NewsTrust - Labor - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

SPEEA: Boeing's decision to add second line in S.C. bad for everyone

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Ray Goforth - Nov. 03 (Opinion) - Boeing's decision to add a second line in South Carolina is bad for the company and employees and eventually will be bad for shareholders. Better to focus on fixing 787 production problems.

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Paul Ingrassia: Saturn Couldn't Escape GM's Dysfunctional Orbit

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - Oct. 03 (Opinion) - Union leaders hated the flexible work rules and eventually got rid of them.

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Progressives shouldn't confuse a party with a movement

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By David Sirota - Sep. 08 (Opinion) - Though the 2006 and 2008 elections were billed as progressive movement successes, the story behind them highlights a longer-term failure. During those contests, most leaders of Washington's major labor, environmental, antiwar and anti-poverty groups spent millions of dollars on a party endeavor — specifically, on electing a Democratic president and Democratic Congress. In the process, many groups subverted their own movement agendas in the name of electoral unity.

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Time for Boeing to get back to the basics of experience and performance

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Stan Sorscher - Sep. 02 (Opinion) - Boeing is considering a second 787 line in South Carolina, which would take the company further down a path that is not working. Guest columnist Stan Sorscher, SPEEA's legislative director, urges Boeing to get back to basics where performance and experience matter.

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Can Obama be deprogrammed?

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Reuters - By Michael Lind - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - Boy, do we need deprogrammers now, to liberate Barack Obama from the cult of neoliberalism. By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies.

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Green jobs must mean good jobs that respect labor

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Rick Bender, Tom Chamberlain - Jun. 12 (Opinion) - in March 2007, SolarWorld purchased a facility in Hillsboro, Ore. The company was lured there in part by $43 million in tax breaks and public subsidies. SolarWorld jumped at this opportunity to move its operation to a new facility. But at the same time, they adamantly rejected requests by the Machinist Union to remain neutral in any efforts to unionize the Oregon work force. New employees at the Hillsboro facility were offered much lower pay than the unionized Washington workers, inferior benefits, no job protections and work shifts that varied between 12-hour graveyard and 12-hour day shifts.

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GM: Is This The End of The UAW?

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Daniel Gross - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Most significantly, as stockholders, unions will have to start thinking like owners. The theory of Detroit was that the United Auto Workers union didn't care about returns Chrysler, Ford, or GM could generate to the stockholder because it was simply concerned with maximizing wages and benefits. But the joke was ultimately on the unions, since high labor costs were one of the many factors that caused the companies to fail—and hence to renege on the long-term retirement and health care benefits they had agreed to pay.

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Kate Bronfenbrenner - A War Against Workers Who Organize

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Kate Bronfenbrenner - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - She talked about the surveillance, constant threats and harassment they endured; how she and other workers were repeatedly taken aside and interrogated, one on one, about how they planned to vote; how two co-workers were fired; and how the rest lived in fear that any day they, too, might get a pink slip. The union filed numerous charges of unfair labor practices and eventually won the organizing election. But three years after the campaign began,

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Falling Wage Syndrome

Mon, 04 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - May. 04 (Opinion) - falling wages are a symptom of a sick economy. And they’re a symptom that can make the economy even sicker.

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The Revenge of Karl Marx

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Christopher Hitchens - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - Marx did not believe in the existence of any such organism as “the economy.” What he postulated, and what made him different from any previous theorist of materialism whether historical or dialectical, was a sharp distinction between the forces and the relations of production.

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A government of men, not laws

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

San Francisco Chronicle - By David Sirota - Mar. 19 (Opinion) - In other words, our government asks us to believe that it possesses total authority to adjust contracts at car companies it lends to, and yet has zero power to modify contracts at financial firms it owns. This, even though the latter set of covenants might be easily abolished.

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The union way up

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Robert B. Reich - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - The way to get the economy back on track is to boost the purchasing power of the middle class. One major way to do this is to expand the percentage of working Americans in unions.

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Racing to the bottom

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Bob Herbert - Dec. 23 (Opinion) - We need some perspective here. It is becoming an article of faith in the discussions over an auto industry rescue that unionized autoworkers should be taken off of their high horses and shoved into a deal in which they would not make significantly more in wages and benefits than comparable workers at Japanese carmakers like Toyota. That's fine if it's agreed to by the autoworkers themselves in the context of an industry bailout at a time when the country is in the midst of a financial emergency. But it stinks to high heaven as something we should be aspiring to. The economic downturn, however severe, should not be used as an excuse to send American workers on a race to the bottom, where previously middle-class occupations take a sweatshop's approach to pay and benefits.

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Labor's fresh face

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Harold Meyerson - Dec. 19 (Opinion) - In the state senate, Solis brought her distinctly working-class perspective to environmental issues. She focused on getting the carcinogens out of the air in neighborhoods where refineries made breathing risky; she worked to spruce up the L.A. and San Gabriel rivers where they ran through park-poor communities. She also crusaded against domestic violence in communities where it had been a taboo topic.

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The Big Three's real union problem

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Jonathan Cutler - Dec. 06 (Opinion) - Even if a deal for a $15-billion to $17-billion preliminary bailout comes together this weekend to keep carmakers afloat into 2009, they will continue to be dogged by their most significant competitive disadvantage: a high-priced, unionized workforce.

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No concessions? No bailout

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - Nov. 19 (Editorial) - Concessions shouldn't be a one-way street. As a condition of any bailout, auto executives should be prepared to reduce their ranks, accept management changes, and take cuts in salaries and bonuses, too.

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It's Time to Give Voters the Liberalism They Want

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Thomas Frank - Nov. 18 (Opinion) - But it is also possible that, for once, the public weighed the big issues and gave a clear verdict on the great economic questions of the last few decades. It is likely that we really do want universal health care and some measure of wealth-spreading, and even would like to see it become easier to organize a union in the workplace, however misguided such ideas may seem to the nation's institutions of higher carping.

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Bailout to Nowhere

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By David Brooks - Nov. 16 (Opinion) - Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be. This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends. Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler? But this, apparently, is about to change. Democrats from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi want to grant immortality to General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. They have decided to follow an earlier $25 billion loan with a $50 billion bailout, which would inevitably be followed by more billions later, because if these companies are not permitted to go bankrupt now, they never will be. This is a different sort of endeavor than the $750 billion bailout of Wall Street. That money was used to save the financial system itself. It was used to save the capital markets on which the process of creative destruction depends.

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To H-1B Or Not To H-1B?

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

InformationWeek - By Alice LaPlante - Oct. 23 (Opinion) - Countering claims that the United States is facing a critical shortage of skilled technologists, former IT professionals like Lovelace and Adler point to depressed wages and their inability to score even preliminary interviews as evidence that the market is already flooded. Yet at the same time, technology companies such asMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), and Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), asserting that their ability to function at full capacity is being hampered by the lack of qualified technologists, are furiously pressing Congress to allow more temporary high-tech workers into the country by raising the cap on how many H-1B temporary foreign worker visas are issued.

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Reversing Boeing's trend to outsource?

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Bill Virgin - Oct. 16 (Opinion) - Should Boeing retreat on outsourcing? Certainly the company's two major unions, one already on strike and the other possibly headed that direction, say so. Aside from the short-term problems Boeing has created in its drive to off-load work, there are long-term competitive issues that suggest a tempering of its enthusiastic plunge into outsourcing might be in order.

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If You Like Michigan's Economy, You'll Love Obama's

Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Wall Street Journal - By Phil Gramm, Mike Solon - Sep. 13 (Opinion) - Despite the federal government's growing economic dominance, individual states still exercise substantial freedom in pursuing their own economic fortune -- or misfortune. As a result, the states provide a laboratory for testing various policies.

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Equal Before Mammon

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By James Surowiecki - Sep. 11 (Opinion) - Protecting workers from discrimination is a fairly uncontroversial idea. So opponents of the bill, who include John McCain, insisted that, while they're in favor of equal pay, the new law would unleash a flood of frivolous litigation. That's a familiar excuse, and in this case a threadbare one.

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UW ignores suppliers' labor violations

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Alyson Mclean, Martina Kartman - Sep. 11 (Opinion) - We brought to the UW's attention that more than 1,600 people, who produced UW apparel in a factory called Estofel, were fired and never paid their severance after they attempted to unionize. In November 2007, workers were locked in the factory for an entire day without food or water until they agreed to sign blank sheets of paper, which management later filled in with statements consenting to the factory's sudden closure and their payment of outstanding wages lower than legally mandated in Guatemala. A recent report by an independent monitor stated that Estofel management stiffed workers approximately $1 million. Hundreds of those workers took their cases to court; in response, they were blacklisted, which left them unable to find work in the apparel industry.

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L-ish economic prospects

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Jul. 18 (Opinion) - Home prices are in free fall. Unemployment is rising. Consumer confidence is plumbing depths not seen since 1980. When will it all end? The answer is, probably not until 2010 or later.

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Helping the Unemployed

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 05 (Editorial) - What is needed -- now -- is for Congress to extend jobless benefits for people who exhaust their initial 26 weeks of payments. Research is unequivocal that bolstered jobless benefits are more effective stimulus than tax rebates. They also have the advantage of being targeted to people in need. The extension could be attached to the supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war, which may come before Congress as early as this week. Predictably, President Bush is balking, mainly because of his wrongheaded belief that tax cuts are the best solution to all problems.

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