labor Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Willingness to strike

Labor Day 2023

I am always heartened to see labor succeed in what I perceive to be a hostile environment. In the Truthout story from early August 2023, UPS Workers Disproved Corporate Media’s Narrative That Strikes Are Harmful. The subhead: It was UPS workers’ willingness to strike — not corporate kindness — that earned them a new tentative agreement.

The story speaks not just to the particular negotiations but the issues that labor everywhere in the USA confronts. “One thing seems undeniable: Any significant gains won by Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because rank-and-file workers showed the company that they were prepared to strike…

“But you wouldn’t know this if you only paid attention to the corporate media’s reporting, which has mostly contained doomsday scenarios on the potential strike that mimic the boss’s talking points. From CNN to The New York Times, from Fox News to MSNBC, the refrains have been constant: UPS workers will disrupt the economy by striking. What if a strike causes a recession? UPS Teamsters already have it pretty good. A strike will hurt the company and benefit competitors. What about the consumers!?…

“Moreover, the corporate media’s criticism of strikes are not uniquely applied to UPS drivers. They’re deployed whenever workers threaten to strike. Teachers, nurses, railroad workers, screenwriters: they’ve all faced these attacks.”

Indeed, “What about the patients?” or “What about the children?” has been the mantra, not just of management but the news coverage. I have heard it often. To which the nurses rightly push back, “What about patient care when nurses are overextended?” Educators ask, “How can teachers teach when they need to work a second job to make ends meet and still take money out of their pockets for school supplies?”

Fair deal

“More than half of UPS’s workers are part-time. Some currently earn as little as $15.50 per hour. In 2022, thousands of part-timers saw their wages slashed, even as the company took in record profits. According to the statement released by the union, the new agreement includes a wage increase of $2.75 more per hour in 2023 and $7.50 per hour over the length of the five-year contract for existing part-time (and full-time) workers…

“Meanwhile, UPS CEO Carol Tomé raked in over $45 million in total compensation in 2021 and 2022. She holds 33,076 shares in UPS stock, worth over $6 million. In 2021, UPS’s CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 548-to-1, meaning a UPS worker making the median wage at the company would have to work well over half a thousand years to earn as much as Tomé.”

From Market Business News (MBN), “According to Glassdoor.com, a job search website, the CEO-to-worker wage ratio in the USA in 2015 was 204:1. In other words, the average CEO pay was 204 times the average worker pay. CEO pay averaged $13.8 million per year, while that of workers was $77,800.”

As recently noted, “The phenomenon of firms with overpaid CEOs and employees is not new.” The ratio should be closer to 20 to 1, lest managers experience “resentment and falling morale.”

DOL

I’m a bit of a labor nerd. I get notices from the US Department of Labor. I received these on August 3.

Department of Labor recovers $350K in back wages, damages after finding Spokane-based supermarket chain denied 602 workers overtime pay.

US Department of Labor obtains judgment ordering Indiana home care agency to pay $188K in back wages, damages to 83 workers denied overtime.

Federal court sentences South Carolina labor contractor, operators after investigation finds fraud, labor trafficking, abuses of farmworkers – This after “a U.S. Department of Labor and multi-agency investigation found the employers subjected migrant farmworkers to exploitative labor, confiscated passports and housed workers in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.”

Federal inspectors again find ergonomic hazards and inadequate medical care exposing Amazon fulfillment center employees to safety and health risks.

These are just a few examples of the government doing good for its workers rather than management.

October rambling: showering less

Covita

From https://wronghands1.com/2020/09/22/abridged-cinema-the-wizard-of-oz/

Thomas, Alito Urge SCOTUS to ‘Fix’ Marriage Equality

Climate Change Activists Warn California’s First Gigafire Is the Sign of Things To Come

Policy Lab’s resource page specifically for clinical research associated with bullying and Cyberbullying in the Age of COVID-19

Why People Dropped Out of the Labor Force

The Final Five Percent re: traumatic brain injuries

He Faced Down Entrepreneurship’s Hidden Demons –and Emerged a Better Leader

Two Ticks (voting in New Zealand)

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Election 2020

Debt Collectors Are Thriving This Year — and Now They’re Filing Even More Suits

Flights to Nowhere Are the Weirdest COVID Trend

How the English language spread around the world

Shaun Rootenberg: profile of a romance scammer

Grandson of 10th U.S. president dies at 95

‘Clean’ Author Makes The Case For Showering Less

The economics of vending machines

Inside Cameo, the celebrity shoutout app hungry for fame and Notes from a user

Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet

Subway bread is not bread, Irish court rules

Is Pandemic Brain Changing Your Taste in Music? You’re Not Alone

If Donald Got Fired – Randy Rainbow (featuring Patti LuPone!)

MUSIC

Balm in Gilead – MUSE/IQUE (vocalists Ben Harper and Maiya Sykes, drummer Jimmy Paxson, bassist Michael Valerio, violinist Charles Yang, and keyboardist Deron Johnson, joined by Herman Cornejo, principal dancer with American Ballet Theater)

Billboard: Eddie Van Halen’s 15 Best Songs and Thanks, Eddie (RIP)

Stir It Up – Johnny Nash (RIP).

We’re All Doomed – Trump vs. Biden, featuring “Weird Al” Yankovic

K-Chuck Radio: The real debate … Helen Reddy or Mac Davis? (Both RIP)

Live From SpragueLand Episode 11 – Peter Sprague Plays The Beatles

Piece for Chamber Orchestra by Edward Bland

Sounds from St. Olaf – Episode 1: A St. Olaf Ensemble Showcase

Colors – Black Pumas

American Standard: Teach Me Tonight – James Taylor

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life – Julien Neel

Mad World – Pentatonix

Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing -San Diego Master Chorale. Arrangement and solo by Zanaida Robles. Singing starts at 29 minutes.

American Tune – Paul Simon

Coverville 1327: Human League Cover Story and Thomas Csorba Interview and 1328: 50th Anniversary of Led Zeppelin III

Ronald Reagan in Labor’s Hall of Honor

America once had at least an implicit norm guiding wages

About a year ago, the induction of the late President Ronald Reagan into the US Department of Labor’s Hall of Honor frankly shocked many working people.

As the New York Times wrote in 2011: “More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity.”

Ironically, PATCO had refused to endorse the Democratic Party because of “poor labor relations with the FAA (the employer of PATCO members) under the Carter administration and Ronald Reagan’s endorsement of the union and its struggle for better conditions during the 1980 election campaign.”

But when the union declared a strike in August 1981, “seeking better working conditions, better pay, and a 32-hour workweek, …Reagan declared the PATCO strike a “peril to national safety” and ordered them back to work under the terms of the Taft–Hartley Act.

“On August 5, following the PATCO workers’ refusal to return to work, Reagan fired the 11,345 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored the order, and banned them from federal service for life…” [Bill Clinton ended the lifetime ban.]

“The FAA had initially claimed that staffing levels would be restored within two years; however, it would take closer to ten years before the overall staffing levels returned to normal.

“In 2003, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, speaking on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, noted: ‘far more importantly his action gave weight to the legal right of private employers, previously not fully exercised, to use their own discretion to both hire and discharge workers.'”

“On March 1, 2018, Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta inducted President Ronald Reagan ” – the “only president to lead a major union”, the Screen Actors Guild – “into the… Hall of Honor, which was established in 1988 to honor Americans whose distinctive contributions have elevated working conditions, wages, and overall quality of life for American families.

“As a worker, an advocate, and a public official, President Ronald Reagan worked to unleash opportunity and prosperity for all Americans… As President of the United States, he returned a sense of economic optimism to our nation that resulted in the creation of millions of jobs for the American people.”

This Brookings article suggests that the Reagan economic policy was at best a mixed bag. Fortune’s Labor Day 2015 story was more explicit:

“America once had at least an implicit norm guiding wages… From roughly the end of World War II through much of the 1970s, real (cost of living-adjusted) wages increased in tandem with gains in productivity.

“More recently, analysts have begun to recognize that the long-term decline in unions and worker bargaining power accounts for a sizable portion of the problem [of stagnant wages].

“It is no coincidence that the gap between wages and productivity began to expand dramatically around 1980, a turning point for collective bargaining.” Clearly, there were other factors, but the decline of unions, championed by the Labor Department’s honoree, Ronald Reagan, certainly contributed to that.

Labor Day: NOT invented by Hallmark

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor.

I’ve become convinced that a lot of people believe that Labor Day in the United States was invented to give those lazy workers a three-day weekend just before the summer ends. From the Census Bureau: “The first observance of Labor Day was likely on Sept. 5, 1882, when some 10,000 workers assembled in New York City for a parade. That celebration inspired similar events across the country, and by 1894 more than half the states were observing a “workingmen’s holiday” on one day or another.

Later that year, with Congress passing legislation and President Grover Cleveland signing the bill on June 29, the first Monday in September was designated “Labor Day.” This national holiday is a creation of the labor movement in the late 19th century — and pays tribute to the social and economic achievements of American workers.”

It’s long been my contention that all of the gains made by the American labor movement in the last century or so most people take for granted such as minimum wage and restrictions on child labor.

It’s well documented that there is an income disparity between the rich and the poor, not just in the United States but in other industrialized nations since the 1980s.

Workers on the “public dole” such as teachers and firefighters were castigated as greedy a few years back by Tea Party favorites such as Governor Scott Walker (R-WI). Now we are seeing in Detroit, and soon in a US city near you, workers who postponed raises in favor of money going into their pensions have discovered that those accounts were not funded properly and that they may have to back to work. Many workers in this class are not eligible for Social Security benefits since they did not pay into that system.

The state of labor, at least in the USA, is shaky at best, with a slow economic recovery – unemployment still well above 7% – and little political will to raise a laughable minimum wage.

Happy Labor Day.

Vegetable washing, poultry killing, EJ shoes, Glida Corp, and my mom

Endicott Johnson was one of the fairer employers of the period, as the title of Professor Zahavi’s 1988 book Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950, would suggest.

This is a photo of my mom, Gertrude Williams (later Green), that I have never seen before this week, behind the counter, in front of the scales to the left. My sister Marcia found it and put it on her Facebook page.

Apparently, my mom told my sisters that she worked at something called the Glida Corporation from the time she was 16 for four or five years, and this, apparently, is from there.

There is an obscured chart to the right about Endicott- Johnson, the shoe company that was huge in the Binghamton, NY area, and its sales for the 12 months ending November something, of $142,029,121.32.

So I wrote to Professor Gerald Zahavi, who is a UAlbany professor mentioned in the Wikipedia bibliography. He has written a history of the Endicott-Johnson Corporation, which is publicly available. Specifically, he compiled an appendix, which notes that the sales in 1947 match the numbers on the board. This would mean my mom would have just turned 20 in November 1947, and the picture was taken shortly thereafter, certainly in cold weather, based on the apparel.

Professor Zahavi also notes that there were E-J food markets in the area. Was this one of them, run by Glida, and subsidized by E-J? And if not, why would Glida be selling food, and noting E-J’s earnings? At this point, I have no idea.

What I found about the Glida Corporation is at a funky site called Fulton history. Glida made canvas products, such as parachutes, during WWII, and was a peacetime manufacturer of “light fabric bags and baby clothing;” it went bankrupt in the early 1950s, after making some questionably ethical decisions, if I’m reading things correctly.

On the other hand, Endicott Johnson was one of the fairer employers of the period, as the title of the professor’s 1988 book Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoemakers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890-1950, would suggest. The Wikipedia notes: “When asked why no attempt had been made to organize E-J workers, [labor organizer Samuel] Gompers said that E-J already gave workers more than unions had achieved elsewhere.”

And who took the picture? At least a couple of people in the photo (the boy to the left, the woman to the right) are aware of the photographer.

Anyone with info about the Glida Corportation or the EJ food markets, please share!

Fair deal

DOL

Now I Know

Racial inequity

Superspreader-in-Chief

MUSIC