LABOR MATTERS
IA Endorses Angelides for California Governor
compiled by Jeff Burman
 Jeffrey Burman |
The IATSE has endorsed Los Angeles mayoral candidate Antonio Villarai-gosa, who faces incumbent Mayor James Hahn in a May 17 runoff. The IA has 25,000 West Coast members.
IA president Tom Short appeared with the councilman at a news conference in late March and cited Villaraigosa’s track record supporting the entertainment industry, writes Dave McNary in Variety.
“Antonio has been a true friend to the IATSE and a champion of our industry throughout his career,” Short said. “When he is elected as mayor of Los Angeles, we know he will continue to fight to keep this $31 billion industry thriving in Southern California. The IATSE will work to turn out our members in support of the candidate who has visibly worked for this industry, and that candidate is Villaraigosa.”
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor endorsed his opponent, Mayor Hahn, in December 2004. The same two candidates faced each other four years ago for the same office. In 2001, both the County Fed and the IA endorsed Villaraigosa, a former California Assembly Speaker and organizer for the Los Angeles teachers’ union.
In the Assembly, Villaraigosa sponsored several bills to keep production in Los Angeles and chaired the Assembly Special Committee on the Entertainment Industry. As a City Councilmember, he backed business tax reform, which eased the tax burden on small production companies
 IATSE President Tom Short, right, endorses Antonio Villaraigosa, left, in the May 17th LA mayoral runoff. Photo by Bill Dow |
“I am proud to stand next to you today and receive this endorsement,” Villaraigosa said. “Film, television and theatre production are the bread and butter of LA’s economy. It is time we had a mayor who understands that and who is willing to fight to keep the entertainment industry here in LA.”
“Antonio has spent the better portion of his life working on behalf of LA’s underpaid working class; the cause animates his being,” writes Harold Meyerson in the LA Weekly. “A Villaraigosa administration would be staffed with talented people animated by the same cause.”
International Observance of Child Labor Day Gets the Royal Treatment
 Spanish Royalty condemns child labor. Left to right: Miguel Angel Moratinos Cuyaubé, Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs; Her Majesty Queen Sofia; Juan Somavia, Director-General of the ILO; and His Majesty King Juan Carlos I during the Spanish delegation’s visit to the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Geneva, Switzerland, March 8, 2005. Photo by M. Crozet, ILO, used with permission. |
While labor issues get short shrift here in the states, coverage is somewhat different abroad. A case in point: The fourth annual World Day Against Child Labor was observed early by King Juan Carlos I of Spain. The observance, set for June 12, marks the plight of children who work in mines and quarries, posing a grave risk to their health and safety. The day was established by the United Nations’ International Labor Organization (ILO).
His Majesty the King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, visited ILO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Spain’s collaboration with the ILO’s International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor. The King described the extent of child labor as “appalling,” and called for it to be vigorously combated as part of the effort to give a “human dimension” to the process of globalization.
“More than 240 million children worldwide work daily instead of attending school. This is indeed an appalling figure,” said the King during a speech given at a Special Session of the ILO, attended by government, employer and worker representatives in March.
 Cartoon by R.J. Matson, Cagle Cartoons, Inc. |
King Juan Carlos I recalled that Spain was a founding member of the ILO, the oldest organization in the United Nations system, and that his country had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ILO in 1995 to support its efforts to eliminate child labor, particularly in Latin America. He went on to say, “Poverty, which is at the root of child labor, transforms child labor into actual forced labor.”
Manitoba, Nova Scotia Raise Tax Credits
Following closely on the heels of four other provinces, the prairie province
of Manitoba has leap-frogged over the rest to offer the most generous film
and TV tax credits in Canada, writes Tamsen Tillson in Variety.
“We have an extremely mobile client base and we know it’s critical to maintain the advantage we’ve had in bringing over C$100 million ($83 million) a year to our province,” said Carole Vivier, film commissioner of Manitoba.
The provincial government raised the tax credit from 35 to 45 percent. There is also a 5 percent “frequent filming bonus,” introduced a year ago, and producers willing to shoot outside the provincial capital of Winnipeg can receive an additional rural bonus of another 5 percent. The credits and bonuses add up to a potential total rebate for Manitoba labor expenditures of 55 percent. The nearest Canadian competitors are the provinces of Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia (which also recently raised its credits), Newfoundland and Labrador, whose rebates all top out at 40 percent.
AFL-CIO Warns Pension Managers on Backing Privatization Plan
Officials of organized labor have issued a veiled warning to companies that
manage union pension investments: Back President George W. Bush’s plan
to create private Social Security accounts, and you may lose our business,
writes Heidi Przybyla in Bloomberg News. The unions, which have $400 billion
invested in pension plans, already have pressured the largest US operator
of retail brokerage offices, Edward Jones, to withdraw from the leading industry
group pushing for the private accounts.
Two other players have also withdrawn. Waddell & Reed, a financial services company in Kansas, withdrew from the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, one of several business-funded organizations backing the president’s proposal. And days later, the Financial Services Forum, an association of 19 chief executives of large financial services companies, decided to withdraw from Compass, the group that is leading industry effort to muster support for the president’s plan outside the Beltway, writes Jeffrey Birnbaum in The Washington Post.
“We’re seeking to pull Wall Street money out of the debate,” said Bill Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO’s Office of Investment. “Wall Street’s covert funding of the drive to privatize Social Security is a conflict of interest because they stand to gain billions of dollars in fees,” according to Steven Greenhouse in The New York Times.
Schwarzenegger’s Attack on Unions Stymied
Under pressure from firefighters and police officers, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
in early April backed off his plan to privatize California’s public
employee pension system, writes Jim Wasserman in The San Francisco Chronicle.
The move, writes John Hill in The Sacramento Bee, represents “a huge
political defeat” for the governor and illustrates the perils of governing
by initiative.
In an earlier blow to Schwarzenegger, a judge ruled that he acted illegally when he delayed implementation of a state law requiring hospitals to have at least one nurse for every five patients. Administration officials promised to appeal the Superior Court ruling, which issued a preliminary injunction canceling the emergency delay imposed by Schwarzenegger, writes Wasserman in The San Francisco Chronicle.
Inspired by what began as an isolated protest by California nurses, opponents of Governor Schwarzenegger are working in a loose but widening network to thwart his policy proposals, writes Peter Nicholas in The Los Angeles Times. In March, ten California labor unions announced they had formed a political committee to combat the Governor’s so-called reform agenda. The group–Seriously, Saving California–includes unions representing firefighters, teachers, prison guards, school administrators and state employees, as well as the AFL-CIO’s California affiliate and the national Service Employees International Union, writes David Drucker in The Los Angeles Daily News.
AFL-CIO Executive Council Hosts a ‘Vigorous Debate’
The president of the AFL-CIO came out of its annual winter meeting in Las
Vegas having fought back, at least for now, the biggest internal challenge
he has confronted since taking the federation’s helm a decade ago, writes
Steven Greenhouse in The New York Times.
American labor is at a crossroads. The executive council meeting of the AFL-CIO leaves the union movement divided into two angry camps, with three major unions considering leaving the federation, writes Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post. A coalition of unions led by the SEIU and the Teamsters failed to persuade their colleagues to back a Teamster proposal to rebate a sizable chunk of the AFL-CIO’s budget to member unions’ organizing programs. The coalition won the support of unions representing roughly 40 percent of the AFL-CIO’s 13 million members, but AFL-CIO President John Sweeney got majority backing for a program that directed more resources to the federation’s political program than to organizing.
During his ten years in office, Sweeney has succeeded on the political front, increasing the percentage of the electorate made up of union households. But these gains have not translated into Democratic presidential or congressional victories in 2000 or 2004, writes Thomas Edsall in The Washington Post. On the organizing front, labor continues to decline. The percentage of workers who are in unions has fallen from 15.8 percent in 1994 to 12.5 percent last year, while private sector unionization rates have fallen from 10.8 percent to 7.9 percent in the same period.
Labor’s decline is not just a case of institutional exhaustion. Over the last four decades several weather patterns have converged to create a perfect storm for labor, writes Frank Joyce in the online AlterNet. The first is intensified employer opposition. The widespread perception is that unions are dying. The reality is that unions are being murdered.
Union-busting is increasingly a large and lucrative crusade. It brings together managers, highly paid anti-union lawyers, “human relations” experts and communications specialists to pound into submission workers who even might support unionization. The de-unionization jihad also works incessantly and effectively to discredit any and all unions in the minds of the general public. As if that weren’t enough, the global mobility of capital has evolved to create exactly the right environment to make good on employer threats to eliminate union work, especially in the private sector, adds Joyce, a labor communications consultant.
“Unless we change the anti-worker policies that are destroying good jobs and stop the forces that are rolling back workers’ rights, we can’t win gains for workers,” said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. “A long-term plan for greater political and legislative mobilization is essential to strengthen and build the labor movement.”
Ultimately, the Executive Council recommended the July AFL-CIO convention adopt a historic plan to improve the ability of state labor federations and local labor councils to carry out both organizing and political mobilization.
Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New MBA?
“The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write
with media, and those who can’t,” said Elizabeth Daley, dean of
the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television. Some who
enrolled in USC’s film school to take advantage of its widely acknowledged
position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic
skills as a new form of literacy, writes Elizabeth Van Ness in The New York
Times.
For some next-generation students, the shot at a Hollywood job is no longer the goal. They’d rather make cinematic technique–newly democratized by digital equipment that can reduce the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word “film” an anachronism–the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military. It is not altogether surprising that film school–promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job–is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future, adds Van Ness.
Jeff Burman represents Sound Editors on the Guild's Board of Directors. He can be reached at jeffrey.burman@nbcuni.com.