Flint Sit-Down Strike's 75th Anniversary Offers Opportunity For Reflection
Huffington Post
Posted December 31, 2011

Autoworkers occupied a factory in Flint, Mich., 75 years ago Friday, launching a struggle that would involve tens of thousands of workers and bring the United Auto Workers into the national spotlight.

The Flint Sit-Down Strike, as it is now known, lasted 44 days. The strike marked the first victory of the UAW, which had formed just a year before in 1935.

Although there had been prior strikes at other auto plants, Flint represented a new milestone for the union movement. The strike targeted two critical plants, Fisher 1 and 2. Both belonged to General Motors, the biggest of the big three auto manufacturers in the United States. UAW activists realized the strike had the potential to paralyze the auto manufacturer and give them a platform to organize on a national level.
Read the source story here.

Woody Guthrie's New Year's Resolutions, 1942
Teamster Nation
Posted December 31, 2011
"Wake up and fight" is our favorite of the 33 resolutions Guthrie wrote when he was 32 years old.

If you can't read them, you can see a clearer version here. They include take bath, shine shoes, read lots good books, shave, write a song a day, make up your mind, save dough, dream good  ... and help win war -- beat fascism.

And while we're at it, here's a photo gallery of Guthrie roaming the streets of New York City.
Read the source story here.

Stop the War on Workers
Teamster.org
Posted December 31, 2011
By Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa (published in The Detroit News on December 14, 2011)
Hardworking Americans tried to send a message to elected leaders in 2011 when they took to the statehouses, the streets and the public parks. That message was loud and clear: "Stop the War on Workers."

Americans may not have the statistics at their fingertips, but they're aware this country is in trouble. A comment I hear quite often is, "I don't know what will happen if we don't do something about it."

America is a place where one-quarter of all mortgages are underwater, where student debt doubled over a decade and where median wages are actually falling. Working Americans rightly blame corporate greed and an out-of-control financial sector for this terrible economic rut we're in.

Congressional Republicans would be wise not just to listen, but to stop obstructing efforts to reverse the shrinkage of the middle class and rein in corporate greed. Unfortunately, I don't think that will happen next year. Corporate America will continue to attack middle-class workers by violating their rights and lowering their wages. Their political allies will continue to attack the middle class with austerity budgets and anti-union laws.
Read the source story here.

Manufacturing coming back—but at what cost?
Daily Kos
Posted December 31, 2011

"There is one rule for industrialists and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible" - Henry Ford

Manufacturing is on the rise in the United States as employers bring jobs back to the United States; however, the jobs do not pay what they used to pay. Many manufacturers have forgotten about the Henry Ford quote above. Goods are not as durable as they used to be, nor, in many cases, can they be repaired. Workers do not make enough money to purchase the products they manufacture:

The shrunken pay scale for newcomers — $12 to $19 an hour versus $21 to $32 an hour for longtime workers — threatens to undo the middle-class status of even the best-paid blue-collar jobs still left in manufacturing. A similar contract limits the wages of new hires at a nearby Ford Motor Company stamping plant, but neither G.E.'s 2,000 hourly workers nor Ford's 2,900, nor their unions nor the mayor, Greg Fischer, have objected.

I understand that $12 to $19 an hour is a lot of money to a lot of folks out there. I do get that, but the problem is we should not be satisfied with the wages our parents were earning twenty years ago today.
Read the source story here.

Indiana Statehouse 'No Longer the People's House'
AFL-CIO Now Blog
Posted December 31, 2011
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' administration will limit the number of people who can assemble in the statehouse beginning Jan. 1–a move that Indiana AFL-CIO President Nancy Guyott says creates a "policy to shut out the voices of dissent and limit access to government to only those they favor."

IndyStar.com reports state security agencies have capped the number of people who can be in the statehouse in Indianapolis at any one time to 3,000, including about 1,700 employees–a fraction of the number who have turned out at the statehouse to protest proposed "right to work" (for less) legislation.

According to Guyott:

Under this policy neither lobbyist nor donor will be turned away–yet everyday, taxpaying citizens will be.

Read the source story here.

5,500 Aircraft Mechanics Gain Wage Increases, More Job Security Protections
Teamster.org
Posted December 31, 2011
Teamster aircraft mechanics and related workers at United Airlines Inc. [NYSE: UAL] overwhelmingly ratified a contract that provides for significant wage increases, maintenance of health care benefits and enhanced job security protections, the Teamsters Union announced today.

The Teamster contract covers about 5,500 aircraft mechanics and related employees throughout the United States.

"This marks a historic day for Teamster United mechanics," said Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa. "They stood united for a better future and for big improvements at United. They should feel proud of what they've accomplished."
Read the source story here.

Views of 'capitalism' and 'socialism' polled
Daily Kos
Posted December 31, 2011
A new survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press indicates that Americans have not much changed their minds  in the past year regarding the terms "socialism" and "capitalism":

The American public's take on capitalism remains mixed, with just slightly more saying they have a positive (50%) than a negative (40%) reaction to the term. That's largely unchanged from a 52% to 37% balance of opinion in April 2010.

Socialism is a negative for most Americans, but certainly not all. Six-in-ten (60%) say they have a negative reaction to the word; 31% have a positive reaction. Those numbers are little changed from when the question was last asked in April 2010. ...

Both of the ideological descriptions used most frequently in American politics—conservative and liberal—receive more positive than negative reactions from the American public. But the positives for conservative (62%) are higher than for liberal (50%). This gap mainly reflects the balance of what people call themselves; more people consistently call themselves conservative than liberal in public opinion polling. Those who think of themselves as politically "moderate" give similarly positive assessments to both words.
Read the source story here.

AFM Musicians Talk Career Benefits of Union Membership
AFL-CIO Now blog
Posted December 31, 2011
Most of the time here at AFL-CIO Now we deal with serious subjects like workers' rights, health care, economic inequality to sometimes even wonkish matters such as currency manipulation and corporate governance rules.

But we thought if you are visiting us today in the middle of holiday season and just a couple of  days before News Year's celebrations get underway, we'd give you something different courtesy of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM).

Each month the union's magazine—International Musician—features one of their better known members who talk about how they got started in the music business and what their union membership means to them.

Violin superstar Rachel Barton Pine told the magazine:

As a home-school assignment, I had to write a paper about the AFL-CIO, and as I was learning about the history of unions in America, I was seeing on a daily basis how the AFM was protecting us.  To this day, I feel a sense of solidarity with my brothers and sisters that I'm playing with every night.

Jazz trumpeter Randy Brecker says he joined AFM in 1966 when he moved to New York City and that the networking with "the great musicians already enrolled" opened doors. "You'd form relationships and play gigs with other members. And one thing always led to another."

Five decades later Brecker says, "[The union's] wonderful pension plan is very important for young musicians. It's important they realize that they have a future when they get older."

Click here and check out the list on the left of featured musicians.
Read the source story here.

New York City office cleaners may strike if no contract agreement is reached
Posted December 31, 2011
New York City office cleaners represented by SEIU local 32BJ may go on strike this weekend if a contract agreement is not reached. A strike could affect more than 1,500 buildings; however, the New York Times reports that:

Despite the tough talk over the past two months, the city's office cleaners and building owners still appear likely to reach an agreement on a new four-year contract by the Jan. 1 deadline, or shortly afterward. The owners have softened some of their language, and both sides say there has been progress. But a new contract is not expected to yield substantial gains in wages or benefits.

Building owners want to introduce a two-tier wage system in which new hires would make substantially less than current workers, who earn an average of $47,000 a year, and have "proposed changes in work rules and health benefits, which currently include full family medical insurance." In the public relations fight, the owners are relying on $47,000 to sound like a lot of money for a mere office cleaner to make, but this is New York City we're talking about:

In 2010, a family of two needed to bring in between $54,536 to live in lower-cost Queens and $78,476 to live in lower Manhattan and cover all of its own basic needs including food, shelter and health care, according to an annual measure released by The New York Self-Sufficiency Standard Steering Committee in June.

Read the source story here.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Asked By Prosecutor To Reopen Collective Bargaining Lawsuit
Huffington Post
Posted December 31, 2011
A prosecutor asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Friday to reopen his lawsuit challenging Gov. Scott Walker's contentious collective bargaining law, contending a justice who voted to dismiss the suit earlier this year got free legal help from the firm defending the law.

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne argued in filings with the court that it should vacate its decision because Justice Michael Gableman never disclosed his arrangement with the Michael Best and Friedrich law firm. Wisconsin's ethics code prohibits state officials from accepting free gifts, and the judicial ethics code bars judges from accepting gifts from anyone likely to appear before them.

Ozanne asked the court to reinstate a circuit judge's earlier ruling declaring the law void and disqualify Gableman from participating in further proceedings if he won't recuse himself.

"Reasonable, well-informed people would reasonably question Justice Gableman's ability to be impartial under the facts presented here," he wrote. "Respectfully, any litigant in any case deserves to have his case heard by a judge who has not secretly received a valuable gift from the other side's lawyer."
Read the source story here.

Anatomy of the 1%
In These Times
Posted December 31, 2011
As Occupy Chicago sympathizers circled the monumental Board of Trade building in the city's financial district in November, several demonstrators held aloft a large red banner with the now-familiar message, "We Are the 99%."

Unlike safe political pitches to the middle class, that inclusive appeal asserts a common interest among workers of all wages, both the socially marginalized, and the traditional middle class of small business owners and educated professionals. And it posits a conflict between the interests of that super-majority and the 1%–including some of the futures traders who work inside the Board of Trade.

But who comprises the "1%"? And what is the conflict?

The Occupy Wall Street movement draws the line over income.

Since the 1970s, a tiny elite has captured most of the nation's income growth, while most Americans have seen their income grow slowly, if at all. Wealth and power, linked loosely to income, are even more unequally distributed. In fact, the concentration of income, wealth and power is so extreme that the line could more properly have been drawn between the 0.1% and the 99.9%.
Read the source story here.

Lionsgate Outsourced Music for 2012′s Most Anticipated Film, Snubbed Unionized Americans
We Party Patriots
Posted December 31, 2011
To get an authentic Appalachian feel, the producers of the movie "The Hunger Games" decided to shoot in North Carolina. In doing so, Lionsgate received $2 billion in government subsidies. But Lionsgate then turned around and decided to record the score for the film in England to avoid paying American Federation of Musicians (AMF) union wages. Yes, the one percent even use their devious tactics on cellists.

So when you go see "The Hunger Games", the most anticipated movie of 2012, and you hear Taylor Swift and Arcade Fire, remember that while they are getting their handsome fee for their tunes, the highly trained musicians who built the sonic world of the film did so underpaid in England so that Lionsgate could save a few of the subsidized bucks they received stateside.
Read the source story here.

Citizens United loses in Montana, Supreme Court upholds state ban on corporate spending
The Political Carnival
Posted December 31, 2011
The Montana Supreme Court is apparently much wiser than the U.S. Supreme Court. The Montana judges have ruled in favor of a 100-year-old ban on direct corporate spending on political candidates in their state.

If rulings like this were contagious, I'd personally make every effort to spread anti-Citizens United germs all over Justices Scalia, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas. That law is the worst thing that's happened to this country in a very long time, and has caused even semi-quasi-demi-partially sane candidates to blurt out declarations like this…
Read the source story here.

Cartoon: What the GOP Wants
The Political Carnival
Posted December 31, 2011

Read the source story here.

The BEST of Occupy Wall Street Protest Signs - #OWS
#OWS
Posted December 31, 2011

Read the source story here.