Joe Kenehan Center

Bush’s Sweatshops

Reporters from Newsday ordered some campaign merch from Kerry and Bush to do some comparison shopping.

Bush’s merch is pricier and his fleece vests are made in the sweatshops of Burma.

Kerry’s merch is union-made and more affordable. Go figure.

Bush’s Goons

The Bush-Cheney campaign is pouring a chunk of its massive war chest into security services provided by Vance International, a security firm that is also well known for its intimidating tactics when providing strikebreaking services to corporations.

DHinMI has the details at Daily Kos. A commenter notes that Bush's private security operatives have tried to stop reporters from talking to regular people in the crowd at campaign events.

Ironically, there is a growing union organizing movement among security guards.

What Kind of Unions?

Don’t miss a series of posts by Andy Stern on the SEIU blog that discuss some of the reasons why unions don’t have the power to really fight for working people’s interests anymore. The discussion in the comment threads about union democracy is very interesting. (Here, here, here, and here.)

Stern and other leaders made their proposals for reforming the labor movement an issue during the recent AFL-CIO meetings in Florida:

Some of the suggestions included changing the AFL-CIO from a voluntary federation into a more powerful ruling authority, slashing the number of unions and setting up close ties between American and foreign unions to match the power of multinational corporations.

Many of the suggestions come from the New Unity Partnership, an informal group formed last year by several labor chiefs.

Its members are Bruce Raynor, president of UNITE, the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; John Wilhelm, president of HERE, the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union; Doug McCarron, head of the Carpenters union; Terence O'Sullivan, president of the Laborers' International Union of North America; and Stern.

The group has been controversial within union circles, however, with some worried that it could further heighten tensions among unions. One cause of concern especially is McCarron's involvement.

Complaining that the AFL-CIO was outdated and inefficient, he pulled his union out of the federation three years ago. That was a severe blow to the AFL-CIO's efforts to boost confidence that the labor movement finally was on the rebound.

"These are five guys sitting around and talking. They don't represent the labor movement," said Leo Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers union.

Gerard's union, which the AFL-CIO says has lost 140,000 members in five years, recently reached a deal with the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers union to merge some basic functions. The unions will streamline some operations as well as coordinate activities, Gerard said.

But Laborers President O'Sullivan said the New Unity Partnership's goals are "neither to point fingers" at the AFL-CIO nor to stir divisions within organized labor. "We all need to look in the mirror and see what is best for our members and our unions," he said.

A popular suggestion raised by New Unity members is merging unions involved in the same or similar industries.

"You have too many unions that do not have the money or the power to represent their workers," said Raynor, the UNITE president. His union and HERE announced this month that they will merge this summer.

Rather than its current 64 unions, Raynor suggested the AFL-CIO might shrink to 20. And as part of that process, he suggested that unions should focus clearly on specific industries instead of gathering workers from diverse occupations, as some unions have done.

I Dreamed I Saw A Blog Today

Marc Brazeau’s blog—the Joe Hill Dispatch—is a comprehensive roundup of on-the-job and union news. It’s another daily must read.

Bush Cabinet Official Mobilizes Anti-Bush Voters

A friend who is a schoolteacher in Chicago forwarded a link to this online campaign to urge President Bush to fire Education Secretary Rod Paige.

There's a saying in the labor movement that "the boss is the best organizer." It means that thickheaded managers, by saying or doing the wrong thing, often do the most to get employees interested in taking action together.

In this case, Bush's top education official may be a significant motivator of Kerry's education voters.

CEOs Resist Political Contribution Disclosure

The Bush administration, as part of its “all enemies on the left and center” strategy to infuriate a majority of people in the world, is moving to impose harsh new red tape requirements aimed at weakening unions’ political efforts.

Unions, acting as institutional investors through their pension funds’ stock portfolios, have begun introducing shareholder resolutions calling on corporations to disclose if their executives are working as “bundlers” who gather high-dollar contributions and forward them on to Bush.

Not surprisingly, the CEOs aren’t excited about offering that kind of transparency in the political process:

Almost two dozen companies asked the SEC for permission to omit from proxy ballots union-drafted resolutions seeking to know how much top executives gave to political candidates. Organized labor, led by the AFL-CIO, which must comply with similar disclosure rules imposed by the administration of President George W. Bush last year, is targeting executives who have contributed to his 2004 re-election campaign.

Companies that received the union resolutions include New York-based AIG, the world's largest insurer, SBC Communications Inc. and Safeway Inc., whose chief executive officers have all been named Bush ``Rangers'' for collecting at least $200,000 for his campaign. Comcast Corp., whose cable unit president, Stephen Burke, 45, was named a ``Ranger'' last month, also faces a resolution.

Connecting the Dots

Harold Meyerson weaves it all together in his Washington Post column -- the Southern California grocery strike, the rise of Wal-Mart (which has launched the largest PAC in the country, giving 85 percent of its contributions to the GOP), the new momentum of UNITE HERE, and good jobs for ordinary families.

Fallout from the Grocery Strike/Lockout

* Doug Dority, the union’s international president, has resigned.

* The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik continues to provide insightful coverage.

The damage done by this dispute to the principle of providing a living wage and adequate healthcare coverage for employees will be felt by workers — union and nonunion — around the state and across the country. First to face the music will be the 50,000 Northern California supermarket employees whose contracts expire in July and September.

Among those who gained from this ugly fight are the supermarket executives who provoked it. Their initial proposal for a contract that they knew the workers would reject made a strike inevitable, and their intransigence in negotiations needlessly prolonged it.

It will be instructive to see whether they pass their lower labor costs on to customers. Will shoppers see huge price breaks at Vons to keep them from driving out to a Wal-Mart in Chino? Outside of a few weeks of discounts to lure shoppers back into their neighborhood stores, I wouldn't bet on it. We're much more likely to see the companies boast fatter profit margins and pay fatter bonuses to the executives who steered these companies through the white water of a union-busting campaign.

And:

In the end, supermarket union leaders say they've learned a lot from what happened during the strike — including the folly of waging a regional campaign against the giant grocery chains, as opposed to a truly national effort.

"Watch what we do in Northern California," Stemerman says. "You can bet we'll do things differently."

In the LA Weekly, Robert Greene joins an emerging consensus that unions’ internal structure make it more difficult to take on major battles like the fight to maintain access to affordable care:

How could this happen? UFCW is in many ways a throwback to an earlier time when the grocery industry was made up of locally owned chains. Ralphs, Vons and Safeway were all homegrown Southern California stores, and as recently as the 1980s the CEO of Vons did commercials for his stores on local TV. The seven locals around Southern California were a good match for the supermarkets.

In the ’80s and ’90s, though, consolidation gobbled up chains like Hughes, Boys, Lucky and Alpha Beta, leaving three corporate giants. Kroger became the largest grocer in the world — until 2002, when it was overtaken by Wal-Mart.

The three chains’ coast-to-coast presence gave them the financial power to weather hard economic times, or strikes, in one part of the country as long as shoppers were still rolling their carts through checkout lanes in other regions. UFCW, though, remained fractured, promoting local and separate control while other unions were coming to terms with the need to centralize finances, strategy and organizing . . . The drawbacks of Dority’s approach became apparent as seven Southern California leaders squabbled over strategy, failed to acknowledge the corporate willingness to forgo short-term profits, and stumbled over outreach to other unions that stood ready with resources and good will.

There isn’t a lot of time to regroup. Grocery workers in Washington, D.C., Northern California, and Seattle are also getting ready to negotiate their contracts. In Seattle, grocery workers will be taking on same three chains that the went up against in Southern California—Alberson’s, Safeway, and Kroger:

Negotiating as a bloc, the three chains have said they must reduce the health benefits and premiums they pay from the current 100 percent. They'd also like to institute a wage structure that would allow new hires to be paid less than existing workers.

Paige Gets Detention

Conservatives fixate on a handful of magic bullet solutions for improving public education, usually focusing on charter schools or vouchers.

But their real bogeyman for all things educational is teacher unions. Conservatives get really mad when anyone says anything about the need for classroom teachers to participate in making change in education (which will best happen through a union, after all.)

They're not talking about teachers, they rage. They're talking about the unions, which they see as a different entity all together.

But that theory took quite a blow when Bush education secretary Rod Paige -- a week after insulting teachers by calling their union a "terrorist organization" -- met with a delegation of actual classroom teachers.Award-winning, locally renowned teachers who gave Paige an F for his behavior and made it very clear they don't see the NEA as an evil force that conspires to oppress them:

Betsy Rogers, who last year received the National Teacher of the Year award from President Bush at a White House ceremony, said in an interview after the meeting that Dr. Paige told the teachers twice that "he wished that he could take back his remarks."

"We're not going to focus on it any more," Ms. Rogers said, "but I don't think teachers will ever forget his insulting remark."

And:

Participants in the meeting said that one teacher, Elspeth Corrigan Moore, a librarian at Memorial High School in West New York, N.J., wept as she discussed Dr. Paige's comparison of the teachers union to terrorists. Ms. Moore said after the meeting that because her school had a direct line of sight to downtown Manhattan, she and many students could see the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

"I watched it burn, and I smelled it burn, so I take the word terrorist personally," she said.

Sickening

Another scandal of crony corruption, this time with Tom Delay's former press secretary Michael Scanlon making millions selling access to conservative lawmakers for the gambling industry.

"Scanlon, 33, made more than $30 million, contracts and tribal documents show."