The Next Hurrah

"It's Too Expensive to Reveal Our Role in Mine Disasters"

by emptywheel

Elaine Chao (and her acting solicitor Jonathan Snare) must have spent a lot of time with Alberto Gonzales. Because she seems to be parroting him, in an attempt to refuse to comply with Congress' oversight requests.

The Labor Department said Friday that it could cost millions of dollars and take months to respond to a House committee's subpoena looking at the agency's oversight of the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah, site of a fatal accident in August.

Jonathan Snare, the department's acting solicitor, said nearly 15,000 documents already had been turned over to the House Education and Labor Committee before Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) issued a subpoena in September.

[snip]

Just searching through their e-mails for material related to the Crandall Canyon mine could cost $3.5 million and take 20 weeks, Labor officials said.

Uh huh. Are we discovering the same kind of email archiving "problems" the White House has? Or is Labor just trying to turn over the emails they want to turn over?

Because every time some part of the Executive branch gets asked for emails of late, we hear the same story. Too much time, too much money, golly we can't find those emails you want.

UAW and Health Care

by emptywheel

The UAW is about to become one of the country's biggest purchasers of health care.

Under the agreement, responsibility for the retiree health plan will shift to a Voluntary Employees' Beneficiary Association managed by the union. Details about how the VEBA will be funded have not been disclosed. But it is expected to involve a one-time payment of as much as $35 billion by GM, providing the union with money to invest and use to pay for retiree benefits while reducing the company's future expenses by billions of dollars. Creation of the retiree health trust is to be monitored by a judge and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to GM's statement this morning.

At a Detroit news conference, UAW president Ronald A. Gettelfinger said the memorandum of understanding outlining the health fund would secure retiree health benefits for decades to come.

Presumably, the UAW will pick up the retiree health care for Ford and Chrysler, as well.

I'm glad the strike was successful and I'm glad it's over (though it looks like MI is going to have a shutdown). But I'm especially intrigued by the possibilities of unions exerting a lot of sway in the health care industry. As the UAW becomes a bigger and bigger buyer, for example, they're going to be able to demand price reductions. Which means they might be able to offer affordable health care to unaffiliated workers who join the union.

In other words, if UAW plays this right, they may well have another benefit to offer union members, which could be used to start growing union numbers again.

Strike!

by emptywheel

My state's a mess: we still have no budget, and today the UAW launched its biggest strike in 30 years. (At least the football world is back to normal, with UM beating JoePa and the Lions losing badly).

A lot of people bitch and moan about bad American cars and use that as an excuse to bitch about UAW. But that ignores two things. First, those UAW guys don't get to design the cars. I've heard as much enthusiasm among UAW workers as I have Ann Arbor yuppies about Priuses--though the UAW members were just wishing their manufacturer was the one making the Prius. And second, this strike is really about whether or not working people in this country get healthcare. For all their bad car designs, American car companies are really getting pounded in this day and age through legacy costs--the health care and pension for the men and women who made the car you learned to drive on (for me it was a Pontiac Grand Prix with way too much power for a 16-year old). By the time the manufacturers have paid the legacy costs that, in the case of many of their competitors, are paid by some foreign government, they're already thousands of dollars behind per vehicle. That has a dramatic influence on the kinds of investments a car company can make in innovative new technologies and cool bells and whistles. And simple things like manufacturing and operating efficiencies.

The UAW and GM are negotiating union-provided health care. But the real solution to the demise of union manufacturing would be universal healthcare. Give the Big Three that, and they're going to have some room to make changes in energy efficiency that we all know they need.

For now, the UAW is striking to preserve the principle that our working men and women should get healthcare. But going forward, it is high time our country picked up the burden from the striking autoworkers.

A Good Day to Celebrate Protesting Women

By Meteor Blades

Today, March 8, is the 150th anniversary of a protest by garment and textile workers in New York City. Those workers, as you might guess from their jobs, were women. Bad working conditions, a euphemism for the reality of their Dickensian factories - and appallingly low wages - pushed these previously powerless women into the streets.

The cops acted for the plutocrats and their legislative puppets, attacking the protesters and forcing them off the public thoroughfare in a fine example of the bloody reality which so often has accompanied the ideals enshrined in our nation‘s great documents, but has been frequently ignored by state authority right up to the present day.

The protesters responded by forming a union before the end of May.

What Should Our Agenda Be? (Economics)

By Mimikatz

Nancy Pelosi has her 100 Days Agenda, but we need to be thinking in terms of shaping the longer term agenda for the next two to four years.  Other than Iraq, the area where we most need to roll back the damage of the Bush years is in the economic sphere.  Max Sawicky proposes five issues for a populist economics, including Trade (least important), Deficit dementia (moderate deficits are better than none), Social Security (there is no problem, let alone a crisis), Health Care (there is no crisis here either, just rising demand for ever-expanding treatments that must be managed fairly) and The Imperial Fed (which has elevcated slow growth and anit-inflationary policies at the expense of labor growth).

To me the biggest issues are global warming and how to turn the tide on increasing income inequality and declining mobility.  On the latter, certainly the minimum wage increase will help, as would repealing any Bush tax cuts that have not yet taken effect (there are several, and they benefit only the wealthy), including freezing the estate tax.  Single-payer or some similar way to provide at least basic health care for all and equalize risk better would also help greatly.  Rising inequality and its effects (along with Iraq), are, it seems to me, the area where the Dems are going to fulfill their mandate and get reelected to run the government for many years, or not and not.

What do you think are the big picture economic issues for the next 2-4 years?

Rotten Fruit From A Poisonous Bush

by emptypockets

Congressional Republicans last Friday, in between legalizing torture and shielding a child molester, sent a bill to President Bush that would build 700 miles of fence along the 2000-mile Mexican border at a cost of $6 billion, roughly what it would cost in today's dollars to build the Panama Canal. The cost of the fence, which leaves open two times as much border as it covers, comes to a little under $9 million for every mile of fencing. That's almost a half million bucks per city block, for 14,000 city blocks or about 150x the length of Manhattan. At that price the fence had better be covered in diamonds. That's some serious border bling.

Meanwhile, as Congressional Republicans whipped out America's credit card to buy this high-priced gadget, uncounted tons of pears and other fruits fell from the trees of California's orchards and began rotting on the ground because there were no workers there to pick it.

California farms employ at least 450,000 people at the peak of the harvest, with farm workers progressing from one crop to the next, stringing together as much as seven months of work. Growers estimate the state fell short this harvest season by 70,000 workers. Joe Bautista, a labor contractor from Stockton who brings crews to Lake County, said about one-third of his regular workers stayed home in Mexico this year, while others were caught by the Border Patrol trying to enter the United States...
Tons more pears that were harvested were rejected by Mrs. Scully's packing plant because they were picked too late. The rejects were dumped in a farm lot, mounds of pungent fruit swarming with bees, left to be eaten by deer. Lake County growers said that pickers' pay was not low -- up to $150 a day -- and that they had been ready to pay even more to save their crops. "I would have raised my wages," said Steve Winant, a pear grower whose 14-acre orchard is still laden with overripe fruit. "But there weren't any people to pay."

The fruit was one of the best harvests California growers have seen in their lifetimes, and it hung heavy on the branches and fell to the ground dripping juice. The orchards filled with that rank rotting stink. A steady flow of immigrants, now too frightened to continue to attempt border crossings and terrified of being "detained" with no recourse to the law, has for decades been the lifeblood of the California farming economy.

"I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you'll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Then its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine."
--Woody Guthrie

The Anti-Corporation Democrat

by emptypockets

The Labor Day Weekend during a midterm election in which Democrats are poised to take over at least one chamber of Congress, thanks in part to a populist uprising that's already dumped one status-quo senator from the party, seems like a great time to talk about Democrats, workers, and corporations.

I don't think I need to use a lot of links or references when I tell you that President Bush has been kind to corporations, and workers have suffered for it. Yesterday, Paul Krugman told us that the workers know it too:

There are still some pundits out there lecturing people about how great the economy is. But most analysts seem to finally realize that Americans have good reasons to be unhappy with the state of the economy: although G.D.P. growth has been pretty good for the last few years, most workers have seen their wages lag behind inflation and their benefits deteriorate.

The disconnect between overall economic growth and the growing squeeze on many working Americans will probably play a big role this November, partly because President Bush seems so out of touch: the more he insists that it’s a great economy, the angrier voters seem to get.

The Woman in the Gray Flannel Suit

by emptypockets

Tomorrow's marking of Equal Pay Day on the last Tuesday in April tells half the story: that on average a woman earns 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid. So, she comes even with his weekly wage on the following Tuesday; she comes even with his 2005 wage at the end of April 2006. Discrimination in hiring and pay -- some of it unrecognized and unintentional -- account for most of the difference.

The rest of the story is that women are not only being paid less, they are being asked to make a choice their male peers don't face: career, or family. In many professions, they can earn an equal wage only by sacrificing home life -- and often that means saying no to motherhood.

Backdate Anti-Immigration Laws to 1492

By Meteor Blades

Depending on whom you believe and how you count, somewhere between 1300 and 600 generations ago, groups of my ancestors migrated to this hemisphere, humping it in over the Bering Strait before it filled with glacial melt or paddling ashore on America's west coast. They didn't call it America. That had to wait for another wave of migration from another direction. Between those two waves, there's considerable disagreement over how many other waves occurred or where all of them originated. Disagreement ranging from respectfully mild to sulfurous, smear-laden academic and cultural warfare, accompanied by ideological motivations or religious claims not supported by science.

For instance, many American Indians, including the late Vine Deloria, object to the Bering Strait theory itself. Cherokee Orrin Lewis explains succinctly here. As you can see, long before we come even close to the legislative atrocities contained in the demented xenophobia of HR4437 - and other schemes - we're already into an argument about immigration.

Who Has the Most Women Working?

by emptywheel

Via Angry Arab, I see this quiz from the BoGlo. Which of the following countries has the lowest level of female participation in the work force?

• Chile
• Finland
• Ethiopia
• Thailand

Turns out the answer is Chile. But I was more interested in the reverse question: Which of these countries has the highest level of female participation in the workforce? The answer is Thailand, which has a whopping 65.1% of its women in the workforce, as compared to our 59%, Canada's 62.1%, Philippine's 50.2% and South Korea's 49.9%.