Union group claims IBM jobs ‘shifted’

The Tribune carried some good news today.  CWA is organizing IBM workers!  Looks like the 600 new jobs bound for Columbia may be good paying  jobs with union benefits.  Nice.

Griggs: Many will be locals.

By JODIE JACKSON JR.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

A union group that watches IBM employment numbers contends the company that is about to put down stakes in Columbia is simply shifting jobs, not creating them.

“To us, it’s just like musical chairs,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator for IBM@Alliance, a chapter of the Communication Workers of America Local 1701. Conrad’s organization is seeking collective bargaining rights for IBM workers.

Conrad’s interest was peaked May 17 when IBM officials joined Gov. Jay Nixon and a collection of local economic development leaders in announcing that the company planned to locate a technical service delivery center in Columbia. With the lure of some $30 million in state and local economic incentives, IBM plans to hire as many as 600 workers by the end of 2012.

But Conrad said IBM has been cutting positions in the United States and sending those positions to India and other countries. Conrad said IBM has eliminated 14,000 jobs across the country in just the past year and a half.

“There are thousands of people losing jobs,” Conrad said, “then there’s a lot of glitter and hoopla over job creation in another location. That’s just contradictory.”

IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said this morning the company does not comment on “speculation, rumor and/or opinions. … We’ve made no announcements about total number of cuts anywhere. Numbers that are out there are not the correct numbers.”

What are the correct numbers?

“We don’t provide head count other than global head count,” Shelton said, noting that the latest IBM global head count is 399,409.

Yesterday, Conrad circulated an e-mail with the subject line “Reality Check” that contends that when IBM opened a service delivery center last year in Dubuque, Iowa, employees who were going to be displaced at other IBM facilities — in what IBM called “resource action” — had been told they could keep their jobs if they moved to Dubuque.

Other published reports and information on Conrad’s website claim that IBM has a history of pulling up stakes after meeting tax break requirements to look in other states for another hefty incentive package.

There are some requirements for IBM. For the company to get the $8.6 million in tax credits through the Missouri Build Program, it has to hire 600 workers. In order to keep the city’s $1-a-year lease, those 600 jobs have to be maintained.

Officials with Regional Economic Development, Inc., which helped broker the deal, have said offering an attractive incentive package was essential to bringing IBM to the city.

The anticipated number of jobs — possibly as many as 800 — could produce an annual payroll of some $44 million. REDI President Mike Brooks has outlined a litany of economic benefits that could result, from higher property tax collections for Columbia Public Schools to increased retail activity and sales tax collections for city and county governments.

Shelton also took exception to comments that could dampen Columbia’s excitement over IBM’s arrival.

“I would have to ask if 800 jobs in Columbia, Mo., is a good thing or not?” he asked.

“I’m not talking about turning down jobs,” Conrad said. “I’m talking about making sure there’s some kind of accountability” for IBM’s employment numbers. “Let’s put people to work, but let’s not terminate people on one hand and then hire on another. And don’t call that job creation. It’s job-shifting.”

REDI Chairman Dave Griggs said IBM plans to hire at least 90 percent of its work force from within a 60-mile radius.

“Those people do not work for the company today,” he said. “That’s going to be 720 of local Central Missourians who work for this company. That’s not job-shifting.”

Reach Jodie Jackson Jr. at 573-815-1713 or e-mail jjackson@columbiatribune.com.

This article was published on page A16 of the Wednesday, May 26, 2010 edition of The Columbia Daily Tribune. 

Are Public Employee Unions Strangling Us?

Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future hit this nail squarely on the head.  It's easy to say there should be a race to the bottom for workers wages and benefits if you are sitting in the top floor of your mansion-

by Dave Johnson

For Billionaire Mort Zuckerman it’s those damn unions that are the problem. For so many of the rest of us the problem is that we don't have a union.

Last week Zuckerman wrote an op-ed, titled The Crippling Price of Public Employee Unions at US News, andBreaking the Public Sector Unions' Stranglehold on State and Local Governmentsat Huffington Post, telling us how public employee unions are harming the country. (The Huffington version has about 2000 comments so far - mostly pro-labor. The US News version has about 70 comments, like "Outlaw Unions of any kind.")

I’m wondering where Mort Zuckerman wrote this piece. Was he at one of his homes in New York, New York, East Hampton, New York and Aspen, Colorado? Or maybe he was writing from his 166 foot Oceanco Yacht, the Lazy Z? We know he wasn’t writing from his Falcon 900 corporate jet, because he recently purchased a Gulfstream G550.

From this high vantage point he seems to have a view that says working people should be paid less, and shouldn’t get good pensions or benefits. He writes, "It is galling for private sector workers to see so many public sector workers thriving because of the power their unions exercise." He says public employees have "gold-plated perks" and enter into corrupt deals with politicians, a trade-off of supplying votes in exchange for good pay and benefits. He says that since private-sector pay and benefits are dropping, public-employee pay and benefits should, too.

But it's the other way around. We, the People should set the example for private companies to follow. Good pay and benefits are good for people. It should be public policy to promote this and encourage companies to treat employees better. That way we all benefit, not just a few.

Private sector pay and benefits have been dropping because people have been forced out of unions, so they have no way to fight the power of the billionaires. Because billionaires have been able to play impoverished workers elsewhere against workers here who have fought hard to get what they have. The obvious answer is for more private-sector workers around the world to join unions so they can be lifted up, not to complete the death spiral by forcing down the pay of the rest of us.

Airline and Railway Workers Finally Get Democracy

The Obama administration just struck a blow for democracy!  We have noted before (see April 15 blog,  "Delta Flight Attendants Vote 98% for Union - - and Lose") about the absurd practice in railway and airline union elections of counting those who don't vote as no votes!  In every other election, the majority of those VOTING decides the outcome of an election.   This change gives union supporters at Delta a shot at a fair election.  Hopefully, we will soon be able to congratulate the Delta flight attendants on their union victory when we fly out of Columbia Regional.  This ruling also creates a level playing field for the workers at FedEx (see March 12 blog, "Republican Senators Crusade Against FedEx Union").  The National Mediation Board just adopted democracy.  Better late than never!

A Delta airlines customer checks his baggage at San Francisco International Airport in October 22, 2009 San Francisco, California.   (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Federal rule change brings industries in line with rest of nation's workplaces, makes unionization easier for tens of thousands of workers

By Jeremy Gantz
Working in These Times

For the last 75 years, workers in America's airline and rail industries hoping to unionize have faced a surreal hurdle: If a worker didn't vote in a union election, that person's "vote" was counted against the prospective union.

But today organized labor finally claimed victory over this alternate electoral universe after years of pressuring the federal agency that oversees labor disputes in the two industries. The National Mediation Board (NMB) voted 2-1 to allow union elections to work the same way as political elections—and union elections in other industries—in the United States: Union representation can now be approved by a majority of those voting.

Predictably, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the airline industry association will challenge the ruling. "It is quite clear that the NMB was determined to proceed despite the proposed rule's substantive and procedural flaws," the Air Transport Association said in a statement, "leaving us no choice but to seek judicial review."

The AFL-CIO, which asked the NMB to change the rule last September (as wereported), also reacted predictably: it celebrated the rule change. Calling it "an important and essential step" for ensuring workplace democracy for airline and rail workers, federation President Rich Trumka said:

For far too long, the NMB rules have provided an upper hand to corporations encouraging voter suppression, while undermining those participating in the union representation election process. ... The new rules will help level the playing field for working people in the airline and rail industries.

The ruling, announced today, wasn't exacty a shocker. The NMB proposed the rule change last November, after a crucial change in the agency last year: Thanks to a White House appointment, a former flight attendant union leader replaced a former Northwest Airlines lobbyist. That put two former unionists on the board, and created the majority for the long-awaited rule change, as Jonathan Tasini notes at Working Life.

That change is likely why the AFL-CIO's Transportation Trades Department submitted its letter to the NMB last fall. "We're in a different environment now," Ed Wytkind, president of the department, said Monday. He added:

There were too many cases...where nearly one-hundred percent of workers who cast a ballot voted for the unon, but less than 50 per cent voted, and the union lost. We don't think that's fair...

The crux of the debate, we said, [was] surely railroad and airlines workers should not be held to a higher standard than we use to elect senators, governors and representatives.

While the airlines challenge the ruling, workers and unions are gearing up for elections and new organizing campaigns. More than 500,000 Americans are employed in the rail and airline industries, and more than two-thirds of them are already unionized, a much higher than average rate. Today's rule change is likely to help that rate increase.

"It took 75 years to come into reality. I'm very pleased to see this board had the courage to do it," Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists (IAM), told the Journal. Buffenbarger said his union is planning on filing for elections for 31,000 Delta/Northwest workers this year.

In an increasingly consolidated airline industry—Delta and Northwest merged last year, while United and Continental announced their merger just weeks ago—the NMB's decision may prove one of this year's only pieces of good news for flight attendants, pilots and the myriad other less visible workers that keep America's airports functioning smoothly.

The Real "Out of Control Spending": Missouri Accidentally Spends Over $1 Billion More Than it Intended on Special Tax Breaks

This report from the Citizens for Tax Justice points to a major cause of the state budget crunch.  As the legislature cuts programs and state worker's pay and pensions, plugging the hole in the bottom of the tax credit bucket is clearly one way to fix the problem for the future.  You may remember that the CTJ midwest office used to be in the Columbia Labor Temple.  

May 7, 2010

A recent report from the Missouri State Auditor’s Office reveals that the actual amount spent by Missouri on tax credit programs far exceeds the amount that policymakers, relying on official fiscal notes, expected to spend.  By comparing the original fiscal notes of 15 of Missouri’s largest tax credit programs to their actual costs, the State Auditor discovered that during the fiscal year 2005 through 2009 period, over $1.1 billion was spent on these credits beyond what had been projected. 

This was made possible, of course, by the fact that many of Missouri’s tax credits are essentially open-ended entitlement programs.  This is in sharp contrast to most other types of spending in the state, which are prohibited from exceeding the amount specified during the appropriations process.


The table on page 8 of the State Auditor’s study provides the gory details on how this over-spending occurred.  For example, while the fiscal note attached to the Historic Preservation credit led policymakers to believe that the state would devote roughly $71 million in state resources to this cause over the 2005-2009 period, the actual cost came in closer to $637 million — nearly 800% more than expected. 

To take another example, the state’s Brownfield Remediation/Demolition credit came it at over 2500% over budget (no, that’s not a typo) — costing a full $93 million, rather than the measly $3.5 million that was projected in the state fiscal note.


To be clear, these discrepancies are not so much a criticism of the accuracy of Missouri’s fiscal notes as they are an indictment of the budgetary mechanisms in place for dealing with such estimation errors.  Creating a new program from scratch will always bring with it enormous uncertainties; the responsibility of those who govern is to ensure that they have the tools in place for dealing with these uncertainties. 

As the State Auditor’s Office notes in its report, greater use of annual caps on tax credits, cumulative caps on credits, sunset provisions, and improvements in existing procedures for analyzing the benefits of tax credits could all greatly enhance the state’s ability to finally bring this unpredictable (and massive) spending back under control.


In addition to the report’s recommendations and its evaluation of the actual vs. projected size of tax credits, its discussion of a few tax credits that are already subjected to the appropriations process provides reason for hope among those who would like to see tax expenditures and direct expenditures put on a more even footing (pp. 10). 

Furthermore, another table in the report interestingly reveals that the vast majority of tax credits are not in fact administered by the Department of Revenue (pp. 6).  This information certainly bolsters the case of those in Missouri who would argue that many of these programs are little more than undercover spending disguised as “tax cuts.”

Workers’ lives depend on safety laws, Honor mine victims by raising penalties.

Did you notice that the Tribune printed a column by Richard Trumka about workers safety?!  In case you missed it, here it is.

By RICHARD TRUMKA

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Here’s a chilling thought: You can get more jail time for harassing a burro on federal land than for killing a worker.

Tragic, but true. Willful violation of workplace safety laws that kills a worker carries a maximum jail term of six months for a first offender. It’s a year for burro harassment.

Penalties for employers who knowingly put workers’ lives in danger are so weak — and so ripe for manipulation — they hardly matter.

Since the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) was passed in 1970, more than 360,000 workers have died on the job — but only 79 cases have been prosecuted, with defendants serving a total of 89 months in jail. And the civil penalties are just as toothless. After legal wrangling and settlements, the average penalty paid by an employer for violations involving a worker’s death is a pitiful $5,000.

Life shouldn’t be this cheap.

Every year, unions and workplace health and safety advocates around the world mark April 28 as Workers Memorial Day — a time, to quote Mother Jones, to “mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

The heartbreaking — and likely preventable — deaths of 29 coal miners April 5 at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia temporarily focused national attention on the negligence of Massey Energy and the inadequacies in our health and safety laws. It was the deadliest coal mine disaster in 40 years. But it was not an isolated event or some rare fluke. An explosion at the Tesoro Refinery in Anacortes, Wash., three days earlier killed seven workers. In February, six workers were killed in an explosion at the Kleen Energy Plant under construction in Middletown, Conn. More than 5,200 workers were killed on the job in 2008, the most recent data available. That’s 14 a day.

Too many employers put profits before safety, pushing for production at any cost. That certainly seems to be the case at Massey, with CEO Don Blankenship’s shameful record of demanding that miners “run coal” regardless of the consequences, drawn-out litigation to delay stronger enforcement and racking up 639 violations at Upper Big Branch since the start of 2009.

There’s got to be justice for those 29 miners, their families, their colleagues and their close-knit community. Legal authorities, federal and state mine safety agencies and congressional committees all are investigating. Personally, I’d like to see Blankenship sent to jail. Clearly we have to stop allowing the gamesmanship that lets people like Blankenship postpone harsher enforcement action until an inevitable catastrophe occurs.

But we’ll do a disservice to those unnecessarily lost miners and thousands of others if we don’t look more broadly at what must happen to make sure workers get home alive at the end of their shifts.

Decades of struggle by workers and their unions have improved workplace safety significantly, but eight years of neglect, inaction and outright hostility by the Bush administration eroded our protections. Focus shifted from protecting workers to protecting employers, claiming corporations could police themselves and allowing crackdowns on workers who had the nerve to get hurt on the job.

OSHA is 40 years old now. It’s been tweaked a bit over time, but it’s due for a real update. OSHA does not cover millions of public-sector workers. Obviously, its penalties are so weak they don’t deter recklessness. It doesn’t shield workers from retaliation for reporting injuries. And with the current work force of 885 federal safety inspectors, the federal safety agency can inspect workplaces on average only once every 137 years. The Mine Safety and Health Act is a much stronger law that provides for regular inspections in all mines, but it still has loopholes that operators exploit to avoid tougher sanctions.

The Protecting America’s Workers Act (H.R. 2067, S. 1580) would extend OSHA coverage to workers who lack legal protection, increase civil and criminal penalties, strengthen anti-discrimination protections and expand workers’, union and victims’ rights.

The S-MINER Act introduced in the last Congress would stiffen enforcement of the mine safety law. And labor law reform enabling more workers to choose a union voice on the job for safety would add protections every working woman and man deserves.

With loss of life at Upper Big Branch mine still fresh on our minds, the least we can do to honor fallen workers is to fight to pass these laws. In our ongoing fight for “good jobs now,” we must never forget that a good job must be a safe job first and foremost.

Richard Trumka is president of the AFL-CIO.

Good news, bad news for MO workers

News today from Missouri Jobs with Justice.  Although the earnings tax elimination for Kansas City and St. Louis doesn't directly effect mid-MO, it would be a disaster for the cities.  Billionaire Rex Sinquefield totally funded this effort. We will track this campaign here and encourage union members in mid-MO to help our brothers and sisters in our two largest cities. Sunday, May 2 was the deadline to turn in signatures for November 2010 ballot initiatives in Missouri.  Missouri Jobs with Justice and its members organize every year to insure the values and interests of Missouri's workers are represented in this process. 2010 sees both good news and bad news for Missouri workers on the November 2010 ballot. The GOOD NEWS the so-called "Save Our Secret (SOS) Ballot" initiative failed to turn in signatures to qualify this anti-democratic initiative for the ballot. Read more The BAD NEWS is that the Millionaire Tax Cut – the Earnings Tax initiative did turn in enough signatures that it will likely qualify for the November 2010 statewide ballot.Read more about this reckless threat to essential public services in our state's two biggest economic centers  CLICK HERE to see St. Louis Jobs with Justice Leader Martin Rafanan discussing the economic devastation that would be caused by eliminating the Earnings Tax. This initiative faced nearly unprecedented opposition statewide in the signature gathering phase -  including nearly 500 JwJ members who actively participated in the 12-week campaign to educate voters to decline to sign.  We were joined by universal support at the Kansas City Council, the St Louis Board of Aldermen and business interests represented by the Civic Council and Chamber of Commerce in Kansas City. Yet, in the face of this immense opposition, the initiative succeeded because of deep pockets.  It was supported and solely funded by checks from one multi-millionaire who recently moved to St Louis. What was at stake with Save Our Secret ballot: The Save our Secret Ballot Initiative would have attempted to limit the ways workers are allowed to form a union in Missouri - forcing us into a broken federal bureaucracy at the National Labor Relations Board.  You can read the stories of Missouri workers who fought for a voice at work and were left unprotected. What is at stake in November with the Earnings Tax Initative Earnings Tax repeal is an attack on the whole economy of the state by seeking to cripple two of the state's economic centers – The cities of St. Louis and Kansas City. It will eliminate the main source of funding each city uses to provide basic services like public safety and garbage collection. St. Louis and Kansas City are the two main economic centers of Missouri – providing almost 70% of the state's sales tax revenue, income tax revenue and other State revenue..  This initiative would prevent residents of Missouri's 2 largest cities from deciding their own future by preventing a future vote by either city's residents or the city councils to reinstate the earnings tax.  If residents of St. Louis or Kansas City decided that they wanted to end the massive cuts to their city's budgets, this initiative actually prohibits them from doing so. The initiative would likely impose tax increases on lower- and middle-income families by forcing them to pay more in property and sales taxes to make up for the revenue it eliminates.