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By Laura Clawson

– Workers at Volkwagen’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, plant are in the middle of voting on whether to join a union—and their senator is making some very serious threats about the outcome of the vote:

“I’ve had conversations today and based on those am assured that should the workers vote against the UAW, Volkswagen will announce in the coming weeks that it will manufacture its new mid-size SUV here in Chattanooga,” said Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN, without saying with whom he had the conversations.

In the past few weeks, Volkswagen officials have made several statements that the vote will have no bearing on whether the SUV will be made at the Chattanooga plant or at a plant in Puebla, Mexico.

If Volkswagen told workers that it would move production away from Chattanooga on the basis of a union vote, that would be a violation of labor law; telling a public official that and sending him out to levy the threat wouldn’t be a lot better. It’s also in direct contrast to something an actual VW official said last fall:

Bernd Osterloh, head of VW’s global works council, said in a statement that forming a council was important if the plant wanted to produce other VW cars and that he would keep talking with the UAW.

Works councils bring managers and workers together to make decisions about some factory policies; workers would have to unionize to have one in the United States. Under pressure from its strong German union and because it knows works councils do work, Volkswagen is officially neutral in this union election. Corker’s public, and legally questionable, threats are an astonishing move by a public official. It’s not Corker’s first such public temper tantrum over the possibility of a union in Chattanooga; he’s called Volkswagen “very naive” for its openness to a union in the past. Now he’s apparently graduated to making the threats he wishes VW would—at whatever cost to his state’s economy.

Source: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/13/1277294/-Corker-threatens-jobs-if-Volkswagen-workers-unionize

By Rose Hackman

– Alicia White, 25, defied the odds of a poor background by attending college on a partial scholarship and going to graduate school. While she spends her days applying for jobs, the only work she has found so far is face-painting at children’s birthday parties.

“By going to college and graduate school, I thought I was insulating myself from being broke and sleeping on friends’ couches and being hungry again. The big, scary part is that I am going to end up where I was, but now I am going to be in that awful situation with $50,000 of debt,” White says.

White’s story is no exception. One in two college graduates are now either unemployed or underemployed. Millennials – even those from the middle class – are experiencing income inequality and America’s failed dream of upward mobility first-hand. The mismatch of college-educated young workers with low-wage, unskilled, precarious jobs is creating a new face of the once-dwindling American labor movement: young, diverse, led by millennials in their twenties and thirties, and fighting what they see as an unfair labor market. Their modest cause? Pushing for a higher minimum wage.

Because of too many young people interested looking for work, these millennials reason that the labor movement is the only way to address large-scale poverty and income inequality – starting with their own.

The “Fight for 15” movement is the most visible of these. Designed by the SEIU to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour, the effort has been driven by young activists. Last fall, the movement claimed its first legislative victory with residents in SeaTac, Seattle’s airport carrying suburb, voting to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour.

“There’s more enthusiasm than there has been probably in our lifetime for this,” says Ady Barkan, a 30-year-old Yale Law graduate and staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy in New York, indicating that the “Fight for 15” movement is picking up where Occupy Wall Street left off. He calls it “part of a similar cultural moment”.

It doesn’t hurt the movement that the difference in pay between unionized and non-union jobs is pronounced. The median weekly earnings of union members in 2012 was $943, compared to $742 for those not in a union, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said in its recently released annual survey of labor.

“The dismal prospects for young workers are underscoring the fact that you can’t rebuild an economy on low-wage jobs and that inequality has reached a point where it really is an existential crisis for America,” says Annette Bernhardt, UC Berkeley’s visiting sociology professor, whose work has focused on the low-wage economy and inequality.

Demographically, even the modest interest millennials have shown in the labor movement recently is a reversal of decades of disinterest. Unions have been ageing out of the economy along with their members, with nearly one in six union members aged 55-64, according to the BLS. Amid other trends – offshoring, automation, the growth of a service-centered economy – the share of national income that comes from labor unions has been steadily falling since the 1970s. Union membership is at its lowest point in recent memory, with only 11.3% of Americans in unions. Critics, including the Center for American Progress blame those trends for the decline of the middle class.

Membership in unions is low for millennials – with only 11% of union members falling in the 25-34 age group, compared to 16% for workers between 55-64 – but their political views tend to align with the labor movement. A Pew poll this June showed 61% of Americans 18-24 in favor of unions, with strongest support coming from women and minority groups.
Diversity is more evident in the newer labor movement among millennials, reflecting the dominance of black and hispanic workers in unions nationally.

Jose Lopez, 27, is an organizer who works with Make the Road New York, mobilizing fast food and car wash workers. His previous work within the same organization involved pairing up young community members and artists with local businesses to paint storefronts, raising awareness about police brutality and stop-and-frisk. Lopez plans on bringing the same type of creativity to mobilize people around issues of inadequate income and wage theft, he said.

Protestor Janah Bailey, 21, of Chicago, currently works two fast food jobs: one full-time at Wendy’s, which she says pays $8.25 an hour, and one part-time at McDonald’s, which pays $8.40. On one day last year, Bailey walked out on both jobs for strikes against low pay. She says $15 an hour would change her life “tremendously”, expecting she would only have to work one job to make ends meet and help support her family, and spend her newly acquired spare time on studying to open up her own business.

The persistence of low wages is also mobilizing millennials who have never known a healthy job market. David Meni, 20, says he has held down a plethora of unpaid positions, internships and temporary jobs since his sophomore year of high school. His George Washington University chapter of the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network recently joined other local organizations in successfully pressuring the Washington DC city council to vote for an increase in the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour by 2016 from its current level of $8.50 an hour – despite the opposition of large corporations including Walmart.

That is not to say that young people will revolutionize the labor movement immediately. Millennials have an uphill battle in turning around the decline of labor. Studies show that while millennials support unions, until now, they have rarely joined them, perhaps in the belief that their low-paying jobs were temporary.

That perception may be changing as it becomes evident that lower wages are likely to be the norm for a long time.

Many economists predict that low wages are likely to continue into 2014, as pressure continues from corporate executives eager to return profits to their shareholders – namely by keeping a lid on expenses like pay. In a research report this week, influential economist Jan Hatzius of Goldman Sachs directly ties the 6.5% rise of corporate profits to the nearly inert 2% growth of US wages.

“The bottom line is that the favorable environment for corporate profits should persist for some time yet, and the case for an acceleration in the near term is strong,” Hatzius wrote. “Eventually, the pendulum will swing back in the direction of lower profit margins and higher wages, but this still looks fairly distant.”

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jan/26/minimum-wage-young-people-unions-corporations

Wednesday, March 5, 2014 (6PM – 8 PM)
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at District Council 21 Painters and Allied Trades
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Featuring Kurt Freeman, President DC 9, (President, Graphics Communications 14-M)
Joe Inemer, President, Graphics Communications 16-N (Exec Vice President DC 9)
at District Council 21 Painters and Allied Trades
2980 Southampton Road
Philadelphia, PA 19154

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By Daniel Denvir

– Superintendent William Hite plans to expand executive ranks at the School District of Philadelphia amid an ongoing budget crisis, according to a new organizational chart released to City Paper. Last year’s chart listed 47 positions, while this year’s lists 57. Such jobs typically pay more than $100,000 per year, and several are assigned to politically connected staffers.

One is Loree Jones, who served as chief of staff to the School Reform Commission under Chair Pedro Ramos, before he resigned in October.

Jones will be the head of Family and External Relations, a newly created office that will oversee a handful of other departments within the school district — including a similar office that had been established last year and headed by Evelyn Sample-Oates, with the purpose of overseeing that same group of departments.

Jones’ new position “will provide strategic and operational oversight over key external relations functions,” according to an e-mail from District spokesperson Fernando Gallard. “It will specifically be charged with improving better services to parents and school communities.”

But Jones’ job description closely matches one already assigned to Sample-Oates: “To run the District’s engagement initiatives with parents and the community-at-large,” according to an October 2012 email from Hite.

The new administrative jobs appear to be redundant.

Jones has worked closely with Ramos for years. After Ramos resigned as Mayor John Street’s Managing Director in 2007, Jones succeeded him that position. As SRC chief of staff, Jones earned $129,000.

It is unclear how much she will now earn—the District says her salary has not yet been determined. Other top central office staffers typically make between $129,000 and $210,000 a year. Hite makes $270,000.

The reshuffling comes as City Councilman Bill Green takes office as SRC chair. He will likely hire his own chief of staff.

Green’s former chief of staff in Council, Sophie Bryan, was paid a salary of $100,000 to run the District’s charter school office. Under the new organizational chart, however, Bryan occupies the newly created position of Special Assistant to the Office of the Superintendent. The District says that such a position had previously existed before Hite’s arrival, and that Bryan is primarily engaged in labor negotiations.

The District did not say what Bryan’s new salary is, or would be. It is also unclear whether she will remain in her new position, or follow her old boss to the SRC.

The School District can provide a comfortable landing pad for City Hall veterans. In March 2013, the District hired former Department of Licenses & Inspections chief Fran Burns as its chief of operations. She is now paid $175,000. At what was likely a much bigger job at L&I, she was paid just $125,000, according to Philadelphia Magazine.

The School District initially denied City Paper’s request for the organizational chart, contending that it was a “draft” and not yet finalized. Today, it released the document after CP filed an appeal with the state Office of Open Records.

While central office staff have been reduced by about 40-percent since 2011, Hite has been criticized in the past for paying excessive salaries to top employees while overseeing widespread layoffs of teachers, nurses, counselors, and support staff. In November 2012, the Daily News reported $311,351 in salary increases to non-union workers primarily clustered in District information technology, human resources, finance and grants, and compliance.

According to a District fact sheet, the “updated organizational structure is aligned to the District’s Action Plan v2.0 — a set of six strategies to accomplish overarching goals tied to improved student outcomes.”

School spokesperson Gallard says that a “new revised Action Plan will be released within a week and will further illustrate the need for an organization that is designed to support key core educational goals.”

The District says that one new office, the Strategy Delivery Unit, “is a monitoring position which primary role is to track the District’s progress against its strategic priorities and the goals the District outlined in its Action Plan.”

Another office, Strategic Partnerships, reflects the District’s increasingly reliance on private-sector support. The office is tasked with managing “the District’s relationship with…the non-governmental funders that play an important role in funding District programs.”

Controversy has surrounded the involvement of outside groups like the Philadelphia School Partnership (PSP), an entity friendly to charter schools and hostile to the teachers union, and the William Penn Foundation, in School District decision-making and funding. The office is headed by former Philadelphia Youth Network CEO Stacy E. Holland. Holland, who also served as a board member at PSP, makes $160,000.

The District says it has raised about $3 million since the position was created.

The overall cost of any new six-figure salaries created this year—and it is unclear how many new hires will ultimately be made—are still unclear. What is certain is that the District faces yet another huge budget deficit in the coming fiscal year, and a fresh round of mass layoffs is likely if significant support from Harrisburg and City Hall are not forthcoming.

Correction: This story has been updated to note that Sophie Bryan left the charter school office last summer to work as a special assistant to Superintendent Hite. Documents provided to City Paper by the District indicated that she currently directs the charter office.

Source: http://citypaper.net/article.php?Is-Hite-on-an-executive-hiring-spree-at-School-District-19523