Wisconsin State AFL-CIO announces a new Good Jobs Agenda

Wisconsin Sustainable Jobs Act and high-speed rail development are a great start

Madison - A better economic future is possible for Wisconsin. Many of the jobs that we have lost during the Great Recession are not coming back but they can, and they must, be replaced with jobs that are just as good or better. Wisconsin doesn’t have to become a second-class state with high unemployment and a deteriorating standard of living.

We can rebuild Wisconsin with jobs that we can be proud of, but it will take a commitment from all of us to:
1. Create a Green Economy for working people.
2. Support and expand our manufacturing sector.
3. Strengthen the public services that make Wisconsin a great place to live.

As part of our Good Jobs Agenda, the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO strongly supports the Wisconsin Sustainable Jobs Act proposed by State Rep. Cory Mason. This legislation will help create a demand for skilled workers, and develop career pathways for potentially thousands of Wisconsin residents to move into family-supporting weatherization jobs.

“The Wisconsin Sustainable Jobs Act creates high-quality employment for individuals, as well as greater ecological and economic stability for our state. It will even contribute to energy independence for our nation. This is a win across the board,” says Phil Neuenfeldt, Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer.

The legislation includes prevailing wage requirements; ensures that a percentage of all of the weatherization work is done by local, unemployed or low-income workers; and requires contractors to participate in apprenticeship programs.

“Rep. Mason should be commended for his attention to the needs of unemployed Wisconsin residents,” says Neuenfeldt. “It is critical that we hire within the state, train people properly, and make sure that they can support their families as they work towards a greener future for all of us.”

The unveiling of Wisconsin Sustainable Jobs Act comes on the heels of another important green jobs break through. Last week, Governor Jim Doyle and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan announced Wisconsin is receiving $823 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to build high-speed passenger rail service, creating an estimated 13,000 high-quality jobs.

Wisconsin is receiving $810 million to build high-speed passenger rail service between Milwaukee and Madison, including construction of track, passenger stations, signaling and other infrastructure improvements. Our state is also receiving $12 million to install crossovers between Chicago and Milwaukee. In addition to Wisconsin’s funding, the Minnesota Department of Transportation has received $1 million to make final determinations on a route between Wisconsin and the Twin Cities.

"These family-wage construction jobs are going to put a lot of our neighbors back on their feet," said Neuenfeldt. "Not only that, but thanks to the Obama and Doyle administrations, Wisconsin is poised to be the nation’s leader in high-speed rail manufacturing."

In July, Governor Doyle signed an agreement with the Spanish train manufacturer Talgo to establish new assembly and maintenance facilities in the state.

Wisconsin State AFL-CIO Good Jobs Agenda

1. Create a Green Economy for working people.
Governor Doyle’s Global Warming Task Force recommendations provide a needed platform from which to discuss the development of new jobs in the green economy. However, the green economy does not automatically translate into green dollars in the pockets of Wisconsin workers.
When Wisconsin taxpayers invest in the Green Economy, the jobs should stay in Wisconsin.

It is essential that workers in newly created green jobs be able to bargain for the wages, benefits and working conditions necessary to stabilize and rebuild our communities. The American middle class was created through the higher wages and benefits negotiated by millions of workers through their unions. In other words, green jobs should be union jobs.

2. Support and expand our manufacturing sector.
Wisconsin’s workforce is competitive in the global economy. Productivity, skill and quality set us apart, and will continue to do so as long as we make the investments needed to stay ahead.

Workforce training continues to be a priority, but retraining is pointless unless there are new jobs.

The manufacturing sector needs support through strategic and responsible public investment to help businesses replace outdated equipment and procedures with the technologies that will make new jobs possible.

3. Strengthen the public services that make Wisconsin a great place to live.
When public sector budgets are slashed it is a double blow. Not only do we lose family-sustaining jobs, but citizens who rely on our schools, courts, hospitals, public safety systems and other institutions are at risk of not receiving the quality services that they deserve.

There are currently over 3,000 vacant positions in state government alone, the result of employees who retired without being replaced, due to budget cuts.

Tight budgets are often used as an excuse to dismantle quality public services through outsourcing or privatizing public sector jobs. This often results in inferior service at a higher cost to taxpayers. Accurate cost-benefit analysis and strict accountability are needed any time that privatization is considered to protect the interest of taxpayers.

Join Us in Las Vegas to Build Retiree Power

by Barbara J. Easterling

I hope you will consider joining me April 5-8 in Las Vegas for Building Retiree Power, the 2010 national convention of the Alliance for Retired Americans. We will offer a wide array of education and training opportunities to improve your skills as a grassroots activist and as a leader of a local or state retiree group.

It may be a new year, but many of last year’s challenges – health care, retirement security, and a lingering recession – still remain as great as ever. The future of our retirement, and what will be there for the generations that follow us, will be dramatically affected by what our leaders do this year.

I’ve heard experts say that in this November’s elections older voters will make up over one-third of the turn-out. If the health care debate has been any indication, retirees will be the object of a lot of attention – and a lot of misinformation. We must do our homework on the candidates and the issues, and educate our neighbors so they will be able to separate fact from fiction come election time.

The Alliance convention will feature noted speakers and training workshops on topics such as health care reform, Social Security, community organizing, fund-raising, and using new on-line communications tools such as Facebook to reach more retirees in your area.

For more information about the Alliance for Retired Americans national convention, to be held April 5-8 at Bally’s Las Vegas, visit www.RetiredAmericans.org or call 888/373-6497.

Hope to see you in Las Vegas!

Barbara J. Easterling is president of the Alliance for Retired Americans. She was previously the secretary-treasurer of the Communications Workers of America.

OIG Says USPS Overpaid Federal Government $75 Billion

A Stunning Announcement:

Burrus Update 03-2010, Jan. 20, 2010

The Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has issued a stunning announcement [PDF]:
The USPS has been overcharged $75 billion in contributions to the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) pension fund.

After an in-depth investigation, the OIG has concluded that an inequitable system for computing the Postal Service’s CSRS pension responsibility has caused the dramatic overpayment. The OIG study [PDF] was conducted in conjunction with the Hay Group, a well-known economic consulting firm.

The funding error follows two previous findings that the Postal Service had been required to overfund its pension obligations. In 2002 it was determined that the Postal Service was on track to overfund CSRS by $78 billion, and in 2003 the USPS was overcharged $27 billion for CSRS military service credits. The earlier overpayments were corrected by legislation adopted in 2003 and 2006, respectively.

The newest overfunding debacle, if corrected, would more than offset the Postal Service’s deficit from Fiscal Year 2009 and the expected shortfalls in FY 2010 and 2011. The doomsday predictors of the imminent demise of the Postal Service must now find a new rationale for their efforts to dismantle postal services.

The cry for a new business model and legislative relief ring hollow when USPS financial difficulties could be fully resolved by returning to the Postal Service the overpayments made to date. Realigning the network, reducing employee compensation and benefits, and transferring the cost of universal service to individual mailers can now be exposed for the fraudulent exercises they represent. Instead, we can engage in a meaningful dialogue about the future of hard-copy communication and the role of postal services in the 21st century — without the looming threat of bankruptcy.

This report is good news for a beleaguered government service. USPS service standards and productivity have remained at high levels; the economy is recovering, and the black cloud of fiscal insolvency could be removed. All parties in the postal community who wish to be of assistance must join in an effort to correct the inequity and relieve the Postal Service of the unjustified funding requirement.

In the meantime, we can take a deep breath and stop the momentum for another round of harmful postal “reform.” And after the attrition of 115,000 APWU-represented positions since 2002, we would appreciate a public recognition that our members have contributed their share.

William Burrus
President

Terrence Wall Kicks-Off Campaign against Wisconsin Working Families

Republican Primary Candidate Pays No State Income Taxes, Says He Owes No State Income Taxes

Madison, WI – Wisconsin State AFL-CIO President David Newby said today that multi-millionaire real estate magnate Terrence Wall had a lot of explaining to do about media reports that he paid no state income taxes in four of the last five years.

“Working families want to know why a multi-millionaire is saying he owes no state income taxes,” said Newby, “They also want to know why he isn’t paying any state income tax. What makes Terrance Wall special?”

According to a personal financial disclosure report Wall recently filed, Wall reported income between $3,494,197 to $15,273,332 and reported personal assets totaling $58,584,046 to $129,862,000. In a November interview with WisPolitics, Wall scoffed at the idea he’s not paying his fair share in taxes, saying, “There’s no such thing as ‘What is your fair share?”

“Wall supports the same economic policies that threw this country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and he opposes the solutions we need to get us out of it,” said David Newby, President, Wisconsin State AFL-CIO. “Working families are angry with tax cuts for the wealthiest few, unfair trade deals that have outsourced jobs overseas, and rising health care costs.”

Newby cited Wall’s past support for President Bush’s economic policies and unfair trade deals, like NAFTA and expanded trade with China, that have shipped Wisconsin jobs overseas.

“Wall has said Wall Street shouldn’t be regulated and that our health care system isn’t broken. He couldn’t be more wrong,” Newby said, “I believe comments like that show how out of touch he is with working families who want Wall Street bankers to be held accountable, and who need health insurance reform and an economy that works for everyone.”

The Wisconsin State AFL-CIO represents over 250,000 members in over 1,000 affiliated unions and is a key part of the nation's largest and strongest labor federation—the AFL-CIO, which unites 10.5 million working women and men of every race and ethnicity and from every walk of life.

Citations:
Wispolitics: 1/15/2010 –
http://www.wispolitics.com/index.iml?Article=182235
The Wall Report: 5/2007 –
http://www.twallproperties.com/ace-files/TheWallReportMay2007.pdf
The Wall Report: 2/2008 –
http://www.twallproperties.com/ace-images/TheWallReportFebruary2008.pdf

Workers in Small Offices We Want to Hear From You

APWU Web News Article 001-2010, Jan. 5, 2010

Postal employees in small offices whose hours have been reduced while managerial hours have been increased are being asked to complete and return a union-sponsored questionnaire [PDF] on the subject. Work-hours for part-time flexible clerks at many small offices have been slashed, APWU President William Burrus noted in a column in the January/February issue of The American Postal Worker magazine.

The National Agreement limits management’s right to shift work from clerks to other employees, Burrus wrote, but management continues to violate arbitrators’ rulings on the issue. “While the APWU-USPS contact recognizes the right of supervisors and postmasters to perform bargaining-unit work in small offices, arbitrators have repeatedly concluded that supervisory work cannot increase at the expense of work for clerks,” he said.

“Some employees have had hours reduced to two hours per week; others have been forced to travel to distant offices; many have surrendered — and terminated their employment. In most instances, these reductions should not have taken place,” Burrus wrote.

The Postal Service persists in violating prohibitions on increasing the workload of postmasters, postmaster-reliefs, and other supervisors at the same time that clerk hours are being reduced, the union president said. The union and management have agreed that Rural Letter Carriers cannot perform clerk work (including when they are on light duty), but management often violates this ban as well.

The union has initiated a series of national-level grievances seeking to have the work returned and to make affected employees ‘whole,’ Burrus wrote.

Employees who worked at small offices between 1993 and the present are asked to complete the survey, which appears in the January/February issue of the magazine, along with a Business Reply Envelope.

Completed forms should be mailed to:

APWU Survey
1300 L Street NW
Washington DC 20005

The Gift America Needs Most: Manufacturing

by Leo W. Gerard, Dec 22, 2009

In Columbus, Ohio, a 5-year-old girl jumped onto Santa’s lap last month and asked if he could give her dad a job as an elf.

Mike Smith, who works the Santa station at the Polaris Fashion Place in Columbus, asked why, the Wall Street Journal reported. The little girl in the Dora the Explorer sweatshirt responded:

Because my daddy’s out of work, and we’re about to lose our house.

Happy Holidays, America!

The gift this country needs most this holiday season is an economy built on a solid foundation, one that will provide middle class, family-supporting jobs now and into the future.

That present would not be another version of Monopoly for Wall Street wannabees. It would not be Barbie-goes-to-the-mall-credit-cards for youngsters in families already maxed out on their plastic and their mortgages.

The metaphorical gift our economy could really use is an Erector Set—a strong steel construction kit from which the intrepid manufacture airplanes, automobiles, robots on motorized tracks, backhoes, helicopters, skyscrapers, cranes, even working Ferris wheels.

That’s because, most of all, this economy needs manufacturing. Enthralled by the glitz, glamour and bogus bonuses of Wall Street, we’ve allowed multinationals to export our grit and grimy factories overseas. Factories that made clothing, sports shoes, large appliances, tires, glass and so much more in big and small U.S. towns—now transferred to China and Indonesia and India, lured not just by cheap labor, but also by lavish government subsidies and absent environmental regulations.

Manufacturing, the basis of any strong economy, has continuously declined as a percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product since its World War II peak, when it was 28.3 percent. Its new low is less than half of that—12 percent.

Here’s the most obvious difference between an economy based on manufacturing and one based on Wall Street: You can hold the handlebars of a Harley-Davidson in your hands, but just try grasping a derivative.

The paper traders on Wall Street bundle mortgages into exotic financial instruments called derivatives, sell those, buy pseudo-insurance to secure them, then engage in legal betting on whether the “instruments” will soar or fail. This kind of activity caused the financial collapse in 2008. Frankly, beyond being incredibly risky, these transactions don’t create true wealth; they just generate big bonuses.

In manufacturing, an entrepreneur takes raw material and adds energy, ingenuity, tools and labor to create a product, like steel, that has real value and can be sold on the market to someone who needs it to combine with other materials to make finished merchandise like motorcycles or refrigerators. And those manufactured items are durable and valuable.

In the process of manufacturing, many people are employed—to get the raw materials, whether it’s limestone or iron or trees, to transport it to a factory, to generate electricity to run the factory, to transform the raw material at the factory, to deliver the product to the buyer, to pave the roads and build the bridges and repair the railroads necessary for all that transportation, to design the highways and factories and overpasses, to feed all the workers lunch.

Tragically, the Great Recession caused by Wall Street has hit manufacturing hard. While unemployment is at a 25-year high of 10 percent, the unemployment in manufacturing has run a couple of percentage points higher than that. More than 2.1 million manufacturing workers have been thrown out of their jobs since the recession began in December 2007.

These workers are the parents of children in Dora the Explorer sweatshirts who are asking Santa for elf jobs.

These are the workers who have cut back on doctor visits or medical treatments—although almost half are suffering from depression or anxiety, a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults showed.

These are the workers who told the pollsters that the frustration and stress of unemployment has provoked conflicts and arguments with family and friends.

These are the workers who have lost their homes or have been threatened with eviction or foreclosure, who have difficulty paying bills and have resorted to borrowing money from friends and relatives. These are the workers profiled by Anne Hull of the Washington Post in a story that began by describing desperate laid-off Warren, Ohio, residents in a pawn shop:

At campaign time, they are celebrated as the people who built America. Now they just want to know how much they can get for a wedding band.

These are workers selling their precious keepsakes to survive 15 percent unemployment in an area along the Mahoning River that once was the world’s fifth-largest steel producer—until it lost 50,000 of those family-supporting manufacturing jobs and another 11,500 middle-class jobs at the Lordstown General Motors plant, all in a decade.

These workers could be holding good, steady factory jobs if the United States had implemented a manufacturing strategy, the way China, Japan, Germany, even the Netherlands, did long ago.

Just last week, the Obama administration offered a gift to all those who believe in manufacturing. It is that strategy for America. Its formal name is the White House Plan to Revitalize American Manufacturing.

For that 5-year-old girl in the Dora the Explorer sweatshirt. For her furloughed father and her family. For the future of this country, let’s give ourselves the gift of a future constructed on a solid economic foundation. Let’s implement that plan to revitalize American manufacturing immediately. Millions of unemployed workers can’t wait.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold

On Senate Passage of the Health Care Bill

“The Senate health care bill is far from perfect. I am deeply disappointed it does not include a public option to help keep down costs and I also don’t like the deal making that secured votes with unjustifiable provisions. I will work to improve the bill, including restoring the public option, when the final version is drafted.

“But, while this bill could and should have been much stronger, it includes very important provisions for Wisconsin that I worked to include. The bill will bring more Medicare dollars to Wisconsin by improving the unfair reimbursement formula that has siphoned money away from the state for years, and by rewarding the high-quality, low-cost care practiced at places like Gundersen Lutheran and the Marshfield Clinic. Wisconsin taxpayers also win because we will see a boost in Medicaid funding, so our state isn’t harshly penalized for its leadership in expanding coverage. The bill also ends discrimination by insurance companies against people with preexisting conditions, expands coverage to 30 million more Americans and reduces the deficit by an estimated $132 billion. Despite the bill's flaws, it does meet the test of real reform, and the cost of inaction was much too high.”

Four Good Reasons to Call a Budget Counselor Now

by Gerri Detweiler
The Union Credit Doctor

Just as it’s a good idea to see a doctor if you not feeling well for any length of time, it’s a good idea to talk with a budget and credit counselor to get relief from financial stress before it develops into something more serious.

Here are four reasons to call a counselor sooner rather than later:

1. Get a New Attitude: Even if you’ve gone over your expenses with a fine tooth comb, a budget review may turn up some new ideas for trimming expenses. Counselors can share creative ways to meet your needs while spending less.

2. Talk Money With Your Honey: When it comes to financial habits, opposites often do attract, and that can lead to sometimes serious disagreements about money. Talking with a counselor can bring an objective and impartial point of view to this often emotional subject.

3. Build Stronger Credit: About a third of your credit score is made up of the debt you carry and, in particular, how much of your available credit card lines you are using. If you carry high balances on one or more of your credit cards, your credit scores have likely taken a hit. Credit counseling can help you pare down your debt, and as a result, you may see your credit improve over time.

4. Beat the Crowds: Credit counselors gear up for their busy season after the holidays when bills start rolling in. By late January, counselor’s phone lines are ringing off the hooks.

Union members and their families are eligible for a free budget and credit counseling session through the Union Plus Credit Counseling Service. Visit UnionPlus.org/CreditCounseling or call 1-877-833-1745 to speak to a counselor over the phone. In-person appointments are available in 120 locations nationwide.