Tuesday, August 5, 2014

ELECTION

► In today’s Columbian — Primary election ballots are due today — Voters have until 8 p.m. to drop off their primary election ballot or have it postmarked for mail delivery.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Check out the list of the Washington State Labor Council’s endorsements for Congress and State Legislature. Contact your local Central Labor Council to find out about labor endorsements in city and county races.

► At KPLU — Primary will winnow crowded fields — Among others, the primary will winnow the crowded fields for Rep. Doc Hastings’ open central Washington Congressional seat and a Seattle-area State Senate race to replace Sen. Adam Kline, who retired.

BOEING

► In the P.S. Business Journal — Union wins NLRB fight with Boeing, company must hand over pay, productivity data — Boeing has been ordered by the National Labor Relations Board to supply wage rate and productivity data to the company’s engineering union. The ruling, which was made public by SPEEA on Monday, is the result of filings made during contract talks in 2012.

ALSO at The Stand — NLRB: Boeing illegally ‘tainted’ bargaining

STATE GOVERNMENT

► In today’s Seattle Times — Ex-governors ask court to let Legislature try again on schools — In one of several friend-of-the-court briefs filed Monday in the McCleary school-funding case, five former Washington governors asked the Supreme Court for more patience with the Legislature.

► In today’s News Tribune — State schools chief: Sanctions not needed yet — Lawmakers should be given until the 2015 legislative session to make progress in fixing how the state pays for public education, Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn said in a brief to the state Supreme Court.

► Also in today’s Columbian — Benton complaint critical of Inslee — State Sen. Don Benton says Gov. Jay Inslee’s decision to not allow Washington State Patrol officers to escort state grain inspectors past picket lines and safely into United Grain Corp.’s Vancouver facility constitutes official misconduct.

ALSO TODAY at The Stand — Benton demands escort service amid lockout

LOCAL

► In The Columbian — ‘Favoritism, cronyism and pressure to conform’ are evident to Clark County employees — Despite being generally satisfied with their jobs, Clark County employees say they view the county as “an increasingly political organization where favoritism, cronyism and pressure to conform appear to influence how policies and procedures may be implemented,” according to a work environment survey.

► In today’s Spokesman-Review — Spokane city job seekers get pass on past — Spokane Mayor David Condon said Monday the city would join a nationwide trend to “ban the box” and no longer ask city job applicants about their criminal background. He said revising the city’s employment application would open “another pathway to access” for people with criminal pasts and give them “more equal footing for meaningful employment.” With the move, Spokane joins almost 70 other cities and counties in choosing to ignore an applicant’s criminal history if it doesn’t pertain to the job at hand.

► In today’s News Tribune — JBLM workers facing layoffs — As many as 102 civil service workers at Joint Base Lewis-McChord could lose their jobs by mid-January as a result of defense cutbacks. That warning came in a letter Friday to the 1,500 workers in the base’s Installation Management Command. That letter said the 102-person reduction-in-force was a worst-case scenario.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

► From Bloomberg — On immigration relief, Obama’s obstacle is political, not legal (by Josh Eidelson) — Legal scholars say the president actually has discretion to go much further than he’s likely to choose to given his political constraints. That could include granting “deferred action” — temporary relief from the threat of deportation and the opportunity to get a work visa — to most of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the United States.

► From the National Constitutional Center — Obama’s use of executive orders in historical terms — President Obama has issued 184 orders so far in his presidency. His predecessor, President George W. Bush, issued 291 orders over eight years, while President Bill Clinton had 364 executive orders during his two terms in office. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the most, 3,728 orders, as the country dealt with the Great Depression and World War II. President Truman issued a robust 896 executive orders.

► At Politico — Poll: Congress approval hits new low — For the first time, a majority of Americans (51%) said that they disapprove of the way their member of Congress is “handling his or her job.”

► In The Hill — NLRB ratifies actions of unconstitutional board — The board said that it had ratified a host of administrative, personnel and procurement actions initially taken when the board was unconstitutionally constructed.

► In today’s NY Times — The tax dodge goes on (editorial) — Evidence of excessive corporate tax avoidance keeps piling up. And so do Congress’s excuses, mainly from Republicans, for not doing anything to curb it.

NATIONAL

► At Truth-Out.org — Amid protests, ALEC launches new spinoff to influence local governments — State legislators and corporate lobbyist members from across the country will sit on task forces designed to review and vote on conservative “model” legislation that will likely travel from the Dallas Hilton Anatole’s luxury conference rooms to official state house chambers, as lawmakers often pass off ALEC model bills as their own.

► In the NY Times — In New Jersey, workers’ advocates aim to put paid sick leave on ballot — Frustrated in their efforts to make paid sick leave mandatory for businesses throughout New Jersey, workers’ advocates are now pressing their campaign city by city, emboldened by laws recently passed in Newark and Jersey City, as well as in New York City.

► From AP — LinkedIn will pay $6 million in back wages, damages after multi-state labor investigation —  Professional networking service LinkedIn has agreed to pay nearly $6 million in unpaid wages and damages to 359 current and former employees in California, Illinois, Nebraska and New York, the DOL said.

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► In the New Republic — NFL cheerleaders should be your fair pay heroes — Cheerleading might sound like a fun job, but as lawsuits against five NFL teams this year show, there’s lots of hard work that goes into the smiling faces and crisp routines — work that is barely rewarded. Cheerleaders for the Oakland Raiders, Buffalo Bills, Cincinnati Bengals, and New York Jets allege that they are paid less than minimum wage — saying their annual salaries sometimes come to just $2 an hour, when time spent at games and practices are taken into account — and that they have been made to use that small sum of money to buy their own travel, hair styling, and makeup.

But cheerleaders aren’t the only ones getting screwed over by low pay. We’re all working very hard. And many of us aren’t getting a whole lot in return. The bottom 60 percent of the workforce hasn’t gotten a raise in a decade, and, for some, pay has even fallen. That’s in spite of the fact that productivity has continually climbed higher, as have corporate profits — both outpacing wage growth by a long shot. The basic bargain that Americans put in a hard day’s work and share in some of the bounty they produce has been broken.

The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.