Posts tagged with 'labor'
Weekly Diaspora: ICE Perpetuating Human Rights Abuses
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By Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger
Ed. Note: This week’s Diaspora is short due to the holidays. We’ll be back to full-length next week.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, apparently isn’t beholden to US or international law. In The Nation, Jacqueline Stevens reveals the “clandestine operations, akin to extraordinary renditions” carried out by ICE.
Beyond the department’s public list of detention facilities—many of which are already sites of alleged abuse—ICE is also “confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices” around the nation. According to Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, these secret detention centers may violate the UN’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory.
But what’s most appalling is ICE’s assertion that the department is some sort of super-police with powers of rendition. James Pendergraph, former executive director of ICE’s Office of State and Local Coordination, said in late 2008 that “if you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally, but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” The boldness with which a law official would state such an idea is confounding; the confession, if true, is criminal.
Last week, The Diaspora wrote about the introduction of the CIR ASAP immigration bill by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). Freshman Congressman Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) is a recent addition to the list of 87 cosponsors on the bill, as The Colorado Independent reported last Wednesday. This is a positive step forward. The bill will most likely be sponsored in the senate by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY). CIR ASAP establishes a basic layout of progressive immigration reform, but the final bill will probably become more focused on enforcement in Schumer’s hands.
Finally, David Moberg reports on the Obama administration’s controversial use of “audits” to purge employment payrolls of undocumented workers for In These Times. While the audit method is much quieter and less likely to make headlines, it is also ineffective. Not only do audits rely upon “flawed federal databases” to judge who is documented, they also purge immigrants who are “legal.”
As the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Executive Vice-President Eliseo Medina explains, workers fired as a result of ICE probes or audits do find other, lower-paying jobs that offer even less protection to the worker. Ultimately the number of undocumented workers in the US remains the same, and the entire exercise but “a losing game of musical chairs.” Medina stresses that SEIU is not suggesting the law shouldn’t be enforced, simply that it be enforced in a way that works.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Diaspora for a complete list of articles on immigration issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, and health care issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Pulse . This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Weekly Pulse: Problems for the Public Option
By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium Blogger
The House released a final version of the health reform bill. It has a public option all right, but not the robust version progressives were hoping for. The public plan would only cover 2% of Americans and premiums will cost more than anticipated.
Meanwhile, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) continued to threaten to join a Republican filibuster of a health care bill with a public option. A lot of people still think he’s bluffing. Realistically, the public option probably faces more serious threats from inside the Democratic caucus. It’s been whittled down at an alarming rate. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Mob Scene
By Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
This week’s edition of the Weekly Pulse is shorter than usual. Our team is getting ready for the fourth annual Netroots Nation blogger conference in Pittsburgh, PA. Esther Kaplan, editor of the Nation Investigative Fund, and I are conducting an investigative reporting workshop on Saturday from 1:30-4:15 p.m. Join us and help expose the corporate roots of the Teabagger/Town hall mob movement.
Here’s the latest news on the healthcare front: Republicans and their allies are pressuring Democratic healthcare reformers at townhall meetings around the country. Addie Stan has a blockbuster piece in AlterNet that exposes the network of corporate funders and lobbyists behind the mobs.
The Progressive’s Ruth Conniff explains the mobs’ marching orders, as spelled out in a memo by Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the Tea Party Patriots, an anti-reform group with ties to former Republican Rep. Dick Armey’s pressure group Freedom Works. MacGuffie instructs town hall protesters to shout at lawmakers and attempt to throw them off their game as they try to make the case for health care reform. So much for reasoned discussion.
As I reported in In These Times, the teabaggers are trying to scapegoat organized labor as the instigators of confrontations at town hall meetings. On August 6, a scuffle broke out in front of a town hall meeting in St. Louis. The below video clip shows the last 10 seconds of a scuffle in which a man in an SEIU t-shirt lies prostrate on the ground. A 38-year-old conservative activist claims to have been severely beaten, but the video shows him apparently uninjured, darting around to different cops and trying to convince them that he was attacked. The man’s lawyer claims that he saw his client get punched in the face and kicked in the head by SEIU members.
A spokesman for the St. Louis County police told me that the police hadn’t reviewed the video because nobody had submitted it to them, despite a call to the public to turn over evidence for the investigation. The fact that the videographer hasn’t turned over the video kind of makes you wonder if the teabaggers really take the “evidence” as seriously as they claim.
How’s this for irony? According to Talking Points Memo, the activist was asking for money to pay his hospital bills because he’s uninsured.
Finally, Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check reports that Kansas Now is calling upon AG Eric Holder to restore the Federal Marshall security detail of prominent late-term abortion provider Dr. Leroy Carhart, a friend and colleague of the late Dr. George Tiller. Carhart was placed under protection after Tiller was shot. But the feds didn’t even wait for the trial of Tiller’s alleged assassin to wrap before pulling Carhart’s detail. Now he’s on his own, just as the alleged killer’s links to a broader coalition of violent anti-choicers are coming to light.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about healthcare and is free to reprint. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and Immigration.Newsladder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: EFCA Vital for Recovery
It’s official: The U.S. economy has been in a recession for a year and a half and many of the economic troubles worrying progressives in 2007 have yet to be addressed. While the Obama administration has taken steps to relieve some problems, a series of counterproductive bailouts, woefully inadequate labor laws and rampant inequality are still in urgent need of attention.
Severe economic inequality has persisted for decades in the U.S., but the current crisis is bringing things into focus. Unfortunately, while Wall Street excess and the corporate jet-setting of Detroit executives have dominated headlines and garnered plenty of justified outrage, the other side of the inequality coin has been largely neglected. As Katrina vanden Heuvel explains in The Nation, the routine exploitation of day laborers and domestic workers has grown even more pervasive since the recession began. Workers who managed to survive by laboring for predatory wages under abusive conditions now see those wages stolen with increasing regularity, as contractors simply refuse to pay up when the work is done. Huge portions of domestic workers are not only living below the poverty line, but subject to verbal and physical abuse. And as jobs have grown increasingly scarce, vanden Heuvel writes, speaking out against employer mistreatment has become a thoroughly daunting prospect for workers with no savings to help them endure unemployment. For the millions undocumented workers who are not protected by U.S. labor laws, an abusive work situation leaves them without any legal recourse.
Our labor laws desperately need to be revamped. Currently, Capitol Hill’s biggest battle for workers rights is the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which would make it easier for workers to form a union without fear of employer reprisals or intimidation. The corporate executive class is lobbying hard against EFCA by claiming it revokes workers’ rights to a secret ballot in union elections, but the bill would do no such thing. As the law currently stands, employers can force workers who want to unionize to hold an election in order to actually establish a union. EFCA would require that a union be legally recognized as soon as a majority of workers sign cards saying they want to unionize. Union leaders are still elected by a secret ballot, but the election is permitted to take place later on, preventing employers from using the election period to bully their workers out of unionizing at all.
Writing for In These Times, David Moberg illustrates the commonplace peril of employer intimidation under the current organizing process:
“In 2005 [electrician Dan Luevano] and most of his fellow workers at Ries Electric near Denver asked their boss to recognize the Electrical Workers as their union to help resolve problems. The boss called everyone in and threatened to fire them if they voted for a union. Luevano said he would, and the next workday he was fired. Though the National Labor Relations Board reinstated him, his boss isolated him and cut his hours while continuing to violate labor laws by fighting the union.”
Workers and unions have pushed for EFCA for years, but when it comes to the economy, the federal government reacts fastest to problems on Wall Street. In Salon, Andy Kroll outlines the generous subsidies the government has paid to companies that drove themselves into the ground, effectively rewarding the economically destructive behaviors that caused the current crisis, while neglecting the workers whose hours and wages have been slashed as business credit tightens ups.
The bailout isn’t just unfair—it seriously risks delaying economic recovery. If the government refuses to take over failed institutions, wipe out their shareholders and fire their executives, the U.S. economy will likely be burdened with a constantly faltering financial sector for years. The Wall Street CEOs who caused the problem have every incentive to cover up for their mistakes and resort to complex accounting tricks to hide losses. But until those bank losses are recognized, the government will not be able to fill the hole and get credit flowing again. As Robert Kuttner argues in a column for The American Prospect, “We still face a prolonged Great Stagnation, one that could be far worse than necessary because of the administration’s circuitous, Wall Street–friendly approach to reviving the banks.”
Just as bad, whenever the economy actually recovers, executives at the surviving banks will have learned that they can score huge bonuses virtually risk-free by gorging themselves on risky loans and letting taxpayers clean up after them. This sets the stage for another catastrophe. So far, Obama’s decision to extend the bank bailout plan enacted under George W. Bush is the single greatest single blunder of his presidency, and as Kuttner argues, it’s a mistake that jeopardizes both the economy and the political sustainability of progressive ideas.
Beyond Wall Street, the administration has also faltered with it’s handling of General Motors, which finally filed for bankruptcy Monday morning after steadily disintegrating since the 1980s. After pouring in money to keep the ailing car manufacturer afloat, the government watched the company lay off tens of thousands of workers without overhauling its failed business model. Under the bankruptcy arrangement, U.S. taxpayers will emerge with a 60% stake in the company, but rehabilitating the company remains an enormous task. GM’s primary business is making cars that people do not want to buy. Without GM, the U.S. manufacturing sector would all but disappear, but turning the company around will require a huge long-term investment. So far, the government has settled for keeping the company on life support. Kevin Drum puts it succinctly for Mother Jones: “This whole deal just keeps getting worse and worse.”
The U.S. economy broke down for a reason: It was heavily dependent on a booming financial sector and failed to adequately protect or reward the workers who actually built the economy up. Both Congress and Obama have the power to give workers families the same economic leverage that corporate executives currently enjoy. It’s up to progressives to convince them to take action.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Why the Current Stimulus Plan Isn’t Enough
by Zach Carter, TMC MediaWire Blogger
The U.S. economy just keeps getting worse. Given the absolute pummeling the job market has taken over the past five months, we’re going to need some much stronger medicine than policymakers are currently proposing. It’s increasingly clear that President Obama’s stimulus plan was devised for a far milder downturn, and this week we received further evidence of the recession’s high human cost.
The U.S. lost another 663,000 jobs in March, according to a report released by the the Labor Department last Friday. Most of us are getting used to seeing big numbers associated with this recession, but those massive layoffs are perhaps the most distressing statistics of all. Jobs matter most to ordinary people right now, as John Nichols notes for The Nation, and the primary measure of success for any economic policy is whether it will get people back to work. Nichol’s argument stands in sharp contrast to what much of the news media is using as its metric of success: the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Speculators on Wall Street have pointed to the Dow’s recent upward trend as evidence that things are getting better. We’ll see if that uptick continues after the next round of quarterly banking losses comes in, but even if they do, Nichols emphasizes, happy speculators are not the same thing as a happy economy.
The national unemployment rate currently stands at 8.5% and, without a dramatic increase in government support, will likely be mired in double digits for years to come. Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it succinctly in an interview at Salon: “This model no longer works. The Americans are completely over-indebted. They can’t increase their consumption, instead they have to save.”
The recession’s growing severity underscores a host of long-brewing economic problems, not the least of which is access to a college education. The cost of tuition has been steadily soaring for decades, but with the life savings of many families decimated by the housing bust, even relatively inexpensive state schools are out of financial reach, as Andy Kroll illustrates for Mother Jones.
“Simply to ensure that a child attends a four-year public university, a family in the country’s lowest-income bracket now has to pay, on average, 55% of [their] total income,” Kroll writes. That’s not 55% of disposable income, that’s 55% of what the family is taking in, period. President Obama has proposed some solid remedies for this issue—increasing federal grants for low-income students and replacing overpriced private-sector student loans with cheaper government loans, to name a few. But Kroll notes that it’s also important to divert more federal stimulus funds to states to increase the flow of need-based financial aid at public universities.
For many younger students, attending college takes a backseat to making sure they have a roof over their heads. One out of every 50 children in the United States is homeless. This problem will not go away on its own, Randy Jurado Ertll writes for The Progressive. Ending homelessness for children would cost just a fraction of what we’re paying to bailout the nation’s largest banks—there is no excuse for ignoring the issue in the next round of recovery funding.
The housing collapse continues to deepen, but some policies designed to help families keep their homes are quietly expiring. In a story for The Colorado Independent, Mary Kane points out that the moratorium on foreclosures imposed by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac expired at the end of March. Foreclosure-related evictions are set to resume. Just as depressing: none of the mainstream media seems to have noticed.
As foreclosures escalate, one policy option that would keep families with a roof over their heads is being generally ignored by both the government and the banking world: renting. If, Kane notes, banks rented foreclosed properties to the borrowers who can no longer afford them, the most devastating impact of the foreclosure crisis could be averted.
But instead of dealing with actual problems, some Senators remain more focused on throwing money at rich people. The estate tax has actually surfaced in the recent haggling over the federal budget, Steven Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, a tax that only applies to the richest 0.2% of American families.
We’ve seen enough giveaways to wealthy people in the recent bank bailouts, and we know that they have extremely limited economic benefits. Steering the economy toward recovery will require a much more aggressive investment in the livelihood of ordinary Americans.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Workers will build the recovery, not Wall Street
With new bailout plans for Wall Street being unveiled almost every week, it’s easy to forget that nearly all of the work that fuels our economy takes place outside of Manhattan. While reviving the financial sector is an important part of recovery, any lasting economic solution must also empower American workers and protect them from corporate abuses.
Workers’ rights are a core issue for our democracy, as progressive icon Noam Chomsky argues in an interview with Paul Jay of The Real News. The discussion covers the current economic crisis and its implications for the democratization of the U.S. economy. It’s a fascinating exchange. In the video below, Chomsky advocates for a much broader palette of reform than a simple clean-up the financial sector.
Chomsky notes that while the recent bank bailouts have brought a great deal of attention to the disconnect between public investment and private profit, it has become routine for the taxpaying public to foot the bill for important research that eventually creates big corporate profits. To ensure that we all reap the benefits of our investments, it is essential to make institutions accountable to their communities, rather than exclusively dedicated to maximizing shareholder returns.
The first step in democratizing the U.S. economy, according to Chomsky, is promoting unionization by enacting the Employee Free Choice Act, which makes it easier for workers to organize.
“The Employee Free Choice Act is always misrepresented,” Chomsky says. “It’s described as an effort to avoid secret elections. It’s not that. It’s an effort to allow workers to decide whether there should be secret elections, instead of leaving the decisions entirely in the hands of employers.”
EFCA would give workers more control over their circumstances, leading to improved wages and living standards for laborers. In a column for The American Prospect, Terence Samuel points out that even if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan to bailout Wall Street succeeds in stabilizing the banking sector, banks can do little to bring about recovery if U.S. citizens are all broke. If we want to get out of the bubble-and-bust cycle, we must establish a middle class that has money to spend. Fundamentally, that means raising wages.
Robert Eshelman puts the plight of today’s workers into focus in a devastating piece for Salon. Even where clear, straightforward laws to protect laborers from predatory employers exist, major corporations have been able to use the fear of being fired to push employees into “voluntarily” working under illegal conditions (Wal-Mart just agreed to pay out $640 million to settle charges that it intimidated its own employees into skipping mandatory breaks and accepting pay rates below the minimum wage).
“If corporations were able to exert such coercive power when the unemployment rate was around 5 percent, what can they do in a job market in which 14.8 percent of the population can’t find adequate work?” Eshelman asks.
Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Department of Labor systematically ignored its duty to enforce labor laws. Writing for Colorlines, Michelle Chen highlights a report from the Government Accountability Office that takes the Department to task for failing to even return phone calls from workers who complained about employer abuses.
Millions of jobs are hanging in the balance as President Barack Obama formulates his rescue plan for the U.S. auto industry. But while the administration has insisted that factory workers at GM and Chrysler have to accept wage cuts, they’ve almost bent over backwards to funnel bonus money to executives at failed insurance giant AIG. General Motors’ CEO Rick Wagoner has stepped down at the Obama administration’s request, and while it’s hard to feel sorry for an executive who lobbied aggressively against the environment and ran his company into the ground, his ousting reflects Wall Street’s privileged status in Washington. As Josh Marshall highlights in Talking Points Memo, it is astonishing that executives at Bank of America and Citigroup, who have put taxpayers on the hook for far greater sums of bailout money than GM and Chrysler, have not been subjected to the same treatment as Wagoner.
We’ve all seen the grim statistics indicating how severe the current economic crisis really is, but the proliferation of roving tent, shack and lean-to communities along U.S. railways underscores the true costs of the recession more grimly than any consumer spending metric or gross domestic product projection. All over the United States, people who cannot afford even rental housing are living in makeshift structures without access to basic amenities. It’s much like the rise of Hoovervilles in the late 1920s and 1930s, where out-of-work laborers took up residence anywhere they could.
While these squatter communities are growing as the crisis deepens, the worst part of the whole phenomenon is that they were common before the current downturn, as Scott Bransford notes for High Country News.
Whatever happens on Wall Street, fixing the economy will mean making sure ordinary people have access to basic amenities, and guaranteeing that workers have the power to prevent abuses from corporate America’s executive class.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit StimulusPlan.NewsLadder.net and Economy.NewsLadder.net for complete lists of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Hilda Solis: Get Excited
Update: At 2:15 today, President-Elect Barack Obama confirmed the nomination of Rep. Hilda Solis,D-Calif, for Secretary of Labor.
President-elect Barack Obama has named Rep. Hilda Solis, D-Calif., as the next administration’s Secretary of Labor and is expected to formally announce the selection this afternoon. To put it simply, progressives are ecstatic about the pick.
“If you were to sketch an ideal Labor Secretary, you could hardly do much better,” Jonathan Stein writes for Mother Jones.
“Solis should make progressives feel pretty good,” according to Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly, who calls her nomination, “a big win for unions.”
Why all the excitement? As Harold Meyerson details in a great profile for The American Prospect, Solis led the successful push to raise California’s minimum wage in 1996, diverting funds from her own State Senate political account to fund a signature-gathering campaign that culminated in the measure’s passage over strong resistance from Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.
Solis doesn’t just have passion and patience, she’s got guts. When she ran for the House of Representatives in 2000, she took on a 9-term Democrat with a terrible record and absolutely trounced him in the primary, going on to win back California’s 32nd District for the left.
“In the House, Solis has continued to champion labor causes, immigrants’ rights, women’s health and environmental protections,” Meyerson writes.
She has a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO, and as Meyerson’s fellow Prospect-er Ezra Klein notes, she has successfully defused tensions between immigrant laborers and older union workers who viewed immigrants as a threat.
And then there’s her personal story. As the daughter of union worker immigrants from Nicaragua and Mexico, Solis embodies America’s most-prized and rarely realized ideal: the promise of opportunity for all citizens that rewards hard work.
The Labor Secretary position can be either enormously powerful or completely irrelevant, as demonstrated by the contrast between the tenures of President Bill Clinton’s first Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, and that of current Secretary Elaine Chao. In just four years, Reich secured the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Pension Protection Act and the School-to-Work Jobs Act, raised the minimum wage and still had time to call out deregulation ideologue, budget hawk and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin on his reckless lunacy. Chao’s only accomplishment after eight years is a 2003 rule that denied overtime pay to 6 million workers. Progressives can trust Solis to ensure that the Department of Labor will finally be going to bat for laborers again.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
