In Their Memory – On this, the one year anniversary of the tragedy in Newtown, Philly Labor dedicates all posts to the memory of the brave teachers and beautiful children who senselessly lost their lives that day.
In honor of them, WE WILL NEVER FORGET AND WE SHALL FIGHT TO MAKE SURE WE DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE TO PREVENT IT FROM HAPPENING AGAIN!
Fight For Safer Schools! Protect our Children and our Teachers!
By Heather Boushey, Jane Farrell, and John Schmitt
– Twenty years ago, the Family and Medical Leave Act, or FMLA, was signed into law. The FMLA granted certain workers new and important rights, including the ability to take up to 12 weeks of job-protected leave after a birth or adoption, but it fell short in at least two important respects. First, the leave guaranteed under the law is unpaid, making it difficult for many covered workers to take advantage of their new rights. Second, the FMLA does not cover about 40 percent of the American workforce. These workers don’t meet the law’s eligibility criteria, the most important of which are requirements that the worker have been on the job for at least 1,250 hours in the year preceding the leave and that the worker’s employer have at least 50 employees. Moreover, since employers mostly control access to time off and there are no federal laws that set minimum standards, time off has been seen as a perk for higher-paid employees. Thus, even within the same firm, some workers may have more access to time off, or paid time off, than others.
Without downplaying the historical significance of the FMLA’s guarantee of job-protected leave for a majority of U.S. workers, this review of Census Bureau data from the first two decades of the FMLA suggests that the law had a limited impact on the frequency of parental leave and no impact on the likelihood that parental leave is paid.
For the women workers between the ages of 16 and 44 that we focus on here, the usage rate of parental leave—whether covered by the FMLA or not—is low. In any given week, about 0.7 percent of women in this age range are away from work to care for a newborn or recently adopted child. This rate has remained remarkably stable over the last 20 years, with no trend toward greater use of parental leave in the wake of the FMLA.
The share of women taking parental leave is low across groups defined by age and education. Even so, disparities between these groups are still large and persistent. College-educated women, particularly those in full-time and union jobs, are much more likely to take parental leave than less-educated, part-time, nonunion women.
Even two decades after the FMLA, so few men take parental leave that they are almost undetectable in the large government survey that we analyze here. By our estimates, over the past five years, nine women took parental leave for every man who did so.
The story is similar when we look at the share of workers whose parental leave is paid. Less than half of workers on parental leave are paid for their time off—a proportion that has not changed in any meaningful way over the past two decades. Older and better-educated women in full-time and union jobs are much more likely to be paid while taking parental leave, but even among college-educated women, only a little more than half are paid during their parental leave. The small share of men who do take parental leave, however, are substantially more likely than women to be paid during that leave.
We analyze data from the Census Bureau’s large, nationally representative Current Population Survey, or CPS. The CPS gathers detailed information on a wide range of household demographics and labor market activities. We focus on worker absences where parental leave was cited as the reason for absence from work and on whether that leave was paid. While this analysis does not tell us whether the individual was covered by the FMLA or whether the pay they are receiving is only for family-leave benefits (as opposed to accrued paid sick or vacation leave), it is still valuable in understanding how rates of use of parental leave have changed in the two decades since the passage of the FMLA. Two additional limitations are that the CPS only started asking respondents about parental leave in 1994—which means we cannot compare before and after the implementation of the FMLA—and that it only identifies workers who took at least a full week of leave away from work. We explain these limitations more fully in our “Data and methodology” section.
Source: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/labor/report/2013/12/12/80889/job-protection-isnt-enough/
From the PA. AFL-CIO (Richard W. Bloomingdale, President – Frank Snyder, Secretary-Treasurer)
– Closing federal tax loopholes, enacting tax fairness provisions would raise revenue and support job growth in Pennsylvania
Today the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 13 and the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO released a study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) that found 152,077 jobs could be created in the Pennsylvania. As a special Congressional budget committee reached a tentative agreement that must be approved by Congress, before adjourning for 2013, the analysis, “The Perfect Match for Pennsylvania: Coupling tax fairness with Job Creation for a Stronger Economy,” shows how enacting three tax proposals would spur job growth in Pennsylvania.
The last congressional battle over budget priorities led tea party politicians to shut down the government and keep America from paying its bills. Members like Congressmen Keith Rothfus (R-12) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-8) could support closing federal tax loopholes for corporations and Wall Street and making sure everyone pays their fair share of taxes. Instead, Rothfus and Kirkpatrick continue to support a budget that ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them and would force deep cuts to Social Security.
“While middle class and working class Pennsylvanians are suffering, the federal government is helping billion dollar corporations and the very wealthy make exorbitant amounts of money through tax breaks and loopholes. Congress needs to make American families their priority and that starts with supporting tax fairness,” said Rick Bloomingdale, President of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, during today’s conference call.
The three initiatives; closing corporate tax loopholes, making the wealthy pay their fair share, and making Wall St. bankers pay a fee on trades, could create 3.3 million jobs nationally and 152,077 jobs here in the Commonwealth. According to the EPI study, pairing job creation policies with permanent tax changes would substantially reduce the country’s deficits over the medium and long term, providing a better economic future for Pennsylvania and the nation.
To read the full analysis go to: https://afl.salsalabs.com/o/4002/c/51/images/PerfectMatchPennsylvania.pdf
Source: http://www.paaflcio.org/?p=3249
By Moshe Marvit
– Unions dodged a bullet today when the Supreme Court took the unusual step of dismissing the strange and possibly disastrous case of Mulhall v. Unite Here Local 355 as “improvidently granted.”
Though the dismissal leaves some bad law in place in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Florida, Alabama and Georgia, labor should nonetheless breathe a sigh of relief.
In Mulhall, a Florida casino employee backed by the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW) argued that neutrality agreements violate an anti-bribery provision in the Taft Hartley Act of 1947 and therefore constitute a federal crime.
Making neutrality agreements a crime would have struck at the heart of organizing as it is practiced today. The neutrality approach—in which the employer agrees not to oppose an organizing campaign—has been the mode of choice in most union drives since the ‘90s. The employer usually further promises to “card check,” which means that it will recognize the union if a majority of the employees sign cards stating their desire for union representation.
The NRTW’s argument against this process had been made before, but no federal court had ever bought it. Until 2012, that is, when, in a messy case that bounced between the court and arbitration, the 11th Circuit held that neutrality agreements could in some instances violate Section 302 of the Taft Hartley Act, which prohibits the bribing of union officials.
Although this was a bad ruling, letting it stand would have been less dangerous than the approach Unite Here took—appealing it to the Supreme Court and giving them the chance to invalidate neutrality agreements entirely. Though incorrectly reasoned, the 11th Circuit decision did not end neutrality agreements as we know them. The precedent may have caused some problems for unions in the 11th Circuit by scaring some potentially cooperative employers into demanding NLRB elections, by inviting additional lawsuits from the NRTW (which uses “strategic litigation” to “eliminate coercive union power and compulsory unionism abuses”), or by posing a possible danger in the hands of a future, zealous Republican U.S. Attorney in Florida, Alabama and Georgia. However, the case did not pose an immediate threat that warranted bringing this case before the Supreme Court—a court that has been found to be the most pro-business Supreme Court since World War II.
Indeed, during oral arguments, several of the justices appeared sympathetic to the NRTW’s bizarre vision for labor-management relations. According to the NRTW attorney, even though the National Labor Relations Act was explicitly passed to promote peace between labor and management, it should be interpreted such that it would be a criminal act for an employer to do anything that might benefit the union—even if it does so unilaterally. This includes a promise of neutrality, an agreement to allow card check, an allowance to enter the workplace, or any other action that the union could value. The attorney further argued that since these actions were made illegal under the Taft Hartley Act, the National Labor Relations Board should lose the ability to rule on them, thereby stripping away some of the Board’s jurisdiction.
Though Justice Kennedy challenged the NRTW attorney, suggesting that the position was “contrary to years of settled practices and understandings,” questions at oral arguments and previous opinions indicate that four of the justices would be open to the NRTW’s interpretation. Had the case been decided on its merits, it is possible that the court would have adopted NRTW’s cynical vision of labor law.
Luckily, the case was dismissed without ruling on its merits, and it will now return to the district court. Such dismissals are relatively rare. Only 16 cases have been so dismissed since John Roberts became the Chief Justice in 2005, with three of those dismissals happening just this year, two of which were labor and employment cases. (The frequency may indicate that something is falling apart in the process of granting appeals to the Supreme Court.)
However, the case may not be dead yet. In their dissent, three liberal justices (Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) invited a new challenge to Section 302 of the Taft Hartley Act. The justices intimated that it may be time for the Court to reexamine its previous position in a 1962 case called Sinclair Refining. A reversal of the Sinclair Refining ruling would render unnecessary much of the inquiry over whether neutrality agreements could be considered a bribe, because individuals would not have standing to bring suit.
But a Supreme Court reconsideration of Sinclair Refining could also put all neutrality agreements at risk.
In order to get a case before the Supreme Court, four justices have to be willing to hear it. In this dissent, three have signaled their willingness to hear a challenge to Section 302. Hopefully, labor will keep this issue far away from the Supreme Court until the current balance changes. As Justice Ginsburg noted in oral arguments, the neutrality agreement at issue in this case expired at least a year ago, and there was no union election or recognition. Labor should take a quiet victory at the district court level and let this case die.
Source: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/15968/supreme_court_dismisses_mulhall_v_unite_here_giving_a_labor_a_lucky_esc/
Who will be Philadelphia Jobs with Justice’s Scrooge of the Year? You decide!
– We need your help! Philadelphia’s Scrooge of the Year will be announced this Thursday 12/12 and we need you to go online and vote NOW! In the true spirit of contemporary American democracy, every dollar buys a vote and you can pay online or at the event itself.
Is there a particularly evil and Ebenezer-like character you’d like to see visited by the Ghost of Injustices Past?
And The Nominees Are:
– Governor Tom Corbett
– Mayor Michael Nutter
– David L. Cohen, Comcast Exec. VP
– ASPIRA Charters
– Post Brothers
– Philadelphia School Reform Commission
– Governor Scott Walker
VOTE HERE: Again a dollar buys a vote so make sure to go online and VOTE NOW at: https://phillyjwj.wufoo.com/forms/z13p1t311b2e3d1/. Final results will be announced at the Philly JWJ holiday party. We Hope to see you there!
PHILLY JWJ HOLIDAY PARTY DETAILS:
– What: Scrooge: THE RECKONING AT THE PHILLY JWJ HOLIDAY PARTY
– When: Thursday, December 12, 5:30pm
– Where: The Bards (2013 Walnut St.)
Source: http://www.phillyjwj.org/
