Tuesday, November 10, 2015

STATE GOVERNMENT

► From IAM 751 — Give and take: We give billions, Boeing takes jobs — IAM President Jon Holden on Monday:

The aerospace industry itself is not shrinking. We are seeing record revenues and record production right now. Our aerospace workers are delivering more airplanes a year at levels previously thought unattainable. However, Boeing has made a series of purposeful decisions to move jobs out of Washington state because that was the easy way for it to meet job “creation” targets that other states have required Boeing to meet in order to receive their tax incentives.

Other states did it right. Missouri, Oklahoma, Alabama and South Carolina already require a specific amount of jobs and capital investment for the tax incentives they were willing to spend. This was responsible of them. We need our state to be responsible as well.

► From KIRO-TV — Unions press Boeing to keep jobs in Washington — The message delivered by the president of Boeing’s Machinists Union was simple. “We can’t afford aerospace tax incentives that don’t grow good jobs,” said Jon Holden, IAM Local 751 president. It was timed to coincide with the day, two years ago, that the Washington state Legislature held an extraordinary special Saturday session.

► In today’s (Everett) Herald — Unions blast Boeing for paring jobs since 2013 tax break extension — Two years ago state lawmakers rushed into special session to extend a suite of incentives to the aerospace industry worth billions of dollars in tax savings to the Boeing Co. And that move helped convince the aerospace giant to build its new 777 passenger jet in Everett. Yet since then Boeing has shed 3,669 jobs in Washington, union leaders and an Everett lawmaker said Monday.

► From AP — Unions seek link of aerospace tax breaks, state workforce

► MUST-READ in today’s News Tribune — Courage lacking among Western State leadership (by Joseph Wainer, MD) — We are often the closest thing to a family that our patients have. We have been here, for them, 24 hours every day, seven days every week, year after year, for the past 144 years. It breaks our hearts not to be able to provide the care they need. Those of us who work every day with patients feel a sense of futility as we’re asked to put more effort into paperwork fixes which simply give the illusion of care. Yet, our desperate requests for more time and more people to work with patients have been marginalized as naive and simply ignored. Our patients have suffered as a result. Some have died. Our staff have been seriously injured. We’ve endured, as much as possible, the overriding imperative handed from the top down, to cut costs.

► In today’s Olympian — Burned twice by wildfires, bill is due (editorial) — The bill for fighting Washington wildfires in 2015 is $137 million more than what the Legislature provided

LOCAL

► In today’s Tri-City Herald — Kadlec nurses, supporters rally as contract talks continue — Hundreds of Kadlec Regional Medical Center nurses and their supporters rallied at John Dam Plaza in Richland on Monday afternoon, chanting, waving signs and calling for a fair contract after months of negotiations have failed to yield a new pact. “There was a time when Kadlec chose to value its RNs,” said Kelsi Duncan, a neonatal intensive-care nurse and part of the negotiating team. “They chose to reward their nurses with competitive pay and compensation in the way of time off. Because there was a time when Kadlec realized how important time away from the hospital was.”

ALSO at The Stand — Stand united with Kadlec RNs at Nov. 9 rally in Tri-Cities

► In today’s Bellingham Herald — Auction process begins for Haggen’s non-core stores — The auction began on Monday and is scheduled to go through Wednesday. Many of the Washington and Oregon stores up for auction are scheduled to be auctioned off Wednesday.

► From the P.S. Business Journal — Albertson’s tries to buy back stores it sold to Haggen — During bankruptcy auction action this week, Albertsons is now the bidder for 36 of the stores in Washington, Oregon and Arizona.

► From The Onion — Housing prices spike as tech employee takes stroll through neighborhood

FIGHT FOR 15

► From Huffington Post — Fast-food strikes and protests to hit hundreds of cities — Letasha Irby says she wants to be part of the next phase of the Fight for 15, the labor union-backed campaign that has shamed low-wage employers and helped spur minimum wage hikes around the country. The campaign launched three years ago this month with a walkout by restaurant workers in New York City. It has since spread to cities around the country and to industries well beyond fast food. Spokespeople for the campaign say it plans to launch one-day worker strikes in 270 cities on Tuesday, its largest demonstration yet.

ALSO at The Stand — “It’s Our Time!” See livestream of workers’ day of action TODAY — “It’s Our Time” livestreaming of workers’ rising up in Seattle, Spokane, Yakima, Olympia and across the state. Watch at WorkingWA.org.

► From Al Jazeera America — Fast-food workers plan nationwide rallies with eye toward 2016 — Protesters also plan to rally at the site of the latest GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, scheduled for Tuesday evening. The day’s protest is, in part, focused on bringing Fight For $15’s demands to the fore in the 2016 election.

JOB, JOBS, JOBS

NOTE: The Stand doesn’t generally post job openings — except for staff positions at the Washington State Labor Council :) — but we’ve been receiving a number of them of late, so we thought we’d make an exception:

► From WFSE — WFSE seeking Labor Advocates, Council Reps — The Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE), AFSCME Council 28 is seeking Labor Advocates responsible for grievance arbitrations and contract and mid-term negotiations, and Council Representatives responsible for daily member contact and activation.

► From WSLC — Wash. State Labor Council seeks Legislative and Policy Director

MORE union staff opportunities in Washington state can be found HERE.

► From USAJOBS.org — FAA seeking electronics specialists — The Federal Aviation Administration has immediate federal government job opening for electronics specialists locally and across the country who, once hired, will belong to the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists bargaining unit.

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

► In the San Francisco Sentinel — The TPP is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history (by Chris Hedges) — When I reached him by phone in Washington, D.C., Ralph Nader told me:

The TPP, along with the WTO [World Trade Organization] and NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], is the most brazen corporate power grab in American history. It allows corporations to bypass our three branches of government to impose enforceable sanctions by secret tribunals. These tribunals can declare our labor, consumer and environmental protections [to be] unlawful, non-tariff barriers subject to fines for noncompliance. The TPP establishes a transnational, autocratic system of enforceable governance in defiance of our domestic laws.

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

► In today’s Washington Post — Appeals court rules against Obama’s immigration plan — A federal appeals court on Monday ruled against President Obama’s plan to shield up to 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation, dealing another blow to the administration’s effort to remake immigration laws and likely setting up a final battle in the Supreme Court next year.

► From The Hill — Dems abandon Obama on ‘Cadillac tax’ — The Democratic Party is abandoning support for the “Cadillac tax” in the healthcare reform law, leaving President Obama as one of the last defenders of the policy. The tax on “gold-plated” insurance plans was included in ObamaCare over the furious opposition of labor unions, who warned it would cause employers to abandon generous coverage in droves.

ALSO at The Stand — Recess! Tell your Representative what you think about ‘Cadillac tax’

► From The Hill — Firefighters union presses GOP candidates on 9/11 health benefits — The IAFF will run a political advertisement Tuesday, pressuring the presidential candidates to extend healthcare benefits for 9/11 first responders who have been diagnosed with cancer and other diseases.

NATIONAL

► In today’s NY Times — Large companies game H-1B immigration program, and jobs leave the U.S. — Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. Those firms have used the visas to bring their employees, mostly from India, for large contracts to take over work at American businesses. And as the share of H-1B visas obtained by outsourcing firms has grown, more Americans say they are being put out of work, or are seeing their jobs moved overseas.

► From Bloomberg — Ford UAW workers to vote on pact with $30,000 more in pay, benefits — Ford Motor Co. employees represented by the United Auto Workers will begin voting on a proposed four-year contract that includes $30,000 in additional wages and bonuses and $9 billion in factory investments expected to create or secure 8,500 jobs, the union said.

EDITOR’S NOTE — Union Yes!

► From AFL-CIO Now — Trumka applauds Missouri students’ collective action against racism — Said the AFL-CIO president:

We applaud the courageous actions of students and faculty at the University of Missouri who have come together to demand change in response to racism and discrimination on campus.  In particular, we commend the university’s football players for their brave stand at a time when college athletes receive too little credit for their enormous contributions to their universities.

► From Huffington Post — This global study shows why people go to work sick — new research finds people around the globe are prone to working when they should be home in bed, most likely due to a combination of high job demands and low job security.

► In the Washington Post — Some retirees are making a terrible mistake with their pensions — Pension advances are complex products that offer retirees a lump-sum cash advance in exchange for all, or part, of their future pension payments.

► In today’s Washington Post — Scott Walker is a diminished figure — except in the state he governs — Although his days of lofty foreign policy speeches are gone, Walker is back to what propelled him to the national stage in the first place: street battle with Wisconsin’s Democrats. And he has reemerged on the state stage as powerful as ever.

► From TPM — The decline of labor, the increase of inequality (Part 1 of the 4-part special series: The March to Inequality: How Did We Get Here?”) — America’s labor unions, once a stalwart of the American economy, are now in danger of fading into oblivion, and with them, America’s defense against increasing income inequality.

TODAY’S MUST-READ

► In The Nation — Now, white people are dying from terrible economic policies, too — A demographic analysis of public health trends in recent years shows that middle-aged whites are living more miserable and sicker lives — and also appear to be dying at a higher rate. This twist in America’s demography of death speaks to a societal malaise: The economic decline began well before the latest recession, but coincides with the economic dislocation that accompanied corporate globalization and “free trade” policies. Then the late 1990s brought a withering of the welfare system, leaving many older Americans facing an economic cliff after the financial collapse and debt crisis… These socioeconomic factors converge against the backdrop of a shattered American Dream: In their analysis of the results, the authors write that since economic growth has sputtered since the 1970s, “with widening income inequality, many of the baby-boom generation are the first to find, in midlife, that they will not be better off than were their parents.”

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