By The PA. AFL-CIO

– On Monday, the union-busting Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker announced he is running for the Republican nomination for President in the 2016 elections. AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka, when asked, had this to say: “Scott Walker is a national disgrace.”

Scott Walker appeals to the ultra-right wing conservative segment of the Republican party. In primary elections this segment of the party is one of the more vocal in trying to push the party further to the right.

Walker recently made a major gaffe on the record by comparing his anti-union crusade in Wisconsin to fighting terrorists. He has been conducting his own brand of economic terrorism against the labor movement in Wisconsin by attacking school teachers, state workers and most recently all workers – making Wisconsin the 25th Right-to-Work “for less” state.

Now that he is a candidate, moderate republicans have a great opportunity to unite and defeat extremists like Walker who are an embarrassment to the nation.

Monday’s announcement came on the heels of a jam-packed day of activities in Philadelphia in which President Trumka met with Philadelphia Mayoral Democratic candidate Jim Kenney, who is endorsed by the Philadelphia AFL-CIO. Philadelphia AFL-CIO President Pat Eiding welcomed President Trumka to their Executive Council meeting in which our National President gave compelling reasons why we should be supporting candidates who have a solid, working family agenda, built around raising wages and commonsense economic.

President Trumka also participated in a roundtable discussion on fighting wage theft hosted by the Philadelphia AFL-CIO Executive Council and led by Council President Patrick Eiding. The roundtable included representatives of the Community Legal Services which assists victims of wage theft. Laws need to be strengthened to fight and prevent this growing economic problem which is cheating workers out millions of their earnings throughout Pennsylvania.

President Trumka’s message to members of the the Philadelphia AFL-CIO Council and to all of Pennsylvania’s working families is: to continue to escalate our national campaign to raise the wages for all working families, to rebuild the economic and political strength of working families through collective bargaining and to support and pass commonsense economic policies that help us grow together. Secretary-Treasurer Frank Snyder, the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO’s Political Director, expressed appreciation on behalf of the entire PA AFL-CIO team, for the Council aggressively moving the initiatives set by the National AFL-CIO.

Source – http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=6159

By The PA. AFL-CIO

– What started as an ordinary work day at a sewage treatment plant, quickly went wrong. Franklin Pound, who usually worked in the concrete pit at the Sewickley Borough facility was installing a pipeline a short distance away when he heard a commotion. Pound, along with two other workers, rushed to the scene, hoping to lend a helping hand, only to find that they were too late. They found the victim, a fellow worker at the plant, dead at the bottom of the concrete pit. The men, with immense heaviness, began to climb the ladder that led out of the pit. Pound, however, was unable to make it the whole way. He was overwhelmed by a cloud of methane gas, causing a 20 foot free fall that resulted in numerous injuries to his body.

The unfortunate rescue attempt resulted in hefty hospital bills, which Pound hoped to settle through the help of worker’s compensation. Pipeline Systems Inc., Pound’s employer, along with the Continental Western Insurance Company pushed to appeal the claim. They declared that Pound was not performing his assigned duties. The insurance company based their appeal on the claim that Pound’s “compulsion to act as a Good Samaritan was not employment-related,” according to Senior Commonwealth Court Judge James Gardner Colins, who ultimately presided over the case.

Take a moment to think about that claim – essentially that Pound should have ignored an industrial accident 30 feet away from where he was working, and not tried to render assistance to a fellow worker who had been severely injured.

Thankfully, common sense and basic human decency won a victory this week in the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, when Judge Colins found that Pound’s participation in the rescue attempt fell “within the course and scope of his employment.” He, along with a Commonwealth Court panel, rejected arguments made by Pound’s employer. Because of Colins’ idea of justice and equality, Pound was able to be reimbursed for his attempts to rescue the life of a fellow worker. Colins explained that Pound’s “attempts to render aid to another do not, in and of themselves, constitute an abandonment of employment.”

Remember this case when someone asks “why bother to vote in these judicial elections?” Having good judges on the bench impacts the lives of workers every day in Pennsylvania. If a different judge – one who tended to side more often with business than with workers – had presided over this case, the results could have been disasterous. That’s because a case like the one of Franklin Pound not only impacts the worker bringing suit, it also sets a precedent that makes every employer in the State take notice.

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO has made endorsements in all of the Statewide Judicial elections coming up in November, supporting David Wecht, Kevin Dougherty, and Christine Donohue for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Please CLICK HERE for a complete list of all of our endorsements, and protect your rights as a worker by voting in November and by encouraging all of your co-workers, friends, and family members to do the same!

Source – http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=6143

By The PA. AFL-CIO

– In a major blow to the Postal Service’s privatization deal with Staples, Region 5 of the National Labor Relations Board issued a complaint charging the USPS with illegally subcontracted work to the office-supply chain and ordering the agency to return the work that existed on July 31, 2014, to the American Postal Worker Union bargaining unit. A hearing is scheduled before the NLRB Administrative Law Judge on August 17.

If the NLRB sustains the allegations in the complaint, it could effectively end Staple’s foray into the mail business.

“In the meantime, the boycott of Staples and its online subsidiary, Quill.com, is still on,” APWU President Mark Dimondstein declared. “Let’s turn up the heat!”

Dimondstein described the ruling as an important first step in the battle against privatization. “But it is not simply the result of strong legal arguments,” he said. “Every APWU member and supporter who passed out flyers outside Staples stores can claim a piece of this achievement,” he said. “Every person who organized their friends and neighbors to boycott Staples and warned them about the dangers of allowing a private company to take over the mail helped us get to this point.”

President Bloomingdale and Secretary-Treasurer Snyder welcomed the good news and joined in urging all of our unions and supporters to continue the boycott of Staples and Quill.com. The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO has supported the boycott since the union began it in April 2014. The entire Labor movement, including the AFL-CIO, our affiliates and friends, including the NEA, are united in ending these attacks on our Postal Service and the good, family-sustaining jobs of the workers who deliver our mail to every home and business in the nation reliably and securely. We urge all consumers: Don’t Buy Staples!

Source – http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=6156

By Dick Polman

– Memo to the average American worker: Jeb Bush doesn’t think you’re working hard enough.

Jeb, who was born on third base and nurtured by a wealthy family, thinks that you need to work more hours. Jeb, whose net worth is in the neighborhood of $20 million, who in fact gets 50 grand whenever he opines at a podium, thinks that you need to work more hours.

Since the median American household income, for an entire year, is roughly 50 grand, you would be correct in deducing that this patrician Republican is wildly out of touch with the way people live – and tone-deaf to boot. Sort of like the way Mitt Romney was in 2012, when he dissed “47 percent” of Americans as moochers and slackers. And look what that episode did for Mitt.

Here’s what Jeb said earlier this week in a New Hampshire interview: “My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it is a four percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive. Work force participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and through their productivity gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we are going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

In Jeb’s defense, it’s reasonable to argue (as he was trying to do, in his ham-handed fashion) that a productive economy is a healthy economy, that an economy grows when its people work harder. And he later sought to clarify his remarks, insisting that when he initially said that “people need to work longer hours,” he was referring to part-time workers, not full-timers.

But, politically, he screwed up big time.

First, the optics: When a preppie elitist says that the average working stiff isn’t working hard enough, it’s like handing an early Christmas gift to the opposition. Hence, Hillary’s instant tweet: “Anyone who believes Americans aren’t working hard enough hasn’t met enough American workers.”

Second, the killer soundbite: It’s arguably unfair to pluck “people need to work longer hours” out of context, but nobody ever said politics is fair. Just look at what happened to John Kerry in 2004. In that race, Jeb’s brother plucked a clumsy Kerry utterance out of context and dined on it for months. Kerry had said on the stump, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” He was trying to explain a complicated Senate parliamentary maneuver, concerning supplementary funding for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Bush team pounded him successfully for that sentence alone.

Third, the work statistics make Jeb look even worse. We’re not exactly a nation of slackers. According to a Gallup poll conducted last summer, the average American already works 47 hours a week; nearly four in 10 said they work more than 50 hours a week, and nearly two in 10 said they work more than 60 hours a week. And according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (an international group), we already work longer hours than our counterparts in most western industrialized nations. Check out the chart; if we work a wee bit longer, we can catch up with the likes of Lithuania, Russia, and Greece.

(Which brings to mind the classic episode, in February 2005, when Jeb’s brother encountered a divorced mom in Nebraska. The mom said that she worked three jobs. George W.’s response: “You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”)

Fourth, Jeb’s overall prescription for the economy is the standard Republican mantra – lower taxes (“lower rates,” as he said in that New Hampshire interview), and that includes lower taxes for the rich (natch), “reducing the size of government,” yada yada. The real problem is not the hours that Americans work, it’s the long-stagnant wages that they earn (the wages have been stagnant for decades, under administrations of both parties). But Jeb doesn’t even get to square one on wages; he even opposes raising the federal minimum wage.

Fifth, Jeb complained that workforce participation has sunk to “all-time modern lows,” and his spinners subsequently said that “under President Obama, we have the lowest workforce participation rate since 1977.” Which, again, makes it sound like we’re a nation of slackers. But the reality – which Jeb ignored, because either he’s clueless or just willfully oblivious – is that baby boomer retirements are what’s accelerating the drop in the participation rate.

But hey, the guy who was born on third base wants us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. I wonder whether that message would play well with working stiffs in the fall of ’16.

Source – http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/national-interest/item/84004?linktype=hp_blogs

By The PA. AFL-CIO

– At their meeting on Wednesday, The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO executive council made endorsements for the upcoming general election and also in a number of legislative special elections. The State Labor Federation is the largest labor organization in Pennsylvania, representing over 800,000 workers.

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO endorsed the following judicial candidates for the November general election:

Pennsylvania Supreme Court: Judge Kevin Dougherty (D), Judge David Wecht (D), and Judge Christine Donohue (D)

Superior Court of Pennsylvania: Alice Beck-Dubow (D)

Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania: Mike Wojcik (D)

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO endorsed the following candidates who are running for the State House in the upcoming August 11 special election:

HD174 – Ed Neilson (D)

HD191 – Joanna McClinton (D)

HD195 – Donna Bullock (D)

The Pennsylvania AFL-CIO had previously endorsed in the August 4 special election to fill the vacancy in HD161

HD161 – Paul Mullen (R)

“These candidates won the support of the Labor Movement because they are especially qualified and committed to providing equal justice and dignity for the working families of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania AFL-CIO President Rick Bloomingdale said in reference to the endorsed candidates. “Each candidate has demonstrated immense commitment to the principles of fairness and justice. We look forward to working on their behalf and sharing their record of support for the rights of working men and women,” Bloomingdale said.

Secretary-Treasurer Frank Snyder stated, “we have the opportunity to elect well-qualified candidates to the most important courts in the Commonwealth. Through their success, we will be able to end the political manipulation that weakened millions of Pennsylvanians.” Snyder continues, saying, “the importance of electing these judges cannot be emphasized enough.”

The general election is on November 3, 2015. This is the first time our history that there have been three open seats up for election on our supreme court.

Source – http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=6140