The lobbyist and spin doctors against the working American have launched all sorts of anti-union websites, one of their newest is using the "stop unions" phrase. So here's a nice little spot on Blogger where I can test some nice widgets for my own site Joe's Union Review
According to the Associated Press this Bill has been dropped for the time being, from The NY Times (5/15/08):
Democrats drop first - responder bill WASHINGTON (AP) -- Senate Democrats on Thursday dropped a bill allowing all police, firefighters and other first responders to unionize after Republicans complained they didn't get enough time to offer amendments.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he did not have enough votes to force final consideration of the bill.
The two top senators on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., will try to work out an agreement before the bill comes back for consideration, Reid said.
The bill would guarantee public safety officers the right to join unions and bargain over wages, hours and conditions of employment. It also would ban them from going on strike.
Two states, Virginia and North Carolina, prohibit public safety officers from collective bargaining. At least 20 other states don't fully protect collective bargaining rights for firefighters, police officers, corrections officers and emergency medical service workers, supporters said.
States could exempt towns with fewer than 5,000 people or fewer than 25 full-time employees.
''I know there are diverse views on this issue,'' Kennedy said. ''We'll try to work out an orderly process and proceed.''
Sources say, that while there is strong bipartisan support, 11 Republicans are co-sponsors of the Bill, there is also fierce opposition, particularly from Enzi, DeMint and Vitter who have essentially been filibustering by amendment. The Bill will be brought up again right before or after Senate recess.
Yesterday I asked you to join with American Rights at Work to contact your Senator and ask them to approve the bill that would allow basic collective bargaining for public safety officers. Today it has been approved by a Veto-proof margin.
The U.S. Senate today moved a step closer to approving legislation that would protect the collective bargaining rights of tens of thousands of firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians and other public safety officers.
By a 69–29 vote, the Senate killed a filibuster led by several extreme anti-worker Republican senators against the workers’ rights bill. Eighteen Republicans joined all Democrats in backing the move to end the filibuster. The vote on final passage is expected later this week.
Some 20 states do not fully protect the bargaining rights of firefighters, police officers and other first responders. Two states—Virginia and North Carolina—prohibit public safety employees from collectively bargaining.
With final passage near certain, the only thing that stands in the first responders’ path to securing the workplace rights most other workers enjoy is a veto threat from the Bush administration. But today’s veto-proof vote, coupled with last July’s 314–97 House vote, provides more than the two-thirds majority needed in each chamber to overturn a veto.
North Carolina's anti worker measures now losing ground
North Carolina's anti-worker laws and failures of labor law enforcement have been reported on this site and at Union Review for a while now, from breaking the bylaws of NAFTA by outlawing collective bargaining and freedom of association for public employees, in which Mexico filed charges with the United Nations International Labor Organization, to the recent Charges filed by over 40 North American unions against the state to the blatant discrimination and disregard for safety standards in the states meat cutting industry . You can check out the stories below
The House recognized this need for public safety employees’ rights when it overwhelmingly passed its version of the bill last year with a vote of 314-97. The same bipartisan support is now needed in the Senate.
Firefighters, police officers, and emergency medical service personnel are often the first on the scene for emergencies big and small.
But tens of thousands of these public safety officers do not have the right to negotiate with their employers, leaving them without a voice at work.
A bill in the Senate would ensure these public safety officers have minimum collective bargaining rights in the few states where those rights are not already guaranteed. As soon as tomorrow - Tuesday, May 13 - the Senate could vote on the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (S. 2123).
Write your Senators now and ask them to vote "YES" on this bill:
The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act would give public safety employees the right to collective bargaining, and would ensure that workplace issues directly affecting public safety can be discussed between these employees and their employers. These minimum rights would include:
the right to bargain over wages, hours, and working conditions;
a dispute resolution mechanism; and
enforcement of contracts through state courts.
And given the unique responsibilities of the public safety community, the bill would specifically outlaw strikes by firefighters, police officers, and emergency medical personnel.
The vast majority of America’s workers already have the right to bargain collectively. Yet tens of thousands of our nation's firefighters, police officers, and homeland security workers are unfairly denied this basic protection.
The House recognized this need for public safety employees’ rights when it overwhelmingly passed its version of the bill last year with a vote of 314-97. The same bipartisan support is now needed in the Senate. Ask your Senators to vote YES on S. 2123:
Hundreds of Indian workers will launch a hunger strike this Wednesday to demand that the federal government investigate the guest worker program and abuse of post-Katrina Gulf Coast workers. The hunger strike follows a march from New Orleans to Washington by the workers, who escaped labor camps in Texas and Mississippi in March. "Guest workers from across the world are systematically exploited under the federal H2B visa program," says the New Orleans Worker Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), which is supporting the workers. "They suffer abuses that routinely rise to the level of labor trafficking, forced labor, and involuntary servitude. If they organize, they face violence and deportation."
Brussels, 18 March 2008: The ITUC has today called on the US and Indian Governments to take action on behalf of nearly a hundred Indian workers who on 10 March protested the trafficking practices they suffered when they were recruited in India only to be exploited on a shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
The workers are demanding that the U.S. Department of Justice open a criminal investigation against their traffickers and that it act to ensure that future workers and their families do not face the same modern-day slavery. Reportedly, on the same day a law suit was filed on behalf of about 500 Indian dock workers. The 82-page complaint accuses Signal International, a marine construction company, and American and Indian recruiters Malvern Burnett and Dewan Consultants respectively, of subjecting over 500 Indian workers to forced labour, trafficking, fraud and civil rights violations. Full Story
Washington, March 19: More than 100 Indian workers, who alleged that they faced "slave-like treatment" in a Mississippi shipyard after being "tricked" into coming to the US, have began a march from New Orleans to Washington to meet Indian Ambassador Ronen Sen in their search for justice.
The protesters, who alleged that the Indian government failed to protect them, are expected to reach Washington DC on March 26.
"We write in response to your seven-day-long silence, followed by a 97-word letter that adds insult to the workers' injury as survivors of human trafficking. Apparently 18 months of human trafficking merited less than 100 words from you," the workers have said in a letter to Ambassador Sen.
"You leave us no choice but to launch a satyagraha so that the truth will come to light and justice will be served," they added.
"My doors are always open to any of my fellow citizens of India," Sen had said in a letter to Saket Soni of the Alliance of Guest Workers for Dignity.
"I am willing to receive you and other Indian workers at my office at a mutually convenient date and time to see how legitimate grievances and concerns could be met," Sen had said in the March 17 letter making also the point that a report submitted by senior Indian officials on the matter is being examined.
The Indian workers have made a number of demands including asking the Ambassador to pressurize the State Department to restrict travel to India for their employer Signal Internationals US recruiters.
They also want India to put pressure on the US government to halt any expansion of the guest worker program until both governments have adopted an agreement that reflects the interests of workers, as well as Companies and recruiters.
"These workers received a harsh education in the caste system of the United States," said Soni, also Director of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice.
"The Indian government must look these workers in their face and decide: On what terms is India willing to send its citizens to become indentured servants in the United States?" he said in a statement.
The workers quit their job in a Mississippi shipyard and sued the employer demanding "tens of millions of dollars" in damages for allegedly bringing them to the US on a false promise of permanent residency and forcing them to work under inhuman conditions.
What do you call it when those who cross the Mexican-U.S. border get charged thousands of dollars for a ride to a job where their employer makes them pay rent for unspeakably bad living conditions and board for the food they can only buy at the company store and where that employer patrols with dogs, trucks and thugs so the workers can't leave?
John Bowe calls it slavery. And it's happening in the United States right now, he says. Bowe's newest book, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the Global Economy, makes the case using three specific cases and geographical areas to show just how much workers in the U.S. get undermined and hurt by these practices.
Interview with author by Suzi Steffen, AlterNet. Same article, excerpted
SS: Do you see American unions helping in this fight for ending slavery? What could they do, and why should they do it?
JB: Well, the unions have caught up and gotten much smarter in the last 10 years. At first they'd be thinking anti-immigrant, and now, it's better for them to focus on, "If you're in this country, and you're working, this is how much you're supposed to be paid," and enforce the labor laws.
But unions have gotten a bad name, and money and corporations have done a lot to give them a bad name. Perhaps it will be tough going for unions until the economic inequality in the U.S. and around the globe gets worse, but eventually it will get bad enough so unions will look like a good idea again. The reason I wrote my book was to help people choose between the imperfections and current uncoolness of unions -- and the endpoint of the current trend towards inequality. Would you rather be in a union? Or would you rather be unpaid entirely and treated far worse?
SS: The middle section of your book concerns the bizarre abuse of "training" programs, in this case for a group of welders from India. What other abuses have you heard about of this program, and how can the government or ordinary citizens help stop this abuse?
JB: Guest worker problems are bad, period. Go all the way back to the colonies and indentured servants from Germany, in which there was tons of abuse, up to the Bracero Program and the people brought to cut sugar cane. There's just always abuse. Guest worker programs don't work. I'm much more liberal than many people on the issue of admitting foreigners to become legal citizens of the U.S., but I'm probably much more conservative than most people I know about illegal immigration. Enforcement against employers who hire illegal citizens should be funded to the fullest possible levels. You can't have a fair or democratic society without the rule of law, and in my opinion, laws formed around the idea that we're all equal are wonderful. Don't have these halfway citizens. Having people around who have half rights leads to abuse.
SS: You mention that people have a hard time calling coerced work "slavery." Why is that?
JB: Because it hasn't happened to them. I had a hard time at first, I just didn't get what was the essence of slavery. It is a very complicated subject; thousands of people are earning their living writing about it. But really, it's as creative as any form of art. There are so many different tortures, punishments, rules; so many ways of convincing the slave this is the correct order of things. Someone else has control over you.
Some people said to me, "We're all slaves to consumer ideology," but you can't go throwing terms around. "Slavery" doesn't mean "suffering," or working at a job that's a bummer, or depressing or whatever. It means someone is hurting you or threatening to hurt you or your family, and they are forcing you to work, and you can't leave.
SS: How should media folks be responding to your work and to the conditions of inequality we see all around us?
JB: There's a fable where the king hired people to go out and circulate among the people and find out what was going on -- that's how journalism in a free country should work. But instead we're blinded by Britney getting fat, and we don't hear anything about regular life -- and no one really cares about it. Journalism about the poor is always done in this boo-hoo way. You have to go out and write about poor people, yes, but you have to be really good at it to make people find it interesting. No one wants to be sorry for people.
So get off your ass and get off your desk and get out there. Forget about the internet. Forget about other media. Go out into the real world. Go to places you don't know, talk to people you don't understand, whom you fear. Ask them what the world looks like through their eyes. Start from there. Surprise yourself.
Main Stream Media, are they lazy, or is it in their best interest not to report factual information.
In November 2007, I wrote a story entitled "Slavery Alive and Well In New York and the rest of the US" at Union Review , in which i run through the various ways in which is not only tolerated and unregulated but the facts are so underground the real tallies on these human rights infractions are almost impossible to figure. From the Long Island, NY perfume barons who had actual slaves living in their house, the slave like conditions in which undocumented workers in the construction industry must endure, to the prostitution industry that uses indentured servitude to pay their way to the states which the NY Times reported on way back in 1994. Before that story, back in 7-08, I wrote about the H1B Visa abuse, mostly in the tech sector, that a law firm actually had the audacity to produce a video training seminar where they boast on how to use this procedure. That story, "Corp Objective: Disqualify Qualified American Workers, Get H-1b Visa's For Non-Citizens." and it's follow-up, "Offshoring and H1B Visa abuse, the 1-2 punch to knockout US tech workers" are among my two most read entries since I have been writing about the labor movement. Which brings us to the newest in the trend of slavery and Visa abuse that is alive and well in these United States.
From:ABC News 3-07-08
Revolt in Mississippi: Indian Workers Claim 'Slave Treatment' Workers Call for Signal International to Be Prosecuted on Alleged Human Trafficking Charges
Rebelling against alleged "slave treatment," some 100 workers recruited from India staged a dramatic protest at a Mississippi shipyard Thursday, claiming they had been tricked into coming to the United States.
The workers, brought from India to work as welders and pipe-fitters at Signal International shipyard in Pascagoula, hurled their hard hats at company gates and demanded a federal investigation.
The workers claim they were defrauded by a Signal International recruiter in India who promised them green cards and permanent residency in the U.S. in exchange for a $20,000 fee. The workers allege that they instead received 10-month work visas, which was only enough time for them to pay off their recruitment fees.
The workers also claim that Signal forced them to live in substandard housing, with 24 men crammed into a small room. The men say Signal charged them more than $1,000 a month to live in company housing.
"For more than one year, hundreds of Indian workers at Signal International have been living like slaves," said former Signal worker Sabulal Vijayan. "Today the workers are coming out to declare their freedom. This trafficking needs to end."
The workers have reported their situation to the U.S. Department of Justice and are calling for Signal International to be prosecuted on human trafficking charges.
Signal International strongly denied the workers' allegations. The company released a statement saying, "Unfortunately, a few of the workers whom Signal had sponsored for H2B visas and recruited have made baseless and unfounded allegations against Signal concerning their employment and living conditions." According to the statement, "The vast majority of the workers whom Signal recruited has been satisfied with the employment and living conditions at Signal."
Signal called its housing complex "state of the art" and said government inspections have "found that Signal's practices and facilities are fully compliant with the law."
The Mississippi Gulf Coast has faced a severe labor shortage in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and many companies have replenished their workforce with overseas labor brought in under a guest worker plan. Human rights groups, however, charge that many foreign workers have been exploited by their employers.
"The U.S. State Department calls it 'a repulsive crime' when recruiters and employers in other parts of the world bind guest workers with crushing debts and threats of deportation," said Saket Soni of the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice. "This is precisely what is happening on the Gulf Coast."
How is it that we have temporary Visa's for Foreign workers when we have vast unemployment here in the United States? It's amazing how they are getting away with this, under the cloak of labor shortages, I fucking know plenty of welders who are quite capable of doing the job for an honest days pay. Never mind the fact that big business wants more Visa's. People's Weekly World has a more in depth article, from way back in March 2007:
Guest workers fired after protesting ‘slave’ conditions
Strike line formed when more than 200 workers walked off of the job at Signal, March 9, in solidarity with at 3 employees that they believe were wrongfully terminated and illegally imprisoned by management on Signal’s property. MIRA photo.
Hundreds of guest workers from India are protesting conditions in a Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard that immigrant rights activists compare to slavery.
Many of the workers gathered in a church on March 11 in this Gulf Coast port, after their employer, Signal International, threatened to send some of them home. Signal is a large corporation that repairs and services oil drilling platforms around the world.
According to Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, “they were hired in India by a labor recruiter sent by Signal. They had to pay exorbitant amounts to the company, to the recruiter and to the attorney who did the labor certification for them.”
Labor traffickers globalized Signal brought about 300 workers from India in December to work in its Mississippi yard, and another 300 to work in two yards in Texas. The workers are part of the H2B visa program, in which the U.S. government allows companies to recruit workers outside the country and bring them here under contract. The visas are good for 10 months, but the company can renew them for those it wants to keep longer. The workers must remain employed, and if they lose their jobs, they must go home.
Signal H2B worker Joseph Jacobs talking to WLOX reporter March 9, about the general despair of mistreated Indian H2B workers at the Signal International, LLC, plant in Pascagoula, MS, including a young man who attempted suicide when he learned that he might have to return to his country without the opportunity to earn the money he had borrowed to come to the United States. MIRA photo.
Workers say they were promised jobs as welders and fitters, and had to pay as much as $20,000 each to the recruiting contractor, Global Industry. Workers also say they were promised that Signal would refund the money.
“I had to pay $14,000,” says one of those workers, Joseph Jacob. “I worked for years in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, and I spent all the money I had to get the visa, which the recruiter promised would be a permanent residence visa. But that visa never came, and finally he said they could get us a H2B visa. That would give us 10 months of work, and if the company renewed it, we might get as much as 30 months. I thought that was the only way I’d ever be able to get back the money they’d taken.”
Signal put the Indian guest workers to work in the yard alongside U.S. workers doing the same job — welding and fitting. The company claims it pays workers from India the same wages as domestic employees. The guest workers say they were promised $18 an hour, but many were paid only half that after the company said they were unqualified. Chandler says the company recruiter in India determined the workers knew their jobs during the process of hiring them.
The new ‘company town’ Out of their wages, workers pay an additional $35 per day to stay in a labor camp Signal set up inside the yard. “The conditions are very bad here for the H2B workers,” Joseph says bitterly. “Twenty-four of us live in a room in a barracks that measures 12 feet by 18 feet, sleeping on bunk beds. There are two toilets for all of us and only four sinks. We have to get up at 3:30 in the morning, just so all of us have time to use the bathroom before going to work.”
Fired for meeting
Indian H2B workers from Signal International, LLC, marine fabrication company meet at a Pascagoula hall to strategize how to present their demands against substandard living and working conditions, March 4. MIRA photo.
A month ago, the Indian guest workers began meeting in a local church to discuss how they might get the company to refund the huge sums they paid to come to the U.S., and to protest the bad conditions. They organized a group, Signal H2B Workers United. It was after the company found out, they say, that it accused workers of being unqualified for their jobs and cut their pay. Eight were told they were completely incapable, and Signal announced it was sending them back to India immediately. Joseph was fired. “I am now terminated because I attended the meeting,” he says. “That’s what the company vice-president told me.”
Signal International President Dick Marler told the Mississippi Press that although workers had been employed since December, the company only discovered recently that they had no skills. Federal law required the company to fire them, he asserted.
Signal did not return calls for this story, but a statement on the company web site says the workers “receive the same pay and are taxed the same as all other Signal craft personnel. Workers from India have a reputation for being pleasant and hard-working.” It quotes Marler, who says, “We are fortunate the U.S. government has such a program that allows us to supplement our workforce during a time of emergency created by hurricanes.”
Deportations, company lock-up When the company announced the terminations, one worker disappeared. Another, Sabu Lal, slashed his wrists and was taken to the Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula. He told the Mississippi Press that dying would be better than being sent home.
“Lal and I are from the same place in India,” Joseph explains. “I knew he had sold his home, and had no place to return to. He was only able to make back a small part of the thousands of dollars he paid to the recruiter, and he said he couldn’t go home like that.”
Company security guards locked the fired workers in what they call the TV room, and wouldn’t let them leave.
Their co-workers contacted the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which went to the Pascagoula Police Department. The police went out to the yard and eventually freed the imprisoned workers. Outside the yard, dozens of workers and activists denounced the firings and mistreatment.
DANGER: Guest worker programs
Signal International plant in Pascagoula, MS. MIRA photo.
“We’ve learned about case after case of workers in Mississippi, Louisiana and all along the gulf in these conditions,” Chandler says. “There are thousands of guest workers who have been brought in since Katrina and subjected to this same treatment. Mexican guest workers in Amelia, La., were held in the same way. They also got organized, and came to Pascagoula to support the workers here when they heard what happened.”
According to Chandler, Signal imported hundreds of workers from Peru a year ago, and after sending them home, brought the present group of guest workers from India to replace them. He says the experience of these workers highlights the problems inherent in proposals introduced into Congress over the last two years, which would set up similar schemes for the importation of as many as 400,000 guest workers per year.
“Organizations that are fighting for the rights of workers and advocating on behalf of workers should be totally opposed to these kind of programs,” he says. “The conditions that people work in here are so exploitative they’re worse than the conditions for even undocumented workers.”
The Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance and the Southern Poverty Law Center plan to go to court to stop the deportations. Meanwhile, workers say they are determined to continue challenging the company until the money they paid the contractor is returned to them.
Suppression of News that matters
Whatever your thinking, know this as a fact, this information was out there a full year ago and the suppressive corporate media didn't acknowledge it.
It is us against them, at so many levels. Turn off the damn TV and get to learning.
We knew about the abuses in New Orleans, the facts are never reported on, just take a look at the article at Union review published by Chuck Lazette in Sept 0f 2007, entitled "In the Lawless Post-Katrina Cleanup, Construction Companies Are Preying on Workers", and its further backed by a comment I found on the upcoming attack on the guest commentary found in the NaplesNews that was published on Labor Day in 2007 about unionized teachers entitled "Labor Day ’07: Union bosses’ agenda scary", by corporate lobbyist, and the mind behind "The Center For Union Facts" and other disillusioning bullshit against the people of America, Rick Berman. Here is the counter "attack" and I use the terms loosely, because Mr.Charlie Ward uses FACTS in his comment.
More for Rick Berman: Why didn't the Right to Work Committee defend the rights of the American workers in Louisianna(which is, after all, a right to work state? Recently, the State of Arizona (which is also a right to work state), passed legislation stating that businesses can not hire illegal workers, and illegals can not own businesses. These illegals are leaving Arizona by hundreds a day, selling their houses, leaving for other states or heading back to their homeland. The U.S. workers of Arizona have had enough of their wages being undermined and demanded change--and they got it. Guess who is challenging this new law? The United States Chamber of Commerce. Where is the outrage by you and the Right To Work Committee? Union membership in Arizona has grown by 30% in the past two years. One wonders why. With respect to The Employee Free Choice Act,tell the truth. The glitch in the bill that you and the Right to Work Committee object to is not the way a union is voted in.(card vs. secret vote--they are both legal and valid, and it is diversionary to assert that this is the issue. The issue really is that this bill would stop management from stalling for time and finding bogus reasons not to sit down and negotiate--just as you and the Right to Work Committee assert that unions use this tactic to slow down a decertification process. What is really not wanted is the clause that would require a federal mediator to step in if management and the union representation can not come together, and any employer who commits unfair labor practices shall be fined $20,000.00 for each violation. Thus far it has been passed by the House and it is up to the Senate. They are being lobbied strongly against this bill---by you know who. You are correct, unions do lobby and donate to politicians that they perceive will help them with their issues. As you know,all union members have the right to use the Beck Right Law, which states that they can request that none of their dues be used for political interests to which they do not subscribe. It's a law. Conversely, anti- union organizations and businesses also lobby strongly and donate heavily for support of their interests. So, where's the beef? It's politics. Right now, the NLRB is stacked with anti-union people, mostly Republicans. And yes, you are right, if the Democrats win, the pendulum will swing the other way. That, too, is politics as usual. The only thing The Right to Work Committee has done has been to assure that an individual does not have to join a union or pay dues, even if there is a union in their workplace. But they have done their best to undermine labor laws for all workers: i.e. minimun wage, overtime laws, OSHA and reduced workmans comp entitlements , which have been reduced as much as 50% in some right to work states already, and other laws which protect the rights of workers both union and non-union. In closing, Mr. Berman, I would like to say that with all the faults unions have, they have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, education, betterment of all races, and for the developing of character in man than any other association of men. Clarence Darrow
Remember, before there is profit, there is labor. Abraham Lincoln (Republican President) Happy Labor Day. Charlie
One more note about Labor Day, according to WIN, Workers Independent News Radio on 3-14-08 "The Department of Transportation came under fire by Senator Byron Dorgan on Tuesday over a controversial “pilot program” that allows Mexican trucks to operate on US roads.", that program, which is Illegally being funded by Mary Peters DOT, was being pushed into operation directly by President Bush to have had a start date of Labor Day 2007.
There is a war against the workers here in the United States and using Labor Day to push our faces in it is showing you just how brazen they are. I don't think if you add all the facts you could come to any other conclusion. Rick Berman, who this site got it's name from, has now launched a new agenda, to find the worst unionized teacher, in the same week here in New York the United Federation of Teachers is fighting for the city to keep its funding for students. Yeah those bad teachers fighting for kids. What a bunch of bullies.
Well the story has been published in full at the Observer and as of an article published on Feb. 4th at The Observer, the US Senate and House committees are now planning hearings on workersafety in the poultry industry.
U.S. Senate and House committees, spurred by an Observer report on N.C. poultry giant House of Raeford Farms, are planning hearings on worker safety in the poultry industry, congressional leaders and aides said.
"All Americans should be horrified at the conditions reported in this investigation," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in an e-mail. He said he plans to hold a hearing this spring.
In a six-part series that began last Sunday, the Observer reported that House of Raeford, which has seven processing plants in the Carolinas, had masked the extent of injuries behind its plant walls.
You can catch the report and related articles in it's entirety at The Charlotte Observer
From: ILCA- The International Labor communications Association
FEDERAL WORKERS UNIONS VS. BUSH: ‘WE WON. THEY LOST. GAME OVER.’ By Mark Gruenberg PAI Staff Writer
Washington- Federal worker unions racked up two big wins against anti-worker GOP President George W.Bush after his regime, on Feb. 18, gave up its long-running attempt to impose new anti-worker personnel rules on the 135,000 employees at the Department of Homeland Security--and when Congress earlier dumped his similar scheme for 700,000 Defense Department workers.
The wins put paid to what AFGE General Counsel Mark Roth called “the Heritage Foundation agenda” to denigrate federal workers and to destroy worker protections. Of Bush’s plan, adopted from the Right Wing think tank’s treatises, Roth said: “We won. They lost. Game over.”
The federal worker union wins are important for all workers because AFGE President John Gage previously said that if Bush won at the two big federal agencies, he would try to extend the anti-worker personnel rules to other federal agencies, then state and local government workers and then to the private sector. In both DOD and the Homeland Security Department, theBush rules stripped workers of union rights, whistleblower protections, pay based on objective standards, and appeal rights, among other things. Pay and promotions would have been decided by presidential political appointees, and appeals of discipline rulings against DOD workers would have gone to a stacked board appointed by the Defense Secretary.
*Click within the Flash below to view the entire project
The Charlotte Observer has produced an unreal look into the dark side of todays meatpacking industry, with a investigative story entitled The Cruelest Cuts: The human cost of bringing poultry to your table. I urge all of my readers to check it out, according to their plants records they are safer than a toy store, can you imagine that?
Safer than a toy store?
Workplace safety experts also question a reported drop in musculoskeletal disorders. In 2006, 20.8 of every 10,000 poultry workers missed work because of MSDs, down from 88.3 in 1996, according to the Labor Department.
That 2006 rate would make poultry plants safer than toy stores. "It's intuitively implausible," said Dr. Michael Silverstein, a former OSHA policy chief. "Something is clearly wrong."
Here are the rates of MSDs resulting in lost time, per 10,000 workers:
47.4 Hobby, toy and game stores
38.6 Average for all industries
27.5 New car dealers
25.9 Pharmacies
20.8 Poultry processing
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Seems to me they probably have an tremendous illegal alien workforce, injuries occur, but don't get reported for fear of employer retaliation. God forbid they try to unionize, ICE will storm in and raid the place. Big props to the investigative writers at the Charlotte Observer, I can wait to read the entire work.
The U.S. has a long history of using its forces and laws to put down Labor. In the late 1800s Pinkerton agents, paid by the DOJ, became famous for infiltrating the Molly Maguires. In the early 1900s, state militias and local police were used to break strikes by breaking heads.
Today, the criminal immigrant isn't an Irish miner; it's a Mexican warehouse worker, meatpacker or hotel maid. And today's Pinkertons are ICE agents working outside their own rules and the rule of law to coddle exploiters and criminalize the exploited.
The latest incident is occurring in Long Island City, Queens, where the Teamsters of Local 805 are working to organize nearly 900 warehouse workers at a FreshDirect warehouse.
INDIAN WORKERS TO LAUNCH HUNGER STRIKE IN DC
