By Kevin McCorry

– In a bipartisan 16-8 vote, the Pennsylvania House Education Committee has greenlighted a bill that would eliminate state-mandated seniority protections for teachers.

HB 1722, sponsored by state Rep. Tim Krieger, R-Westmoreland, would require districts to base layoffs on a teacher’s performance as measured by the state’s new teacher evaluation system.

Now, 499 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts are required to base teacher layoff and recall decisions on the inverse order of seniority, sometimes referred to as “last in, first out.”

The Philadelphia School Reform Commission, flexing its “special powers,” suspended the state code that protects teachers based on longevity. The school district has called on the state Supreme Court to provide a ruling that would affirm that the SRC has this right.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers has petitioned the court to reject the district’s position – arguing that work-rule changes should be negotiated at the bargaining table. The union’s contract expired at the end of August; since then, negotiations have screeched along without any signs of progress.

HB 1722 also would allow districts to eliminate staff based on budgetary shortfalls. Aside from Philadelphia, state school districts now can order layoffs only when student enrollment declines or by eliminating specific programs.

Critics of the status quo say this leads many Pennsylvania districts to make wholesale cuts to programs such as art, music and kindergarten when revenues decline.

All Republicans on the education committee voted to advance the bill. Two Democrats, James Clay, D- Philadelphia, and Jake Wheatley, D-Allegheny, joined them.

Krieger, the bill’s sponsor, said the measure will “protect good teachers and make schools better.”

“If you’re a young teacher, and you’re doing a great job, you shouldn’t be furloughed because you haven’t been there that long,” he said.

Krieger lamented that the Pittsburgh School District had to cut 16 young teachers last year who carried a “distinguished” evaluation.

This is not an issue that has particularly affected schools within Krieger’s legislative district.

“We hear more of the complaints and more of the requests for this, frankly, from places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia,” he said.

Why didn’t a legislator representing one of those districts propose the measure?

“I don’t know. I guess none of them were willing to do it,” Krieger said. “And I thought it was a good idea.”

Krieger’s original bill proposed increasing the time it takes teachers to earn tenure from three to five years. That provision died before leaving committee.

Minority chair James Roebuck, D-Philadelphia, argued that teacher seniority has “traditionally worked” and that the proposed bill has “a lot of problems.”

“I don’t get the idea that somehow there’s such great teachers coming in that are largely unseasoned that are somehow trumping well-established teachers in the classroom,” he said. “I’ve seen very little evidence of that.”

Roebuck contends that the debate over seniority has been manufactured by what he sees as the state’s underfunding of public education.

“If you fund schools properly, you don’t have to [lay teachers off],” he said. “I think this is looking at a self-created problem of saying, ‘because we created this problem, now we’ve got to do something else.'”

The state’s new teacher evaluation system will grade educators based on principal observation, evidence provided by teachers themselves, and students’ standardized test scores as averaged over a three-year period.

Roebuck worries that the new system isn’t ready.

“The problem is taking this new system that hasn’t even been fully tested or implemented and using that to make rather major decisions,” he said.

Jonathan Cetel, executive director of the school-reform advocacy group PennCAN, exalted the committee’s action.

“The house leadership said something that I’ve often heard — that voters would be shocked to learn that this already isn’t law, that we’re not already making important personnel decisions based on how well a teacher is doing with students,” said Cetel.

Gov. Tom Corbett has long supported changing teacher tenure.

Gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf has gone on the record in favor of the state’s existing teacher seniority rules.

“Are there teachers who may not be teaching up to par? Yeah. There are in any organization,” he said at an education panel discussion in Philadelphia in April. “The system we have now has a way to identify those teachers and relieve them of their duties.”

The bill will now go before the full House of Representatives, where leaders have been receptive to its aims.

Source – http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/68852-bill-that-aims-to-curtail-teacher-seniority-clears-hurdle-in-the-pa-house?linktype=hp_impact

By Jobs With Justice

– The Supreme Court could issue a decision as early as Monday that could repeal collective bargaining rights for home-care workers. Learn the potential impact the ruling could have on care workers, care consumers and working people.

You can make your voice heard by adding your name to our petition and stand with these caregivers now!

What is the Supreme Court case Harris v. Quinn about?

On October 1, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a hearing in the case Harris v. Quinn. The case was brought by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), an extremist group with ties to the ultra-conservative Koch Brothers and ALEC. This case is the latest in a decades-long right-wing attack on the rights of working people to join together to improve their jobs and the quality of services they provide.

The NRTW lawsuit started as a specific challenge against Illinois home-care workers’ collective bargaining rights, but the case has now expanded to attempt to repeal the right of all public sector home-care workers from banding together and collectively bargain with states over core terms of their employment. In the suit, NRTW is also asking the Supreme Court to bar other independent care providers, like family child-care providers, from forming a union by arguing that independent providers are independent contractors – and not public service employees – who cannot bargain collectively. The lower courts have already rejected this argument.

When is a decision expected from the Supreme Court on Harris v. Quinn?

The decision could come at any point between next Monday and the end of the month.

Why do home-care workers need collective bargaining rights?

As more states are allowing Medicaid to fund in-home care, millions of paid caregivers deliver home-based care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities. From administering medicine to preparing meals, home-care workers allow the millions of people they care for to live independently at home with dignity and respect. Despite an increasing demand for home-based care providers, this workforce – made up of mostly women, immigrants and people of color – faces low pay, few benefits and little job security. The median hourly wage for home-health and personal-care aides is $9.70 an hour.

Given these poor job standards, many providers have sought to form unions. Hundreds of thousands of these caregivers have now earned collective bargaining rights, and nearly two million home-care workers finally secured the right to earn a minimum wage and overtime just last year. A Supreme Court ruling limiting their collective bargaining rights opens the door for home-care workers to lose hard fought gains in hours, benefits, training opportunities and wages.

Why don’t all care workers have collective bargaining rights?

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act gives most private sector employees the right to form unions and collectively bargain with their employers. The federal law does not, however, extend to public employees, although most states have laws that grant union rights to public sector employees as well. But for those workers in the gray area of providing home-based care and receiving reimbursements through state and federal programs, there was no established structure in which to form unions. While the consumers of this care or their family members typically do the hiring and often supervising of these workers, a significant percentage of the workers receive their income through state or federal reimbursements (largely Medicaid). So these care workers couldn’t be categorized as independent business owners since they have no control over the reimbursement rates, but they weren’t employed by the private sector either. Still, state governments were ignoring their obligation to serve as the “employer of record” for providers.

How did care workers gain a voice on the job?

Despite the structural impediments, care providers began joining unions anyway to secure a voice on the job. And since the 1990s, care workers and their unions began mobilizing consumers and other allies to pressure elected officials to raise reimbursement rates and create public authorities that controlled state and federal funding streams and could recognize and bargain with providers’ unions. Now, as of 2013, nine states have granted rights to home-care providers.

How could this case affect the people that home-care workers care for?

The dismantling of union rights for providers would also be a blow to the consumers of care who benefit from a stable workforce – studies have shown that increased wages and benefits lead to reduced turnover among home-care providers. With the demand for home care predicted to soar in the coming years as baby boomers age, a decision limiting these rights will compromise care standards at the moment our aging nation needs it most.

What are the implications of the case on income inequality and economic justice?

A decision limiting these rights could also directly drive down the wages and the basic rights of care workers. Public workers could have fewer resources to stand up for good jobs and quality care. If our friends and neighbors can’t join together in strong unions, it will become harder for all workers to gain better wages and benefits, increased job security and safer workplaces. We all need the freedom to have a voice at work and to speak up for decent jobs and quality services.

The Supreme Court will issue a decision in the coming weeks – and possibly as early as this Monday. Click here to sign our petition to stand with care workers! We will deliver your petition to the workers who could be hit hardest by this ruling.

Source: http://www.jwj.org/supreme-court-may-gut-care-workers-collective-bargaining-rights

– Today, June 5, 2014, marks the first anniversary of the building collapse that killed six in Center City Philadelphia nears, efforts continue to construct a memorial park at the site where the Salvation Army thrift store stood.

The process of taking the former thrift store property and transforming it into a place for recreation and reflection is well under way, said John White of the 22nd and Market Memorial Committee.

“We’ve raised about 40 percent of the money we think will be necessary,” he said. “They city has taken possession of the land from the Salvation Army and made it available for this purpose, so it is under our control.

And the group has talked with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to select the artist who will do the memorial, White said.

A ceremony is planned for the site on Thursday, the one-year anniversary of the day a building undergoing demolition collapsed on the thrift store, killing six people and injuring 14.

“The mayor will make some remarks about the role the city has played in it, some of the families of the victims will be there and they will also speak,” he said. “We’ll have some songs of a religious nature … we’ll just recognize what happened and dedicate ourselves to being sure that something’s established on the site.”

Source: http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/68604-almost-a-year-later-memorial-to-victims-of-philly-building-collapse-moving-forward?linktype=hp_impact

By David Shepardson and Karl Henkel

– The head of Volkswagen AG’s global works council said the union still wants a German-style works council for workers at VW’s assembly plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., vowing to step up the fight despite a narrow loss in February.

Frank Patta, general secretary of the Volkswagen Global Group Works Council, told 1,100 delegates at the UAW Constitutional Convention on Monday that he believes organizing efforts will be successful eventually at the Chattanooga plant and all over the South.

VW has 105 union facilities with more than 600,000 around the world. The only major non-union facility is in Tennessee.

“Let me say this to our enemies: We will go on… We will not be beaten,” Patta told the delegates, invoking the Bruce Springsteen song: “Working on a Dream” in the long-running campaign to organize foreign plants in the United States.

One of the VW workers from Tennessee is in attendance at the convention, as are two workers from Nissan Motor Co.’s Canton, Mississippi, assembly plant — another factory the UAW has sought to organize.

“We want people to have a say in what happens at their workplace,” Patta said. “The rights of our brothers and sisters are trampled.”

Gary Casteel, a regional director for the UAW who helped oversee the VW organizing effort, blamed well-funded outside groups for the union’s loss. “That victory was stolen from us,” Casteel said. Workers voted 712-626 against joining the union in February.

Patta said U.S. companies and opponents of labor “were using the fear of losing their jobs” to discourage workers from exercising their rights. The move was aimed at ensuring cheaper labor costs, he said.

On Saturday, the Birmingham (Ala.) News reported that pro-union workers at the Daimler plant in Vance, Alabama, say they no longer want to work with the UAW to organize the plant.

“This has gone on for two-and-half years, and people are burnt out,” Kirk Garner, a 13-year employee and union supporter, told the newspaper. “It’s over.”

Several pro-union workers said they want to ask another union to organize the plant. Garner said he spoke to International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

Outgoing UAW President Bob King said he thinks the union will be successful. In April, the union decided to drop its appeal this week of the union election with the National Labor Relations Board.

King has said the union is considering a number of options, including a “private election” that could take place later.

“There’s many options under the law. We could wait a year for the NLRB. We could do a private election earlier than that,” King said in April. “There’s a number of different options and we’ll explore all of them to see what we think is best for providing the representation.”

King noted that worldwide VW says that “worker representation is a key part of their success.” The UAW would work with VW to “find the best way to achieve the common goal that we have.”

Source: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140602/AUTO01/306020077

Contact: Tony Montana at (412)562-2592, tmontana@usw.org

– The United Steelworkers (USW) International President Leo W. Gerard today issued the following statement after U.S. Steel announced plans to idle tube operations in Pennsylvania and Texas, which will lead to an indefinite furlough for 265 workers.

“For months, our union has warned the Department of Commerce, the U.S. Trade Representative, the public and others that a flood of illegally subsidized and unfairly traded oil country tubular goods (OCTG) poses a significant and immediate threat to American steel companies and the jobs of our members.

“In addition, because of these imports and lax enforcement of existing trade laws, the domestic steel industry has yet to see the promised and expected benefits brought about by increased shale oil and gas energy production throughout America’s industrial heartland.

“The USW demands an immediate investigation into how a trade partner such as South Korea, which produces 100 percent of its steel tubular goods for export because it has no domestic market, has managed to conduct business here without regulation or any kind of fair tariff in place.

“For the workers and families in McKeesport, Pa. and Bellville, Texas, the USW pledges to continue fighting for a fair and level playing field so that American workers can get back to their rightful jobs as soon as possible.

“The USW will continue to be an outspoken advocate for workers who have paid and continue to pay the price for unfair ‘free’ trade, which remains the single most dangerous threat to the good, family-supporting, community-sustaining jobs the USW strives to create and protect.”

The USW represents 850,000 men and women employed in metals, mining, pulp and paper, rubber, chemicals, glass, auto supply and the energy-producing industries, along with a growing number of workers in public sector and service occupations.

Source: http://www.usw.org/news/media-center/releases/2014/usw-demands-action-on-unfair-trade-as-u-s-steel-announces-layoffs-in-pennsylvania-and-texas