Right to work is a step backward for labor movement

Columbia Missourian 
Tuesday, December 18, 2012 | 6:00 a.m. CST
BY ROSE NOLEN
COLUMBIA — Thank heavens, the Missouri legislators got it right — the first time. Some workers are still trying to make it to minimum wage. They are not willing to work for free. Fortunately, most of us Missouri residents are not so politically inclined that we would allow politicians to determine how much money we’ll work for.

I refuse to get into a fight over politics. People in my family worked as domestic help for most of their lives. They didn’t have access to union representation. They worked for whatever the people would pay. That was then, this is now. We’re not going back to yesterday. And although some people are determined to do that, I’m not one of them.

I’ve learned over the last few days that some states have governors and majority legislatures of the same political party. Now, this is no accident. People have manipulated the political system to suit themselves. Citizens should have been more mindful and not allowed this to happen.

Some people believe there should be only the poor and the rich. They don’t believe in a middle class. They only want to have poor people beneath them so that they will be able to dictate to them how they should live. You see, this is how we get into these messes in the first place. Some people are determined to have a servant class to work for them. They want to have people who will do all of their work for peanuts.

Union organization broke up that kind of stuff. People who don’t want to pay union dues are not very smart. They don’t understand that they are playing right into management’s hands. Today, some believe that people don’t want to belong to unions. People believe that they can negotiate with management on their own. They don’t realize that it was the unions that opened the door to all the benefits available to workers today.

The bad thing is that our educational system has failed to teach the history of labor in America. We would like everyone to believe that bosses have always been good guys. There was never any child labor. Workplaces have always been safe and humane. We have always worked eight hours a day, five days a week. There has always been overtime and sick days. No one has ever had to fight for these things.

I think that those who want to live in right-to-work states should be allowed to secede. I don’t think that the rest of us should have to support them. Obviously, they don’t want to be paid enough to have a decent lifestyle. It’s wonderful to have successful industries and businesses move into your hometown, but if it doesn’t improve the lifestyles of the citizens who live there, what is the point?

Most people can guess that right to work will not live long in Michigan. The idea will probably follow the lines of leading a horse to water. After all, Michigan was known as the home of the labor union movement. The contributions of that movement to work in America can never be forgotten.

People who have worked hard all their lives in America will always appreciate the sacrifices of the labor movement. Those who have enjoyed an easy time can never imagine the injustices of the past.

Let us continue to build for the future.

MO Speaker Coming After Workers Rights

 Jones considers bid for lieutenant governor, plans effort to curb labor rights

St. Louis Beacon
In Backroom
By Jo Mannies, Beacon political reporter
1:28 am on Fri, 12.14.12

While he’s preparing his agenda for the coming legislative session, new Missouri House Speaker Tim Jones admits that he’s considering another post in state government – lieutenant governor – should it open up.

“We’re definitely considering it,’’ Jones said during an interview Thursday, as he formally opened his new district office in his hometown of Eureka. The event also ended his four-day tour around the state to meet with the public, including supporters and businesspeople, to discuss proposed legislation.

Jones’ interest is the result of Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder’s decision to consider a bid for the soon-to-be-vacant 8th District congressional seat. Veteran incumbent U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, is resigning her post to become the top executive of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.

The announcement by Kinder, a Republican, has prompted political debate over whether his possible shift to Congress would allow Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to appoint his replacement.

Republicans and a few lawyers in both parties have questioned whether the state constitution allows the governor to appoint a replacement lieutenant governor. Democrats say there’s no question of Nixon’s power and cite previous governors who have filed lieutenant governor vacancies -- most recently in 2000.

Jones, a lawyer, took note of the recent legal opinion to the contrary by Democratic activist Jane Dueker that has been making the rounds of the internet, especially on Twitter.

To circumvent any legal fight, Jones predicted that the state House and Senate – both controlled by large GOP majorities – may finally pass an often proposed bill to require special elections for all vacant statewide offices, thus ending the governor’s role.

“That’s the type of bill, if the governor vetoes, we would have enough votes to override that veto,’’ Jones said.

Such a change also might make it easier for Jones to decide whether to make a serious pitch for lieutenant governor.

Seeks to curb labor clout
In the meantime, Jones is mulling over various other pieces of legislation should he remain speaker for the next two years.

As a result of what he heard during his four-day tour, Jones said that – besides the standard GOP focus on lower taxes and less regulation -- his list of preferred early legislation will likely include what he called “labor reform’’ measures.

Such labor-related proposals, he said, would include a bill to bar payroll deduction of union dues – dubbed “paycheck protection’’ by backers – and a proposal to curb the state’s prevailing-wage requirement for public projects.

Union leaders oppose both measures and see the payroll-deduction ban as a GOP political attempt to cut off money to labor unions, which often back Democrats.

Both sides agree that eliminating the state’s prevailing-wage law would reduce wages for workers on the affected projects. Republican critics of the prevailing wage say that repealing it would save taxpayers' money; prevailing wage supporters say its elimination would result in substandard work.

Jones predicted that the General Assembly could override Nixon's likely vetoes. He characterized the measures as ways to implement key provisions of the controversial right-to-work law, which bars a requirement that workers pay union dues if a majority vote to join a union, without attempting to pass a right-to-work law.

Senate President Pro Tem Tom Dempsey, R-St. Charles, has said that he doesn't believe that he would have enough Senate votes to pass a right-to-work law. The issue most recently has touched off an uproar in Michigan.

From the Speaker's Mouth - Anti-Worker Legislation is Coming

Listen to this nine minute interview with Speaker Jones to hear how the Republicans plan to come after labor this year and in the future.

 Speaker of the House Tim Jones- We're going to cut off unions' money
In this interview with Dana Loesch, Speaker of the House Tim Jones, R-Eureka, says chances for right to work in Missouri this year are almost nil, but added that he intends to push through legislation that will cripple unions' ability to put money into political campaigns.

http://rturner229.blogspot.com/2012/12/speaker-of-house-tim-jones-were-going.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FASRIt+%28The+Turner+Report%29

Mo. Unlikely to Follow Michigan Lead on Union Law

Election matter.  And being ready to organize statewide keeps elected officials honest.

KOMU
Posted: Dec 11, 2012 12:20 PM by Associated Press
Updated: Dec 11, 2012 12:20 PM

JEFFERSON CITY (AP) - Missouri Republican leaders say it would be difficult to follow Michigan's lead in passing a "right-to-work" law that prohibits union dues as a condition for employment.

On Tuesday, protesters flooded the Michigan Capitol as lawmakers met to cast final votes.

Missouri House Republican Speaker Tim Jones, of Eureka, says passing a similar law would require strong leadership from the governor and the support of the business community. Republican Senate leader Tom Dempsey, of St. Charles, says numerous senators support a right-to-work law but not enough to overcome a veto.

Republicans have supermajorities in both chambers. Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon previously has called the idea a backward step.

Jones says Missouri lawmakers still could pursue measures dealing with the prevailing wage governmental entities must pay for construction projects and paycheck deductions.

The Columbia Business Times put labor on the cover of their November issues.  If you guessed that this isn't good news, you are right.  Yep, Right to Work...again.

Main article:

http://columbiabusinesstimes.com/16070/2012/11/05/labor-and-politics/

 Editorial:

http://columbiabusinesstimes.com/15949/2012/11/05/show-us-new-business/

Walmart Workers Stand Up to Live Better

You won't see a better explanation for why workers want to organize.  This is a campaign worth supporting for the long term.

Walmart Workers Protest For Better Wages And Benefits On Black Friday

Think Progress
By Igor Volsky on Nov 23, 2012 at 12:18 pm

Workers at Walmart stores across the country are walking off their jobs to protest the national retailer’s low wages and poor working conditions in an effort to raise public awareness about how the company treats its employees on the busiest shopping day of the year. The strikes, which began earlier this month, are the first in the 50 year history of the company and come just as Walmart reported a 9 percent increase in third-quarter net income, earning $3.63 billion.
Workers are also opposing Walmart’s poor benefits, alleged systematic discrimination against women, and its decision this year to kick off Black Friday on Thursday night. As Fox News reported today, many employees say they fear retaliation for speaking out against the company’s policies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INh0syM0G0o&feature=player_embedded

Walmart filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in an effort to stop the walk out last week, accusing protesters of violating a law “which prohibits picketing for any period over 30 days without filing a petition to form a union.”
The walk out is being organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and its subsidiary OUR Walmart. Walmart’s 1.4 million workers in the U.S. are not unionized.





Kansas City area workers rallied outside a Roeland Park Walmart.  They even sang a song for the occasion.  Check it out on the KMBC blog:  http://20poundsofheadlines.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/wal-mart-protest-in-song-at-roeland-park/

 About two dozen protesters holding signs outside the Roeland Park Walmart on Black Friday.  (Thanks to Micheal Mahoney, a very good reporter for KMBC).

Boonville Hostess Bakery Prepares to Close

KOMU
Posted: Nov 16, 2012 by Stacey Kafka

http://www.komu.com/news/boonville-hostess-bakery-prepares-to-close/

Vulture Capitalism Ate Your Twinkies

 

 

 The Nation Magazine

John Nichols on November 18, 2012 - 11:37 PM ET 

What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a great American company?

The vultures blame the workers.

The vultures blame the union.

And vapid media outlets report the lie as “news.”

That’s what’s happening with the meltdown of Hostess Brands Inc.

Americans are being told that they won’t get their Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos because the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ran the company into the ground.

But the union and the 5,600 Hostess workers represented by the union did not create the crisis that led the company’s incompetent managers to announce plans to shutter it.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more pay.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more benefits.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for better pensions.

The union and its members had a long history of working with the company to try to keep it viable. They had made wage and benefit concessions to keep the company viable. They adjusted to new technologies, new demands.

They took deep layoffs—20 percent of the workforce—and kept showing up for work even as plants were closed.

They kept working even as the company stopped making payments to their pension fund more than a year ago.

The workers did not squeeze the filling out of Hostess.

Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists—“a management team that,” in the words of economist Dean Baker, “shows little competence and is rapidly stuffing its pockets at the company’s expense.”
Even as the company struggled, the ten top Hostes executives pocketed increasingly lavish compensation packages. The Hostess CEO who demanded some of the deepest cuts from workers engineered a 300 percent increase in his compensation package.

“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”

When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.

They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group—Ripplewood Holdings—that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.

“When a highly respected financial consultant, hired by Hostess, determined earlier this year that the company’s business plan to exit bankruptcy was guaranteed to fail because it left the company with unsustainable debt levels, our members knew that the massive wage and benefit concessions the company was demanding would go straight to Wall Street investors and not back into the company,” recalled BCTGM president Frank Hunt, who described why the union struck Hostess rather than accept a demand from management for more pay and benefit cuts.

“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” Hunt explained. “They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and ‘restructuring specialists’ walk away with untold millions of dollars.”

On November 6, American voters rejected Mitt Romney and Bain Capitalism.

But that didn’t end the abusive business practices that made Romney rich. They’re still wrecking American companies, like Hostess.

Instead of blaming workers, we should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.

Twinkie-Maker Hostess Fires 18,000 People: Blames Long-Suffering Workers

We hate to see this happen to our brothers and sisters across Missouri and the country.

Working In These Times
Friday Nov 16, 2012 8:50 pm

By Bruce Vail

Hostess Brands is blaming its liquidation on this week’s strike, by workers such as these in Schiller Park, Ill. The company’s financial woes, however, are years old.   (Photo by Scott Olsen / Getty Images).

Today, the owners of Hostess Brands—the company that makes widely recognized baked goods such as Twinkies and Wonder Bread—made good on a longstanding threat to close down operations, eliminating as many as 18,000 jobs.
Company spokesperson Lance Ignon told Working In These Times that some 22 bakeries around the nation completed their last production runs early on Friday morning, while delivery drivers finished their final routes this afternoon. The company has no plans to resume operations.
In a statement, Hostess CEO Greg Rayburn blamed the shutdown on a strike this week by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM).
However, his scapegoating of the union obscures a larger and more complicated story of corporate mismanagement and naked greed. In fact, the company has been in severe financial distress for more than a decade, management has been in disarray, and vulture capitalists have been circling in search of financial prey.

Hostess might be considered an "old economy" company in the sense that it manufactured, produced and marketed popular cakes to a mass market. In its newest incarnation—under the slicker, greedier sensibility of Wall St.—it  is something else altogether.

Hostess claims that a BCGTM strike begun on November 9 was the company's undoing. The strike started at four scattered Hostess plants and spread across the country, forcing 11 bakery closures, according to Ignon.

The union, however, notes that the strike came only after months of fruitless contract negotiations and the imposition by Hostess of  “draconian cuts” to wages and benefits. Prior to that, employees of Hostess were working under reduced incomes for almost 10 years. From 2004 to 2008 the company, then called Interstate Bakeries, went through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in which all union workers took forced cuts.
BCTGM President Frank Hurt was not available for comment on today, but told Working In These Times earlier this week that the BCGTM strike was the “tragic” result of the company’s ill-conceived plan to bust the unions, dismember the company and sell off the pieces to highest bidders. Hostess managers have made clear that they care little for the hardships imposed on the workers, Hurt said, leaving the union no choice but to strike in hopes of the bringing the company back to the bargaining table.
Hurt has made other comments over the last three months in which he made clear that he believes the owners of the company have no real desire to return the ailing Hostess to profitability. Rather, they want to strip the company of its valuable assets while discarding the long-term employees and financial liabilities.
Hostess confirmed at least part of Hurt’s analysis on Friday when the company also announced it wants to move quickly to sell its bakeries, distributions facilities, retail outlets and “popular brands.”
According to an article in Friday’s Kansas City Business Journal, that means the company will sell brand names such as Hostess, Twinkies, Wonder Bread, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. Food industry analyst John Stout Jr. believes such sales would allow other businesses to resume profitable manufacturing of these products in other facilities.
Such a plan will require the approval of Judge Robert Drain of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Hostess filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in Judge Drain’s court early this year, and under bankruptcy law most major business decisions at Hostess require his approval. Indeed, the imposition of the brutal wage and benefit cuts on BCTGM members was specifically approved by Judge Drain in October.
Hostess spokesperson Ignon said the company plans to be back in Judge Drain’s court next week to seek his okay for measures to further wind down operations. Hostess will not seek a formal conversion to a Chapter 7 liquidation proceeding, but rather a continuation of the status quo, in which the current owners and managers maintain control of the company, he said.
Whatever happens in Judge Drain’s bankruptcy court next week, an estimated 18,000 Hostess workers will have no job to return to Monday.
The company has been maintaining a payroll of 18,300 to 18,500 workers, Ignon says, and most were laid off Friday. An undetermined number of managerial and administrative workers will be retained for the immediate future, he adds, but it is too early to give exact numbers.
About 5,000 BCTGM workers will lose their jobs, along with 7,500 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and hundreds of members of ten other unions representing smaller sectors of the Hostess workforce.
CEO Rayburn’s Friday statement made no mention of any assistance that the company plans to offer the newly jobless employees.

School board votes down plan to outsource Battle janitors

The custodian & maintenance staff of the Columbia Public Schools won an important victory when the school board voted not to outsource the staff for the new Battle High School.  The result would have been lower pay and loss of their state pension, in addition to probable future outsourcing of the staff district wide.  Not to mention the inevitable turnover and low morale that would result.  Kudos to those district workers who bravely stood up for themselves and the CMNEA President Susan McClintic, who spoke publicly and privately to the board and administration in opposition to the outsourcing.

 Columbia Tribune
By CATHERINE MARTIN
Tuesday, November 13, 2012

 The Columbia Board of Education last night rejected a proposal to outsource maintenance staff at Battle High School after hearing concerns from Columbia Public Schools janitors.

Administrators first asked the board to consider outsourcing to GCA Education Services, based in Knoxville, Tenn., at a meeting last month. The proposal was sent back to the administration after some board members voiced concerns about pay and benefits. A revised proposal, with increased pay and benefits, went to the board last night, but members agreed it still wasn't up to snuff. The measure was defeated 6-1, with Tom Rose casting the only vote in support of outsourcing.

In the initial proposal, pay from GCA started at $8.50 for custodians and topped out at $13.50 for hourly supervisors. District pay ranges from $9.15 to $16.05. A revised proposal changed the GCA pay range to $9.15 to $14.50. Employees for GCA also would have 20 fewer sick days or paid holidays.

Longtime janitor Alvin Sweezer said custodial employees who have been with the district for 10 to 15 years were worried about what the proposal would do to their jobs, and some even discussed early retirement.

The proposal was presented as a cost-saving measure — the initial plan with GCA would have saved the district $298,792, and the revised planned would have saved $240,756. Battle, the district's newest school, would have served as an experiment for outsourcing custodial staff, Superintendent Chris Belcher told the finance committee last week.

If it went well, the district would expand the plan. If it didn't go well, it would be a learning experience, Belcher said.

But custodians saw it differently, district custodial employee Jeff Hempstead said.

"This is being called a pilot program," he said. "Most custodians think it's the beginning of a program to eliminate our jobs within Columbia Public Schools."

Board member Jim Whitt said although the plan was just for Battle, the next logical step on many people's minds would be expanding it to the rest of the district.

"Everybody is going to look at this and say, 'This will cost me to lose 20 days,' " he said, referring to benefits. "At this point in time, I'm a little uncomfortable with that."

One of the biggest reasons for the cost savings was that the GCA plan only called for 12.5 full-time equivalent positions at Battle, while the district's plan called for 19. Some board members proposed bringing in a consultant to work on having a more efficient in-house system districtwide.

"What I'm struggling with now, I've heard enough from employees and community members that maybe now is just not the right time for this," board member Christine King said, pointing to recent board approval to outsource substitute teachers.

"That might have rubbed some people a little wrong. … My personal feeling is to see us say 'no' to this and say, 'Let's regroup and get a consultant and look at it in more detail.' "

Deputy Superintendent Nick Boren said he wasn't aware of such services but `would look into it.

Sweezer said "it was nice" that the board rejected the proposal, and he said he hopes the district provides more training to make sure its employees are working efficiently.

Reach Catherine Martin at 573-815-1711 or e-mail cmartin@columbiatribune.com.

Get Out the Union Vote

How did labor fare on Tuesday?
HAROLD MEYERSON NOVEMBER 9, 2012

Despite setbacks in several states, the American labor movement came out a clear winner in Tuesday’s elections. Most important, they played a key role in ensuring the re-election of President Obama, and contributed significantly to Democratic Senate victories in hotly contested races in Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

How effective were the unions’ massive voter-education and mobilization programs in the swing states? This year, for the first time, the network exit polling didn’t ask whether respondents were union members, though it did ask if there was a union member in their household. Historically, while union-household voters are more pro-Democratic than voters with no union members at home, the gap is smaller than that between actual union members and non-members. Also historically, union membership doesn’t make much of a difference among, say, African-American women, who are going to vote Democratic at a 95-percent rate whether or not they belong to a union. Where membership matters is among white working-class voters. (Pollsters don’t ask voters if they’re working class—that’s a pretty subjective assessment—but they do ask if they went to college, so non-college-educated voters are the designated stand-ins for working-class voters.)

Nationwide, the exit polls showed only a small difference between the votes of white working class voters with a union member in their household and those with no union members—indeed, a rate just 2 percent higher. But in the swing states that the unions flooded with volunteers and money, the differences were far greater. In Ohio, non-union household, white-collar voters favored Mitt Romney over Obama by 59 percent to 39 percent. Such voters with a union member in the house, however, favored Obama by a 54 percent to 44 percent margin—a 15 point swing. Among white working-class men, the swing was even greater: 21 points. The numbers for Wisconsin tell a similar story: White working-class voters from non-union households preferred Romney by a 57 to 42 percent margin, while those from union households preferred Obama by 60 percent to 38 percent—an 18 point swing.

The one poll of union members (not just voters with union members in their households) was conducted by Hart Research for the AFL-CIO. Nationally (the poll doesn’t have state-level results), all union voters went for Obama over Romney by a 66 percent to 34 percent margin, while non-union voters backed Romney, 52 percent to 48 percent—an 18-point swing. Among white working-class men, union members voted for Obama at a 54.5 percent rate while non-members gave the president just 27.5 percent of their votes—a monumental swing of 27 points. Among white working-class women, who gave Obama 62.5 percent of their vote if they were union members and just 35.5 percent if they weren’t, the swing was also 27 points.

But union efforts weren’t confined this year just to getting out the vote of their own members. For years, the AFL-CIO has been building its Working America program in such key swing states as Ohio, using door-to-door canvassers to enlist residents of largely white working-class neighborhoods who aren’t union members into the AFL-CIO’s political program. This year, Working America members—of whom there were nearly 2 million in Ohio—voted for Obama at the same rate as union members: 66 percent. As well, the Citizens United decision enabled unions to contact all voters, even without enlisting them in any program at all. In Ohio, while the AFL-CIO was focusing on swing white working-class voters, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) undertook a massive voter-registration and turnout program of its own among African-American and Latino voters. With more than 2,300 volunteers working full time during the last four days of the campaign, the SEIU helped raise the African-American share of the vote in Ohio from 11 percent in 2008 to 15 percent this year. Nationally, the SEIU-funded Mi Familia Vota employed 600 organizers to mobilize Latino voters across the Sunbelt. The rising number of pro-Obama Latino voters in such key regions as California’s Inland Empire (where the Democrats picked up two Congressional seats from the Republicans), central Florida (where Osceola County has gone from providing 54 percent of the vote to George W. Bush in 2004 to giving Obama 54 percent in 2008 and 62 percent this year), and Colorado testify to the success of SEIU’s Latino election programs.

The unions’ record on ballot measures this week was mixed. They won very big in California, where they not only defeated a Republican-backed measure that would have restricted their ability to deploy their treasuries in election campaigns, but, by virtue of their intense door-to-door get out the vote efforts, also helped pass a measure backed by Governor Jerry Brown that raised taxes on the rich to fund California’s schools, and contributed to down-ticket victories that produced four more Democratic congressional seats and two-thirds Democratic supermajorities (the level required to raise taxes) in both houses of the state legislature. (Indeed, labor’s victories in California this year recall the similar spillover effects of their successful 1958 campaign to defeat a “right-to-work” ballot measure, when their turnout effort also helped put a liberal Democrat—Pat Brown, Jerry’s father—in the governor’s office and turned the legislature Democratic for the first time in many years.)

Labor also suffered some defeats on Tuesday’s ballot measures, notably in Michigan, where a union-backed initiative to enshrine collective-bargaining rights in the state constitution went down to a thumping (58 percent to 42 percent) defeat. Comparing the fate of this measure to the success unions had last year in Ohio, persuading voters to repeal the suspension of public employee collective-bargaining rights enacted a few months earlier by the Republican legislature and governor, suggests that voters are uneasy at rewriting the social contract in either direction. Moreover, there’s ample evidence both from polling and election results that voters are more inclined to favor worker rights than union power, however contradictory that sentiment may seem.

On the whole, however, Tuesday was a very good day for America’s unions, which demonstrated yet again their power at the polls. How much that power will carry over to the battle brewing on the grand bargain—whether they can keep Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid intact – remains to be seen.

Missouri Home Care Workers Prepare For Collective Bargaining After Decisive Legal Victory

Here's the AFSCME statement on the court victory for home health care workers.  AFSCME and SEIU are working together. It's great to see workers winning some victories in Missouri - first the 1300 Columbia teachers voted for MNEA and now this.
 
MISSOURI HOME CARE WORKERS PREPARE FOR COLLECTIVE BARGAINING AFTER DECISIVE LEGAL VICTORY

State Supreme Court Rebuffs Union Foes' Last Request for Appeal; Sets Stage for Negotiation Over First Contract to Begin

In a climactic victory in their four-year struggle to improve their working conditions and strengthen the quality of care for the people they serve, 13,000 Missouri home care workers Tuesday cleared the last legal obstacle delaying negotiations on their first contract with the state.

The milestone came when the Missouri Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to a lower court decision upholding a 2010 election in which the state's home care workers voted to form union. The ruling represents the legal end of the line for the union's opponents who had sought to invalidate the results of the election and obstruct collective bargaining on behalf of the workers who provide vital home care to the state's seniors and people with disabilities.

Home care workers perform essential services for their consumers such as bathing, cooking, cleaning and emergency response. They're also instrumental in curtailing costs the state would incur in nursing home expenditures if home care wasn't available.

"This ruling is a huge relief to people like me who rely on home care providers to help us live independently and stay out of nursing homes," said home care consumer Edna Austin of Crystal City. "The union will give them the resources they need to improve their working conditions, reducing turnover and providing more security for the consumers that hire them."

In May, the Court of Appeals for the Western District unanimously reversed a lower court ruling that had blocked state officials from certifying a 2010 election in which a majority of Missouri home care workers had voted to unionize, setting the stage to negotiate for stronger consumer protections, higher wages and professional training. By rebuffing the request to hear an appeal in that case, the Supreme Court Tuesday effectively squelched the last gasp effort by opponents to derail those negotiations.

The state's home care workers won the right to form a union after Missouri voters approved the Missouri Quality Home Care Act passed 2008 by a resounding 75 percent majority. Since the act's inception, home care providers around the state have worked to build a union that will protect consumer-directed, in-home care programs from cuts, and ensure providers working in those programs have the wages and training that will allow the programs to thrive and grow. Consumer-directed programs allow seniors and people with disabilities and individuals to live and receive care in their own homes from an attendant of their own choosing.

"Since 2008, Missouri voters and Missouri in-home care providers have spoken repeatedly in favor of allowing providers to organize themselves to protect the consumers who rely on these programs and improve training and wages," said Elinor Simmons of Moline Acre. "Thousands of caregivers are vindicated today, now that the courts have recognized the validity of the democratic choice they made to be represented by the Missouri Home Care Union."

The Missouri Home Care Union is the voice for home care attendants in Missouri. We are a joint local union, combining the strength of the nation's largest home care unions - AFSCME and SEIU. With a long track record for winning better wages and benefits for workers and protecting hours for consumers, our organization is poised to join with senior and disability allies in our state to improve home care services and ensure seniors and people with disabilities get the quality in-home care they need to maintain their independence.

Spence cites Chrysler closing as Nixon's failure; unions note decision made under Blunt In Backroom

Why can't this Spence guy get his facts straight?  It's a good thing some UAW members attended this photo op to provide the facts to the media.

St. Louis Beacon
By Jo Mannies, Beacon political reporter
4:58 pm on Mon, 10.29.12

Dave Spence, the Republican nominee for Missouri governor, stood on a bluff Monday overlooking the empty site of what used to be the north Chrysler plant in Fenton, part of a complex that – with suppliers – employed 45,000 people.

A businessman, Spence said the lost jobs reflected the bad governmental policies that he contended are to blame for Missouri's economy lagging behind.

“We’ve got to lower the cost of doing business,” said Spence. “We’ve got to get factories in our state. … We’re simply losing jobs every single day.”

Among other things, Spence called for lawsuit reform and for changes in Missouri’s labor laws to make it a "right-to-work" state, which bars closed-union shops, in which all workers must pay union dues if a majority vote to join a union.

Standing with Spence were several area legislators, including state Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Glendale, and state House Speaker Tim Jones, R-Eureka. Schmitt praised Spence’s success as a businessman.

“We need a governor who understands what this site could be, emblematic of a new economy,’’ Schmitt said. “We need a governor who will not ignore the St. Louis region.”

Spence said he offered “real world common sense leadership.”

Spence also said that Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, deserved some blame for Chrysler’s closing in early 2009, throwing 6,300 people out of work. Spence asked why Nixon hadn’t been as active in protecting the Fenton operations as he was in providing state tax breaks that encouraged General Motors and Ford to remain and expand their operations.

Several union members standing nearby provided the answer: The first phase of the plants’ closings were announced in February 2007, almost two years before Nixon took office. The next round was announced by 2008. The governor at the time? Republican Matt Blunt.

Darin Gilley, former union president at a now-defunct firm supplying parts for the Chrysler plants, blasted Spence for “empty photo ops” and getting his facts wrong.

“It’s Matt Blunt’s failure,” Gilley said. “All of this happened long before Jay Nixon came in. Ford (in Hazelwood) closed under Matt Blunt’s leadership.”

Gilley, who now works at the GM plant in Wentzville, also cited statistics showing that many "right-to-work" states have higher unemployment rates than Missouri. Nixon has highlighted the state's unemployment rate, which is under 7 percent. 

https://www.stlbeacon.org/lantern/public/resources/content/27773/images/IMG_6553_14831.60.JPG 

Nixon is campaigning Tuesday in Wentzville and Liberty to promote his actions in expanding the Ford and GM operations.

“On his first full day in office, Gov. Nixon made clear that rebuilding the automotive industry would be a top priority by signing an executive order to establish the Missouri Automotive Jobs Task Force,” his campaign said in a statement. “Over the next two years, he made multiple trips to Detroit to meet with senior leaders from major automotive manufacturers and suppliers and the UAW. In 2010, he called a special session of the General Assembly to pass the Missouri Manufacturing Jobs Act, which provided innovative tools to attract next-generation manufacturing jobs to Missouri.

“As a result, Ford and GM are investing nearly $1.5 billion in Missouri and bringing 3,200 new automotive jobs to the state. In addition, major automotive suppliers, such as Magna, are investing in new technology and jobs.”

Missouri Home Care Workers Prepare For Collective Bargaining After Decisive Legal Victory

Sacramento Bee
By SEIU Healthcare Missouri and Kansas
Published: Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012 - 1:39 pm

ST. LOUIS, Oct. 30, 2012 -- State Supreme Court Rebuffs Union Foes' Last Request for Appeal; Sets Stage for Negotiation Over First Contract to Begin

ST. LOUIS, Oct. 30, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being released by SEIU Healthcare Missouri and Kansas:

In a climactic victory in their four-year struggle to improve their working conditions and strengthen the quality of care for the people they serve, 13,000 Missouri home care workers Tuesday cleared the last legal obstacle delaying negotiations on their first contract with the state. 

The milestone came when the Missouri Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal to a lower court decision upholding a 2010 election in which the state's home care workers voted to form union.  The ruling represents the legal end of the line for the union's opponents, who had sought to invalidate the results of the election and obstruct collective bargaining on behalf of workers who provide vital home care to the state's seniors and people with disabilities.

Home care workers perform essential services for their consumers, such as bathing, cooking, cleaning and emergency response. They're also instrumental in curtailing costs the state would incur on nursing home expenditures if home care wasn't available.

"This ruling is a huge relief to people like me who rely on home care providers to help us live independently and stay out of nursing homes," said home care consumer Edna Austin of Crystal City. "The union will give them the resources they need to improve their working conditions, reduce turnover and provide more security for consumers who hire them."

The state's home care workers won the right to form a union after Missouri voters approved the Missouri Quality Home Care Act passed 2008 by a resounding 75 percent majority.  Home care workers subsequently voted to form their union, and opponents sought to stymie them in the courts.

"Since 2008, Missouri voters and Missouri in-home care providers have spoken repeatedly in favor of allowing providers to organize themselves to protect the consumers who rely on these programs and improve training and wages," said Elinor Simmons of  Moline Acre. "Thousands of caregivers are vindicated today, now that the courts have upheld the validity of the democratic choice."

The Missouri Home Care Union is the voice for home care attendants in Missouri. We are a joint local union, combining the strength of two national unions -- AFSCME and SEIU.

SOURCE SEIU Healthcare Missouri and Kansas

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/10/30/4949360/missouri-home-care-workers-prepare.html#storylink=cpy

Missouri Home Care Union hopes for first contract

Yes!  Finally.

Kansas City Star
JEFFERSON CITY -- A union representing 13,000 workers who provide in-home care to the disabled says it hopes a decision by the Missouri Supreme Court can clear the way for negotiations with the state on a contract.

The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear an appeal of a May ruling upholding a vote by the workers to be represented by the Missouri Home Care Union. The union says that clears the “last legal obstacle delaying negotiations” on its first contract.

The workers are paid by the state to help the disabled in their homes with daily tasks such as bathing and cleaning.

They were given the right to unionize under a 2008 ballot initiative approved by voters. But the certification of a subsequent unionization vote was tied up in court.

| The Associated Press


Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/10/31/3893998/missouri-home-care-union-hopes.html#storylink=cpy

Jerry Tucker was one of the giants of the Missouri labor movement.   He was sometimes controversial within labor, but anyone who knew him had no doubt that he had a sincere and voracious passion for workers and the labor movement.  He will be missed.

 

Working In These Times

Sunday Oct 28, 2012

Jerry Tucker: A Life on the Front Lines for Workers

By David Moberg

Still from an interview with Jerry Tucker at the 2012 Labor Notes conference, where he won the Troublemaker's Award.   (< a href="http://labornotes.org/blogs/2012/10/remembering-legendary-labor-troublemaker-jerry-tucker">Labor Notes)

Jerry Tucker, one of the most creative leaders in the labor movement over the past several decades, was not a household name to most Americans--as Walter Reuther, Cesar Chavez or John L. Lewis were--when he died last week of pancreatic cancer. But he was legendary among the workers and progressive labor union staff and officers who worked with him.
Both American workers and their unions would be better off today if Tucker's influence was greater, and his ideas and strategic models will remain crucial to any future revival of labor. Although his ideas often seemed novel when he proposed them, many were rooted in American history--from the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World to the CIO and broader upsurge of the 1930s. They also reflected his outlook that capital--owners and managers--had fundamentally different interests than labor (even if there might be some temporary shared interests). As a leader, he expressed his views forcefully, but philosophically his goal was to empower working people more than to enhance his own power.
"Jerry was very much a commander," says Bill Fletcher, a long-time union official, author and collaborator with Tucker on some recent projects. "He knew how to assemble a core, to develop strategy, to encourage people to think critically about tactics--and he believed in the members." He also viewed the job of the labor movement as transforming society, not just serving members. "He talked about labor not simply as looking out for people who belonged to unions, but something broader," Fletcher recalls, noting that Tucker was "an instinctual as well as a conscious anti-racist."
Tucker, born in St. Louis in 1938, grew up in a socially conscious union household, but he also played baseball--and was proud to have been the only white player in the local Negro Baseball Sandlot League. In his youth, he headed off to San Francisco for a while during the "Beat" era to write and paint.  After graduating from Southern Illinois University, Tucker took a job at General Motors and then Carter Carburetor in the early 1960s. He rose through the ranks of his United Auto Workers (UAW) local, then worked on the international union staff in Washington and as assistant regional director of the eight-state region headquartered in St. Louis.
In 1986 he ran as an insurgent candidate for regional director at the UAW convention. He appeared set to win but at the last minute, the union's long-dominant administration caucus brought to the convention two union officers from a small Texas local who had not been elected as delegates to cast the deciding votes against him. Tucker challenged the election, and the Labor Department successfully sued to overturn it. He won when the balloting was held again in 1988, but a year later the administration caucus poured enormous effort into a campaign against him, and he lost. He continued for several years to work with the New Directions movement he had launched, conducting a largely symbolic challenge to UAW President Owen Bieber's re-election, before broadening his attention to the labor movement as a whole.
Tucker continued throughout his life to advise, educate and help workers in contract battles, organizing drives and political campaigns--such as the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare and U.S. Labor Against the War, both of which he helped to establish. In his organizing work, he tried to figure out ways for workers to gain power by effectively using their own talents and knowledge, by nourishing their solidarity, and by extending their struggles beyond the workplace into their communities.
"An informed and well-organized rank-and-file is at the center of every victorious struggle," Tucker said in recorded remarks played at a tribute to him held by Labor Notes magazine earlier this year. "The best fight-backs are organized horizontally."
Tucker applied those ideas in his first big triumph, organizing the 1978 defeat of a Missouri referendum favoring a right-to-work law, which would have barred any arrangement requiring workers in a unionized workplace to pay union dues, even though the union was obliged by law to represent all employees in the bargaining unit. With polls showing the public favoring the referendum 2 to 1 and even a slim majority of union members backing it, labor seemed doomed before Tucker arrived. Instead of hoping that the courts would throw out the initiative petitions, as other union leaders proposed, Tucker assembled a broad coalition that stressed voter registration and grassroots education and mobilization. Ultimately the referendum went down to defeat, 60 to 40 percent.
Tucker was also primarily responsible for reviving the venerable strategy of "working to rule," or workers doing only what they were told to do and no more, as well as strictly obeying every rule. Also referred to as the "the inside game," or in Tucker's words, "running the plant backwards," these tactics were an alternative to striking when employers were ready and anxious to bring in strikebreakers.
But the tactics were also a way for workers as a group to use their intimate knowledge of how their work is done to effectively slow down and disrupt production under their control. In many cases, workers felt more powerful using these inside tactics than going out on strike, and at a time of rampant concessions on contracts in the early 1980s, Tucker's strategy repeatedly led to improved contracts.
His critique of unions offering concessions as a way to avoid layoffs led Tucker into a more general criticism of labor-management partnerships, or "jointness," as he called it.  Beyond questioning its success, Tucker argued that such partnerships--which often were followed by the reverse management strategy of attacks on workers--made the union and its members unprepared to fight back when they needed to do so. He often said that workers need a union to contest management decisions, but nobody needs a union just to cooperate with management.
Michael Cannon, Tucker's friend and staff assistant at the UAW for many years, recalls, "Jerry used to always say to me, 'Michael, it always comes down to labor versus capital.'"
Union leaders and groups of workers called on Tucker in his years after the UAW for advice and assistance, particularly when times were tough, as in the Decatur, Ill., "war zone" strikes and lockouts at Staley, Caterpillar and Firestone in the early '90s. Among his contributions, Tucker worked with the local union's "road warrior" members to organize public pressure on businesses using Staley's corn products to switch suppliers, carefully circumventing a call for a consumer boycott of the products that might have been declared an illegal secondary boycott. The campaign started with Miller beers, and eight months later, Miller dropped Staley as a supplier.
Despite his contributions, top officers in the labor movement often tried to exclude Tucker, such as Paperworkers officials arguing that he should not be involved with the Decatur Staley local, or UAW officials insuring that his name be kept out of an AFL-CIO publication featuring much of his work on "the inside game," according to Peter Olney, organizing director at the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.
Over the past decade, Tucker was involved with a group of progressive unionists in forming, first, a group called Labor Left, then the Center for Labor Renewal, which has held "solidarity schools," where Tucker was an important teacher, according to New Directions colleague Elly Leary.
Most people who knew him had a personal Jerry story that captured some of the qualities that inspired friends--or infuriated foes. I had known and written about Tucker since the right-to-work fight, but I particularly recall a spring day in 1985 in Plattsburg, Missouri, where Tucker had brought a delegation of auto workers to support Perry Wilson, a 73-year-old farmer who faced foreclosure on his farm mortgage and the sale of his land and possessions. At the courthouse, nearly 50 law enforcement officers had gathered to permit the trustee for the Federal Land Bank, a publicly chartered but private lender, to conduct the sale.
But as the door opened at 2 pm, a crowd of hundreds of farmers and autoworkers surged forward, pushing back the phalanx of police, shouting, "No sale, no sale," so loudly that it drowned out the trustee and ultimately stopped the sale. As I tried to get close to cover the event, I ended up getting trapped in the crowd near the front line. As the police pushed against me, I found myself being pushed back toward them by the formidably strong Jerry Tucker, who was not letting up until the sale was canceled. Though I worried about compromising professional journalistic ethics, my heart was with the protesters, and Jerry luckily had no hesitation about helping to literally put his body--and mine--on the line.
Tucker had an appreciation of the value of many ways to advance workers' interests, including electoral politics, but he always seemed particularly at home with such direct action by workers allied with the broader community against the interests of capital.
His impulse to help never faded. A little more than a week before he died, he was talking from the hospital with his friend, Michael Cannon. "I need some work," he said. "I'm just sitting here."
"You've helped a lot of people," Cannon said. "Now it's time to help yourself and your family."
"I guess so," Tucker replied, reluctant to let go of the grand causes that animated him, a man who gave much to working people in America, and who, should the lessons from his life be heeded, could still give so much more.

Keep Politics Out of Our Courts -- Vote NO on Amendment 3, Tues. Nov. 6

Thanks go to Missouri Jobs with Justice for reminding us not to forget about the issues on the ballot when we vote.  

 Missouri Judicial Appointment Amendment, Amendment 3 - Currently Missouri is a national model for keeping politics out of the judicial selection process. Amendment 3 would give the Governor a majority control over the body that recommends Missouri’s Supreme Court justices, thereby giving him effective power to appoint individuals to the Supreme Court. 

Jobs with Justice believes politics should stay out of the judiciary and supports the current non-partisan process. We encourage you to vote no on Amendment 3.

Lastly, what do Missouri Governors think about it? Both Democratic incumbent Jay Nixon and Republican challenger Dave Spence have come out against Amendment 3. Even the politicians who would benefit from this Amendment passing know better. For more information check out: http://mofaircourts.com/

Amendment 3

Official Ballot Title:
        Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to change the current nonpartisan selection of supreme court and court of appeals judges to a process that gives the governor increased authority to:


 appoint a majority of the commission that selects these court nominees; and

appoint all lawyers to the commission by removing the requirement that the governor's appointees be nonlawyers?


For the Full Text of Amendment 3, visit this page on the Secretary of State's website. For the Fair Ballot Language, visit this page on the Secretary of State's website. To see the full list of MO JwJ's recommendations on this election's Propositions and Amendments, click here http://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4023/content_item/ballotissuesnov6.

Columbia Teachers Vote for Collective Bargaining

The young student reporter doesn't understand that the vote was:

Yes, CMNEA is the exclusive collective bargaining representative for all teachers

No,  Continue the current system of two groups "acknowledged" by the board, but no collective bargaining.

Let's give him a break given that the MSTA and the school district don't understand collective bargaining either.

http://www.komu.com/player/?video_id=12584 

Teachers approve CMNEA representation

Jenese Silvey does a good job of explaining CMNEA's victory in historical context.  This is a great victory for Columbia teachers and the students they teach.


http://www.columbiatribune.com/photos/2012/oct/12/47297/
Columbia Public Schools teachers and supporters cheer Thursday at a watch party at Coley’s American Bistro as they learn the majority of teachers voted to allow the Columbia Missouri National Education Association to be the exclusive representative to bargain on behalf of all school district teachers.


Columbia Tribune
By JANESE SILVEY
Published October 11, 2012 at 7:42 p.m.
Updated October 12, 2012 at 2 p.m.

Columbia Public Schools teachers yesterday elected the Columbia Missouri National Education Association as the exclusive representative to bargain on behalf of all teachers, a decision that caps a debate that has spanned more than five years.

"I'm very pleased," a teary Laurie Spate-Smith, former president of the Columbia Missouri National Education Association, or CMNEA, said after finding out the results. "We're proud to represent all teachers and to do what's best for kids."

She joined about 25 other members gathered at Coley's American Bistro on Sixth Street to await word of the results. The group erupted into cheers when CMNEA President Susan McClintic delivered the message.

Of 1,311 eligible voters, 933 cast ballots at 27 polling sites across the district. Of those, 520 voted to endorse CMNEA, representing 55.7 percent of the vote, Superintendent Chris Belcher announced after members of the League of Women Voters counted the ballots.

Had the vote gone the other way, the district would have kept its informal "meet-and-confer" system that lets CMNEA and the Columbia Missouri State Teachers Association share representation.

"I'd hoped for a different result," said Kari Schuster, CMSTA president. "We'll move forward and continue to serve our members and those unaffiliated."

About 700 of the 1,311 teachers eligible to vote are CMNEA members, McClintic said. Schuster declined to say how many members CMSTA has.

McClintic said the next step is to survey all teachers about how to proceed.

The vote means the Columbia Board of Education and school district must formally work with CMNEA on all decisions regarding compensation and working conditions. The school board can reject, modify or accept anything CMNEA recommends, Belcher said.

It also makes CMNEA the district's teacher representative indefinitely, although teachers could call for another election in the future.

The board has been haggling over how to hold an election for a year and in January approved policies that paved the way for yesterday's vote.

Although the organization doesn't believe in exclusive representation, CMSTA, formerly known as the Columbia Community Teachers Association, enjoyed being the sole voice of Columbia teachers for years. Administrators at the time considered the group the "professional body representing teachers" through the informal meet-and-confer process. CMNEA members grumbled about not having a chance to participate at board meetings but were mostly ignored.

That changed in 2007 when the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the Independence chapter of MNEA had the right to collective bargaining. The 5-2 ruling overturned a 1947 decision that interpreted a constitutional right to collective bargaining as only applying to private-sector employees.

By the end of that year, Spate-Smith was calling for an election in Columbia. Administrators asked for time to let Missouri lawmakers provide guidance on the court ruling, but that never happened.

The next year, CCTA attempted to include CMNEA members in discussions by forming one group, the Columbia Public Schools Employees Organization, that everyone could belong to, and the school board agreed to recognize both CPSEO and CMNEA. By 2010, the two groups still had not been able to see eye to eye philosophically, and CPSEO became Columbia's MSTA.

Before learning the results of yesterday's vote, Schuster said much will depend on "how CMNEA approaches collective bargaining and how receptive the Board of Education is to that approach."

In other districts where NEA chapters have gained control, "the end attempt is to shut out other teachers' groups and exclude them from all-district events," said Charles Brooks, MSTA's manager of Community Teachers Associations organizing.

McClintic said that won't happen.

"We're pleased with the democratic process," she said, adding that teachers "have spoken, and we look forward to representing all of them."
_______________________________________________________________________________
A LONG ROAD

May 2007: A Missouri Supreme Court ruling gives teachers and other public-sector employees the right to collective bargaining.

December 2007: The Columbia chapter of the National Education Association asks for a 2008 election to let teachers decide on professional representation. Administrators ask for time to let the General Assembly provide guidance.

October 2008: The Columbia Community Teachers Association forms the Columbia Public Schools Employees Organization in hopes of allowing both entities to have a seat at the bargaining table. The Columbia Board of Education soon agrees to recognize CPSEO and the Columbia Missouri National Education Association. The groups are supposed to work together.

April 2010: The president of the now-defunct CPSEO tells board members attempts to cooperate were not successful because of differing ideas about collective bargaining. CPSEO is now the Columbia Missouri State Teachers Association.

April 2011: Board members face mounting pressure to develop bargaining policies. The Missouri School Boards’ Association urges adoption of local policies because lawmakers failed to draft guidelines. The Columbia school board spends the rest of the year debating proposed policies.

January: The school board approves two collective-bargaining policies outlining the process and allowing for exclusive representation.

September: The district sets an election date, allowing teachers to vote for CMNEA to exclusively represent them or for the district to continue to use an informal “meet-and-confer” model.

October: Teachers elect CMNEA as the exclusive representative.

Reach Janese Silvey at 573-815-1705 or e-mail jsilvey@columbiatribune.com.

This article was published on page A1 of the Friday, October 12, 2012 edition of The Columbia Daily Tribune with the headline "Teachers vote on union: CMNEA chosen as sole representative."

Columbia teachers vote to approve exclusive union representation

Columbia Missourian
Thursday, October 11, 2012 | 8:40 p.m. CDT
BY SHAINA CAVAZOS

COLUMBIA — Columbia Public School teachers voted Thursday to have the Columbia Missouri National Education Association exclusively represent them in all forthcoming collective bargaining negotiations with the district.

Until now, the district and its teachers operated on a meet and confer basis, an informal process of negotiating salaries, benefits and other conditions of employment. For the first time, teachers will be exclusively represented by a union, Susan McClintic, the association's president and second-grade teacher at Alpha Hart Lewis Elementary School, said.

"It formalizes the process," Superintendent Chris Belcher said. "We had a history here in Columbia of having lots of input, and we will still have lots of input, but when it comes to the formal inputs — about working conditions, compensation — those will become negotiated."

Of the 1,311 district employees who were eligible to vote in Thursday's election, 933 cast ballots, Belcher said. About 56 percent voted in favor of exclusive representation. The election was conducted by the League of Women Voters at 27 polling places across Columbia. Employees could vote to either be represented by the association or to continue with the meet and confer system, according to an email sent by district spokeswoman Michelle Baumstark.

McClintic said she was pleased with the democratic process and the opportunity for members of the bargaining unit to vote for how they want to be represented and negotiate.

"The members of the unit have spoken, and we look forward to representing all of them," she said.

To be eligible to vote as part of the bargaining unit, employees had to hold full-time positions that required them to have teaching certificates. This includes classroom teachers, career center teachers, counselors, speech and language pathologists, media specialists and clinical associates, according to the district's election notice.

Employees who hold teaching certificates but do not need those certificates to do their jobs were not able to vote, including all administrators, part-time employees and Parents As Teachers educators.

The district chose the specifications dictating which employees could participate in the bargaining unit, McClintic said. She was careful to add that members of the bargaining unit do not have to be members of the association to be able to negotiate their contracts.

Kari Schuster, president of the Columbia Missouri State Teachers Association, said she and her organization had hoped to retain the meet and confer system.

"We will move forward and continue to serve our members and others who are unaffiliated in the district," Schuster said.

The association has been trying to get the board to consider exclusive representation since 2007, McClintic said. In January 2012, the board passed Policy HH, which proposed a vote on exclusive representation.

The policy was formed in response to a 2007 Missouri Supreme Court decision that made collective bargaining legal for teachers and other public employees., according to a previous Missourian article. Old labor standards made in the 1940s did not require teachers to be included in collective bargaining.

The association will proceed by informing its members of the outcome of the vote and, within the month, electronically surveying the rest of the bargaining unit to begin the negotiating process, McClintic said. She said the district will be made even better by "bringing the experts to the table."

The union has to start providing the information it collects to the district by December, McClintic said. Because the process is new, McClintic said she is unsure when the first negotiations with the new representation will begin.

Supervising editor is Elizabeth Brixey.

Appeals Court OKs Union Election for 10,000 American Airlines Workers

It's good to know that labor can still get some justice in the courts.  Now Delta employees need an election.

 

Working In These Times

Thursday Oct 4, 2012 11:20 am

By Mike Elk

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals brought American Airlines back to Earth yesterday by validating the authority of the National Mediation Board.   (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

In June, a federal judge blocked a planned union representation election for American Airlines' 10,000 customer-service agents. The judge ruled that the Communications Workers of America (CWA) needed to redo its petition for the union representation election since a part of the new FAA reauthorization had changed the threshold of workers needed to file for an election. At the time, CWA blasted the decision, claiming that the law should not be applied retroactively since the union had filed for election months before the reauthorization bill had been passed.
On Wednesday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that judge's initial decision, ordering the National Mediation Board (NMB) to schedule an election for American Airlines' customer-service agents. The Fifth Circuit Court ruling claimed that the George H.W. Bush-appointed federal judge, Terry N. Means, should not have overturned the National Mediation Board's previous ruling to go forward with the election.
The Appeals Court instructed Means to dismiss the case because he did not have proper jurisdiction to rule on it in the first place. The ruling states that judicial reviews of NMB decisions to hold elections “are only appropriate where there is a ‘plain violation’ of an unambiguous and mandatory provision of the statute, or in other words, where the NMB has committed ‘egregious error.’ ” The decision also stated that judicial review “is not applicable on the facts of this case and therefore the district court erred in exercising jurisdiction. As a result, we do not need to reach the other issues presented on this appeal.”
American Airlines did not immediately respond to request for comment, although they wrote a letter to their employees, suggesting they were not finished fighting the election.  CWA, however, applauded the decision.
“Now, the National Mediation Board can go forward with the election process that had been wrongly denied to American Airlines passenger service agents since they filed for union representation in December 2011," said a statement released by the CWA. "Those employees will finally have the opportunity to exercise their legal right to vote on union representation."
It’s not clear when the NMB will schedule an election, though the CWA hopes it happens soon. As American Airlines goes through bankruptcy proceedings and layoffs become more and more likely, the CWA feels that the workers will need a union to represent their interests.

Romney on Teachers and Their Unions: Silence Them!

John Nichols on September 26, 2012

Mitt Romney has absolutely no problem with billionaires buying elections. In fact, had it not been for billionaires’ buying elections, he would not be the Republican nominee for president.

But Romney has a big, big problem with working people’s participating in the political process. Especially teachers.

America’s primary proponent of big money in politics now says that he wants to silence K-12 teachers who pool their resources in order to defend public education for kids whose parents might not be wealthy enough to pay the $39,000 a year it costs to send them to the elite Cranbrook Schools attended by young Willard Mitt.

“We simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids. I think it’s a mistake,” the Republican nominee for president of 53 percent of the United States said during an appearance Tuesday with NBC’s Education Nation. “I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns. It’s the wrong way for us to go.”

That’s rich.

So rich in irony, in fact, that it could be the most hypocritical statement uttered by a candidate who has had no trouble scaling the heights of hypocrisy.

If Romney wanted to get money out of politics altogether and replace the current crisis with a system where election campaigns were publicly funded, his comments might be taken seriously. But that’s not the case. Romney just wants “reforms” that silence individuals and organizations that do not share his antipathy for public education.

Romney is troubled that unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association voice political opinions. But he is not troubled by Bain capitalists’ pooling their resources in Super PACs and buying election results.

Indeed, if it had not been for massive spending by the lavishly funded Romney Super PAC “Restore Our Future” on Republican primary season attack ads—which poured tens of millions of dollars into the nasty work of destroying more popular rivals for the nomination.

When he was facing a withering assault by “Restore Our Future” in Iowa, Gingrich said Romney would “buy the election if he could.”

Romney could. And he did.

Never in the history of American presidential elections has so weak and dysfunctional a candidate as Romney been able to hold his own as a presidential contender solely because of the money donated by very wealthy individuals and corporations to the agencies that seek to elect him.

Yet he now attacks teachers who are merely seeking to assure that—in the face of frequently ridiculous and consistently ill-informed media coverage, brutal attacks by so-called “think tanks” and neglect even by Democratic politicians—the voices of supporters of public education are heard when voters are considering the future of public education.

Romney is the most consistently and aggressively anti-union candidate ever to be nominated for the presidency by a major American political party. His disdain for organized labor has been consistently and aggressively stated. He’s an enthusiastic backer of moves to bust public sector unions, he supports so-called “right-to-work” laws as a tool states can use to bust private-sector unions and he wants to do away with guarantees that workers on construction projects are fairly compensated and able to negotiate to keep job sites safe. The Republican platform on which Romney and Paul Ryan are running goes so far as to call for the “enactment of a National Right-to-Work law,” which would effectively undo more the seventy-five years of labor laws in this country.

That’s extremism in the defense not of liberty but of plutocracy. But there are points where Romney goes beyond extremism.

When it comes to the role of teacher unions, the Republican nominee’s royalist tendencies come to the fore. Unable to recognize the absolute absurdity of a nominee who would not be a nominee were it not for the support he has received from billionaires and millionaires seeking to prevent kindergarten teachers from pooling small donations to defend their schools, his message is the modern-day equivalent of the monarch of old sneering at the rabble and ordering his minions, Silence them!

Some Republicans do support unions… when a labor lockout gets in the way of their football game, that is. Check out Dave Zirin’s take on Scott Walker and the NFL.

Editorial: Class warfare comes to Monday Night Football

Why union labor is a good idea.

Even Gov. Scott Walker, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are supporting the referees' union is this fight.  They won't say it like that, but they know we need the experienced union refs back in the game.  A additional problem is the fact that the health and safety of  NFL football players is in peril as long as the scab refs are on the field.
 
St. Louis Post Dispatch
September 25, 2012By the Editorial Board

We interrupt the presidential campaign, every other political campaign, the looming "fiscal cliff," Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and the rollout of the iPhone5 to note that on Tuesday, the biggest story in America was that the Green Bay Packers lost a "Monday Night Football" game to the Seattle Seahawks because a replacement official blew a call.

Oh, the humanity.

There's actually a lot to like in this story, unless you're a Packers fan and/or you had some of the $250 million reportedly bet on the Packers Monday night. Wisconsin's union-busting Gov. Scott Walker took to his Twitter account Tuesday morning to demand the return of locked-out union referees.

Oh, the irony.

Then there's the unfortunate Lance Easley, a vice president of small business banking at Bank of America in Santa Maria, Calif. In his spare time, Mr. Easley referees junior college and high school football and basketball. When the NFL locked out its officials this summer, Mr. Easley decided to move up in class. He was the side judge who blew the call Monday night.

Bankers don't cause all of the nation's problems. Just this one. And a few others.

The 121 members of the National Football League Referees Association have been locked out since their collective bargaining agreement expired this year. They're part-timers who are paid very well — beginning at about $70,000 for 20 weekends of work. Senior officials make well into six figures.

Money isn't the big issue, though. As with firefighters, cops and teachers, the big issue is pensions.

Unlike public employees, the refs' employer, thanks to a socialistic business model that divides TV revenue, has lots and lots of money. The NFL has been paying into a "defined benefit" pension plan for the refs since 1974. At current levels, a referee who is fully vested will receive an six-figure pension when he retires.

But the league wants to do away with pensions and go to a the less expensive (for the owners) 401(k) plan. As NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell put it, "About 10 percent of the country has [a defined benefit plan]. Yours truly doesn't have that."

Of course, his truly makes $10 million a year running the league office, which, by the way is organized as a not-for-profit corporation, because he has valuable skills that referees don't.

You turn on "Monday Night Football," and suddenly class warfare breaks out. At least maybe this way people will pay attention.