By the APWU

– Hearing Room is Cleared When Secret Documents Are Discussed

A National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) hearing on charges that the Postal Service illegally subcontracted work to Staples resumed on Feb. 24 – after months of procedural wrangling – and finally got to the substance of the dispute.

In an opening statement, the APWU offered its perspective on the case: The Postal Service’s decision to allow Staples employees to perform the work of USPS retail clerks was motivated in large part by management’s desire to save money on labor costs. The union was never offered the opportunity to negotiate over the program, and therefore the USPS violated its duty to bargain in good faith.

The Postal Service asserted that the goal was simply to expand customers’ access to retail services and therefore, management had no obligation to bargain with the union over the program.

But the first and only witness of the day, APWU Manager of Negotiations Support Phil Tabbita, testified about numerous USPS documents that revealed that management’s goals in the Staples program included reducing labor costs by transferring the work of window clerks to Staples employees. He was questioned by NRLB Region 5 General Counsel Daniel M. Heltzer, who is representing the NLRB in the complaint against the Postal Service.

The Postal Service’s attorney repeatedly objected to the General Counsel’s line of questioning, but Administrative Law Judge Paul Bogas overruled the majority of the objections.

Observers Cleared

The Postal Service claimed that two of the internal documents were so confidential that the hearing room had to be cleared of observers before Tabbita could be questioned about them. Judge Bogas temporarily granted the request to keep the documents sealed, but said he would revisit the designation later. The judge’s ruling prohibits the APWU from reporting on the documents, at least for now.

Among the observers cleared from the hearing room were activists from New York, Philadelphia and Washington, DC, wearing Stop Staples T-shirts. “We came because we want to preserve postal jobs with good benefits and not give them to low-benefit jobs,” said Carol Thomas, a retired Training Technician from New York. “We wanted to show our support for the cause,” added Rosa Greene, a retired Window Clerk.

“The Postal Service should end its dirty deal with Staples and stop efforts to privatize retail operations,” said APWU President Mark Dimondstein. “Our country deserves public postal services that are provided by well-trained USPS employees who are accountable to the people.”

The case arose after the APWU filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the NRLB. The hearing is expected to continue for several days.

Source – http://www.apwu.org/news/web-news-article/nlrb-hearing-staples-deal-finally-gets-heart-matter

BY Leo Gerard, United Steelworkers President

“The Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens to send even more American jobs oversea”

In the week before Valentine’s Day, United Technologies expressed its love for its devoted Indiana employees, workers whose labor had kept the corporation profitable, by informing 2,100 of them at two facilities that it was shipping their factories, their jobs, their communities’ resources to Mexico.

A few workers shouted obscenities at the corporate official. Some walked out. Others openly wept as United Technologies shattered their hopes, their dreams, their means to pay middle-class mortgages.

Three days later, 1,336 workers at Philadelphia’s largest remaining manufacturer, Cardone, learned that company planned to throw them out too and build brake calipers in Mexico instead. Two weeks earlier, a Grand Rapids, Mich., company called Dematic did the same thing to its 300 workers.

No surprise. In the first decade of this century, America lost 56,190 factories, 15 a day.

Republican presidential candidates talk incessantly of building a physical wall to keep impoverished Mexican immigrants out of America. What they fail to offer is an economic barrier to prevent the likes of United Technologies and Cardone and Dematic from impoverishing American workers by exporting their jobs to Mexico.

The president of Carrier, owned by United Technologies, gathered the Indianapolis factory employees, skilled workers who earn an average of $20 an hour, and informed them that the corporation planned to kick them to the curb but expected them to perform to the highest standards until Carrier opened a new plant in Monterrey, Mexico, where workers will be paid $3 an hour.

Carrier President Chris Nelson told the group, “This was an extremely difficult decision.”

Such difficulties for poor, poor United Technologies! It was making a nice profit at its Indianapolis and Huntington factories. But it was not the big fat profit it could pocket by paying Mexican workers a mere $3 an hour, providing $3 an hour in health and pension benefits, and doing it all in the nation with the longest work weeks among the 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

It would be “extremely difficult” for United Technologies to abandon Indiana after the corporation grabbed $530,000 from the pockets of hard-working Hoosiers over the past nine years as the state’s economic development agency forked over taxpayer cash to the corporation.

It would be even more “difficult” to turn its back on America considering that United Technologies grabbed $121 million from a federal tax credit program established specifically to ensure that green manufacturing jobs remained in the United States. Carrier took $5.1 million of those tax credits in 2013.

“This is strictly a business decision,” Nelson told the jeering workers. It wasn’t because of anything they had done. It was just that Mexico allows corporations to exploit its people in ways that America does not. Its minimum wage is 58 cents an hour, while the United States requires at least $7.25. For now, at least. Some GOP president candidates (Donald Trump) have said they think that’s too high.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ensnared Mexican and American workers in a race to the bottom. And the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a free trade deal among 12 countries instead of just three, would place American and Mexican workers in an even worse competition. They’d vie for jobs with forced and child labor in places like Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Under NAFTA, cheap American grain shipped to Mexico without tariffs destroyed peasant farming. And that prompted migration north. Meanwhile, American factories saw desperate Mexicans willing to work for a pittance, a government unwilling to pass or enforce environmental laws, and because of NAFTA, no tariffs when the goods were shipped back to the United States. That propelled factory migration south.

Before NAFTA, the United States had a small trade surplus with Mexico. That disappeared within a year, and now the annual trade deficit is approximately $50 billion.

Though it has been 22 years since NAFTA took effect, a report issued last week by the AFL-CIO says, “Labor abuses in many cases are worse now than before NAFTA … In short, NAFTA has contributed to labor abuses, not improvements.”

The report says the Mexican government fails to enforce labor laws and refuses to ensure that workers can form independent labor unions to try to protect their own rights. In fact, the report says, “The human and labor rights situation in Mexico is rapidly deteriorating.”

As a result, workers are powerless and completely at the mercy of corporations. So corporations like United Technologies can pay them $3 an hour and get away with it. This is not good for Mexican workers. And it’s not good for American workers.

The AFL-CIO report makes it clear that the TPP would worsen the situation because it would give corporations like United Technologies the option of moving to places like Vietnam where they could pay trafficked workers and child laborers $1 an hour. Or less.

Just like with NAFTA, there’s nothing enforceable in the TPP that would stop the labor abuses. It would facilitate corporations forcing workers from Indianapolis, Philadelphia and Monterrey, Mexico, into competition with 14-year-olds laboring 60-hour-weeks for $1-an-hour in Malaysia.

Just like United Technologies, these corporate CEOs would say it was “strictly business” to offshore American mills, industry that had served as city centers for decades, even centuries, factories so synonymous with towns that the communities took their names like Ambridge (American Bridge) and Hershey, which, by the way, laid off workers at its Pennsylvania home in 2007 and opened a chocolate plant in Monterrey, Mexico.

The AFL-CIO investigation of the TPP determined that it would do nothing more than increase corporate profits while sticking workers—in the United States and elsewhere—with lost jobs, lower wages and repressed rights.

For 22 years NAFTA has destroyed subsistence farming in Mexico and good, middle class factory jobs in the United States. Maybe corporations have made out like bandits. But the banditry should be stopped for the heartache it has caused on both sides of the border.

As Carrier President Nelson told the Indianapolis workers, members of my union, the United Steelworkers, that he was taking their jobs from them so that shareholders and corporate executives could make a few extra bucks, the workers protested. Nelson kept saying, “Quiet down. Let’s quiet down.”

That’s exactly the opposite of what American workers and communities should be doing. They should shouting from rooftops, “No TPP!”  For the love of American manufacturing, they should be yelling bloody murder.

Source – http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18911/murdering_american_manufacturing_TPP

By John Kopp

The electricians union leader says newspaper acted with a ‘false urgency’

Labor leader John Dougherty says he acted in self-defense during a physical altercation with a nonunion contractor in January, claiming a story published Tuesday by The Philadelphia Inquirer sought to defame him by portraying the incident inaccurately.

Dougherty, business manager of IBEW Local 98 and the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council, claimed the Jan. 21 incident began when Joshua Keesee, a nonunion contractor, sucker-punched a union worker and later took a swing at Dougherty near a construction site in South Philadelphia. His story runs counter to the account Keesee and his attorney, Robert Mozenter, told The Inquirer.

“Everything in that Inquirer story was wrong – and you can say that,” Dougherty said. “I think it was the most disingenuous, irresponsible piece of writing I’ve seen to date – and I’ve sued people for less than that. It was just irresponsible, disingenuous.”

Dougherty claimed the Inquirer sought to tarnish his reputation because the newspaper is upset at the outcome of litigation that went in his favor.

“I can’t think of any reason why they would have done something other than to try to damage my reputation,” Dougherty said.

He alleged that a video that accompanied the Inquirer’s report is at odds with its reporting of the story.

“The video absolutely tells the truth and contradicts the story that the Inquirer told,” Dougherty said. “We explained that to them.”

Dougherty provided a statement to The Inquirer through his spokesman Frank Keel, but he claimed the newspaper failed to provide him an appropriate amount of time to respond. He said the newspaper acted with a “false urgency” by reaching out to him late Monday night.

Inquirer spokeswoman Amy Buckman did not respond to a request for comment made early Tuesday evening.

STARTED WITH A STICKER

The incident occurred around 8:20 a.m. near a construction site at Third and Reed streets. Local 98 electricians have long protested outside the site, pointing to various alleged code violations. They were protesting on the day of the altercation.

Dougherty, 55, said Keesee previously had been asked to remove a Local 98 sticker from the rear window of his truck. As Dougherty was driving by the site on his way to work, he said he noticed Keesee, 36, by his truck. Dougherty parked his vehicle, approached Keesee and asked him to remove the sticker.

Keesee responded by launching into a curse-laden tirade criticizing Dougherty, Local 98 and others, Dougherty said. A number of people approached, Dougherty said, and Keesee eventually gave permission for someone from Local 98 to remove it.

But when Local 98 member Tommy Rodriguez began scraping off the sticker with a small razor, Dougherty said Keesee struck Rodriguez. Dougherty restrained Tommy Rodriguez while another Local 98 member, Niko Rodriguez (no relation to Tommy), held Dougherty. Keesee screamed at them, Dougherty said.

“Right now, none of us realize that Tommy was bleeding,” Dougherty said. “We walk away. A couple of people are taking (Keesee) down the street. I’m asking him, ‘What the heck is he doing?'”

THREATS TO FAMILY

As Dougherty walked back to his vehicle, he said Keesee began threatening his family. Dougherty said he responded that Keesee could simply deal with him.

“One of the guys with me sees one of the (nonunion) guys lean into his car,” Dougherty said. “We don’t know what he’s doing. We don’t know what he’s getting. Then I see (Keesee) come running toward me.

“We literally squared up. He threw a punch. I blocked it. I hit him twice. End of dispute after the second punch.”

Dougherty said a crowd gathered and Keesee began reaching into his pocket. Another construction worker reached into his car, pulling out a phone and “something black.”

Dougherty said “a little scrum” that included “more pushing and shoving” ensued before he and the Local 98 members returned to his vehicle.

A video captured by a neighboring business and published by The Inquirer does not show any of the physical altercation.

Dougherty is seen walking along the sidewalk toward Keesee as the contractor is pulled back by another man. Three Local 98 members – Chris Owens, Niko Rodriguez and Tommy Rodriguez – are with Dougherty. Tommy Rodriguez can be seen with a bloody forehead, which required stitches.

Dougherty said the video shows the period of time between Keesee punching Rodriguez, but before his Dougherty’s physical altercation with Keesee. Keesee told The Inquirer the video depicts the scene after the physical altercation.

The group then moves out of camera range for about 25 seconds before Dougherty and his Local 98 members reappear, walking toward their vehicle. Dougherty shakes the hand of a local bystander. Ten seconds later, Keesee reappears and Dougherty approaches him.

The group again moves off camera with two Local 98 members running across the street toward Dougherty. After several seconds pass, Tommy Rodriguez, who Dougherty said was tending to his injuries, runs over.

A few seconds later, the Local 98 members can be seen walking back across the street toward their vehicle.

‘THIS IS NOT A JOKE’

“When I left my house that morning, I had no intention of being anywhere close to an altercation,” said Dougherty, noting he was dressed in business attire for a series of meetings with prominent developers. “I’ve seen that sticker before on the truck, but I’ve never seen the guy getting out of the truck.”

Keesee told The Inquirer that he agreed to remove the Local 98 sticker from his truck, but also told Dougherty that he was not intimidated by the union leader. Dougherty began talking with clenched teeth, Keesee said, and “just moved forward and threw a left-and-right combo.”

Keesee, who suffered a broken nose, told the newspaper that he did not swing back at Dougherty because he did not want to shatter his sunglasses and concluded he was elderly:

“I definitely didn’t want to hit him,” Keesee told The Inquirer. “The first shot I just took. He hits me twice and they kind of converge on me.”

Mozenter, Keesee’s lawyer, did not respond to a message seeking comment on Dougherty’s claims. When PhillyVoice briefly reached him before talking with Dougherty, Mozenter said police recommended charges after conducting an investigation.

Keesee plans to pursue the matter in a federal civil lawsuit, if necessary, Mozenter said.

“We’re going to go through with this,” the attorney said. “This is not a joke.”

District Attorney Seth Williams referred the case to the state Attorney General’s Office, citing a “longstanding professional relationship” with Dougherty. Attorney General Kathleen Kane, who, like Williams, has accepted political contributions from Local 98, said another state attorney will decide whether to pursue charges against Dougherty.

“I’m not one bit concerned who has it, because there’s nothing here that merits a charge,” Dougherty said.

Dougherty said he did not contact police after the incident, noting they did not bring charges when he filed a complaint following an incident at the same construction site on May 10, 2014.

During that incident, Dougherty said a contractor threw a brick that hit him in the head. A witness picked the perpetrator out of a lineup, Dougherty said, but police never filed charges.

A police report from the incident says neither side sought to pursue criminal charges, but Dougherty claims the report was filed by a Philadelphia police officer he later learned was moonlighting as an electrician at the site. The officer, Frank Lafontano, was forced to give up the electrical work after Local 98 filed a complaint, Dougherty said.

Philadelphia police did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Dougherty’s allegation.

Source – http://www.phillyvoice.com/johnny-doc-he-acted-self-defense-claims-inquirer-reporting-irresponsible/

By Katie Colaneri

Philadelphia Council President Darrell Clarke wants to make sure projects getting tax breaks and other subsidies are making enough of an effort to hire city residents.Since 2012, businesses getting more than $250,000 in taxpayer support are expected to prioritize Philadelphia applicants when hiring for entry-level jobs by making a “first source agreement” with the city’s Commerce Department, although they’re not required to actually meet a certain quota. The law sets the target for local hiring at 50 percent.Clarke wants to change that law by making city council’s Economic Opportunity Review Committee responsible for enforcing it, a job now belonging to the city’s Commerce Department.

He’d also like to clarify the law to include penalties for businesses that don’t make a good faith effort to hire local residents, and to include them in the city’s definition of “diverse workforce” along with minority groups.

“At this point, we have not established the penalties associated with noncompliance,” he said. “We just simply want people to give the citizens of the city of Philadelphia a first opportunity for any job that’s created as result of receiving taxpayer-supported incentives.”

A spokeswoman for the Kenney administration said the mayor’s office is still looking over Clarke’s proposed ordinance.

Source – http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/91134-clarke-seeks-legal-nudge-to-make-city-supported-businesses-give-philly-job-applicants-priority-?linktype=hp_impact

By  Ryan Schuessler

–  Private drones were deployed this week to monitor an electrical workers’ strike to protect members from false legal claims, reigniting the ‘very tricky issue’ of how to regulate drones used for activism.

From a small drone causing panic when it landed on the White House lawn to Amazon’s plan to make deliveries by air, privately owned drones have been raising security fears around the country. But drone technology has capabilities beyond just serving the interests of corporations – and this week a union in Philadelphia reminded us of that.

The Philadelphia chapter of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers recently purchased three drones that officials say will be used to monitor construction sites and to make sure union members aren’t breaking any laws during protests.

Releasing its first video of a January protest, chapter president John Dougherty told a local television station that the fleet is “out and about”, in part to protect the union from false claims made against it.

The chapter’s younger, tech-savvy members devised the program, a spokesperson for the group said.

This is not the first time privately owned drones have been used for activism, or in the name of accountability. Peta used them to investigate farms, and protesters used drone footage to back up their claims of unjust arrest. In 2012, images inadvertently captured by a drone enthusiast prompted an investigation into a Dallas-area meat packing plant that appeared to be dumping pig blood into a nearby river.

Gary Mortimer, who originally covered the Dallas pig blood story, said having drone technology in the hands of the public is a good thing, but that its impact can be limited.

“A system that can operate for 20 minutes [a drone] isn’t as effective as a bloke who can sit in a tree all day and all night with a telephoto lens. You have to put it in perspective,” Mortimer said.

The fact that the union’s drones were used in the name of corporate accountability nevertheless raises the same concerns that drones have been causing since they first became available to the public.

Across the US, state and municipal governments have passed regulations that control or ban the use of drones in different ways, largely out of popular demands to protect privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union has been supportive of such legislation, especially when it comes police or governmental use of drones. However, when it comes to the private sector usage of drones, they have not called for any action.

“It’s a much more complicated issue, and often the reason is that photography, using drones, implicates first amendment rights for photography,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a very tricky issue.”

“With respect to [private drones], there are of course still privacy issues in that realm,” said Jeramie Scott of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

“There are some laws that are helpful, either trespassing laws, peeping tom or voyeurism laws, that can be used to protect one’s privacy. But there still needs to be baseline protections implemented, preferably through a new law by Congress to provide some additional protections.

“I think the transparency part of it is a big key to allow the public to participate in the use of drones as they are being integrated into the national airspace,” he added.

However, some analysts point out that most drone usage in the US has not been for surveillance – either by government, police or individuals – but rather by hobbyists, for data collection, conservation efforts or infrastructure inspection.

“I think when drones came out, in a consumer sense, a couple years ago, there was a big fear that they would be looking over private property and doing surveillance,” said Sally French, a journalist for MarketWatch and founder of Drone Girl, a website that follows the latest developments in drone technology and usage. “But that’s not really what we’re seeing them being used for.”

Since the FAA launched its registration program, nearly 200,000 drones have been registered in the US – an indicator that drone technology is much more accessible than it used to be.

“The reason the technology has changed in the last five years, rather than 10, is that electric power, both in the form of the motors and batteries, has become affordable,” Mortimer said.

“Citizens with sensors is a good thing,” he added. “It’s just up to the citizens to work together to work out how to use this data for good.”

Source – http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/19/philadelphia-union-strike-international-brotherhood-of-electrical-workers-private-drones-activism