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The Federal Communications Commission could consider tightening media ownership regulations as it rewrites them to satisfy a federal appeals court, said Commissioner Michael Copps. In June, a federal appeals court returned the rules to the FCC, saying the agency had failed to justify the new, looser limits it proposed on local media ownership. At issue are limits on owning multiple TV stations in a community, limits on owning a broadcast station and a nearby daily newspaper, and rules aimed at making it more difficult to own more radio stations in some markets, wrote Todd Shields (ADWEEK, June 30, 2004). Critics from across the political spectrum argued the FCC’s “relaxed” rules would result in less local news coverage and fewer voices in the media, wrote Susan Crabtree (Variety, June 24, 2004). When the FCC originally decided to “relax” media ownership rules without public hearings, in June of 2003, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney was adamant in his opposition. “Deregulation of media ownership on this unprecedented scale deeply threatens the public’s first amendment right to what the Supreme Court has described as the ‘uninhibited marketplace of ideas.’ In our democratic society, media ownership matters. It matters because ultimately it is the deciding factor that determines what America’s working families are able to consume in news, entertainment and information. It matters to our democracy because an informed public is the bedrock of our free and open society,” said Sweeney. Supreme Court Upholds ‘Alien Tort Act’ A Supreme Court decision in late June kept federal courts open to lawsuits by foreigners who allege that they were victims of serious human rights violations anywhere in the world. The decision interpreting the Alien Tort Act came as a relief to human rights organizations that had feared the court would accept the Bush administration’s invitation to narrow the application of the 215 year-old law, writes Linda Greenhouse (New York Times, June 29, 2004).
Terry Collingsworth, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) and lead counsel in half a dozen Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) cases, praised the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Act. “The Alvarez decision erases any doubt about the validity of the ATCA for addressing egregious human rights cases, and sends a clear message to multinationals, who seek to profit from forced labor and torture of workers and other human rights victims,” said Collingsworth. Natacha Thys, ILRF’s assistant general counsel, added, “Alvarez allows all of our ATCA cases to go forward: Unocal, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola, Drummond, Occidental, Del Monte and DaimlerChrysler.” The U.S. Supreme Court held that the Alien Tort Claims Act allows foreign litigants to bring claims in U.S. Federal Court for crimes committed in violation of the law of nations, which prohibits murder, torture, genocide, slavery and crimes against humanity. Nation’s Employers Shift to a Wal-Mart Model Wal-Mart, together with other large service sector employers, is defining the new industrial landscape and the structure of the U.S. working class, according to the Labor Research Association (LRA). Although the portion of large companies in the U.S. has remained relatively stable over the past decade, the industrial composition of the largest companies has continued to shift dramatically from relatively high-wage, unionized industrials to low-wage, nonunion retailers. Judge Certifies Suit Accusing Wal-Mart of Sex Discrimination A federal judge granted class-action status in a sex discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart, creating a class of up to 1.6 million women, making it the largest employment discrimination lawsuit against a company in United States history. The lawsuit, brought on three years ago in San Francisco, asserts that Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest company, systematically discriminated against women in pay and promotions. The lawsuit noted that while 65 percent of Wal-Mart’s employees were women when the lawsuit was filed, only 33 percent of Wal-Mart’s managers were women, according to business writers Steven Greenhouse and Constance Hays (New York Times, June 22, 2004). In an 84-page ruling, the judge noted that Wal-Mart claimed the difference in treatment is due to differing job aspirations and interests between men and women that exist in the general labor force and can’t be blamed on the company, reported Amy Joyce (Washington Post, June 22, 2004). SEIU President Calls for Changes in AFL-CIO The AFL-CIO has failed to keep up with the changing workplace and must be radically reinvigorated – or replaced – if the labor movement is to survive, the president of the nation’s largest union said. “Our employers have changed, our industries have changed and the world has certainly changed, but the labor movement’s structure and culture have sadly stayed the same. Union activists must either transform the AFL-CIO or build something stronger that can really change workers’ lives,” said Andrew Stern, President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), in June at a national SEIU convention in San Francisco, noted staff writer Thomas Edsall (Washington Post, June 22, 2004).
The reforms, referred to as the New Unity Partnership proposals, have already generated heated discussion and plenty of dissent among union leaders and labor researchers, wrote staff writer Nancy Cleeland (Los Angeles Times, June 21, 2004). Many oppose the top-down nature of the discussions and say only grassroots change will be sustainable. A ‘New Unity Partnership’ What would the New Unity Partnership (NUP) look like? As outlined in a draft program of the NUP, a familiar alarm is raised about union decline. Offered as a solution, a drastic restructuring of institutional labor is proposed that would take the 66 unions currently in the AFL-CIO and merge them into 12 to 15 mega-unions, forged along industry lines and operated according to a “strategic growth plan,” said online reporter Joann Wypijewski (CounterPunch, October 6, 2003). Seventy-seven percent of all resources would go toward organizing and most of the rest to politics, both of which would be single-mindedly focused on growth. The culture, traditions and history of faltering unions that, under this plan, didn’t get to keep their names and identifying insignia as part of the chosen 12 or 15 would be swept away, the clutter of old days, adds Wypijewski. SEIU Begins to Organize Globally He may not have been entirely happy about it, but SEIU’s Andrew Stern had his John L. Lewis moment, wrote staff writer Harold Meyerson (Washington Post, June 23, 2004). The SEIU’s level of global union cooperation is new, but much about this campaign takes a leaf out of Lewis’s 70-year-old book on industrial organizing. Like Lewis, who signed the first company-wide contracts with General Motors and U.S. Steel, Stern and UNITE-HERE’s leaders, Bruce Raynor and John Wilhelm, believe the only way to build back union strength is to organize entire companies at a time, rather than go facility by facility. John L. Lewis was the President and Founder of the Conference of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1935. UNITE is the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees. HERE is the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union. The SEIU also began to use the internet as an organizing tool, creating a new, virtual labor organization that isn’t tied to a work site or dependent on employer recognition, according to Leigh Strope (Associated Press, June 23, 2004). The site, called PurpleOcean.org, was disclosed at the SEIU’s convention in San Francisco. The union’s trademark color is purple. The new group “is a radical new way to think about organized labor,” said Andrew Stern. The SEIU is the largest union under the AFL-CIO umbrella with 1.6 million members. |
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