By Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers

– A century ago, Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago the City of Big Shoulders: “hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; stormy, husky brawling.”

All of this was true of America itself as well: Nation of big shoulders. The United States was a brawny country that would intervene to help win World War I and later quickly retool factories to serve as munitions mills to win World War II. Now, though, as America’s tool makers and freight car builders are furloughed, their factories shuttered and offshored, America is wasting. Ill-conceived free trade deals are reducing it to a nation of stooped shoulders.

The newest proposed deal, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed in New Zealand last week by representatives of its 12 member states, would further enfeeble American manufacturing. The first of the ilk, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), devastated U.S. manufacturing. Allowing China into the World Trade Organization and the bad trade deals that followed NAFTA all pummeled American manufacturing when it was already down.

From cookies to car parts, factories fled America for places like China and Mexico. There, corporations pay workers a pittance and pollute virtually penalty-free. CEOs and shareholders roll in the resulting royal-sized profits. Meanwhile, formerly middle-class American workers and their families suffer. Communities bereft of sustaining mills collapse. And the United States atrophies, losing more and more of those once-bulky industrial shoulders.

NAFTA crushed 300 decent middle class workers in Grand Rapids, Mich., last week. They make automated conveyor systems for a company called Dematic. Represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, they earn between $11.55 and $24.26 an hour. That means the best paid among them receive the median wage for a U.S. worker.

Soon, however, they’ll have no wages. That’s because they can’t compete with the $1.50 to $1.70 per hour paid to workers in Monterrey, Mexico. Several weeks ago, Dematic told the workers it would move the factory to Mexico unless the UAW came up with a better offer.

The workers voted unanimously not to submit a counter proposal. It’s illegal in the United States for workers to labor for $1.50 an hour. So the company, founded in Grand Rapids in 1939, will sever its American roots, shed its American workers and squat in Mexico.

It will follow a well-beaten path. Grand “American” brands Hershey’s and Whirlpool and Nabisco and La-Z-Boy and many others all closed American factories, laid off American workers and opened plants in Mexico. GM, Ford and Chrysler all built plants in Mexico. Car factories in Mexico produced about one in five vehicles made in North America in 2014, double the rate from a decade earlier.

In the first 10 years of this century, America lost 56,190 factories. That’s an average of 5,619 a year. Or 15 a day.

Not all of them moved to Mexico or offshore. But many did. And when they did and shipped their cars or Hershey bars back to the United States, that contributed to the nation’s ever-ballooning and increasingly dangerous trade deficit. The trade deficit in manufacturing hit $831.4 billion last year, up 13.2 percent from 2014.

This is the opposite of what NAFTA-pushing politicians promised. And it’s the opposite of what TPP-pushing politicians are promising now.

TPP peddlers have no credibility. The TPP, like NAFTA, provides no protection for American manufacturing or American workers like those at Dematic – other than retraining money for some thrown out of their jobs.

U.S. workers are guaranteed a minimum wage of at least $7.25 an hour, but steps away, just across the border, Mexican workers are not. Dematic can pay them $1.50. A report on the labor provisions of the TPP issued last week by the minority staff of the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives explains why.

The Mexican government facilitates “company unions,” which are run by corporations in their interests. Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, the leader of Los Mineros, one of the very few true worker-run unions in Mexico, is forced to live in exile in Canada because the Mexican government first falsely charged him with crimes then said it couldn’t guarantee his safety if he returned.

Although Mexico claims that it has established a panel to review that nation’s deeply flawed labor justice system, Gomez pointed out to the Ways and Means Committee that the government neglected to include on the panel even one worker representative. It’s not likely, then, that any meaningful labor reform will result, he told the committee.

The TPP contains weak plans to help countries like Vietnam and Malaysia improve conditions so that Americans workers aren’t placed in competition with forced and child labor there. But the proposed trade deal contains no strategy at all under which Mexico would meet its supposed commitments to improve labor conditions.

So it’s likely manufacturers in Mexico will continue to pay workers there about 20 cents for every dollar a U.S. worker earns. The House Committee report warns, “The lower costs resulting from the lack of worker rights and protections [in Mexico] create a powerful incentive for corporate decision-makers to relocate manufacturing plants and factories across that border.”

NAFTA and the TPP are giant greenbacks for multinational corporations. CEOs close U.S. factories, destroy the lives of American workers and collect bigger profits as a result of the less-than-subsistence wages they pay foreign labor.

Meanwhile, NAFTA, the TPP and the rest of the free trade schemes are sapping U.S. industrial strength, shipping it overseas. They’re emasculating America.

Source – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leo-w-gerard/tpp-would-further-emascul_b_9183026.html

BY Moshe Z. Marvit

– Some held out hope that Justice Scalia might go labor’s way on Friedrichs, because of his understanding of the ‘free rider’ problem. But that hope was dashed during oral arguments.

Conservatives had a great plan in motion to decimate unions. If Justice Antonin Scalia hadn’t died in his sleep, they almost certainly would have pulled it off.

First they got the Court to rule their way in 2014’s Harris v. Quinn, which targeted home healthcare unions. Like “right to work” laws, the case sought to gut unions’ funding and diminish solidarity by saying that union members can’t be required to pay dues. The Court agreed, holding that the First Amendment does not allow the collection of fair share fees from home healthcare workers. The decision, written by Justice Alito and signed by the Court’s four other conservatives, also not-so-subtly invited further attacks on the funding and membership of unions.

Next came Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which sought to expand Harris to impose right-to-work on all public sector employees. The conservative Center for Individual Rights (CIR) rushed Friedrichs to the Supreme Court by essentially conceding at every lower court that under current law, it should lose. Friedrichs could only win if the Supreme Court overturned 39 years of precedent that date back to the 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision.

When the Court accepted Friedrichs, there was some hope that Justice Scalia might provide the critical vote to save public-sector unions. This was not because Scalia had any great love for labor—he did not—but because he understood the basic economic theory of free riders: Just like any other enterprise, it can be difficult for a union to get its members to pay dues when they can get all the benefits of the contract for free. Scalia had said as much in a 1991 concurrence-dissent, and many were hoping that he would exercise consistency with Friedrichs.

However, the oral arguments on Friedrichs last month destroyed any such illusions. Justice Scalia, never coy about his beliefs, made it clear that he now believed that fair share fees should be eliminated. Though it’s often difficult to divine the Court’s final decision from oral arguments, it was plain after the Friedrichs arguments that labor would lose.

Accordingly, labor was scrambling to figure out how best to run a union in a post-Friedrichs world. Meanwhile, conservatives already had a plan in the works to expand what they saw as a certain win.

Last week, in a little-noticed case called D’Agostino v. Baker, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation lost at the First Circuit in their attempt to argue that the First Amendment does not allow exclusive representation of home healthcare workers. This case sought to expand the Harris holding by arguing that the First Amendment prohibits home healthcare unions not only from collecting fees from workers who don’t want to pay, but also from bargaining on behalf of any worker who doesn’t opt to be a member.

Former Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote the decision for the First Circuit in D’Agnostino, relying heavily on Abood and its progeny. If history is any indication, National Right to Work was planning on appealing this case to the Supreme Court. The case provided a glimpse of what the likely post-Friedrichs plan of attack would have been: After you win on the dues front, go after membership.

In addition, other cases, such as Bain v. CTA, that attacked the membership rights of unions but had been thrown out by lower courts, were likely to reappear.

However, on Saturday it was reported that Justice Scalia had been found dead. With his absence from the Court, conservative plans to attack union dues and membership through Supreme Court challenges may have dissolved for now.

If President Obama can get a new justice confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate and that justice is permitted to take part in Friedrichs, then the case will likely be decided 5-4 in favor of labor. If Republicans leaders made good on their vow to thwart any nomination by Obama, or the new justice does not take part in Friedrichs—either because the Court decides not to set it for rehearing or the justice must recuse herself—then all indications are that the case will be decided 4-4. In the event of such a tie, the lower court ruling is upheld—in this instance, the 9th Circuit’s dismissal of the case.

When the Supreme Court ties 4-4, no precedent is set. Anyone in labor worried about that outcome in Friedrichs can rest a bit easier remembering that no precedent is needed here. Abood created the precedent in 1977, and Friedrichs was a shameless ideological ploy to overturn that longstanding precedent. In Friedrichs, the CIR did not present the Supreme Court with the typical grounds for review: either a “a circuit split,” where lower courts issued conflicting decisions, or proof that circumstances had changed so significantly since Abood that the Supreme Court needed to reconsider its ruling. (Justice Stephen Breyer pointed to the absurdity of the Court overruling good case law for no good reason when he asked in oral arguments whether the Court should also revisit its landmark 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, which helped set the very terms of judicial review.)

Therefore, unlike other cases on the Court’s docket, if Friedrichs goes away quietly, it will stay gone until there is another conservative majority.

Without a Friedrichs decision that bans fair share fees, it is unlikely the Supreme Court would accept D’Agostino, and even less likely that it would decide against labor in such a case. Other cases attacking the membership rules of unions on specious Constitutional grounds are similarly unlikely to make it to the Supreme Court. With Justice Scalia’s unexpected death, conservatives will have to go back to attacking labor the old-fashioned way: at the state and federal legislatures.

Source – http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18869/when_scalia_died_so_did_friedrichs_and_an_anti-union_grand_scheme

By Melissa Chan

– Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz on Sunday pledged to filibuster any appointee President Obama nominates to fill Justice Antonin Scalia’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Texas senator said he would prolong the process of the president selecting a new successor to the bench after Scalia’s death. “This should be a decision for the people,” Cruz told ABC News’ This Week host George Stephanopoulos. “Let the election decide it. If the Democrats want to replace this nominee, they need to win the election.”

Obama said he plans to make a nomination “in due time.” He also said the Senate would “fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.” The death of the conservative Scalia has upended the Republican party and could change the Supreme Court, which previously swung 5-4 conservative.

“Right now, the court is exquisitely balanced,” Cruz said. “This next selection needs to be a referendum on the court. The people need to decide.”

Brief PhillyLabor Editorial – (Ted Cruz’s statement that he will filibuster President Obama’s Supreme Court Nominee IS everything that is wrong with Washington. It’s the type of gridlock based Partisan politics that people are so sick and tired of and likely the reason why a raving lunatic like Donald Trump is the leading Republican candidate in the race for President ahead of Cruz. Smell the Coffee Mr. Cruz!)

Source – http://time.com/4224367/ted-cruz-filibuster-obama-supreme-court/

By Tom MacDonald

– A Philadelphia labor union is using unmanned aircraft to survey building sites in the city.

John Dougherty, head of the Philadelphia Building Trades Council says he’s bought three drones scanning the city for unscrupulous contractors who are violating building codes.

“It’s more to get the unlicensed contractors sometimes undocumented workers just document it and send it to the right authorities and let them know,” he said. “It’s just a more positive way to do business in the modern world.”

Dougherty, who also is business manager at the influential IBEW Local 98 of the electricians union, says the overhead surveillance could even save lives.

“Who is to say if we had a drone flying around 22nd and Market Street [before the 2013 building collapse there] we could have prevented that tragedy,” he said.

Dougherty says if they find something troubling, they will send it to city officials or even federal officials for further investigation.

Source – http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local/philadelphia/90995-union-leader-johnny-doc-now-has-his-own-air-force-video