NewsTrust - Labor - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

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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Dick Gephardt's Fall: How a Progressive Stalwart Turned into a Spectacular Political Sellout

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Sebastian Jones - Oct. 15 (Opinion) - In a town where everyone seemingly has a price, Gephardt has distinguished himself, selling his reputation as a pro-labor, pro-universal healthcare, pro-environment expert and advocate to his new corporate masters, giving their efforts to kill and maim reforms a familiar, friendly face in the Democratic establishment. As a result, Gephardt has become a highly sought-after and very effective lobbyist. He has also betrayed nearly every principle he once claimed to hold.

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Stocked Exchange

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Jonathan Cohn - Oct. 06 (Opinion) - Ten years from now, if health care reform is a boondoggle, you might be able to trace that failure back to a decision in the wee hours of last week's Senate Finance Committee hearings. It happened on Thursday night, just before midnight, when John Kerry put forward an amendment. It was amendment C-8: "Empowering State Exchanges to be Prudent Purchasers." The title may sound innocuous, if a bit arcane. But if you've followed the health care reform debate, then you know (or should know) that anything involving the insurance exchanges is important.

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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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Where have All the broad Shoulders Gone? Or, Labor Day in a Kleptocracy

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Sep. 07 (Opinion) - Now Americans have convinced themselves that we don't have a working class. Everybody is middle class, even those who make minimum wage in the fast food industry, or those who are kept as part-timers so that the store (I'm looking at you, Walmart) doesn't have to enroll them in a health care program. The closest we get to celebrating the workers who built this country is when we talk about "working families," an odd locution, since aside from the idle rich who defrauded the country into bankruptcy last fall, wouldn't that be everyone?

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Tom Woodruff: A New Workforce Model for A New American Economy

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Tom Woodruff - Sep. 07 (Opinion) - For many Americans, Labor Day has become better known as a holiday to mark the end of summer rather than a celebration of the many contributions workers have made to our society - from the weekend, to safer jobs, to paid vacations and health care.

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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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"One Nation, Two Economies"

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Democracy Now - By Amy Goodman, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Max Fraad Wolff - Aug. 25 (Opinion) - President Obama is nominating Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to a second term today because of his attempts to combat the financial crisis and the recession. Last week, Bernanke gave his most positive assessment of the economy yet, saying, “the prospects for a return to growth in the near term appear good.” We speak with economist Max Fraad Wolff, who cuts through the numbers to expose the deepening long-term inequality in the United States.

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HeraldNet: Boeing enjoys profitable model here in Puget Sound

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

HeraldNet - By John Burbank - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - This is now Boeing’s dilemma, because that model of employer-union cooperation has yielded the company and its shareholders great profits. If the company sees a union-free environment as its No. 1 objective, then it has to leave behind the talent and the workers who helped to create the sweet spot for Boeing profits. That’s a heavy price for an ideological agenda, a price that would be paid by Boeing, by its current employees, and by this great community here in Washington that Boeing has helped to build.

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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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Working for Happiness

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Greater Good - By Alex Frankel - Aug. 02 (Opinion) - I started at UPS on Monday. I drove to the San Francisco UPS headquarters, a block-wide fortress of freight. A staffer from human resources took me to get a uniform and pointed me toward the locker room. I changed out of my street clothes and into the brown outfit. I had the locker room to myself; after buttoning up my shirt I took a second to stare into the mirror. As I changed into this new brown uniform, I was changing my attitude. I was becoming one of them. For a decade I had worked as a journalist, covering business and the rise of branding. But by that fateful morning, I'd decided to leave my desk behind and dive deeper into a subject that had long intrigued me: the role of corporate cultures in large companies. In what became a two-year adventure through the world of commerce, I served as a driver's assistant at UPS, poured coffee at a busy Starbucks cafe, folded garments at Gap, rented cars for Enterprise, and sold iPods at an Apple Store.

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Move to S.C. would cost Boeing dearly

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

HeraldNet - By John Burbank - Jul. 22 (Opinion) - Things haven’t exactly worked out for Boeing’s 787 global production strategy. The Chicago-based corporation farmed out the pieces to sites around the world, and then brought them back to Everett to be fitted together. It is hard to maintain quality controls when the production and design is shopped out to companies in China, Japan, Italy, Sweden, and several other countries.

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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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Shilling on the Corporate Dollar

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

In These Times - By Art Levine - May. 31 (Opinion) - Testifying before the Senate labor and health committee hearing in March, economist Anne Layne-Farrar of the corporate consulting firm LECG warned about the horrendous impact of the Employee Free Choice Act. Its potential to increase union membership from between five and 10 percent, she said, “would result in an increase in the unemployment of around one and a half to three percentage points. These are sizable effects for the U.S. economy.” Earnest and well-prepared, Layne-Farrar cited her study that concluded that 600,000 jobs would be lost in the first year after the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) became law. Fox “Fair and Balanced” News, naturally, in its TV report neglected to mention that her “research” was funded by the corporate-friendly, anti-union “Alliance to Save Main Street Jobs.”

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At OpEdNews: Why Unions Have Failed, and Obama Should Let Them

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Op Ed News - May. 22 (Editorial) - God, Guns and Gays - Unions

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Coming Soon: The Truth About Starbucks

Tue, 19 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By ZP Heller - May. 19 (Opinion) - Less than 42 percent of Starbucks' 127,000 baristas in the U.S. are insured by the company, whereas Wal-Mart insures 47 percent of its employees. To make matters worse, Starbucks offers its workers wages similar to those earned by Wal-Mart employees, and Starbucks does not guarantee workers set hours. Instead, the company follows an Optimal Scheduling policy that requires baristas to make themselves available 70 percent of open store hours just to work full time in any given week. This means that low-wage earning baristas do not have time to take a second job. Moreover, it precludes tens of thousands of Starbucks employees from working the 240 hours per quarter needed to qualify for the company's health insurance.

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This Mother’s Day, Let’s Promise Her Equal Pay

Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New America Media - By Ariane Hegewisch - May. 11 (Opinion) - Instead of flowers, this Mother’s Day, let’s celebrate the women who keep families together by giving them pay equal to men’s.

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NY Charter school teachers to union: Let my people go

Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

American Thinker - By Rick Moran - May. 06 (Opinion) - Union work rules at most public schools are an absolute drag on school reform as unions seek to undermine the very concept of charter schools. They are a mortal threat to their centralized power structure as well as the hold they have over the educational process.

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Myths and Realities about the Employee Free Choice Act

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

Campaign for America's Future - By John Logan - May. 04 (Opinion) - For more than a year, the most powerful corporations and banks in the country have engaged in a massive campaign of misinformation concerning the Employee Free Choice Act. Supported by Bank of America, Citigroup and others, the corporate lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars spreading distortions and half-truths about legislation that is designed to restore to working Americans the freedom to bargain for better wages, healthcare and pensions. Below are the principal lies about the bill’s three main provisions: union certification through majority-sign up or elections, mediation and arbitration of first-contract disputes, and tougher penalties for employers who commit illegal practices during organizing and first contract campaigns.

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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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Why Workers Need the Employee Free Choice Act

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By David Bacon - Apr. 13 (Opinion) - The EFCA would also bring back the process for forming unions used in the years after the labor act was first passed (and used today in Canada). Workers would be able to sign union cards, and employers would have to recognize their union if a majority signed. Today, employers demand secret ballot elections, and then wage an anti-union fear campaign that peaks on election day. At Blue Diamond in Sacramento, for instance, the company told workers that growers wouldn't bring any more almonds into the plant if the union won. Hundreds of workers might lose their jobs.

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Why Unions Matter

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Seth Sandronsky - Apr. 12 (Review) - His "Why Unions Matter" sheds critical light on the US labor movement at a time of promise and peril, nationally and globally. The author's approach to organized labor in the world's most powerful nation is personal and political. He is no armchair theorist. Yates's aim and interest is not to dazzle readers with theory. Rather, he wants to empower ordinary people to see their history as a way to change themselves and the world for the better.

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