bapifar01: This week in the War on Workers

Monday, 5 September 2011

This week in the War on Workers

For this Labor Day weekend update on the War on Workers, let's revisit a video we saw from Change to Win earlier in the summer:

Bob Herbert writes:

Three to four trillion dollars worth of improvements will be needed over the next decade just to bring the infrastructure into a reasonable state of repair. Meanwhile, we?ve got legions of unemployed construction workers, manufacturing workers, engineers and others who are ready and eager to step into the breach, to take on jobs ranging from infrastructure maintenance and repair to infrastructure design and new construction. It shouldn?t require a genius to put together those two gigantic pieces of America?s economic puzzle ? infrastructure and unemployment.

And Sarah Jaffe counts down the five worst so-called job creation ideas from the GOP.

Check in on Monday for lots more perspective on where working people stand now and why it's important to celebrate and fight for labor, organized and not.

Assorted

A strike at the Congress Plaza hotel has passed the 3,000 days mark.
How can we improve teacher preparation?
The foreign students who walked off the job at Hershey are working to draw attention to the J-1 visa program under which they were in the United States:
The Summer Work Travel program was originally fashioned during the cold war to promote America to foreign students. Now it annually accounts for 130,000 college students, in low-wage jobs, while another 200,000 J-1 visas are issued to workers in year-long trainee and intern programs.
Unlike other guestworker programs, J-1 employers don?t have to advertise jobs locally to show that Americans don?t want them, and there is no limit on the number of J-1 visas issued. The H2A agricultural guestworker program brings 40,000 workers while H2B, the non-agricultural program, is capped at 65,000.
After Michigan public workers got a 3 percent raise for 2010-2011, the legislature passed a bill forcing them to pay ... 3 percent of their salaries into their retirement healthcare fund. Now, an appeals court has overturned that requirement.
The IBEW is putting pressure on NV Energy for some extremely good reasons:
America?s leading consumer research firm once gave NV Energy the highest ranking for customer service in the West. But after years the eliminating service line crews and the closure of all but one customer service office in the state - NV Energy ranks dead last. Executives have pushed these cuts while reporting over $225 million in profit and paying CEO Michael Yackira nearly $5.3 million. And now, NV Energy is breaking its promise to retirees by slashing their health care when they need it most.

The Shame on NV Energy campaign has a very active Facebook page filled with pissed-off customers.
Public Citizen:
Over the past 20 years, at least 523 workers have died and more than 43,000 have suffered heat-related injuries serious enough to result in at least one day away from work. However, because many worker injuries and deaths go unreported and many serious injuries are not counted in company data, even these numbers are probably a vast underestimate of the true scale of the problem, the groups said.
?The epidemic of worker injury and death due to extreme heat exposure is only projected to worsen with global warming, as we see more frequent days of extreme heat,? said Dr. Sammy Almashat, researcher with Public Citizen?s Health Research Group. ?Yet OSHA has repeatedly refused to act on recommendations from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and its own advisory committee to enact a heat standard that would protect workers from these entirely preventable health effects. As a result, tens of thousands of workers have suffered serious injury or death while OSHA essentially relies on employers to police themselves.?
Speaking of workers who are vulnerable to heat-related illness and death, the United Farmworkers are continuing their march to Sacramento while California Gov. Jerry Brown proposes inadequate changes to existing legislation, arguing that the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act, a bill that's been passed repeatedly by the state legislature, hasn't had an adequate debate.
In another heat-related story, nearly 300 workers at factories making H&M clothes passed out over a period of two days. H&M says it's investigating.