From the AFL-CIO:

…Today, American Rights at Work, the national workers’ advocacy group, launches a new ad campaign to cut through the dishonest spin about the Employee Free Choice Act, a vital bill to restore the freedom to form unions and bargain and make the economy work for everyone.

The broadcast and print ads, set to launch Sunday, will push back on a massive and misleading corporate campaign, in which anti-worker front groups are blanketing politicians, journalists and the public with falsehoods about the Employee Free Choice Act…

Union!

Interestingly enough, some people don’t like unions or the Employee Free Choice Act: “Bailout Recipients Hosted Call To Defeat Key Labor Bill”. Go. Read the whole thing. Some of the hyperbole is delicious, especially the part about “the demise of civilization.” I wonder why someone would think that?

Friday, March 7, 2008 at 11:00 AM EST

The ‘Fortunate 400?

Here’s a little something to chew on while you get your income tax files together this season. Median income in the USA is $48,000. Average annual income of the top four hundred taxpayers? Two hundred and fourteen million dollars. Yep. Two hundred and fourteen million.

Their share of the nation’s income has doubled since 1995. And the tax bill of our happy gazillionaires? Well, it’s fallen by almost half in that same period, from 30 to 18 percent.

Compare that against yours, and the national deficit…

And more recently:

JANUARY 30, 2009

For ‘Fortunate 400,’ a Tumbling Tax Rate

By JESSE DRUCKER

The nation’s top 400 taxpayers made more than $263 million on average in 2006, as the stock market was rallying, but paid income taxes at the lowest rate in the 15 years that the Internal Revenue Service has tracked such data, according to figures released Thursday…

Oh, I now understand this “demise of civilization” thing. It’s about money. That explains everything. You see, if employees unionize they might be able to negotiate an actual living wage and decent benefits – and maybe ‘almost” billionaires would just control hundreds of millions of dollars of personal wealth instead of approaching their dream of controlling billions. It all makes sense now…

According to the KC Star, Kansas City Firefighters Local 42 is set to endorse Sam Graves, with a lifetime rating of 20% by the AFL-CIO (boosted by a whopping 42% rating in 2007), over Kay Barnes in this year’s election. Why would they do something like that, you might ask? Apparently, the national IAFF wants to reward Graves for a vote on collective bargaining rights this year.

Let me get this straight. Graves, with a terrible labor record, is set to get an endorsement over Barnes, who actually led a drive to raise sales taxes as mayor to directly benefit Kansas City firefighters, because he’s slightly improved on labor over the course of one year. Talk about shortsighted. I pray that the Star’s sources are just blowing smoke here.  

As I exited the main lobby of Union Station I was approached by an individual who saw my press identification from the McCain event. She pointed me to the crowd at Liberty Memorial Park across the street. When I arrived at the location I found Bridgette Williams, Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO president, and Mike Sanders, Jackson County Executive, along with a backdrop of thirty or so AFL-CIO members and Obama campaign supporters.

Bridgette Williams, President of the Greater Kansas City AFL-CIO, and Mike Sanders, Jackson County Executive, at Liberty Memorial Park across from the entrance to Union Station.

Bridgette Williams’ statement for the media:

Today Senator John McCain will try to convince Missourians that his economic agenda represents a departure from the disastrous policies of George Bush. Bust as the old saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding.” The truth is that Senator McCain’s plan is little more than a carbon copy of the failed Bush agenda that has led to a rapidly collapsing economy. From skyrocketing gas prices to the health care crises, McCain offers more of the same…

…McCain’s ill conceived plan to extend the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy and add billions more in tax breaks for the health insurance industry and Big Oil is just one example of his misguided agenda for Missouri’s working families. He also supports unbalanced trade deals, privatizing Social Security, and taxing people’s health care benefits. Nearly every part of the McCain economic agenda mirrors the Bush adminstration’s failed approach. And McCain stubbornly refuses to stray even an inch from his most damaging recycled Bush proposal, to continue the war in Iraq for up to one hundred years, costing America’s taxpayers ten billion dollars every month and dragging down the fragile economy.

With no end in sight to the current economic downturn, the last thing Missouri working families need is another four years of senator McCain towing the same lines as President Bush, “you’re on your own.” Thousands of families are losing their homes to foreclosure, energy prices are skyrocketing, good jobs are moving overseas, forty seven million Americans without health care, including seven hundred seventy thousand right here in Missouri. More than one hundred sixty thousand people in our state are unemployed.

We call on Senator McCain to change course by listening to working families’ concerns and supporting our priorities like good jobs, health care for all and fair trade. Anything less simply won’t cut it with Missouri’s working people.

There are some happy candidates and campaigns today:

…The Missouri AFL-CIO Executive Board met in Jefferson City yesterday to vote on candidate endorsements for the November ’08 election.

Board members unanimously voted to endorse Jay Nixon (the current Missouri state attorney general) for governor of Missouri…

…Other candidates the board voted to endorse included: Sam Page for lieutenant governor, Robin Carnahan for secretary of state and Clint Zweifel for state treasurer. Candidates for state representative, state Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives also were endorsed by the board.

The Missouri AFL-CIO has held several political training and meetings on health care this spring to get its members mobilized for the 2008 election. Unions and other affiliates represented at the meeting included: AFGE, AFSCME, ATU, Building and Construction Trades Department, CLUW, IBEW, SEIU, SMWIA, UA, UFCW and USW. Central labor council presidents for Kansas City and St. Louis were present as well as the Missouri legislative chair, Missouri AFL-CIO president and the secretary-treasurer.

There were no endorsements in the Attorney General primary or in the 9th Congressional District primary.

Missouri AFL-CIO’s list of endorsed candidates

AFL officials say they have not yet endorsed a candidate for 9th District

By Amelia Waters

Posted: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 at 2:23 p.m.

Missouri’s American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO) held a press conference Wednesday morning at their Jefferson City office…

…Typically the AFL supports democratic candidates but Johnson said that the organization supports any and all supporters of the AFL, “There are a number of republicans that we have endorsed. And the reason, I can show on the records that we keep on our core issues, issues that cater to working people they voted with us.”

Candidates who received the endorsement in my geographic area include (for the Missouri House):

120 Kristi Kenney (D)

121 Jim Jackson (D)

122 Mike McGhee (R)*

123 Juan Alonzo (D)

124 Luke Scavuzzo (D)*

125 Carla Keough (D)

And for the Missouri Senate:

31 Chris Benjamin (D)

There’s quite a long list. And yes, there are a hand full of republicans on it.

Hotflash will have a fuller post on this today, but Mike Garman, running in the Democratic primary for the chance to face Todd Akin in the fall, just got the AFL-CIO endorsement. They rarely endorse in a primary.

Look for hotflash’s post later in the day for more details.

Endorsed by the SEIU, UFCW, Bricklayers and Teamsters and none other than DLA Piper Law Firm partner and former MO Congressman, Richard (Labor) Gephardt, the Illinois Health Care Reform Plan is off to a flying start. And if that isn’t enough the plan has now been endorsed by John Sweeney for the AFL-CIO.  Rose Ann DeMoro, Executive Director of the California Nurses Association (CNA), and Executive Board Member of the AFL-CIO, is definitely not amused. She calls the endorsement, “unfortunate”.

  The program, an employer based state health insurance reform plan has been pushed by Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich.  DeMoro, along with the Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP) have severely criticized employer based “reforms” as undermining to the nationwide single payer movement. 

According to Michael Lighty, public policy director for the CNA, the plan is very similar to the plans introduced by California’s Schwarzenegger, Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and Hillary Clinton’s candidate’s proposal.

They all take the current system and try to make it meet our current human health care needs.  We think that is wrong.  You can’t do that.  Private insurance by definition makes money by denial of care.  And you can’t meet the needs of people through that approach.  That’s why we support single payer.

Lighty went on to say that the Illinois plan “keeps the health insurance industry at the apex of power and diverts the momentum for single payer.” But he notes that just because the AFL-CIO has endorsed the Illinois plan it does not mean that they do not support single payer. The single payer movement in the labor movement is a bottom up effort and at least 300 locals support single payer. There are also 26 state AFL-CIO labor federations and 70 labor councils that support single payer.  Lighty states that there is no reason that the CNA cannot work with those supporters within the labor movement.

The California Nurses Association is no newcomer to the health care reform battle.  They have put blood, sweat and tears on the line for reform. In fact they passed a single payer bill in the California legislature last year, which was unfortunately vetoed by The Arnold. Only four votes in the Senate and six to eight votes in the Assembly were needed to override the veto.  Schwarzenegger’s compromise bill is currently moving through the California legislature and, of course, will put insurance back in the picture. 

And what does Blagojevich have to say about all of this.  Well, this is what…:

So much of what you do in politics is done through political realities. The art of politics in government is the recognition of what is possible.  The choice is between whether you take an existing structure – an employer based health care system and build on that, shore that up … or whether you scrap the whole thing and create a whole new system that has not yet taken root in the United States.

C’mon Rod, you can do better than that!  Did anyone ask Illinois employers if they want to continue to play on  the roller coaster  with insurance?  Perhaps if you were truly interested, you could find a plethora of polls that show that a majority of Americans would love for a single payer system to “take root”, if only the “artful” politicians would allow it to happen. And political realities generally have to do with big money donors or do you think we don’t know that.  I think overall,  this is what Lakoff calls “surrendering in advance”.

One bright spot in the picture is the fact that so much candidate energy (at least on the democratic side) is going into the health care reform debate. And the discussion centers on what kind of reform, rather than “should we reform”.  And that, I think, should be viewed as good.  But, if the economy worsens, the issue of health care may very likely take precedence over the Iraq war in the coming election.

Now let’s see, are Harry and Louis still on the Riviera?

Nearly 700 nurses, members of the United American Nurses have been on strike at nine Appalachian Regional Healthcare (ARH) hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia since Oct. 1.  They are striking because management policies are endangering patient care.  Primary concerns are understaffing and mandatory overtime. 

We’re being asked to do impossible tasks, to be responsible for too many patients.  Some days we have as many as 12 patients to care for.  That’s too much for one person to do without making a mistake.  I tell my husband who is a retired teacher that if he makes a mistake, he can just erase the board. If a nurse makes a mistake, it could erase someone off the earth.

ARH has hired replacement nurses and is housing them in vacant wings of the hospitals.  The striking nurses now state that the company is increasing intimidation efforts by hiring security guards who continually harass them and use video cameras to spy on them.  Worse, over the weekend of November 10, a union representative’s car was burned just as he got off the picket line.

Local President of the West Virginia Nurses Assn. Union at Beckley ARH in West Virginia, Ocie Helton, RN states:

We are stunned. Violent threatening actions like this are beyond the pale.  Registered nurses who are out on this picket to stand up for patient care are being repaid with threats to our lives. What if the next time someone is in the car that is set on fire?  Working women and men are literally under attack in Beckley and risking our lives to speak out for our patients.

The home communities of the strikers are giving them strong support and state legislators joined nurses for a rally in West Virginia.  In Hazard Ky., the Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, Daniel Mongiardo, a surgeon, refused to cross the nurses’ picket line.  Sarah Hunley, RN for 37 years in Harlan, Ky states:

This is home to us and we like it.  We like our patients – they’re our friends and neighbors and we want to give them the best care.  We’re fighting a big corporate giant, but we’re right in what we’re doing.

Picketing and monetary support for the strikers has come from across the nation and includes the California Nurses Assn, the Ohio Nurses Assn, NY State Nurses Assn, and Washington State Nurses Assn.  Also supporting are AFL-CIO, AFSCME, UMWA and  USW.

This Labor Day, whether you are grilling in the back yard, catching those last rays of summer sun, or catching a game, it’s worth remembering why people all across America have this day off – to celebrate the value and dignity of the hard work that men and women do every day in America. As Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, said in 1898, Labor Day is

“the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”

Let’s also remember that the guy who had the original idea of Labor Day, Peter. J. McGuire, had a strong connection to St. Louis – his skillful organizing of St. Louis carpenters led to the foundation of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America. From his AFL-CIO bio:

Moving to St. Louis, Mo., in 1877, McGuire helped win the Missouri legislature’s support for one of the first Bureaus of Labor Statistics in the United States. Still in his 20s, McGuire was appointed deputy commissioner of the new bureau but resigned in 1879 to organize a union of carpenters. McGuire had come to see trade unions as indispensable to his socialist vision and to believe he should turn his energies to organizing and building a labor movement.

Within two years, McGuire had organized St. Louis carpenters thoroughly and won such impressive wage gains for them that it attracted the attention of carpenters everywhere. McGuire then issued a call for a national meeting of carpenters’ unions in Chicago. The 1881 meeting resulted in the formation of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters (UBC). McGuire was elected UBC secretary, the organization’s chief administrative officer. That same year, McGuire wrote the convention call for the national conference of labor unions that established the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU), the organizational forerunner of the American Federation of Labor.

Labor Day was eventually enshrined as a US holiday by Congress as an attempt at conciliation of the new labor movement after the aftermath of the Pullman Strike. Of course, the struggle on behalf of workers’ rights didn’t end with the declaration of a one-day holiday. As Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan notes, “Labor Day should also serve as a reminder that there is still much to be done to help working Missourians and their families, especially those who struggle to access adequate and affordable health care.”

Consider this a Labor Day open thread.