Working Families

Legislative sessions are gearing up all over the country.  In Indiana, the first thing radical republicans took aim at were rights of workers, immediately attempting to pass a Right to Work for Less bill; and here in Missouri we have a number of different versions of Right to Work for Less which have already been filed in addition to other egregious attacks on workers like Kinder's and other radicals' attempt to eliminate the Prevailing Wage.  Of course there were last year's fights in Wisconsin over collective bargaining and Ohio's defeat of Senate Bill 5 which would have eliminated a significant number of workers' rights.

This past weekend, the New York Times had an excellent, must-read article regarding Right to Work for Less, striking at the heart of the issue of these sorts of attacks on workers: bad economics and cynical politics.

Attacking workers and their rights isn't about jobs, it's not about boosting the economy, it's not about solving the budget issues our states face.  No.  Attacking workers and attempting to pass bills like Right to Work for Less, Paycheck Deception and an elimination or suspension of the Prevailing Wage is about politics and silencing workers in the political arena.

Continuing Assault on Unions

Along with their shameful campaign to curb the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers in Wisconsin and Ohio last year, Republicans in statehouses around the country are taking aim at private sector unions. [...]

Many Republican leaders are adopting model legislation proposed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national corporate-financed conservative organization that is also assisting the Republican push to require voter identification cards to suppress the vote of minorities, young people and other constituencies that tend to favor the Democratic Party.

There is little doubt that politics is also behind the Republicans’ push for right-to-work laws: they see an opportunity to further weaken unions, which are far more likely to support Democrats — as well as health care reform and a higher minimum wage — by slashing their funding and their donating power.

The G.O.P. and its allies, like the Chamber of Commerce and brethren organizations, are trotting out the charge that unions reduce economic growth and jobs. [...]

Unionized workers earn more and get more generous benefits. In 2010, wages of workers in unionized manufacturing companies in Indiana were 16 percent higher than in nonunion plants. One study concluded that the decline in unionization since the 1970s is responsible for one-fifth to one-third of the growth in inequality in this country. Voters, unionized or not, should recognize the new “right to work” push for what it is: bad economics and cynical politics.

Emphasis added.

From RebuildTheDream.com: "Everybody knows that the unions exist for no real reason except to bleed us dry, right? What have they done for us? The answers slowly dawn on this management meeting..."

Today in the Post-Dispatch:

[W]e’re not overly concerned that Missouri Senate Republicans trotted out an anti-union “right-to-work” law for debate on Monday, under the false auspice of creating jobs. The debate lasted less than four hours, proof that the Senate isn’t serious about passing this measure...

[F]or the moment, do what Republicans have been doing: Forget the evidence. That’s not really why the Senate debated right-to-work in the first place. It’s about money, as in the kind politicians can raise when their base gets fired up...

The bottom line is that unions matter in Missouri. They help provide a reasonable living for thousands of middle-class employees along with their partners — yes, partners — in the business community. About 4,000 of those union members rallied at Kiener Plaza downtown preceding this week’s right-to-work mini-debate, and hundreds more filled the Senate galleries Monday night just to make that point.

Even the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a defacto arm of Missouri’s Republican Party, knew better than to include right-to-work legislation among its priorities this session.

Rep. Mark Parkinson (R-St. Charles) thinks the working poor and their children should go hungry when they travel to other states looking for better deals, looking for work and visiting family. After all, nothing says freedom and limited government like mean-spirited proposals to limit movement and choice.  

Kudos to Rep. Jeanette Mott Oxford for standing up to Parkinson's mean-spirited and half-baked proposal. 

Parkinson, pictured here being totally awesome, is giving up all that claptrap about the poor for Lent. "Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth."

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Moments ago, the House of Representatives voted 96-61 to pass HB61, a a de facto repeal of the minimum wage passed overwhelmingly by Missouri voters in 2006 that included an annual cost of living adjustment (COLA) to ensure the state’s lowest paid workers don’t fall behind each year.  The 2006 initiative stated that the Missouri minimum wage in a given year  would be the Missouri rate or the federal rate, whichever is higher. With the current state of the national and state economies,  Congressional Budget Office projections state that Missouri’s minimum wage is not expected to exceed the federal rate until 2015.

Eight Republicans refused to go along with their leadership's mean-spirited effort to make life even harder for families who are really struggling to make ends meet: Ryan Silvey of Kansas City, Ann Zerr of St. Charles, Lyle Rowland of Cedar Creek, Don Phillips of Kimberling City, Mike McGhee of Odessa, John McCaherty of High Ridge, Kent Hampton of Malden and Paul Fitzwater of Potosi.

McCaherty actually voted for the bill in committee.  Kudos to him for listening to his constituents instead of the corporate special interests.

UPDATE: Hours after going on the record with no opinion on right-to-work-for-less legislation, the Chamber has caved and now says it supports the idea. 

Jo Mannies' story for The Beacon, "Could Wisconsin happen here?," has a couple of key points worth remembering about the right-to-work-for-less debate in the General Assembly:

The Missouri Chamber did not make right to work one of its key objectives this sesson because [Dan Mehan, chief executive for the Missouri Chamber of Commerce] said some businesses have no objection to current laws allowing closed shops, in which all workers must pay union dues if a majority approve union representation.

Soutier and other labor activists believe that Nixon would veto any right-to-work bill that gets through the legislature. "Gov. Nixon is strongly behind workers in this state,'' Soutier said.

In addition, while Republicans hold huge majorities in both chambers, it's unclear if the GOP has enough votes to override a veto. Several Republican senators, for example, have declared their opposition to "right to work."

As the protests and governing crisis continue in Wisconsin, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder has voiced his full support for the proposals and actions from Badger Governor Scott Walker, who wants to remove collective bargaining rights from nearly all state workers.

On Twitter tonight, Kinder called the situation in Wisconsin "delicious," and endorsed a call to "support" Walker. 

Yesterday, without debate, the House International Trade and Job Creation Committee passed Rep. Jerry Nolte's (R-Gladstone) bill (HB61) to overturn Missouri's minimum wage law that was passed by voters in 2006.  Nolte's proposal would completely eliminate the cost of living adjustments approved by 76% of voters in 2006, tying Missouri's minimum wage to the already inadequate federal standard.

Never mind all that talk about state sovereignty and respecting the will of the voters. 

The Post-Dispatch weighs in on the Missouri business lobby's "Fix the Six" platform: "With the possible exception of [authorizing the state to issue bonds for businesses to pay back what they've have borrowed from the federal government to pay unemployment insurance], the “Fix the Six” package looks more like a “Throw the Workers Under the Bus” package. Business-friendly is one thing. Business-promiscuous is quite another.

The Riverfront Times' Chad Garrison asks: Does Making Missouri More "Job Friendly" Always Require Screwing the Working Class?

Sen. Jane Cunningham's (R-Chesterfield) General Laws Committee will take up Sen. Luann Ridgeway's (R-Smithville) 'right to work for less' proposal on Tuesday at 3pm, despite bipartisan opposition and the lack of interest from the state's corporate lobby.

Rep. Mike Cierpiot (R-Lee's Summit) introduced a constitutional amendment yesterday (HJR6) that he and co-sponsors say would guarantee "the right of individuals to vote by secret ballot." The resolution is really about limiting workers' rights to ask an employer to recognize a union after showing that a majority of workers demonstrate that they want to form a union.  

This is bad news for workers and their families -- and would also conflict with federal law.  Four other states have recently enacted similar measures, but the National Labor Relations Board informed those states' Attorneys General today that federal law pre-empts the state amendments.  From an NRLB press release:

The National Labor Relations Board today advised the Attorneys General of Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah that recently-approved state constitutional amendments governing the method by which employees choose union representation conflict with federal labor law and therefore are preempted by the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. 

The states were also advised that the Board has authorized the Acting General Counsel to file lawsuits in federal court, if necessary, to enjoin them from enforcing the laws. 

Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, private-sector employees have two ways to choose a union: They may vote in a secret-ballot election conducted by the NLRB, or they may persuade an employer to voluntarily recognize a union after showing majority support by signed authorization cards or other means.

The state amendments prohibit the second method and therefore interfere with the exercise of a  well-established federally-protected right. For that reason, they are preempted by the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Further details are available on this page, including a fact sheet prepared by the NLRB and copies of the advisory letters.

In 2006, 76 percent of Missouri voters supported a plan to increase the minimum wage to $6.50 and tie any future annual increases in the minimum wage to changes in the Consumer Price index. 

However, Rep. Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) and some of his fellow Republican colleagues think  that (as Roy Blunt would put it) "the Federal Gubmint" is a better authority for setting Missouri workers' wages than voters in the state.

According to the Associated Press, Nolte filed legislation prohibiting the Missouri minimum wage from rising above the federal one. The bill has the backing of several other Republicans, as well as a coalition of business groups.

I guess competitive wages might have been the only thing Nolte and his fellow Republicans weren't thinking about when they pushed legislation last year to enforce Missouri's "constitutional sovereignty and the sovereignty of its citizens under the Tenth Amendment." 

The Post-Dispatch reports that Sen. Jim Lembke (R-Lemay) will not support so-called "right to work" legislation supporting by incoming Senate President Pro Tem Rob Mayer (R-Dexter).  "I have a high percentage of union households in my district, and I've always had a very good relationship with labor," Lemke says said. "There's a lot of other things we can do to make Missouri business-friendly."

Fox2's Charles Jaco interviewed Rep. Todd Akin last week about his vote to end long-term unemployment benefits -- ostensibly because he's concerned about the deficit -- while fighting to cut taxes for the wealthiest of the wealthy.   Picking up at the 3:15 mark:

JACO: So what do you tell her and other people whose extended benefits run out?  Ms. Payne says she's sixty, she's been interveiwing for job after job after job. There's six to eight applicants per job.  And you klnow, the statistics show that about forty five percent of the people who are unemployed are over the age of forty five, and we know employers aren't hiring them. What she might say, I'm all about fiscal austerity, but what do you say to people like that whose benefits are going to be cut off in these hard economic times and suddenly their out $850 a month, which is not much to you and me, but it's everything to her.  What do you tell them?

AKIN: Well, the point of the matter is that you can't tell 'em anything, can you Charles?   I'm mean, they're -- the amount of suffering, the amount of pressure, the stress, the difficulty we've created by doing these things has created a tremendous amount of pain.  And I'm aware of that.  I'm in my sixties too.  These are people, we all grew up together.  So what can you say to them?  Well, you can't really say anything for those individual situations.

What a dope.  Here's an idea for something Akin could say: "I'll vote to extend unemployment benefits because it will have a direct impact in the lives of my constituents and in the economy at large, and it would be pretty audacious for me to stick it the poor while exacerbating long-term federal deficits with tax cuts for the very wealthy, wouldn't it?" 

The first two minutes of this clip is a review of a story Fox 2 ran earlier last week, and the Akin interview begins at around the two minute mark. Watch the whole thing here:

Fox2Now reports that "around four million Americans, including anywhere from 35,000 to 40,000 in Missouri, will lose their extended unemployment benefits as of December 1st" because House Republicans blocked a measure to provide the crucial money.

h/t St. Louis Activist Hub

Because Republicans really care about struggling families, Republicans blocked legislation yesterday to extend unemployment insurance for three more months.  Representatives Todd Akin, Roy Blunt, Jo Ann Emerson, Sam Graves and Blaine Luetkemeyer all voted against the extension. 

Good stuff from The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers.

The correct answer is, "No."  But Michael Steele somehow can't muster the strength to say that Republicans aren't interested in reducing the minimum wage.  Given Steele's nack for telling whoever he happens to be talking to whatever they want to hear, his self-restraint on this issue is notable. 

Released today:  "Today, Tuesday, October 5th, the Vote Kids Action Fund launches a campaign in Missouri to let voters know about Rep. Roy Blunt’s record supporting Wall Street while voting against the needs of Missouri’s children and working families. We are running this ad on television in the St. Louis market starting today. Please visit www.bluntexposed.com This website is devoted to exposing Roy Blunt’s record on children’s issues as he seeks a promotion to the United States Senate to represent all of Missouri’s children. You can see a summary by clicking here."