower wage workers — reinforcing their job security as they spend more proportionately at lower wage firms (does not work for low wage employees of high end restaurants — the exception that actually proves the rule).
Add in sector wide labor agreements and watch Germany appear on this side of the Atlantic overnight.
* * * * * *
If Republicans held the House in the last (115th) Congress they would have passed HR2723-Employee Rights Act — mandating new union recertification/decertification paper ballots in any bargaining unit that has had experienced “turnover, expansion, or alteration by merger of unit represented employees exceeding 50 percent of the bargaining unit” by the date of the enactment — and for all time from thereafter. Trump would have signed it and virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text
Democrats can make the most obvious point about what was lacking in the Republican bill by pretending to be for a cert/recert bill that mandates union ballots only at places where there is no union now. Republicans jumping up and down can scream the point for us that there is no reason to have ballots in non union places and not in unionized workplaces — and vice versa.
* * * * * *
Biggest problem advocating the vastly attractive and all healing proposal of federally mandated cert/recert/decert elections seems to be that nobody will discuss it as long as nobody else discusses it — some kind of innate social behavior I think, from deep in our (pea sized) midbrains. How else can you explain the perfect pitch’s neglect. I suspect that if I waved a $100 bill in front of a bunch of progressives and offered it to the first one would say the words out loud: “Regularly scheduled union elections are the only way to restore shared prosperity and political fairness to America”, that I might not get one taker. FWIW.
Another big problem when I try to talk to workers about this on the street — just to get a reaction — is that more than half have no idea in the world what unions are all about. Those who do understand, think the idea so sensible they often think action must be pending.
Here is Andrew Strom’s take:
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/
[see just below for last link — can’t lay more than three at a time :-)]
*1968 federal minimum was $12/hr – indicating that consumer support was there at half today’s per capita income.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.60&year1=196801&year2=202001
sigh
If HR2723-Employee Rights Act had been made law it would have been the greatest attack on labor in the history of the US.
Please stop.
econ101 should tell you that the eitc is a subsidy to the corporations that hire droves of low-paid workers, with meagre spillover to the workers themselves. More effective and persistent improvements to social justice would come from significant increases to the minimum wage, societal support to unionization, and other efforts to increase the threshold of what is considered by society to be the bare minimum of compensation for work.
The concomitant decline in the value of the dollar and the terms of trade would be small compared to the reduction in inequality.
EMichael,
Why do you keep doing this to me? Why do you keep misunderstanding me 180 degrees, backward?
HR 2723, 115th, was the Republican bill — forcing union recert/decert elections at already unionized workplaces — OBVIOUSLY PRESENTED AS ANTI-UNION. An alternate Democratic bill as proposed by Andrew Strom would require regularly scheduled union CERT/recert/decert elections at every private (non gov) workplace.
I keep telling you this and you keep coming back that I am pushing the Repub bill. So there it is again for about the hundredth time.
Because you do not understand what is in that bill. Not at all. When you say
” Trump would have signed it and virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text”
that is totally incorrect. the “mandated” part is dependent on things that will not ever happen, effectively eliminating any votes in every bargaining unit.
What I cannot understand is why, with all of your pro union comments, you make no mention of the PRO Act, passed by the House in February?
that is a real, pro union bill as opposed to your scattershot posts about garbage bills.
EMichael,
I don’t know why you keep railing at the Repub bill that I present as big anti-union — we all know it is big anti-union; it is presented by me as big anti-union.
I don’t know why you don’t applaud Andrew Strom’s proposal for mandated cert/recert/decert elections at every private (non gov) workplace. Any thoughts on Andrew Strom’s proposal which is what I am strongly pushing with everyone I can possibly contact any way I can contact?
***************************************
I AM THINKING OF COMING UP WITH A STANDARD ANSWER FOR YOU — WHERE I JUST HAVE TO PUSH A BUTTON TO STAMP IT OUT (e.g.):
EMichael,
Why do you keep doing this to me? Why do you keep misunderstanding me 180 degrees, backward?
HR 2723, 115th, was the Republican bill — forcing union recert/decert elections at already unionized workplaces — OBVIOUSLY PRESENTED AS ANTI-UNION. An alternate Democratic bill as proposed by Andrew Strom would require regularly scheduled union CERT/recert/decert elections at every private (non gov) workplace.
I keep telling you this and you keep coming back that I am pushing the Repub bill. So there it is again for about the hundredth time.
Explain your comment.
” Trump would have signed it and virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.”
such a third world country as America , riots are the only way to get heard for some. the Elite have been looting us blind for decades, the Covid bail outs to Corporations by the Elites in DC as the latest installment of Capitalist theft know as Business as Usual.
it’s all about the money.
sick,sick country praising capitalism over everything else.
the comfortable white people are afraid of losing what they have. Divide and Conquer is the Republican and now Democratic way they run America.
to the rich go the spoils. the rest, well. screw them .
the Lee Atwater idea to use coded language when St. Reagan implemented the destruction of America society, coincided with St. Thatcher’s destruction of England.
the White elites post Civil War in the South knew how to divide the poor whites and the poor blacks.
that is how we got to where we are now.
Did you see any of the bankers go to jail for the 2008 ripoff?
not one and they got bonuses for their “deeds.”
America, such a nation of Grifters, Thieves and Scam artist. like Pelosi , McConnel and all the people in DC and the Business men who sold out our country and the American people for “small change”.
God forbid Corporations should ever have to pay for the damage they have done to America and its” people. My RIGHT to Greed trumps your right to clean air, water, safe neighborhoods, says Capitalism!
the Rich get richer and the poor get poorer, Everybody Knows!!!
But let’s not focus on things lest some uncomfortable truths.
and wonder why riots happen, Not at All!
When HGTV dies, I will know where America has recovered. The debt based ponzi new deal loves must die and expose capitalism as a hollow shell
EMichael,
[snip]
Explain your comment.
” Trump would have signed it and virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.”
[snip]
EM, do you any suggestion that that would be nothing more than a wrong direction ratchet: unions can only go down, not up. Do you see any suggestion other than that?
How to get unions to go up — way, way up?:
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule/‘
Should the Democrats gain the senate, immediately after they eliminate the filibuster, they should authorize the packing of the Supreme Court. 11 should be enough.
Ditto
I want to appeal for the forgotten people in this discussion – those who for whatever reason (dependents – aged or children or handicapped, incapacity, location). A better solution for EVERYONE, is straight redistribution (i.e. a universal basic income). It also increases the bargainng power of workers, including the precariously employed. Unionism and collective bargaining is great for commodified workers in mass production, but doesn’t necessarily help niche workers in the knowledge economy.
Dennis,
“virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.”
Isn’t that what Strom says he wants?
Let’s forget that it is a totally false reading of the statute. There would be no, none, zilch, nada votes other than the ones that management wanted.
EMichael,
“virtually every union in the country would have experienced mandated recert/decert votes in every bargaining unit.”
For the fiftieth time: Strom wants CERT/recert/decert votes in EVERY private (non gov) workplace.
For the fiftieth time: the Republican law (HR 2723, 115th) mandated ONLY recert/decert votes, ONLY in workplaces that were unionized already.